A parallel thought occurred to me as I was putting together the above post (Rank Stupidity): what about some decent books about WWII Britain?
Of course, there are thousands upon thousands of them, but what follows are two (unranked) lists of the ones I’ve read. I’ve mostly ignored the general history books (Churchill’s The Second World War, etc.) to concentrate on novels and biographies.
Let me start with the ones that spawned various of the WWII movies mentioned above. (F) denotes fiction, otherwise historical.
- Enemy Coast Ahead (The Dam Busters) — Guy Gibson V.C.
- The Eagle Has Landed — Jack Higgins (F)
- Eye Of The Needle — Jack Higgins (F)
- The Hill — Leonard B. Scott (F)
- The Cruel Sea — Nicholas Monsarrat (F) might be the best naval story ever told.
Then there are others that mostly haven’t been made into movies (yet):
- Bomber — Len Deighton (F)
- The entire RAF series (e.g. Piece of Cake, Damn Good Show, etc.) — Derek Robinson (F)
- The Colditz Story — P.R. Reid (the movie wasn’t that good, hence its exclusion from the top 10 movie list)
- HMS Ulysses — Alistair Maclean (F)
- Reach For The Sky — Paul Brickhill (Douglas Bader biography)
- Cheshire V.C. — Paul Brickhill (about the man who succeeded Gibson at 617 Squadron)
- The Tunnel — Eric Williams
- The Sword Of Honour trilogy — Evelyn Waugh (F)
- Citizens Of London — Lynn Olson
That’s a partial list, of course. But it says something of all of them — some of which I haven’t read in over thirty years — that I remember them to this day.
Colditz was also a TV series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colditz_(1972_TV_series)
“Escape of the Birdmen was also about Colditz, but not even partially an British-made movie.
I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who thinks that “The Cruel Sea” is one of the greatest semi-fictional stories from WWII Britain. The horrific descriptions of the injured and wounded after a torpedo attack, and trying to (hopelessly) treat them has stayed with me forever. The different reactions of the men after their own ship is sunk, and whether they live or die (and why) is a great description of human beings under stress.
“HMS Ulysses” is probably the only really good book McLean ever wrote. The rest of his work can be entertaining (if only for his egregious nonsense about firearms…the first chapter of “When Eight Bells Toll” is hysterically incorrect) but not really good. In “HMS Ulysses” his description of the hardships faced by the seamen on the Murmansk run is similar to that of Monsarrat’s and gives people of today a feel for how terrible that service really was.
Piece of Cake was done as a mini-series and shown on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater sometime between 89 and 92 ( the date range based on where I was stationed when I watched it)