Twelve Wargaming Books for Christmas

Señor Skinner, one of the trio of brains at Too Fat Lardies had an initiative at Twitter to publish his best 12 wargaming Christmas books under the hashtag #12booksofchristmas. The initiave was quickly followed by other Twitterati (including me) and soon we have all gathered an impressive collection of interesting military history and wargaming books.

I thought it was a shame to lose this trove of information (it is impossible to search and find interesting posted materials on Twitter) and for that reason I decided to transfer the list to my blog in this post. 

Nick Skinner list:

#12 Arnhem by Major General Urquhart  

#11 Storming Saint Nazaire byJames G. Dorrian 

#10 Texan Iliad by Stephen L. Harding

#9 Sturmzug: Tactics of the German Assault Platoon 1944

#8 Command by Al Murray

#7 Red Devils by Mark Urban, who incidentally was recently interviewed by Henry Hyde and the podcast is available in his Patreon page really worth subscribing.

#6 Wargaming Campaigns by Henry Hyde coincidentally. This is IMHO the wargaming book of the year and a must-have for anyone in the hobby

#5 is the BAOR series of 12 British Army battlefield tours in Western Europe. A real jewel! 

#4 Oosterbeek - Arnhem 1944 is a book in Dutch of the "then and now" type, comparing historical and modern photos of the Arnhem battle sites.

#3 The Silence of the Merville Battery by Neil Barber 

#2 A Street in Arnhem by Robert Kershaw, of It Never Snows in September fame (among other outstanding military history books)

#1 The Holland Patch by Simon Haines

 

If you follow the threads of the different entries, you'll find a lot of additional suggestions and recomendations. My own list is a sort of ecclectic, mixing literature and military history works, most of them read this eyar but not necessarely.

#12 is for "14" by French writer Jean Echenoz, an account of a group of French soldiers in WW1

#11 is  The Tartar Steppe by Italiand writer Dino Buzzati. An anti militarist writing in Moussolini Italy in 1938 is a breve move

#10 Sympathy of the Devil by Ken Anderson. In the Vietnam jungles written by a veteran of the Special Ops group. 

#9 Pacific War Trilogy by Ian W. Toll. Everything you want to know from Peral Harbour to the atomic bomb in several thousand pages. A master work

#8 Cassino by Peter Caddick-Adams, used extensively during my trip to the battlefiled last April

#7 The Middle Parts of Fortune by Frederic Manning. Back to WW1 this time with the British by a veteran of the conflict.  

#6 The Battle of the Rhine 1944 by Robin Neillands. Already a classic but fresh and enagaging about the campaign since the Normandy breakout to the Ardennes.

#5 Island of Fire by Jason D Marks. Over 700 pages on Stalingrad BUT focused on the fight around a few hundred sqaure meters: The Barrikady Factory

#4 It Never Snows in September by Robert Kershaw. Another classic about Market Garden from the German eyes

#3 Brazen Chariots by Major Robert Crisp. A veteran of the North Africa campaign riding a Stuart in the desert

#2 1945 Victory in the West by Peter Caddick- Adams (again). You thought Ardennes was the end of the war in the West and 1945 was a walkovr for the allies in the Western Front. Then you must read this. A very much neglected period of suffering and mounting casualties despite the war clearly coming to an end sonner or later.  Probably the bext military history book I've read this year.

#1 Napoleon Campaigns by David Chandler. As Napoleon said abouy Marshall Ney, "The classic-est of the classics". This is one the books that most influenced me to undertake wargaming projects in the Napoleonic era.

I hope you liked these lists and will much appreciate if your leave your book suggestions in the comments sections