Books like Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys — picked by fans

This well-written book taught me a great deal about WW2. I especially appreciated learning more about Mary Churchill, Winston’s youngest daughter, who was seventeen at the start of the war. The author obtained access to her diaries, and he quotes from them often, so I got a feel for the life of a young woman in society during wartime. Mary had a conscience and good insights and became a main character in this historical book.

It’s not a novel, but at times it reads like one.  

This is the third and final of Rick Atkinson’s three-volume Liberation Trilogy, and if you loved the first two, as I did, you’ll love this one. A meticulous researcher and masterful storyteller, Atkinson devotes this volume to the final year of World War II in Western Europe (D-Day to V-E Day).

Along with mining diaries and letters of soldiers, civilians, journalists, and world leaders for fresh details, Atkinson balances the human drama with crisp military analysis and engrossing background information.

I was indebted to this two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author for helping me better grasp what Ellen England’s father experienced while he labored, in concert with thousands of Allied troops, to cripple and ultimately defeat Hitler’s vaunted Wehrmacht.

Red Cross trainees were among the thousands of people who poured into Washington, D.C., during World War II, with Mary Brandon–in our book–arriving there for instruction in 1943. What was the city like?

Esteemed journalist David Brinkley shared his personal reminiscences of a 1940s-era Washington in this lively account, showing how the city morphed rapidly from a slow-moving Southern town into an initially ill-prepared wartime capital. Brinkley’s many anecdotes are amusing, astonishing, and always instructive, as when he noted that even though the army placed antiaircraft guns on roofs of government buildings, so few guns were available that some–it was later learned–were merely wood replicas.

Through Mary Brandon’s letters, I glimpsed wartime Washington. Brinkley’s book treated me to a full portrait.

It’s no secret that uniformed men and women welcome canine friends in wartime. In our book, Bill Husselman and Mary Brandon wrote home regularly about dogs they or their mates adopted in France, Italy, and elsewhere.

That said, Robert Weintraub’s book is no ordinary tale about bonding between humans and animals. Weintraub painstakingly recounts how an RAF radar technician named Frank and a purebred English pointer named Judy survived separate hells at the start of World War II, only to be imprisoned in an internment camp in the Pacific. There, despite being close to starvation, they used their wits to keep each other alive, even as they were subjected to ever-worsening cruelty and malnutrition.

Weintraub’s story is spellbinding and inspiring–and no less a love story of loyalty between man and dog.

Less involved with the moral and political dilemmas than some of the other novels I’ve listed, this is more of a straightforward adventure story about a British aircrew who survives a crash landing in France and hides out in a farmhouse. Naturally one of them falls for the farmer’s daughter and she helps him on his way to the border. A great romantic adventure but tinged with the real horror and pain of warfare.

April in Paris presents a perspective not often seen in World War II fiction: the first-person account of a German soldier.

Fluent in French, Corporal Roth is assigned to interpret prisoner interrogations in Nazi-occupied Paris. Disturbed by the torture he witnesses, Roth escapes his repugnant duties by posing as a Frenchman when off-duty, attempting to shed his identity as “occupier” by blending in with the populace.

He encounters the beautiful Chantal and ardently pursues her, unaware that she is part of the Resistance. Love ripens between Roth and Chantal, but the outcome spins out of their control, as both are hurled toward the perilous consequences of their affair.

Wallner’s fast-paced novel is more thriller than romance, as human emotion collides with the brutality of war. 

In 1812 Britain ruled the waves and Napoleon ruled everything else. We in the twenty-first century don’t realise how difficult and dangerous those times really were, how much of an analogy can be drawn with the dark days of World War II, when Britain stood alone against the forces in Europe. While the main plot line appears to be a simple romance, in fact Bennetts has gathered together strand after strand of conflict into a rich, absorbing tapestry. There's code-breaking, social mores, how to partake of snuff, politics, the assassination of the British PM. The story is utterly absorbing and very, very real.

I recommend this book because it introduces the reader to one of the first organized resistance networks in Paris. As a double agent, Mathilde Carré (nom de guerre: Victoire) was also known as “The Cat.” She was ultimately responsible for the arrest of hundreds of Interallié agents (including her boss, Roman Czerniawski).

This book has it all. The author weaves the stories of collaborationists (e.g., Bonny-Lafont), SOE double agents (e.g., Henri Déricourt), and Abwehr spy catchers (e.g., Hugo Bleicher) around intricate counter-intelligence plots involving British and German spy agencies. You will meet Czerniawski again as he became a double agent after his arrest by the Germans and worked for the Allies in Operation Double Cross. It’s a great foundation to begin your study of the resistance movement in Paris.

Marc Bloch was a prominent French historian, who specialized in Medieval social history during the years between the two world wars of the twentieth century. He was a major figure in the formation of the “Annales School” which focused on the study of history with an emphasis on long-term developments in social history. Of Alsatian-Jewish background, he wrote the book Strange Defeat during the summer of 1940, following the rapid defeat and conquest of France by Nazi Germany. Bloch’s book was published in France after the war, in 1946, but he did not live to see it. He was able to maintain a professorial position at the University of Montpelier in southern France but, after joining the Resistance, was captured, tortured, and executed in 1944. In Strange Defeat, Bloch examined the long-term causes of the 1940 defeat, focusing on the failure of the French military leadership to… show more.

I love this book. Although it’s a novel, Virginia Hall was a real person. She was recruited by the Allies to be a spy.

The book is written in present tense—which I usually find distracting—but it works in this book. It really lends an air of immediacy to the story. My heart didn’t stop pounding through the entire book. Even though I knew the basics of Virginia Hall’s life, this novel really brings it to life. She was an extraordinary woman.