Alex Kershaw's Reading List

"He’s written a lot of good books and he’s rightly considered to be a preeminent historian of World War Two. For me, Stalingrad is by far his best book, and I’ve read nearly all of them. It’s magnificent and gripping. He took a story that hadn’t been told for quite a while and did a lot of important new research. There was that window when you could actually get into the archives, and he was able to get in. He just told a damn good story. It’s a wonderful story anyway, but he told it in a way that—it’s a cliché—was hard to put down. It’s very easy to put down history books, especially big, long tomes. They’re not usually written for the benefit of the casual reader or to be page-turners. This was just really good storytelling. He followed the rhythms of a great narrative, the way the battle developed, the climax, the way that everything became very brutal and very tense. He did a superb job of tracking that narrative and making it really come to life. It’s a really fantastic read. Antony Beevor did an awesome job. In terms of taking a big battle and making it really gripping and accessible, I’d say it’s the best World War Two book that I’ve read. It’s a classic."

"Yes. Cornelius Ryan was a war correspondent who had the benefit of witnessing the battle at the time and then interviewing key people. It was pretty useful to be writing then, because the main players were still alive. He could interview division commanders and the people who made really significant decisions, as well as a lot of guys who were there. A lot of people know about The Longest Day because it became a very expensive (and long) movie but it’s actually a pretty short book. You can read it in the time it takes you to get across the English Channel on the ferry. So if anybody is going to the Normandy beaches, they can just take The Longest Day . It’s the ultimate primer on D-Day and you can read it while sipping a beer or cup of tea in the bar on the cross-channel ferry. Cornelius Ryan interviewed hundreds of people for the book. It’s almost history as pointillism. He had access to an enormous amount of information. He sent out questionnaires. If you look at the Ryan archive, it shows you all the material that he gathered for The Longest Day , and it’s really impressive. But he had the discipline, as a really experienced and concise journalist, to say, ‘Okay, I could write a 600- or 700-page book, but I’m not going to.’ It’s short and precise. It’s condensed everything down to the essence of what was dramatic but also important. The story is really well told. Historians would argue, after further review and much more research, that there may be some mistakes or a misinterpretation here or there. There are many areas where you could argue that things were perhaps different or could be interpreted differently. But as an introduction to D-Day that gives you the overall picture, that captures the drama and the enormity of it, and the heroism, and covers the German side as well as the Allied side, there’s nothing better. And I don’t think there ever will be. You try and take a different angle. If you can find people who are still alive that haven’t spoken before or, in archive material, if you can find new stuff that hasn’t been used before, that’s what you’re aiming for. With The Bedford Boys , it was told from the point of view of a small unit—a company of less than 200 men—who fought on D-Day, but it was also told from the point of view of the families and loved ones of those men back in the US. In the book, I cut between Britain, Normandy, and Bedford, a small community in the heart of Virginia. It’ll be a chapter with the guys in Europe getting the training and ready to go and then I come back to the US. I develop the story pretty well in parts of it, so that you understand the cost to one community of that sacrifice on D-Day. So if you’re an American and you were to go and visit Normandy, The Bedford Boys is a recommendation that a lot of people would give you, as a book to read to understand D-Day on a very personal level. It’s not the massive broad picture that Cornelius Ryan presents very well. Although I tell the overall story of the day, I do it very much from the point of view of this unit of men from Bedford, Virginia. There were 34 of them on D-Day, and 19 of them were killed in the first hour or so of the invasion. That’s why Bedford, Virginia is the place where they have the National D-Day Memorial in the US, because it’s been estimated it’s the community that, per capita, had the highest loss of any Allied community on D-Day. So that book was quite a new approach. I don’t think anybody had ever told the story of a battle from the point of view of the wives, the kids and the parents back home. If I don’t do anything else in my life, it will be one thing that I will look back on and think, ‘Well, that was interesting.’ I don’t know whether any books are a favourite but I think it meant something to quite a few people in Bedford, Virginia, and it told the D-Day story in a new way. Therefore, hopefully, a couple of people will read it long after I’m gone. I’m not being falsely modest. It did feel like new ground was being broken. I also did another book about D-Day called The First Wave which was just an unashamed ‘Greatest Hits’ approach. I just picked my favorite guys from the Canadians, the Brits, the Americans and even a Frenchman. I decided, ‘I’m just going to tell this incredible story but tell it up close and personal from the point of view of my eight stars and really go to town.’ There wasn’t a lot that was enormously new but the angle there was somewhat innovative in that I took the combat leaders who were in action first, who had the most critical missions. They landed first—either from the air or the sea—and if they didn’t succeed in the first minutes or hours of D-Day, then the whole operation would have failed. So it was an interesting approach and I got to hero worship some really cool guys. There’s nothing wrong with hero worship when it comes to people who were prepared to die to save everything that we care about."

"If you could have only one author of World War Two books on your desert island, I would say take Paul Brickhill with you. He was an Australian fighter pilot who had been through World War II and just had a nose for a fantastic story. It was almost as if he said to himself, ‘What would make a Hollywood blockbuster? I’m going to write the true story.’ He also wrote The Great Escape —which became a really good movie with Steve McQueen—and The Dambusters. Reach for the Sky was also turned into a movie. So he had a really great strike rate. The books, again, are really short. I think they’re even shorter than The Longest Day . (You’ll note that brevity is a common theme). Reach for the Sky is about Douglas Bader, the legless Second World War flying ace and an extraordinary character. He lost both his legs in a flying accident in the 1930s and somehow—through bluster and bravado and connections and just doggedness—persuaded the RAF to allow him to return to combat and he flew in the Battle of Britain. He was a very good pilot, obviously. The stirrups in the Spitfire were changed for his false legs. It’s a massive inspiration to anybody that’s lost their legs because here’s a guy who thought his world had ended and went on to fly in dogfights in the Battle of Britain. “They’re really gripping reads and over the years, they’re ones that I come back to and enjoy again and again” Then, he was shot down and taken prisoner. He was a legend among the Germans and while he was recuperating in a hospital in Normandy, he was asked ‘Can we do anything for you?’ I believe it was Adolf Galland—one of the leading German fighter pilots—who was involved in that decision. There was a certain gentlemanly conduct between the Luftwaffe and the RAF. It’s been overly romanticized but it wasn’t like on the Eastern Front, where they killed each other whenever they possibly could. Bader replied that he needed new legs and the Germans arranged for the RAF to drop in the legs and they were delivered to Bader. It’s an extraordinary story. The first thing Bader did once he had fitted the legs was to try and escape. He continued to try to escape throughout the rest of the war and was placed in Colditz. Colditz was the maximum-security prison that the Germans had for serial escapers—people who thought it was their duty to try and escape and kept on doing it—along with some high-profile prisoners. Ben Macintyre wrote a really good account of Colditz just last year. That, again, is a wonderful story. Bader escaped from Colditz. Here’s a guy that couldn’t be put down, he was just indomitable. It goes through to the end of the war, basically."

"From the day that Churchill came into power in May of 1940, he really only had one objective. A lot of Brits don’t like to hear this, but he knew that there was no chance for Britain, or the Empire, unless they “dragged” the United States into the war, as he put it. Almost daily until Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Churchill was doing everything he possibly could to get the United States into the war. He was relieved when Pearl Harbor happened because then, finally, the Americans were a part of the worldwide effort. But I should stress that Germany declared war on the United States, not the other way around. It was Hitler who decided—because of the Tripartite agreement between the Italians, the Japanese and the Germans—to declare war on the United States. So you might want to ask yourself, what would have happened if Hitler hadn’t done that? Would the US—seriously under-armed and taken by surprise—have engaged in the Pacific against the Japanese and then gone to war in Europe? You could make a good argument for saying they might not have. Their war was with the Japanese, not Nazi Germany. Thankfully, Hitler made that massive geopolitical error and the industrial might of the United States helped us massively. The 3rd Infantry Division (ID) that he belonged to began in North Africa in November 1942, but Audie Murphy didn’t see any combat until the 10th of July, 1943, in Sicily. He was in B company of the 15th Infantry Regiment. Among the American divisions, the 3rd ID fought the longest in the European theater. They went all the way from North Africa to Berchtesgaden in Germany, which is an awful long way. They had the most Medal of Honor recipients of any American division in Europe, Audie Murphy being one of them. He was the most decorated US infantryman of World War Two, gaining every medal that you could possibly get for valour. He was a really skinny, small guy who had been rejected by the Marines and the Navy. He was allowed into the US Army on his second attempt, I believe. He was the last guy you’d think would end up being this incredible warrior, unrivaled in terms of medals, in World War Two. He wrote this book, To Hell and Back, which was also turned into a movie. It’s very intense, a great distraction. I think most of it is true. There is a little bit of dramatization here and there, and a bit of dialogue that I’m not sure would really have happened. But when I was writing about Audie Murphy, I read the book several times and I looked at the archival material as well. Surprisingly, a lot of it was spot on. I was quite taken by the fact that what he wrote corresponded to what had actually happened because it’s quite difficult to do. He was a lowly private at the beginning of the war and you really have no idea what’s going on in terms of the big picture. Your recollections are very fragmentary. Also, because of trauma, the violence, the loss and the chaos, it’s hard to create a narrative that actually intersects with what happened. It’s only afterwards that you can put it in context. So he did a good job. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s a really fun read, very enjoyable. His story is also remarkable. When they made the movie, he actually played himself. It was a really big hit at the time, I think the highest-grossing movie for Paramount up until that point. It made him wealthy. Much of that wealth he gambled away later on in his life. It still is a good movie. A lot of people might sit there and go, ‘It’s so corny!’ but I actually think it’s really fun and watchable. You’d be very hard-pressed to find someone who saw as much combat in the critical battles in the liberation of Western Europe, and experienced as much of the grit and the grime and the horror of war, as Audie Murphy. He had an extraordinary ability to lead. He’s about as close as you can come to an effective predator, in a uniform, in the US Army, in World War Two. He was extraordinarily good at killing people and very good at not getting killed. And whether people want to embrace this fully or not, you needed people like that to get the job done. In many battles, when it really came down to it, you needed people to get out of foxholes and attack and destroy the enemy. In terms of Western Europe, whether it was the Brits, the Canadians, or the Yanks, it didn’t matter: We were aiming for Berlin and Berlin is a long way away from Casablanca. It’s a long way from Normandy, even. You had to get up most days and attack. The Germans, often, were defending. It takes a certain kind of person to do that over and over and over again. And to do it willingly. The vast majority of people in that situation are terrified. They’re scared and they’re not going to put their life on the line. They’ll do what they’re told, they’ll do things automatically if they’re trained, but to be enterprising, to actually consciously put your life on the line over and over and over again and to do something that goes beyond the call of duty is rare. And I think Audie Murphy was probably the rarest of the rare. He went all the way across Sicily. Then there was the Salerno invasion in September 1943. He fought with the 3rd ID all the way up the spine of central Italy. He was at Anzio, in January 1944. He was wounded there, then came back in at the end of the battle and was part of the breakout. His fourth amphibious invasion was Operation Dragoon, in August of 1944. This summer, I was actually at the vineyard where he earned his DSC or Distinguished Service Cross. You can see the beach at St Tropez where they came ashore. Then he fought all the way up the Rhone Valley, through the Vosges mountains, was in the Battle of the Colmar Pocket in January and February of 1945. That’s close to the German border and where he earned the Medal of Honor. Finally, he was taken off the frontline in March of 1945 because you didn’t want your Medal of Honor recipients to be killed in action: they were too useful as propaganda figures. Although I would argue that with someone like Murphy, you should have just kept him in the line because he was so effective. Other people can raise war bonds. So he’d gone all the way from Sicily to Salzburg—where he received the Medal of Honor in June of 1945, after the war had ended—and was still only 20 years old. He had killed a lot—some people say he killed over 250 Germans, which is a ridiculous statement. He was totally brutalized and had massive PTSD. His face appeared on the front cover of Life magazine in July of 1945. He was handsome and the literal cover boy for American heroism in World War Two. Jimmy Cagney, the actor who played gangsters in Hollywood, saw him on the cover of Life and said, ‘Wow, who’s this kid? He could be a movie star! He’s the real deal, the action hero.’ Cagney contacted Audie Murphy and flew him out to Hollywood in the fall of 1945. He let him sleep in his pool house, paid for acting lessons, put him into a gym, fattened him up. And then, lo and behold, Audie Murphy ended up being a big star and appearing in more than 30 movies. To Hell and Back was a blockbuster movie in 1955. As I said, Audie Murphy played himself, including the scene where his best friend was killed and other key moments. He was still hugely traumatized with a serious case of PTSD as he reenacted those scenes. He actually asked the producers to cut the scene where he received the Medal of Honor but they thought it was the climax and too important not to have in the movie. So they finally persuaded him to keep it in, but it tells you a little bit about his mindset. Yes, and I follow them not just to the end of the war, but afterwards. The last quarter of the book is post-World War Two. Audie Murphy had a very interesting second chapter of his life, being a movie star. He wrote a lot of country and western songs and starred in a lot of westerns. But he was deeply scarred by the war. He slept with a pistol under his pillow and had troubled relationships. The remarkable thing is that, given how much he’d seen and how much he endured, he was even able to function at all, that he didn’t just go and drink himself to death or commit suicide. One thing that a lot of the characters in these books I’m talking about have in common is incredible resilience. He certainly had it."

"This is one of the most deeply moving books I’ve ever read. There’s one part of it which is about her partner at the time, Robert Antelme. He was part of the French Resistance and was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp. When I was researching The Liberator —which is a book that came out in 2012 about a guy who ended up liberating Dachau—I was looking for suitable characters that I could have in Dachau, as the liberating forces were approaching. I did a lot of research and found Robert Antelme, who was a really cool guy. Then I came across Margaret Duras’s book, which tells the story of her relationship with him. It’s so powerful. Duras’s description of how she nursed him when he arrived back in Paris…it’s difficult to turn the pages. She talks about having to feed him so delicately with a spoon, with a very thin broth, how you could see through his skin to his ribs and his internal organs. That’s how emaciated he was. He was actually rescued from Dachau by Francois Mitterand, the future French president. She writes about how, when he was driven back from Germany to Paris by Mitterand, Mitterand was afraid that if they went across too many bumps in the road that it would literally kill him. He was so close death. Duras writes about how she was terrified of the responsibility that she now confronted of having to try and save him, to try and nurse him back to some kind of health. The kicker is that she no longer loved him. She had had relationships and fallen in love with somebody else. But she did everything that she was capable of doing to give Antelme the chance of living. Then there’s a scene near the end where she has to tell him, ‘You’ve recovered sufficiently to walk on your own, but we can’t be together.’ It’s enormously powerful. I just remember the descriptions of how she fed him, what would go in at one end of his body and come out at the other. It’s extraordinary. It’s an incredible account of what you can do for someone. He was a great writer too. He only wrote one book, about his experience in Dachau. It’s not the whole war. There are a number of novellas within the book that cover different aspects of the war. One, controversially, involves her relationship with a German. But the relationship with Antelm is the one that forms most of the book, and it’s really, really well done. It’s really moving. I was always taken with the idea that you can devote almost every last ounce of your energy to somebody else and then break their heart. It’s the kind of thing that Duras, as a writer, excelled at, this sort of ambivalence and complexity and things that people might not like to dwell on too much. When people think of Margaret Duras, they don’t think of this memoir, but for me, it’s her most powerful, beautiful writing. It’s very elegant and moving. As a woman writing about her experiences in World War Two, about what Nazism did to people and the consequences of trying to bring someone to life after that evil, there’s nothing like it. It’s really extraordinary. I’m not that interested in strategy or tactics, or what the inside of a tank looks like. I’m finishing a book now about the Battle of the Bulge and my editor has a whole bunch of notes like, ‘More on weapons, people love tanks’ or ‘Where were they on this day? Where are they moving towards?’ These are good points, and you have to address them. But I’m much more interested in what they were feeling and thinking and how they coped with the stress, what they believed in, what motivated them, how much they loved the guys around them, how they led their lives later, how they endured, what they were inspired by, whether they prayed, whether they didn’t pray. The thing about World War Two that is really compelling for me—and always will be—is that it’s like the perfect pressure cooker for testing humanity in different ways. With Duras, it’s ‘How do you save someone you don’t want to be with?’ With Audie Murphy it’s ‘How do you carry on? How do you keep moving? How do you wake up every day and do the impossible? And then how, when you emerge from that, do you put the thing that disfigures and scars you to the side and still function?’ Those are the things that are enduring about World War II. It’s not about lots of people killing each other and flag waving and ‘aren’t we wonderful?’ and all that. It’s about human beings tested over and over again. Yes. It’s a good question."