(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best workd war ii history books

I wish I was more knowledgeable about this, but the Dieppe raid was originally suggested under the cover of testing the feasibility of the Normandy landings. Though this was partially true, it was revealed last year that it was also a guise to try and capture an Enigma machine. This also opens up the secret can of worms that was Bletchley Park.

Source: http://globalnews.ca/news/274605/breaking-german-codes-real-reason-for-1942-dieppe-raid-historian/

If this is your kind of thing, William Breuer wrote an interesting, easy read about covert operations in WWII (you can say what you wish about the man as an author). In several instances it discusses the activities of Nazi (Abwehr and SD) spies in the United States that were eventually rounded up by the FBI. One was an executive in the motor industry, and posted an ad in an mechanical magazine asking for information about recent developments in the industry. He got dozens of useful responses about the technical specs of US military aircraft.

http://www.amazon.ca/Top-Secret-Tales-World-War/dp/0471078409

J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter - Originally, I bought this one for my older brother as a birthday gift, because he got me into Tolkien in the first place. I borrowed it when he had read it. Definitely a must for any fantasy fan! You start to get his work when you realize what he had to go through.

Die drei Leben des Rudi Dutschke / The three lives of Rudi Dutschke by Ulrich Chaussy - If you´re not german, you probably never heard of this guy and never will. While students in the US in the late 1960s demonstrated against the war in vietnam and dreamed of a better way of living, students in west germany pretty much did the same things, but they also started to aks questions about what their parents did during the nazi regime. Rudi Dutschke was one of the ideological leaders of the student movement in the west. Born in communist east germany, he wasn´t allowed to study since he refused to serve in the east german army because of his christian-pacifist believes. He fled to west Berlin and became a vocal activist against any kind of authoritarianism (wich was still very dominant even in west germany at that time).

Strong of Heart: Life and Death in the Fire Department of New York by Thomas von Essen - Long story short, this guy was the commissioner of the FDNY during 9/11. As a volunteer FF and (back then) student of an emergency management engineering program, this autobiography was a must read. And I openly confess, I cried at certain points.

From Dachau to D-Day by Helen Fry - The story of Willy Field, born Willy Hirschfeld, a german of jewisch faith, who was improsoned by the nazis, was send to Dachau concentration camp, was bought free by a friend of his family, fled to London and joined the british army to free europe. This man was born in my hometown, which is why I became interested in his story in the first place.

There is an assumption beneath all of this math. And that is that there are no short cuts (or at least no significant short cuts) to working SHA256 backwards. Over the years there have been many cryptographic algorithms that appeared to require a certain amount of brute force to break, but shortcuts were found that "broke" these algorithms.

So basically, if you use these algorithms you are trusting the people who claim to have evaluated them when they say they couldn't find any shortcuts. You are trusting them to be honest and you are trusting them to be competent. And they could even be both and someone cleverer or luckier might come up with a new way of recasting the problem that makes it easy.

I'm not saying that I know how to do this, or that I know anyone who does. However, I have met a number of people who have known of shortcuts to break many encryption algorithms. Most of these people worked or had worked for NSA. And before that there are famous people before my time who broke "secure" crypto. The most famous example of this is Alan Turing and the people who worked with him at Hut 6 who broke the German enigma cypher system during WWII through a combination of mathematics and special purpose hardware.

The imitation game

The Hut Six story

There is a series of graphic guides to some of the political ideologies that I enjoyed. You can buy the titles as part of a broader set or individually.

Marxism - available free on Kindle. Or a bigger guide.

Capitalism - currently free on Kindle. Or a bigger guide.

Fascism - free on Kindle.

There is also a free sampler available for free on Kindle ATM.

One thing to understand about how geometry is taught is that before the latter part of the 20th century Euclid's Elements was the text used.

After the launch of Sputnik by the USSR the United States decided to revamp science and math education. Euclid's Elements was considered overly difficult and so a new type of geometry was created. One not as formal, one easier to learn.

This is the type of axiomatic geometry still taught in high schools today. If you are simply interested in that then I recommend the book Geometry Workbook for Dummies by Mark Ryan.

This is a nice gentle introduction into axiomatic geometry and shows how it is taught in most US schools. Note, although this is a 'dummies' book it has lots of examples to show you how to work, lots of problems for you to work, and all solutions.

If you are interested in more hardcore geometry then I recommend Euclid's Elements.

Free online edition: Euclid's Elements

Paperback edition: Euclid's Elements Green Lion Press Edition

Despite being 2300 years old this book is still worth reading. It does take a little effort to get use to the way it is written but it is worth the investment.


Edit: Someone might try to jump in and recommend the visual edition of Euclid's elements : http://www.amazon.com/Six-Books-Euclid-Werner-Oechslin/dp/3836517752/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1334515073&sr=8-3-fkmr0

This is an impressive looking edition of Euclid's Elements which tries to cut down on the verbage and teach only with pictures.

I've studied from both the normal version and this visual version and I have to say I find all the pictures and colors distracting. I find the normal version much easier to study.

Not to jack your thread but I would like to put in a plug for John Keegan. He is a wonderful author and has a terrific style of writing (usually a combination of narrative and analytical) that is very hard to put down, once started.

Edit: And his A History of Warfare is an excellent read as well.

Yeah, but it's also worth noting A LOT of the ships - a lot more than most people are willing to admit - were old ships. PT boats, trawlers, schooners, ocean liners...

If you have a chance and are into reading; read Glyn Prysor's "Citizen Sailors" http://www.amazon.com/Citizen-Sailors-Glyn-Prysor/dp/0141046325 (on mobile, so sorry for the format). There's probably even better books out there that cover ships and the RN in general; but this one comes with first hand tales from the men serving aboard these ships.
It's also the last one I read about it, so it's fresh in my mind.

If you libe the RN like I do, but haven't thought about things such as to why it was the largest navy in the world, then this may be an eye opener for a lot of people.

I by no means want to take any glamour nor fame away from the Royal Navy, but it was what it was, not only due to the transition from a worldwide empire to the commonwealth it is today, but also the time during which it took place; wartime. Desperate times call for desperate measures, they did what they had to, and let there be no doubt over the fact that these men did the best they could with what was at hand. Be they serving on the RN's battleships or cruisers, or shamble PT boats

Agreed. Lots of the WWII books from the 80's and 90's very much bought into the superior Wehrmacht narrative. Michael Reynolds "Steel Inferno: 1st SS Panzer Corps in Normandy" was one of the first "serious" books I read about Normandy and it really hit home on the "inferior" nature of Allied tanks, the superiority of training and leadership of the SS soldiers, and that the Allies prevailed through numbers. It wasn't Wehrby in the sense that the author had a hard-on for the SS, but it was part of the school of thought that developed from the 80's revisionist works like Carlo D'Este book "Decision in Normandy", which made the notion the Allies won purely through superior material and manpower central to its thesis.

My fourth year university seminar paper was on the historiography of Anglo-Canadian armor in the Battle of Normandy, and you can see how many of the Wehraboo idea's came out of the literature of the late 70's and early 80s, though they existed in more "military" circles prior to that (NATO really got off in the 50's and 60's on getting the former German commanders to give them tours so they could "learn their secrets" on how to defeat enemies with superior manpower and resources - apparently forgot these guys lost).

It wasn't until the 2000's you started to get books like John Buckley's "British Armour in the Normandy Campaign 1944" or Stephen Hart's "Montgomery and Colossal Cracks: The 21st Army Group in Northwest Europe, 1944-45" or Terry Copps "Fields of Fire: The Canadians in Normandy" the reevaluated the Anglo-Canadian performance in Normandy against the Wehrmacht and SS in a better light. I'm less familiar with the historiography of the US army in WWII.

But the stuff that Wehraboo's spout was pretty mainstream only 2-3 decades ago. That is why the History Channel stuff is so bad, since the HC stopped doing serious documentaries in the early 2000's for the most part, so what HC documentaries remains on youtube tends to reflect where the school of thought was at that time. For all intents and purposes, the stuff on this subreddit is an outgrowth of the recent round of revisionism that occured in WWII history, which is revisionism against the previous round that occured around the 80's, which itself was revisionism from the post-war works (and there are different kinds of revisionism as well, for example post war works tended to be very strategic looking where as the revisionism of the 80's brought in a lot of the ground level stuff from interviews with veterans - John Kegans work "The face of battle" was really important in starting the trend of getting the experiences of soldiers recorded in WWII history books)

For depth on the subject I suggest 'The American Heritage Picture History of WWII'

No single piece of medium can truly capture the whole story but this book comes awfully close. It also has great first person accounts

http://www.amazon.com/American-Heritage-Picture-History-World/dp/0828103321

For breadth, I suggest WWII from Space.
Its a nice overview with a fairly engaging world view

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR3aIv2UB3U

The Vatican actually did do a lot to oppose the Nazi regime. Read Spicer's "Resisting the Third Reich". Also "Bodyguard of Lies" by Anthony Cave Brown goes into far more detail that Wikipedia ever meagerly hints at about the vast efforts of the Schwarze Kapelle (that Josef Muller was a big part of. It's amazing how Muller even got through all the times that he did when there were other Catholics sympathetic to the Nazis trying to thwart him, but then other members higher up in the Catholic church-involved with the Schwarze Kapelle-were able to find stern or peaceful means for neutralizing those said thwarters attempting to stop Muller.) that were bringing important information (secretly via the Vatican) to Allied forces....and this isn't even going into into all of the various defiant priests, nuns, and other Catholics working within Nazi occupied territory to protect and rescue those Jews persecuted by the Nazi regime-or even the ones within the Nazi party trying to take it down from the inside (like Baron Alexis Von Roenne who ended up getting executed for treason).

Granted much of this involved deception and sabotage, and not the far more dramatic life-threatening attempts (as one would have with say a pastor like Dietrich Bonhoeffer) suggested by the thread's title.

Well of course the first place to start would be Wikipedia. You could look up:

1936 Soviet Constitution, Gosplan, five year plans, collectivization, kolkhoz, Gulags, the Virgin Lands campaign, TASS, Izvestia, Pravda, Elektronika, their incredible space program, etc. And of course the leaders. And the various republics (SSRs) would be good to know. In fact the country itself was CCCP = SSSR.

Read about all the post-collapse conflicts: Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Chechnya, Transnistria, Russia-Georgia war, Ukraine Crisis. And about how turbulent the 90s were.

There are personal accounts of the gigantic conflict with the Germans, like those of Vasili Grossman and Marshal Zhukov. There are transcripts of interviews with Khrushchev and the books that Gorbachev wrote on Glasnost and Perestroika. Historian David M. Glantz writes almost exclusively about the Soviet military. There are the accounts of dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.

There are some classic pieces of literature like Master and Margarita and Dr. Zhivago. And music on YouTube by people like Shostakovich.

There are surplus stores like Soviet-Power.com that sell helmets, medals, coins, busts, and the like if that is what you are into. And blogs like English Russia.

r/history here on reddit probably has some articles to peruse. r/HistoryPorn often has old Russian photos.

And of course I've talked to several people on this forum who lived during Soviet times. I'm sure some here or elsewhere on reddit would be happy to tell you.

There is a book called Operation Mincemeat as well: https://www.amazon.ca/Operation-Mincemeat-Bizarre-Assured-Victory/dp/0307453286

It's amazing! There is so much detail about how every aspect of the operation was so meticulously planned, it'll leave you in awe of how amazing the British spies were. And you'll finally understand why Britain had hundreds of spies in Germany, while Germany had every single one of her spies caught and turned by British intelligence.

I pretty much only read nonfiction because I am a mega nerd (did you know there's a massive nonfiction sale on Amazon right now?! Glanz's books are all like 2$ on kindle OMFG), so a book with all the people replaced would be pretty useless. As far as fiction, sure, why not. If the book is good enough to pull it off it'll work regardless. I just watched that Battlestar Galactica show and one side of the show was made up of literal clones who were referred to by their model number. It still managed to create interesting characters with unique identities.

As far as more WW2 games, sure overall there were a ton back in the early 2000s, but there are very few hardcore WW2 RTS games and not much beyond RO2 (shooter) and COH2 (good but the setting is atmospheric, not gameplay driving) right now. The closest thing to WRD in the setting is Graviteam Tactics which is pretty crap. Both settings allow for mechanized combined arms warfare, so there's not a huge difference in terms of gameplay barring the loss of helicopters (as someone who played ranked with Polish national, I feel this loss keenly). IMO the biggest real difference between early Cold War and late WW2 is that REDFOR is Nazi instead of Soviet and there's not as much vehicle divergence on BLUEFOR as there is in the 1950s. I could point to some equipment stuff (multi axis stabilizers, early missiles, early helos, early jets) but they weren't particularly mature in that period so not super important.

At the operational level I 100% agree, there's nothing Cold War outside of Vietnam 65 (lowest level of operational warfare but excellent game) and I really feel the lack.

I dunno, I guess what I'm getting at is that I'm sad that people I played WRD with for years are so unwilling to even give SD44 a shot (during launch, I completely understand nobody playing the game right now because blegh). I'd be just as sad if WG4 came out and people ignored it because for me, it's all about those mechanics and this RTS franchise serves up the kind I like best.

Since we're talking about books, reading this right now which I highly recommend:
https://www.amazon.com/Unwomanly-Face-War-History-Women-ebook/dp/B01M5I4A0Z/

Farley Mowat And no Birds Sang

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/329554.And_No_Birds_Sang

Anything by Mark Zuehlke

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/312061.Mark_Zuehlke?from_search=true

http://zuehlke.ca/

Denis & Shelagh Whitaker Victory at Falaise: a Soldier's Story

https://www.amazon.ca/Victory-at-Falaise-soldiers-story/dp/0002000172

Tim Cook The Necessary War and Fight to the Finish

https://www.amazon.ca/Necessary-War-Canadians-Fighting-1939-1943/dp/0670066508/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486312261&sr=1-5

https://www.amazon.ca/Fight-Finish-Canadians-Second-1944-1945/dp/0670067687/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486312261&sr=1-3


Edit: I forgot My Father's Son by Farley Mowat.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/750733.My_Father_s_Son

just keep in mind sometimes Mowat takes a few liberties with the truth in the interest of spinning a good yarn. I believe it was he who said never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

I can't really help jgm0228, but just learning about the Book List you linked I think one good addition to the Holocaust section would be Isaac's Army about the Jewish presence in Poland in the lead up to and during WW2.

Apologies if mistaken and you are not the one managing the list. Would appreciate either the suggestion being passed along or the name of someone who does.

Edit: Just remembered The Brigade and The Avengers. The Bielski Bros. book is good too but the movie covered a good chunk of the content.

Good film and all, but I prefer "Russia's War", by Richard Overy, as a sort of "you don't really know the Eastern Front yet", go to source.

Come and See is certainly better for an emotional understanding though. But I can't recommend that book enough, I feel like if anyone is going to read one WW2 History Book, read that one.

In that case, you most likely won't find much in terms of police accounts of cannibalism being translated. You can find accounts of cannibalism in a few books that have been written about the siege but there's only one 'document' driven monograph that I'm aware of which might contain mention of cannibalism. I'll look into it but I wouldn't hold out much hope, this is still a very sensitive issue and I don't know for sure if all archival data has been opened for historians/researchers.

Edit: Seems you're in luck. The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives search this book for 'cannibal' and you can see all the references and parts of at least one report that was written up.

And as for your question:
>Why were these police officers not out manning the defenses?

They weren't really 'police officers' they were NKVD. Some NKVD units took part in frontline combat, especially in Stalingrad, but many others were relegated to keeping the peace and ferreting out spies/saboteurs/fifth columnists in the rear.

i would start with a biography of Eisenhower.

“Eisenhower in War and Peace” by Jean Edward Smith

here is a great book by this USMC general James "mad dog" Mattis

• Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam by H.R. McMaster (1997)
  
  but the guy is real interesting and there are several books about him.
  
  its one of those subjects where a few perspectives doesn't really let you have the full picture of it. understanding the different mechanisms at work are really quite interesting. like how the need of research and development, from operation paperclip to say how the microeconomics of different senators and congressmen are basically bought and sold by lobbyists from "defense" companies. maybe a book on the early days of lockheed martin would be of interest, or perhaps some biographies on the folks who worked on the manhattan project.
  
  there are more abstract ones out there kind of interesting on the societal structures of how this thing forms. not so much about one individual story more commentary on society than anything.
  
  On nazi scientists in american programs
  
• [the Phoenix program]
  (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000855FPC/_encoding=UTF8?coliid=I2LC91CV9GI78T&colid=388LMJNXN4FBU)
  
  
• [Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War by Christopher Simpson] (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1555841066/_encoding=UTF8?coliid=I27180ULK3JFMA&colid=388LMJNXN4FBU)
  
  
• [The lords of creation,
  by Frederick Lewis Allen] (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000855FPC/_encoding=UTF8?coliid=I2LC91CV9GI78T&colid=388LMJNXN4FBU)
  
  that's probably enough to get you started

This. This. This.

Lots of material out there about this. Two excellent and accessible books dealing with this side of things are Battle of Wits and Enigma. I've read the former a few times; excellent and, if you want, has a pretty decent overview of the math behind Enigma and Purple.

For the more personal (but general) side of things I also liked The Secret Lives of Codebreakers. But for Turing biographies it's hard to beat Alan Turing: The Enigma

The book about this by Ben MacIntyre is an insanely fun read. Highly recommend.
https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Mincemeat-Bizarre-Assured-Victory/dp/0307453286

Operation Mincemeat - Ben Macintyre

or Agent Zigzag - Ben Macintyre

If you like Charlie Wilson's War you'll like either of these two. They are about the British counter-intelligence efforts during world war two. It is funny how bizarre, yet successful some of their efforts were.

I highly recommend them.

I really enjoyed this book on Operation Mincemeat: https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Mincemeat-Bizarre-Fooled-Assured/dp/0307453286

Yes!
http://www.amazon.com/Operation-Mincemeat-Bizarre-Assured-Victory/dp/0307453286/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1462819898&sr=1-1&keywords=operation+mincemeat

It was a ruse to make the Germans think the Allies were going to invade Greece rather than Italy thus causing them to misallocate their defensive resources. It worked.

Hah! How very timely! Just finished reding this last night! Good book, but dug a bit into the details for me - my eyes started to glaze over at some of the code-breaking logic. I think I understood about 1/3 of it.

Which book are you referring? "The man who never was" (that also inspired the movie of the same name); "Operation Heartbreak" (by Duff Cooper); or "Operation Mincemeat" (by Ben Macintyre)?

Can someone post the quote where Chomsky says the U.S. had an "alliance" with the Nazis. This is rather vague language. I have read a lot of Chomsky and never read where he says this. It is a fact that many right-wing businessmen in the U.S. openly supported the Nazis prior to WWII, that U.S. corporations such as Ford supplied the Nazis with manufactures, that the U.S. enlisted former-Nazis to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union after WWII, and there were former Nazis who became part of right-wing regimes in West Germany and Latin America which were supported by the U.S.

http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Americas-Recruitment-Nazis-Effects/dp/1555841066/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396398421&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=blowback+america%27s+recruitment+of+nazis

I have also seen numerous people claim that Chomsky "denied" the Khmer Rouge atrocities, but have never seen the actual quotes. The best they have come up with is that Chomsky underestimated the deaths, but Ed Herman addressed this in a response to Brad DeLong, who made similar claims. As far as I can tell Chomsky and Herman only claimed that the deaths were being exaggerated while ignoring similar atrocities committed by U.S.-backed genocide in East Timor. They never condoned Pol Pot. And they made the claims about Pol Pot's atrocities with the caveat that there may be "untold deaths" but that their figures were based on the best available evidence at the time.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/07/25/refuting-brad-delong-s-smear-job-on-chomsky/

I would also like to see the Chomsky quote that says, “whatever the Khmer Rouge may have done, it's more important not to allow my opponents to win, because they are evil, and it is morally wrong to allow evil to win.” This is just completely made-up horse shit.

He admits to only having read "pieces" of Chomsky. I wonder how much he has actually read. There is no substantive critique of anything Chomsky wrote in that entire interview. This guy probably hates Chomsky because he is an apologist for Israel.

"Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victor" by Ben Macintyre is a wild ride: "Near the end of World War II, two British naval officers came up with a brilliant and slightly mad scheme to mislead the Nazi armies about where the Allies would attack southern europe. To carry out the plan, they would have to rely on the most unlikely of secret agents: a dead man." https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Mincemeat-Bizarre-Fooled-Assured/dp/0307453286/ref=sr_1_1?crid=21KI22HQYKNG4&keywords=operation+mincemeat&qid=1573404413&s=books&sprefix=Operation+min%2Cstripbooks%2C179&sr=1-1