Annotated Bibliography: World War II Home Front Featured Unit
All titles listed below have been read and vetted by Judith Stanford Miller, Redwood Learning Platform editor, as appropriate for middle school and high school students to read. The books are excellent resources to enhance knowledge of World War II, D-Day, the World War II Home Front and the Holocaust.
• Atkinson, Rick. The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Volume Two of the Liberation Trilogy. Henry Holt and Company, 2007. (588 pages)
This is an excellent book for a deep dive into the Allied Italian campaign or because of its length, as a reference to put that history into context within the more well known story of the D-Day invasion and the end of the war. The Tuskegee Airmen flew out of Ramitelli Air Base near Foggia, Italy, mainly as escorts for bombers. With the tails of their P-51 fighter planes painted red, the Tuskegee Airmen “Red Tails” quickly earned a reputation for their skill and discipline in the skies escorting bombers to and from their targets.
• Baime, A.J., The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War. Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.
• Brown, Harold H. and Bordner, Marsha S., Keep Your Airspeed Up: the Story of a Tuskegee Airman. The University of Alabama Press, 2017. (248 pages)
Before Harold was 21 years old, he had earned his silver pilot’s wings as a member of Tuskegee Class 44-E. One of 992 Black aviation cadets who earned their wings in Tuskegee, Alabama at the U.S. Army Air Forces training base for Black aviation cadets, Harold was one of 355 pilots (later called Tuskegee Airmen) who were deployed overseas during World War II. On his 30th mission on March 14, 1945, his P-51 was disabled by debris from an exploding locomotive. He was forced to bail out. Soon after landing in the Alps, he was captured and taken a Prisoner-of-War (POW). On April 29, 1945, Gen. George Patton liberated Harold and about 10,000 American POWs being held in Moosburg, Germany.
• Brinkley, Douglas, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc. New York, Harper Perennial, 2005.
This book weaves together the story of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Battalion (Rangers) who scaled the cliff Pointe du Hoc on D-Day to take out powerful German guns with President Ronald Reagan’s speech at the Pointe du Hoc Ranger Monument in 1984 on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day. Reagan’s speech that day came to be considered one of his best speeches of his presidency. It was written by Peggy Noonan, a young speechwriter recently hired by the White House just a few months before the June 1984 anniversary. This book goes into precise details of the Rangers and the process Peggy followed in writing the speech. It was this speech that prompted Reagan’s “New Patriotism” and a renewed interest in the World War II generation, called the Greatest Generation.
• Brinkley, Douglas and Drez, Ronald. Voices of Valor: D-Day: June 6, 1944. Konecky & Konecky, 2004.
Ron Drez and Douglas Brinkley both knew and worked with Stephen Ambrose, author of Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, first published in 1992. In 2001, the book was made into a popular television miniseries. Brinkley and Drez collaborated on this book as a result of their extensive interviews with D-Day veterans.
• Butter, Irene; Bidwell, John and Holloway, Kris. Shores Beyond Shores: From Holocaust to Hope, My True Story. Amherst, Massachusetts, White River Press, 2018.
This book is an excellent introduction to the Holocaust for middle school and high school students. Irene Hasenberg had an idyllic childhood in Berlin before her family was forced to move from Germany to Amsterdam as Hitler came to power in the 1930s. After Nazi Germany invaded Holland in 2family was first deported to Westerbork, a transit camp in Holland, and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. Her father was able to obtain passports for the family, which allowed the family to stay together in the camp. Irene, her mother, and older brother would survive the Holocaust. Alone as a teenager after spending almost one year by herself at a United Nations refugee camp in Algeria, Irene came to America on a Liberty Ship, arriving in Baltimore on Dec. 24, 1945.
• Clawson, Augusta H., Shipyard Diary of a Woman Welder.
During WWII, the War Department wanted information on the high attrition rate of women workers employed at shipyards. Clawson was a “Special Agent (Training, Women for War Production)” within the Vocational Division of the U.S. Office of Education. She went undercover as a ship welder and kept a diary of her experiences. She published her diary in 1944 and it became a bestseller.
• Colman, Penny. Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the Home Front in World War II, Random House. 1995.
This book is a terrific overview of Rosie the Riveter that includes a WWII timeline.
• Doolittle, Gen. James “Jimmy” with Carroll V. Glines. I Could Never Be So Lucky Again. New York, Bantam Books, 1991.
Note: At 502 pages (paperback), this autobiography is long but worth reading. Gen. Doolittle spent his early years in Nome, Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush but moved back to California to attend better schools. It’s there he developed a love for flying. During World War I, he was a flight instructor as he joined the Army Air Corps to learn to fly. He left the Army to work in private industry only to return to service during World War II. He led Doolittle’s Raid over Tokyo in 1942 and then helped plan the air component of the D-Day invasion in 1944. The book is not simply a military history because Gen. Doolittle tells a heartfelt story about his marriage, which is reflected in the book’s title. Especially valuable is Doolittle’s commitment to learning. He was the first person to earn a doctorate in aeronautics from MIT.
• Fleischman, John. Black and White Airmen: Their True History. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York, 2007.
• Gies, Miep and Gold, Alison Leslie, Anne Frank Remembered, The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1987, 2009.
Along with Shores Beyond Shores by Irene Butter, this book is an excellent resource to read to introduce students to the Holocaust. Few people realize the Frank family hid for 25 long months. Miep Gies worked for Otto Frank at his spice business. Otto asked Miep to help them if they had to go into hiding. For 25 months, Miep secured food and other essentials for not only the Frank family of four but for four other people hiding with the family. On the day the Frank family was betrayed, Miep collected Anne’s diary and other papers and put them in her desk. When Otto returned from Auschwitz, the only member of his family to survive, Miep gave him the papers. Otto published Anne’s diary in 1946.
• Guidry, Paula. Treasures in My Heart: A True World War II Love Story. iUniverse, 2004.
• Halvorsen, Gail. The Berlin Candy Bomber. Horizon Publishers, 2010, 2014, 2017.
• Herman, Arthur. Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II. Random House, 2012.
• Hervieux, Linda. Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes, at Home and at War. New York, Harper, 2015.
This book is as much a history lesson about the American civil rights movement as it is about the African American Barrage Balloon Battalion, the only U.S. Army unit of African Americans to land on D-Day. Readers will be angry at the way these heroes were treated after returning from fighting to free Europe from Nazi oppression and racism only to return to it themselves at home. While training in England, black soldiers were treated equally as Americans. They experienced freedoms they never had before in the United States. It would take years to defeat Jim Crow at home. About one million African American soldiers served during WWII.
• Hoose, Phillip. The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and The Churchill Club. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015.
Phillip Hoose wrote this book following his visit to the Museum of Dutch Resistance in Copenhagen in 2000. It was young boys who sparked the Dutch Resistance when Denmark fell quickly to German occupation in 1940 and the Dutch people largely acquiesced to the occupation. The boys formed The Churchill Club in tribute to Winston Churchill whom they felt bravely resisted Hitler. The book recounts the boys’ dangerous escapades trying to disrupt Nazi operations. They were eventually caught and sent to prison but survived to see the end of World War II and Denmark return to sovereign rule. Some of the boys met Winston Churchill when he came to Denmark to receive an honor in 1950.
• Mundy, Liza. Code Girls: the Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II. New York, Hachette Books, 2017.
This is a fascinating book about female college students who were recruited to be code breakers during World War II. The military hired the girls to break primarily Japanese naval codes as British intelligence was working on breaking the German Enigma machine. It was challenging but rewarding work for the girls.
• Murphy, Leo F. Lost in Heaven: The Story of 1st Lt. James R. Polkinghorne Jr., USAAF, Early Black Aviation History and the Tuskegee Airmen, .Pensacola Bay Flying Machines, Ltd. Co, 2018.
• Rickman, Sarah Byrn. BJ Erickson: WASP Pilot. Palmer Lake, Colorado, Filter Press, 2018.
BJ Erickson was a student at the University of Washington when she learned that flying lessons were being offered by the government for students. She was accepted into the program. After the United States entered WWII in 1941, BJ and other female pilots offered to ferry planes to destinations within the United States. The Womens Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) was formally established. BJ rose to be a squadron commander based in Long Beach, California. After the war, BJ tried returning to work at a department store in Seattle but she missed flying. She moved to Long Beach and spent the rest of her life involved in aviation. WASP were finally granted full military status in 1977 and awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010.
• Rickman, Sarah Byrn. Nancy Love: WASP Pilot. Filter Press, 2019.
• Rubin, Susan Goldman. Anne Frank: Letters from Amsterdam to Iowa. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 2003.
Susan writes about a piece of history few people know. Anne Frank had a pen pal in Danville, Iowa. Before the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, an Iowa teacher traveled to Amsterdam to work out a pen pal program with a school there. Students were matched. Juanita Wagner in Danville was given Anne Frank’s name. Juanita had a sister and so did Anne so the four girls exchanged letters. But then Germany invaded Holland in May 1940 and the letters stopped. It would not be until after the war Juanita realized that the Anne Frank now the subject of a popular Broadway play was her former pen pal. Her letters from Anne are now at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
• Stagg, James Martin. Forecast for Overlord. New York, W.W. Norton, 1971.
British Group Captain James Stagg was Gen. Eisenhower’s chief meteorologist for the D-Day invasion. He led a team of British and American meteorologists who issued forecasts to Eisenhower and his leadership team as D-Day was being planned. Originally scheduled for June 5, 1944, Eisenhower decided to delay the invasion one day after hearing Stagg’s weather forecast. Stagg kept meticulous notes of the meetings he had with his team and Eisenhower’s team in the days leading up to D-Day. Stagg noticed a slight break in the weather for June 6th, which convinced Eisenhower to give the go ahead for the invasion. The book is highly technical. Student News Net recommends this book for teachers and parents interested in how weather affected the invasion. At Southwick House where Eisenhower had his command headquarters before D-Day, weather maps can be viewed. The book is now a rare book and difficult to find.
• Wales, Solace. Braided in Fire: Black GIs and Tuscan Villagers on the Gothic Line. Knox Press, 2020.
• Walton, Francis. Miracle of World War II: How American Industry Made Victory Possible. New York, The MacMillan Company, 1956.