10 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
British historian — Hoover Institution senior fellow — author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018), Napoleon: A Life (2014), and Masters and Commanders — the leading popular biographer of Churchill and Napoleon in the English-speaking world.
Norman Ohler's 2016 history of drug use in Nazi Germany — documenting how Pervitin (methamphetamine) fueled the Blitzkrieg and how Hitler received daily drug injections — the most thoroughly documented account of institutional drug use in modern warfare.
Timothy Snyder's 2010 history of the 'bloodlands' — Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, the Baltic states — where Nazi and Soviet killing machines overlapped between 1933 and 1945, killing approximately 14 million civilians — arguing that the specific combination of two totalitarian systems created an unprecedented killing zone.
American historian — former President of Dartmouth College — author of Those Who Have Borne the Battle (on America's combat veterans) — who writes on American military history and veterans.
British historian who wrote the 8-volume official biography of Winston Churchill, a history of the Holocaust, and The Second World War — among the most prolific and meticulously researched British historians of the 20th century.
German author — whose Blitzed (2016) documented the systematic use of methamphetamine by the German military and by Hitler personally during World War II — a mainstream historian's account that reads like a thriller.
Vannevar Bush's 1970 memoir documenting his role directing American science during World War II — including the coordination of the Manhattan Project and radar development — and making the case for the OSRD model of government-funded university research.
Robert Kurson's 2004 account of two New Jersey divers who discovered a WWII German U-boat 60 miles off the American coast in 1991 — their obsessive quest to identify it — one of the most gripping narrative nonfiction books.
William Shirer's 1960 comprehensive history of Nazi Germany from its origins through the war and defeat — written by a journalist who covered Berlin throughout the 1930s — still one of the most widely read accounts of the Third Reich.
John Keegan's 1989 single-volume history of the Second World War — providing the most accessible and comprehensive narrative account of the entire global conflict — written from the perspective of the military historian who understood war as a human experience, not just a strategic problem.