Lit on Deck

I think I’m itching to get into WW2 again.  Watched a special this past weekend on one of the History or Military Channels on “The Man Who Never Was.”  This was the British black-op program to deceive the Germans regarding actual Allied invasions in the near future.  British secret service obtained a corpse (of a man who died a natural death) and created a fake English officer from scratch who ostensibly drowns in the Mediterranean carrying top secret documents of the “actual” landing sites and dates.  The Germans swallowed it whole. 

Anyway, I have had a bunch of thick WW2 histories piling up over the past two years eyeballing me from the Great and Imposing Shelf of Immanent Reads behind me.  Think I’ll spend the nonfiction part of my summer reading delving my way through them:

The Second World War (2012), by Antony Beevor

The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (2013), by Rick Atkinson

Crusade in Europe (1948), by Ike himself

Would also like to read something about the war in eastern Europe, the grim affair between the Germans and Russians.  Beevor wrote a couple of books on that subject; if I like his writing in The Second World War I might pick up one of them.  (That phase of the war always brings to my mind the old adage, “why can’t they both lose?”)

I’d also like to read up a bit about the war in the Pacific, but that might have to await a future summer.