Books about World War II generally fall into two categories. The first is the hour-by-hour account of individual battles, often told via accounts of individual soldiers. One example is Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, which was the basis for the HBO mini-series The Pacific.

The second type is the “big picture” or strategic view, such as A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, by Gerhard Weinberg.

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