Making a List, Checking it Twice…
No, not a list of naughty and nice armchair generals, but cool books and DVDs they’ll love for the holidays. Here’s the “A” list of new releases in 2008, sure to bring a smile when they come out of the wrappers. Click on highlighted entries to read Armchair General reviews and articles.

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BOOKS

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943, Rick Atkinson (Henry Holt and Company, 2007). Okay, it didn’t quite make it as a 2008 release, but this second volume in Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy (following An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-43) is too good to pass up.

House to House: An Epic Memoir of War, Staff Sergeant David Bellavia with John R. Bruning (Free Press, 2008). When it comes to war memoirs from the sharp end of the bayonet, Bellavia’s unblinking account of the fighting in Fallujah may end up being to the Iraq War what E.B.Sledge’s With The Old Breed was to WW II in the Pacific.

Day of the Panzer: A Story of American Heroism and Sacrifice in Southern France, Jeff Danby (Casemate, 2008). Another gripping foxhole-level memoir of war, this one covering the desperate fight for survival of a U.S. rifle company deep behind German lines in 1944.

Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill, 1874-1945, Carlos d’Este (Harper Collins, 2008). Is there anything more to say about Churchill? Yes there is, and trust d’Este (best known for his brilliant biography of George S. Patton) to say it.

A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn – The Last Great Battle of the American West, James Donovan (Little, Brown and Company, 2008). Is there anything more to say about Custer? Yes! This new book on the Little Bighorn battle has delighted both general military history audiences and Custer buffs alike, for its painstaking reliance on primary source material and archaeological research as well as a crackling narrative style that keeps the pages turning.

The Forever War, Dexter Filkins (Knopf, 2008). Arguably the preeminent war correspondent of this generation, Filkins has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 1998, and offers a compassionate, intimate, and shockingly honest account of the war against Islamic fundamentalism.

The Wars Against Napoleon: Debunking The Myth of the Napoleonic Wars, General Michel Franceschi and Ben Weider (Savas Beatie, 2007). Is there anything more to say about Napoleon? Well, we will probably never completely unravel the man and his place in the world, but Franceschi and Weider take a terrific stab at dispelling some of the myths. Of course, one person’s myth is another’s orthodoxy, which is what makes this sort of book so much fun.

Marine Corps Tank Battles in Vietnam, Oscar Gilbert (Casemate, 2008). A useful follow-on to the author’s previous works on Marine tank battles in the Pacific and Korea, this is also a nice bookshelf companion to General Donn A. Starry’s Armored Combat in Vietnam (Bobbs-Merrill, 1980).

The Maps of Gettysburg: An Atlas of the Gettysburg Campaign, June 3-July 13, 1863, Bradley Gottfried (Savas Beatie, 2007). All real students of military history are map junkies, and sometimes you just have to feed the habit. Gottfried offers in one package an atlas, a history, and a reference guide, and it works well on all three levels.

Tarawa and the Marshalls: The U.S. Marines in World War II, Eric Hammel (Zenith Press, 2008). This is unique among our recommendations, being a pictorial history. Hundreds of black and white photographs, many of them never before published, bring this campaign to stark life. Unless you were there, you’ve never seen the Pacific War in quite this detail before.

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