Looking for some quality reading material about WWII. Mostly interested in the ground war in Europe but any decent historical account is good.
Looking for good analytical history with a good strategic and especially tactical overview that also gets into the personal experiences of the participants. Stephen Ambrose's "Citizen Soldiers" and "Band of Brothers" are decent examples.
Sledge's "With the Old Breed" and George's "Shots Fired In Anger" are good personal accounts (great personal account in the former) but I'd like to get into more big picture type material while trying to avoid books like one about which this reviewer states, "This is a very difficult book to review. Because there is some really good wheat buried in some really uninspiring chaff. I agree with other reviewers that the writing style is dry and reeks of bureaucratic military lifelessness..."
I know there are at least one or two history buffs here so let me know what you recommend.
Added: I'm trying to remember the title of one book mentioned here a while ago - "The Army Learns to Fight" or "An Army Goes to War", something like that, about lessons learned by our inexperienced forces in North Africa and how those were applied later on. That's a general idea of what I'm looking for.
An Army at Dawn
The liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is a story of courage and enduring triumph, of calamity and miscalculation. In this first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the ultimate victory of the Allied powers without a grasp of the great drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943. That first year of the Allied war was a pivotal point in American history, the moment when the United States began to act like a great power.
Beginning with the daring amphibious invasion in November 1942, An Army at Dawn follows the American and British armies as they fight the French in Morocco and Algeria, and then take on the Germans and Italians in Tunisia. Battle by battle, an inexperienced and sometimes poorly led army gradually becomes a superb fighting force. Central to the tale are the extraordinary but fallible commanders who come to dominate the battlefield: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Montgomery, and Rommel.
Brilliantly researched, rich with new material and vivid insights, Atkinson's narrative provides the definitive history of the war in North Africa.
