Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [221]
A general treatment of the campaign of Germany is G. Blond’s The Death of Hitler’s Germany (New York, 1954). All of the innumerable works on Hitler deal with his last days, often at stultifying length. The German missile campaign is the subject of Basil Collier’s The Battle of the V-Weapons (London, 1964). As might be expected, the Battle of the Bulge has been thoroughly examined. Specific aspects of it were covered by S. L. A. Marshall in Bastogne (Washington, 1964), and R. Gallagher in The Malmedy Massacre (New York, 1964). The most popular general treatment was John Toland’s Battle: The Story of the Bulge (New York, 1959). Most of the material on the Russian advances comes from German works, but there is available Maria Galantai’s The Changing of the Guard, The Siege of Budapest, 1944-1945 (London, 1961). A classic popular general account of the closing days of the war in Europe is John Toland’s The Last 100 Days (New York, 1956). On the western breakthrough into Germany there is C. B. MacDonald’s The Battle of Heurtgen Forest (Philadelphia, 1963); MacDonald’s Company Commander (Washington, 1947) has become a classic memoir. R. A. Briggs did The Battle for the Ruhr Pocket (West Point, Ky., 1957), R. W. Thompson wrote The Battle for the Rhineland (London, 1958) and The Eighty-Five Days: The Story of the Battle for the Scheldt (London, 1975), and K. W. Hechler did The Bridge at Remagen (New York, 1957). On the Bavarian Redoubt there is R. G. Minott’s The Fortress that Never Was: The Myth of the Nazi Alpine Redoubt (London, 1965), and finally, on Berlin itself, S. E. Ambrose’s Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Stop at the Elbe (New York, 1967), and A. Tully’s Berlin, the Story of a Battle (New York, 1963), as well as the many works on Hitler suggested above.
THE WAR IN EAST ASIA AND THE PACIFIC. Far Eastern geography is so complicated that an atlas such as Esposito’s excellent West Point Atlas of American Wars referred to earlier is indispensable for dealing with the war in that area. Potter’s U. S. and World Sea Power and John Toland’s But Not in Shame have excellent coverage of the whole war and of the period up to Midway respectively. The fall of Singapore, as a major disaster, has attracted many British writers. A most interesting general account is Noel Barber’s A Sinister Twilight: The Fall of Singapore, 1942 (Boston, 1958). The outstanding single event of the Malayan campaign was the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales; on this there are R. Grenfell’s Main Fleet to Singapore (London, 1951) and B. Ash’s Someone Had Blundered: The Story of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales (London, 1960). The collapse of the Malay Barrier is treated in R. C. H. McKie’s The Survivors (Indianapolis, 1953), and the horrible conditions of fighting in New Guinea will be found discussed in R. Paull’s Retreat from Kokoda (London, 1960). The extremely complex battle at Midway is made clear for the reader in Thaddeus V. Tuleja’s Climax at Midway (New York, 1960) and Walter Lord’s Incredible Victory (New York, 1967); it was Professor Tuleja who made sense out of contradictory movement charts by discovering that some Japanese carriers had their island structures on the port side, whereas most carriers carry them to starboard. The view from the other side is in M. Fuchida and M. Okumiya’s Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan (Annapolis, 1955).
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