Your First WWII Book

Morning Worsham.
I cannot remember a title, but it would have been about aircraft. Planes were my thing,(Grandad was in the RAF.)
I did not start reading escape stories until much later.
I would have had a junior history version, but am sure one on planes came first.

It was a giant red book that had gold lettering on the cover that read “WORLD WAR II” and it had all these pictures in it. The first few pages were big portraits of Erwin Rommel, Bernard Montgomery, and Dwight Eisenhower, with about a page of text written about each man by their one of their children (I thought Rommel’s was funny because his son was listed as an Oberburgermeister, which at 7 was a funny looking and sounding word).

I can’t even begin to take a guess at the title of the first WWII book I ever read…but I do recall that one of the first (if not the first) books on battleships that I ever read was “Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship” by Richard Hough.  And one of the first (if not the first) documentaries on WWII that I ever saw was the “Stalingrad” episode of “The World at War.”

@ABWorsham:

I read every book in the school library on WWI & WWII. I was such a regular in the library that the librarian would order me new books in to read.

SSSHH!

You’re not supposed to let people know that! ;)

I can’t quite remember the name of my fist WWII book… was one of my fathers. I think it was “WWII in Pictures”  And it had an Iconic photo of Germany infantry running on the cover in the Axis & Allies famous pose.

Something like this picture, but from the side as opposed to the front.  I recall it was in an urban setting.

Now that I think about it… it might have been “D-Day in Pictures”.  With red lettering.

Guys,

––If I remember correctly it was “Lucky Forward”. “Lucky” was the code name for 3rd Army and “Forward” was the code name for General Patton. It was/is a great book,….written by the 3rd Army’s Intelligence Officer.

----My Dad was in the 15th Corps, 3rd Army and saw Patton on three different occasions. Dad was a T-5, equivalent to a staff sergeant, and never talked to “Georgie”, but was a big fan of his and still is 71 years later.

“Tall Paul”

I can´t even guess what my first book was…

Stalingrad from anthony beevor, or ¨A bridge too far¨/¨the last battle¨ from Cornelius Ryan, (have read the longest day as well)

I think it´s a bridge too far, but not sure.

“A Bridge too Far” by Cornelius Ryan

I think Midway was the 1st 40 or so years ago.

Midway in paperback, came out when the movie did and had advertisement on back for it. The book itself was the factual account of the campaign.

@Gargantua:

Now that I think about it… it might have been “D-Day in Pictures”.  With red lettering.

Hey Garg. it looks like a 1940 picture in France.
Where did you get it from?

Or a late '41 picture in Russia.

@CWO:

I can’t even begin to take a guess at the title of the first WWII book I ever read…but I do recall that one of the first (if not the first) books on battleships that I ever read was “Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship” by Richard Hough.  And one of the first (if not the first) documentaries on WWII that I ever saw was the “Stalingrad” episode of “The World at War.”

I’m pretty much in the same boat… I can’t remember the first book… I started reading WWII books in the 1970s when I was a kid, just can’t recall the first… I also was watching documentaries back before cable was a thing… I remember one of the first series was the “World at War” series (probably watched it on PBS).

Mine was probably one of the books in the Time-life series published about WWII.

Can’t recall my first but knowing it was from Podzun-Pallas, a very good publishing company.

I think my first proper book was about Norwegians volunteering to fight for the Nazis on the Eastern front. The book was red, with drawing of a stahlhelm and some barbed wire on the cover.

I remember better some of the first documentaries I watched, back in the days when Discovery Channel sent good documentaries and not just crap. They where called Battlefield and had a duration for almost two hours. Topics where the battle og Britain, battle for Atlantic, attack on France, Barberossa and so on. They delt with the commanders, their plans, the soldiers, order of battle etc… I’m nut sure how I would rate them today, since I didn’t have very much knowledge back then when I first saw them, but at least I remember them as being quite good.

@Herr:

I remember better some of the first documentaries I watched, back in the days when Discovery Channel sent good documentaries and not just crap. They where called Battlefield and had a duration for almost two hours. Topics where the battle og Britain, battle for Atlantic, attack on France, Barberossa and so on. They delt with the commanders, their plans, the soldiers, order of battle etc… I’m nut sure how I would rate them today, since I didn’t have very much knowledge back then when I first saw them, but at least I remember them as being quite good.

I have a few of them on DVD.  They offer a pretty good general overview of the various battles they cover; it’s been a while since I watched them, but I don’t recall any glaring errors.  The episodes all use a standard format, in a standard order, for presenting the different elements related to each battle, which has its good points and bad points.  On the up side, this gives the viewer – especially, I would imagine, someone who’s new to the topic of WWII – a useful sense of structure as each episode proceeds; on the down side, this required the producers to make each battle fit into this general model, which gives each battle a sense of uniformity rather than reflecting its distinctive character.  All in all, I think they’re well done…which is more than I can say about some of the other documentaries in my collection.

It was either Beevor’s Stalingrad or Shirer’s Rise and fall of the Third Reich.