“We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked,” whispered Secretary of State Dean Rusk to national security adviser McGeorge Bundy when he heard that Soviet ships carrying missiles had turned away from Cuba. It was October 24, 1962, in the midst of the most dangerous nuclear missile crisis in history. President John F. Kennedy had given the order to attack Soviet ships before he realized they’d changed course 24 hours earlier. Kennedy was greatly influenced by Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August and wanted to avoid the kind of misunderstandings, misinformation, stupidity and individual complexes of inferiority and grandeur that had led to World War I. But here was a communication problem.

The dominant narrative in the U.S. has long been that when the missiles in Cuba were removed, it was because Kennedy’s grace under pressure and skillful diplomacy had prevailed. Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy takes a different approach as he considers the many instances when both sides got things wrong in his riveting Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Drawing on KGB documents, Soviet military memoirs and more American and Cuban sources, he outlines all the times catastrophe was averted.

This excellent re-creation of events begins by explaining the relationship between Cuba and the U.S. and placing the U.S.-Soviet relationship in the context of the Cold War. We see how changing details drove the daily debates as diplomatic, military and political assumptions were tested. As the meetings with his advisers dragged on for almost two weeks, Kennedy went from being a “dove” to a “reluctant hawk” and back again, always hoping for a diplomatic solution while remaining tough. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev shared a fear of nuclear weapons, and neither was prepared to pay the price for a nuclear war victory. Throughout Nuclear Folly, Kennedy “plays for time” as he considers his next move in the complex and tense negotiations.

In February of 2021, the U.S. and Russia formally agreed to extend the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between their countries. This well-told account is a timely reminder of a danger we must still live with today. 

Games can be deadly serious—ask any soccer parent—but we generally see them as child’s play. It is therefore surprising that in war, where the stakes are the absolute highest, games play an essential role. War games allow armies to test officers’ strategies and decision-making in a risk-free environment, and lessons learned on the game board are frequently transferred to the battlefield. One man who thoroughly grasped this idea was Captain Gilbert Roberts, who, along with his team of eight officers from the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS, popularly known as the Wrens), devised a game that arguably changed the course of World War II. In A Game of Birds and Wolves, Simon Parkin tells this remarkable and little-known story.

In 1941, Great Britain was in danger of being starved of food and supplies by U-boat attacks. Roberts realized that, by simulating the conditions of war as closely as possible on an auditorium-sized game board, he could devise countermeasures to the tactics used by U-boat captains. He could also train submarine hunters without the risk of failure. Ultimately, the men who played the game used their knowledge to defeat the U-boat fleet in the decisive Battle of Birds and Wolves. Without the Wrens, who not only ran the games but also helped design new scenarios and countermeasures, none of this would have happened.

Like a well-designed game, A Game of Birds and Wolves is fun, informative and intense. Parkin naturally focuses much of his attention on Roberts, whose story of triumph over adversity and skepticism is a great read. But the book really shines when Parkin reclaims the history of the Wrens. Although women played a vital role in the war, their work was often undervalued, and much of this history was lost or destroyed. The Wrens, working with Roberts, were instrumental to an Allied victory, but few among us know what we owe to them. 

Parkin’s respect and affection for these women is apparent on every page, and his extensive research and excellent storytelling go a long way toward paying that debt.

By his own admission, Michael Korda, the bestselling author and former editor at Simon & Schuster, enjoyed a privileged childhood growing up in England at the start of World War II. His uncle, Alexander Korda, was a famous film director and producer who ended up in the United States as a “first-class refugee” during World War II, while his mother was an actress and his father would later win an Academy Award for art direction. But war is war and children are children, and in this fine book that combines memoir and history, Korda describes the coming of the war, the fall of France and the “miracle” at Dunkirk in the measured tones of a true historian.

As Korda writes, “Keeping calm was seen as a patriotic duty, even as one crisis led inexorably to war—panic was the enemy.” British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy toward Hitler was a disaster. When war came, so did rationing and, eventually, evacuation for Korda. Meanwhile, the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, assessed the situation across the English Channel, announced it dire, and yet somehow managed to reassure the nation with a grim but defiant speech, which young Korda stayed up late to hear.

In his analysis of Dunkirk, Korda, like most everyone else, is baffled by Hitler’s decision to halt the advance of the German troops on British and French forces stranded on the beach, which essentially allowed the famous “Little Ships” to rescue countless men, even though a tremendous loss of life preceded the arrival of the boats. It may not have been a victory in the traditional sense of the word, but it was a triumph, nevertheless.

Alone is a masterful account of war, resiliency and England’s brave and defiant stand in a time of utter crisis.

In June 1941, there was no hint that a well-born, unfocused young Englishman named David Sterling would become the leader of one of the most daring units of World War II. Nicknamed “the Giant Sloth” by friends, Sterling had spent most of his posting in Cairo gambling or frequenting nightclubs. His commando military career almost ended before it had begun when he injured his spine in a parachute training run, becoming temporarily paralyzed.

But as Ben Macintyre (author of the 2014 bestseller A Spy Among Friends) reveals in his thrilling account of the SAS exploits in the desert and later in Nazi-occupied Europe, it was that accident that inspired Sterling to propose an innovative combat model that endures today in special forces units such as the Navy SEALs.

“Do you want to do something special?” Sterling would ask recruits. And the mission was indeed unique. The SAS, or Special Air Service, was originally designed to drop small groups of elite, exceptionally well-trained soldiers deep into enemy territory to inflict the maximum amount of damage on airfields and other targets. While the initial concept focused on parachute jumps, an early disastrous failure led Sterling and co-founder John “Jock” Steele Lewes to turn to jeeps for their attacks against Rommel’s desert forces. Hiding by day and attacking by night, the SAS “rogue heroes” soon became a striking force that won the admiration and respect of Winston Churchill himself.

The stalwarts of the SAS were complex, driven men, who risked, and often lost, their lives under brutal and dangerous conditions. Macintyre, who had unprecedented access to SAS archives, is a compelling storyteller who honors their legacy in this thrilling, well-researched narrative.

Given that only one American soldier—the statistically unfortunate Private Eddie Slovik—was executed for desertion in World War II, one might conclude that it was rare for a soldier to prematurely leave the battlefield during that protracted conflict. Not so, says Charles Glass, the former chief Middle East correspondent for ABC News, in his new book, The Deserters. By official estimates, around 50,000 American and 100,000 British combatants deserted for various reasons and stretches of time. A great number of these fought bravely before and/or after their unsanctioned absences—and many deserted more than once.

The common denominator of these desertions, as Glass sifts through them, was battle fatigue, not cowardice. Indeed, he heads each of his chapters with a quotation from Psychology for the Fighting Man, Prepared for the Fighting Man Himself, a guide to understanding behavior caused by wartime stress, published in 1943 at the height of the war. (The insights conveyed in these quotations apply just as well to the flood of mentally damaged soldiers returning from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq today.)

To convey the chaos and horror that so frequently led to desertion, Glass examines the individual histories of three soldiers—Americans Stephen Weiss and Alfred Whitehead and Englishman John Bain—who fought in campaigns throughout North Africa and Europe from the start of the war until Germany surrendered. All three men (hardly more than boys at the time) volunteered for service, and all gradually became disillusioned and embittered with the way the war played out. They witnessed friends dying under the most gruesome circumstances, suffered incompetent and indecisive leadership, lived like burrowing vermin on the front lines and endured the around-the-clock terror of imminent death or injury.

The tide of desertions was a double problem for the Allied Command. To begin with, it was a public relations embarrassment since it carried the message that not all soldiers were eager and heroic warriors, as the prevailing propaganda suggested. Moreover, it depleted the supply of men desperately needed at the front. Consequently, the definition of what constituted desertion became fairly elastic, and deserters were routinely forgiven if they agreed to return to battle.

Weiss, Whitehead and Bain were convicted of desertion and sentenced to long periods of hard labor. Ultimately, though, their sentences were reduced. Weiss became a psychologist, Whitehead a professional barber; Bain changed his name to Vernon Scannell and lived out the remainder of his life as a respected poet. None repudiated his actions or lost his distaste for war.

The literature of the Vietnam War does not feature much hagiography, just stories of inner torment, senseless deaths and shattered ideologies. What’s tragic—and overlooked—is that the soldiers were not the only ones who endured an unimaginable hell. In the sobering Kill Anything That Moves, Nick Turse provides an exhaustive account of how thousands upon thousands of innocent, unarmed South Vietnamese civilians were senselessly killed by a military that equated corpses with results.

Turse’s book, a graphic collection of rapes, shootings and wanton disregard for human life, is a difficult, frequently depressing affair. By the end, it reads as a parody of machismo taken to fatal, troubling extremes. But this actually happened. Who’s to say it won’t happen again?

Relying on interviews, government documents and other research, Turse breaks down how these atrocities came to pass. Recruits in basic training became killing machines; indeed, they were rewarded for a high number of kills. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s game plan for the war boiled down to “killing more enemies than their Vietnamese opponents could replace.” The U.S. military did little to protect Vietnamese civilians, essentially shooting anyone running away or wearing black. A bit of clerical fudging turned farmers, children and the elderly into kill-crazy Vietcong.

It went on like this for years, with the infamous massacre at My Lai serving as just the most publicized example. The incidents become a blur of awfulness, a rush of power run amok. Kill Anything That Moves is a staggering reminder that war has its gruesome subplots hidden underneath the headlines—but they’re even sadder when our heroes create them.

In 1952, with the Cold War beginning and a hot war raging in Korea, American voters sought a leader whose foreign policy could bring peace and security. Toward that end, they elected war hero Dwight Eisenhower as their president. With an escalating nuclear arms race, Ike found he was the first person in history with the power to destroy the world. As Evan Thomas demonstrates in his riveting Ike’s Bluff, the new president’s single most important preoccupation was avoiding war. How he did it, with subtlety and a pragmatic approach, is the focus of the book.

At the heart of Eisenhower’s strategy on nuclear weapons was confidentiality—he was the only person who knew whether he would drop the bomb. His ability to convince the enemies of the U.S. as well as his own supporters that he would use nuclear weapons was, Thomas writes, “a bluff of epic proportions.” To do this required extraordinary patience and self-discipline.

As Thomas points out, “Eisenhower’s critical insight was that nuclear warfare had made war itself the enemy.”

Thomas shows that Eisenhower’s approach to nuclear weapons would have worked only for him, a highly respected and popular military hero. As Thomas writes, “Ike was more comfortable as a soldier, yet his greatest victories were the wars he did not fight.”

"An average of 27,000 people perished each day between September 1939 and August 1945 as a consequence of the global conflict,” observes military historian Max Hastings in Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945. This is a profoundly depressing book but an essential corrective to those who have mined this war for tales of valor and selflessness. No doubt such instances occurred, but, as Hastings demonstrates through both anecdotes and statistics, the war turned the planet into a merciless slaughterhouse where unthinkable acts of cruelty were committed by all sides.

Instead of searching through the official papers of generals, politicians and their defenders to paint his picture of the war, Hasting relies on accounts of soldiers and civilians who were on the frontlines of suffering. He organizes his account chronologically, moving from one theater of action to the next until he has taken the reader through Eastern and Western Europe, Russia, China, Japan, Burma, the Pacific islands, Africa, India and flashpoints in between.

With each new episode of conflict, it becomes clearer that Hastings’ title for the book is more photographic than poetic. “At one time the victim was a girl of sixteen,” recalled a nurse who tended to the civilian casualties during Germany’s 1939 bombardment of Warsaw. “She had a glorious mop of golden hair, her face was delicate as a flower, and her lovely sapphire-blue eyes were full of tears. Both her legs, up to the knees, were a mass of bleeding pulp, in which it was impossible to distinguish bone from flesh.” Elsewhere in Poland a few days later, “a hysterical old Jew” stood over the body of his wife who had been killed in an air raid and shouted, “There is no God! Hitler and the bombs are the only gods! There is no grace and pity in the world!”

Circumstances became even more grim and deadly with Germany’s invasion of Russia, where starvation and death from exposure became rampant and where enraged Russian soldiers tortured and mutilated the luckless German soldiers who fell into their hands. But the Russians were hardly more charitable toward their own. “In the course of the war,” Hastings writes, “168,000 Soviet citizens were formally sentenced to death and executed for alleged cowardice or desertion; many more were shot out of hand, without a pretence of due process.”

By the summer of 1943, the Italian army had had enough of war (although their German counterparts had not). Hastings reports that Italian soldiers surrendered to the Allied forces “ ‘in a mood of fiesta,’ as one American put it, ‘their personal possessions slung about them, filling the air with laughter and song.’ “ But their attitudes provoked a brutal response: “In two separate incidents on 14 July, an officer and an NCO of the U.S. 45th Division murdered large groups of Italians in cold blood.” One of the Americans machine-gunned 37 captives to death, while the other killed 36 via a firing squad he convened. While both offenders were court-martialed, neither was punished and the incident was hushed up. General George Patton later remarked that he regarded these two massacres of prisoners as “thoroughly justified.”

And so it goes, battle by battle, until the war ended. It is not Hastings’ aim here to compile a catalog of horrors—which this vigorously researched narrative surely is—but to deglamorize the war and rob it of its rationalizations and supposedly grand purposes. Inferno should be companion reading to Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation.

In To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild pairs an account of British soldiers at war in France during World War I with a report of the efforts of pacifists and war resisters back home in England. The result is a book that is powerful in its detail and that engenders a gut-level understanding of the terrible disruptive impact of war in the field and at home.

The so-called “War to End All Wars” turns out to have been anything but, for in its ending lay the seeds of World War II. The death toll of that second total war was higher than the first but, as Hochschild clearly shows, it was only technologically and morally possible because of the first, whose scale of carnage—futile, needless carnage at that—had simply been unimaginable before.

What makes To End All Wars so moving, so convincing and so readable is that Hochschild, who also wrote King Leopold’s Ghost and Bury the Chains, grounds his narrative in the lives of a fascinating array of historical personalities, ranging from Rudyard Kipling, who glorified the war and lost a son to it, to Emmeline Pankhurst, a feminist and anti-war activist who changed sides and alienated her activist daughter. Among the most interesting and telling of these personalities was anti-war activist Charlotte Despard, who continued to love and support her brother, John French, an ambitious military officer “who was destined to lead the largest army Britain had ever put in the field.”

Near the end of his book, Hochschild notes that “the conflict is usually portrayed as an unmitigated catastrophe,” but recently some historians have begun to argue that the war was necessary. Readers of To End All Wars will surely beg to differ.