Garrett Graff's new book, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky, is an oral history of the first atomic bomb. Below, the best-selling author of The Threat Matrix, The Only Plane in the Sky, and Watergate: A New History recommends six World War II books.
'Tower of Skulls' by Richard B. Frank (2020)
This first volume of a coming trilogy traces the first five years of Japan's war in East Asia, all but the final months occurring before the U.S. entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Tower of Skulls will forever reframe how most Americans understand the war's roots and scope. Buy it here.
'Last Stand of the Tin Can Soldiers' by James D. Hornfischer (2004)
This is an incredibly detailed and propulsive narrative that captures one of the great naval battles of the war, the Oct. 25, 1944, Battle of Samar, in which a small, dramatically outgunned U.S. task force held off a large Japanese fleet. Buy it here.
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'Black Snow' by James M. Scott (2022)
Scott's book documents and explains how the 1945 firebombing of Japanese cities by Gen. Curtis LeMay's massive B-29 fleet brought total war to Japan months before the atomic bomb did. The horrific night raids leveled large swaths of more than 60 cities, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and created, in many ways, the permission structure for the use of nuclear weapons. Buy it here.
'Nimitz at War' by Craig L. Symonds (2022)
You've probably never thought a biography of Chester Nimitz, the grizzled, hard-fighting admiral who headed the American war effort in the Pacific, could be laugh-out-loud funny. But naval historian Symonds mined a wide range of sources to build a highly personable study of leadership under the most trying conditions. Buy it here.
'Road to Surrender' by Evan Thomas (2023)
The debate over whether the U.S. was right to drop two atomic bombs on Japan has ebbed and flowed over the years, but Thomas used new documents in this important recent book to show that Japan's surrender, even after the bombings, was hardly a foregone conclusion. Buy it here.
'Fallout' by Lesley M.M. Blume (2021)
The U.S. tried hard for years to downplay the reality of the devastation and death from the atomic bombs. Blume does a masterful job tracing the "cover-up" and the efforts by brave survivors and journalists, particularly The New Yorker's John Hersey, to share the stunning true story with the world. Buy it here.
