Also of interest ... in war stories

The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

(Penguin, $40)

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The final volume of Richard Evans’ three-part history of Germany’s Third Reich “may well be not only the finest but the most riveting account” of the Nazi war years, said Walter Reich in The New York Times. “Drawing deftly” from individual diaries and memoirs, the Cambridge historian fills the book with memorable recurring characters while “brilliantly” weaving together the larger strands of his complex, horrifying story. “Raw violence,” we recognize anew, “was at the core of who the Nazis were and what they did.”

Soldier From the War Returning

by Thomas Childers

(Houghton Mifflin, $26)

Just because World War II veterans never liked talking about the traumas of combat doesn’t mean they bore the memories lightly, said Wendy Smith in the Chicago Tribune. Historian Thomas Childers highlights the high incidence of divorce, unemployment, and psychiatric disorder among “Greatest Generation” servicemen, and his linked portraits of three men scarred by their experiences “makes palpable the human cost of a conflict too often sanitized as ‘the good war.’”

Gallipoli

by Robin Prior

(Yale, $35)

Historians have battled over the lessons of Gallipoli almost since the disastrous 1915 campaign to seize the Turkish peninsula ended in an Allied retreat, said Robert Messenger in The Wall Street Journal. Until Ottoman archives are opened, Robert Prior’s new book should serve as “a decisive end to the debate.” Neither Winston Churchill, at the time Britain’s naval chief, nor the commanders Churchill later scapegoated, deserve all the blame, says Prior. The gambit was doomed from the start by “amateurish preparation” across the entire top tier of Britain’s government.

Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

(Scribner, $28)

The 2001 victory over the Taliban that was engineered by a mere 100 CIA officers and 350 Special Forces soldiers on horseback “deserves a hallowed place in American military history,” said Bruce Barcott in The New York Times. But Doug Stanton’s “rousing, uplifting” tribute to these resourceful warriors and their Northern Alliance allies is haunted by “the events that came later.” As Stanton acknowledges, the Taliban today once again controls “large portions of Afghanistan,” and whether it can be crushed again is anyone’s guess.