Below is a list of selected memoirs and biographies relating to the military and civilian
experiences during World War II.
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Remember, you must pick one book from the military section and the homefront
section.
Remember that you must pick books from different national backgrounds (one
American and one British book, but not two American books)
Remember, you are responsible for obtaining the book yourself.
Homefront Memoirs/Biographies
American Homefront:
Katherine Archibald, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity (University of Illinois Press,
2006)
Alistair Cooke, The American Homefront: 1941-1942 (Grove Press, 2006)
Mary Matsuda Gruenewald, Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese
American Internment Camps (NewSage Press, 2005).
Agnes Meyer, Journey Through Chaos (Harcourt, Brace, & Company, 1944)
British Homefront:
Amy Helen Bell, London Was Ours: Diaries and Memoirs of the London Blitz (I.B. Tauris,
2011)
Nella Last, edited by Richard Broad. Nella Last’s War: The Second World War Diaries of
Housewife 49 (Profile Books, 2006)
Mollie Panter-Downes, Good Evening Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie PanterDownes (Persephone Books, 2008)
Chinese Homefront:
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (Penguin Books,
1998)
Ha Jin, Nanjing Requiem: A Novel (Pantheon, 2011)
John Rabe, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe (Vintage Books, 2000)
German Homefront:
Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary (Picador, 2005)
Sebastian Haffner, translated by Oliver Pretzel. Defying Hitler: A Memoir (MacMillan Books,
2003)
Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: Volume 2, 1942-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years
(Modern Library, 2001).
Oliver Lubrich, ed., Travels in the Reich, 1933-1945: Foreign Authors Report from Germany
(University of Chicago Press, 2010)
Ursula Mahlendorf, The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2009)
Japanese Homefront:
Frank Gibney and Beth Carey, Sensō: The Japanese Remember the Pacific War : The Letters to
the Editor of Asahi Shimbun (Macmillan, 2007).
Daniel Keene, So Lovely a County Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers
(Columbia University Press, 2010)
Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, translated by Eugene Soviak, A Diary of Darkness: The Wartime Diary of
Kiyosawa Kiyoshi (Princeton University Press, 2008)
Kazuko Kuramato, Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist (Michigan State
University Press, 2004)
Masuji Ibuse, Black Rain: A Novel (Kodansha USA, 1988)
Samuel Hideo Yamashita, Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime
Diaries of Ordinary Japanese (University of Hawaii Press, 2005)
Soviet Homefront:
Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler, Life and Fate (New York Review Books
Classics, 2006)
Cynthia Simmons and Nine Perlina, Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs,
and Documentary Prose (University of Pittsburg Press, 2005)
Ella E. Schneider Hilton and Angela K. Hilton, Displaced Person: A Girl’s Life in Russia,
Germany, and America (Louisiana State University Press, 2004)
The Holocaust:
Tadeusz Borowski, This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Penguin Classics, 1992).
Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Penguin
Books, 2002)
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (Touchstone Books, 1995)
Elie Wiesal, Night (Hill & Wang, 2006)
Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: Volume 2, 1942-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years
(Modern Library, 2001).
Shlomo Venezia, Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz
(Polity Press, 2011)
Other Homefronts:
France - Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 (W.W. Norton
& Company, 1999)
Spanish Civil War – George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Mariner Books, 1980)
Military Memoirs/Biographies
American Accounts:
Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from
Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle Nest (Simon & Schuster, 2001).
James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers (Bantam, 2006)
Charles W. Dryden, A-Train: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman (University of Alabama Press,
2002)
William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (Back Bay Books, 2002)
Ernie Pyle, Brave Men (Bison Books, 2001)
E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (Presido Press, 2007).
British Accounts:
David Crook, Spitfire Pilot: A Personal Account of the Battle of Britain (Greenhill Books, 2006)
George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here (Skyhorse Publishing, 2007)
German Accounts:
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland (Harper Perennial, 1993).
Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern
Front (Princeton University Press, 2011)
Siegfried Knappe, with Ted Brusaw, Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949 (Dell
Publishing, 1992)
Willy Peter Reese, edited by Stefan Schmitz, A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War:
Russia, 1941-1944 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005).
Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, translated by Cesare Foligno (New York Review of Books, 2005).
Japanese Accounts:
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers (University
of Chicago Press, 2006)
Tatsuzo Ishikawa, translated by Zeljko Cipris, Soldiers Alive (University of Hawaii Press, 2003)
Kumiko Kakehashi, translated by Giles Murray, So Sad to Fall in Battle: An Account of War
Based on General Tadamichi Kuribayaski’s Letters from Iwo Jima (Presido Press, 2007).
Yoshida Mitsuru, translated by Richard H. Minear, Requiem for Battleship Yamato (U.S. Naval
Institute Press, 1999).
Ooka Shohei, translated by Ivan Morris, Fires on the Plain: A Novel (Tuttle Publishing, 2001)
Ooka Shohei, translated by Frank B. Gibney, Taken Captive: A Japanese POW’s Story (Wiley
Books, 1996)
Michio Takeyama, Harp of Burma (Tuttle Classics, 1989)
Soviet Accounts:
Vasily B. Emelianenko, Red Star Against the Swastika: The Story of a Soviet Pilot over the
Eastern Front (Greenhill Books, 2006)
Boris Gorbachevsky, translated by Stuart Britton, Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier’s
War on the Eastern Front, 1942-1945 (University of Kansas Press, 2008)
Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 (Vintage,
2007).
Isaak Kobylyanskiy, translted by Stuart Britton, From Stalingrad to Pillau: A Red Army Artillery
Officer Remembers the Great Patriotic War (University of Kansas Press, 2008)
Nikolai Litvin, 800 Days on the Eastern Front: A Russian Soldier Remembers World War II
(University of Kansas Press, 2007)
Dmitrii Fedorovich Losa, translated by James F. Gebhardt. Commanding the Red Army’s
Sherman Tanks: The World War II Memoirs of Hero of the Soviet Union, Dimtry Loza
(University of Nebraska Press, 1996)
Zoya Matveyeyna Smirnova-Medvedeva, On the Road to Stalingrad: Memoirs of a Woman
Machine Gunner (New Military Publishers, 1997)
Nokolai I. Obryn’ba, Red Partisan: Memoirs of a Soviet Resistance Fighter on the Eastern Front
(Potomac Books, 2007)
Joseph Pilyushin, Red Sniper on the Eastern Front: The Memoirs of Joseph Pilyushin (Pen &
Sword Books, 2010)
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