Best World War II novels

The novel is set in World War II, but Heller’s real subject is the institutional logic that sends men into danger and then punishes them for objecting to it. A pilot is insane if he keeps flying dangerous missions without complaint, but if he complains about them, he’s demonstrating the kind of rational self-interest that proves he’s sane. The novel is very funny, but the comedy never softens its anger at a system that can make its own cruelty sound reasonable. 

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Jones fought at Guadalcanal. This novel draws directly on that experience. A large cast of soldiers moves across a fictional island, rendered with a specificity that only comes from having been there. Jones is less interested in producing a single hero than in showing how fear, desire, resentment, and brief flashes of courage move through an entire company.

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The famous scene, the choice of the title, comes about two-thirds through the book, and what Styron does to get there is extraordinary. He makes sure I understand Sophie fully before he shows me what she was asked to do. The novel’s also about the narrator’s own reckoning with the American South and its history of slavery, and about whether guilt can be compared across atrocities. It’s a demanding book, emotionally and structurally, and Styron makes it that way on purpose. He refuses to make guilt simple.

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Némirovsky wrote this during the German occupation of France and was deported to Auschwitz before she could finish it. She died there in 1942. The manuscript sat in her daughter’s suitcase for sixty years before it was published. The two completed sections cover the fall of Paris and life under occupation with a remarkable novelistic precision, given that she was writing them while living through them. I can’t read it without thinking about the unwritten third section or the writer who didn’t survive to finish what she began. That knowledge changes with every completed page.

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Four people end up in a damaged Italian villa at the end of the war. There’s a burn patient who may or may not be who he says he is, a nurse who won’t leave him, a Sikh sapper defusing German mines, and a thief and spy with a complicated past. Ondaatje moves between time periods and perspectives without announcing every transition. The novel is interested in the identities war destroys, but also in the identities people invent when their former lives no longer fit. I’ve read it three times and found a different center each time. I’ve read it three times and found something different each time.

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Two French sisters make their way through the German occupation. Because Hannah writes for a broad audience, the novel sometimes gets treated as less serious than more formally ambitious war fiction. That dismissal overlooks what the book actually does well. The novel does what it sets out to do with skill and emotional honesty; it puts women at the center of a war narrative, shows the resistance as unglamorous and terrifying, and doesn’t let anyone off easy. This book’s a useful corrective for anyone who’s been reading mostly the male-centered World War II canon. It is more accessible and emotionally direct than Grossman, Ondaatje, or Heller, but accessibility isn’t the same as carelessness.

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A fifteen-year-old German boy has an affair with an older woman. Years later, as a law student, he watches her on trial for war crimes. It’s a short, cold novel. Schlink is writing about an entire generation of Germans who had to reckon with what their parents did. Schlink is writing about an entire generation of Germans who had to reckon with what their parents did. The novel’s treatment of Hanna has been debated, especially the extent to which her secret deflects attention from her responsibility, and that debate is why the book keeps getting assigned and argued over.

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A blind French girl and a German boy move through occupied Europe on separate paths that eventually cross. Doerr writes in very short chapters and with close attention to physical detail. He spends hundreds of pages building two separate lives, so when their paths finally meet, it feels less like a plot mechanism and more like the moment two carefully built histories briefly touch.

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I read this one after hearing how it almost didn’t survive. In 1961, the KGB seized every copy of the manuscript, along with the typewriter ribbons and carbon paper Grossman had used to write it, as though the ideas themselves could be confiscated. He died before it was published. The novel follows the Shaposhnikov family, scattered across the war, from the siege of Stalingrad to the Soviet camp system. It does something few World War II novels even try. It places Nazism and Stalinism beside one another and examines how both systems reduce individual lives to the demands of an absolute political idea. Grossman moves between invented characters and historical figures without ever drawing attention to the shift.

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Mailer was twenty-five when this came out, drawing on his own infantry service in the Philippines, and it shows in the texture of the thing. A platoon fights to take the fictional island of Anopopei, modeled closely on Leyte, and the combat detail reads as if it came from someone who carried a rifle there himself. The famous bit of trivia is the profanity workaround. Wartime publishing standards wouldn’t allow the word Mailer’s soldiers would’ve actually used, so he substituted “fug” throughout, which is why Dorothy Parker supposedly told him he was the young man who didn’t know how to spell it. What stays with me is how flatly Mailer refuses to let combat resolve into anything noble. His men are petty, frightened, and small, and Mailer just leaves them that way. Mailer offers no redemptive lesson. That refusal is part of the novel’s achievement.

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Ballard was a child in Shanghai when the war reached it, interned by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, and he drew on that childhood directly for this novel. It follows Jim, a British boy separated from his parents when Shanghai collapses into chaos. The book stays close to Jim’s partial understanding of the camp, the hunger, and the slow disappearance of any adult who might explain what is happening. The detail that has stayed with me longest comes late in the novel, when Jim sees a flash of light on the horizon that turns out to be Nagasaki, miles and a whole different kind of war away, and only much later understands what he actually watched. Ballard doesn’t build the book toward relief when the war ends. He builds it for a kid who’s been so reshaped by deprivation that peace arrives and doesn’t feel like an answer to anything.

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Jones’s earlier novel is worth reading alongside The Thin Red Line, because the two books are doing nearly opposite things. This one’s set at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii in the months before Pearl Harbor, and there’s no combat until the very last pages. What Jones is actually writing about is the peacetime Army, the boxing rackets, the stockade, the way rank turns ordinary cruelty into policy. The title comes from a line in Kipling about soldiers who’ve fallen “from here to eternity” outside the world that respects them. The barracks setting is just where Jones shows it happening.

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Wouk served on Navy destroyer-minesweepers in the Pacific, and that time on deck is all through this book. The Caine is a rust-bucket minesweeper; its captain is a man named Queeg who clicks two steel marbles in his hand when he’s under pressure, and the crew’s slow realization that he might be unfit to command ends in a mutiny and a court-martial. I went in expecting a straightforward story about a bad officer and a justified rebellion. Wouk doesn’t let me keep that story. The defense attorney wins the case, then tells the men who won it that they’d humiliated a broken man who’d given the Navy years, when all they’d given it was a war. The whole book turns on that one reversal.

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Hersey wrote this while he was still working as a war correspondent, covering the Allied invasion of Sicily, and the reporter’s eye shows in every scene. Major Victor Joppolo is put in charge of a small, occupied Italian town. He spends the book trying to get the town’s confiscated church bell back, a task that sounds minor but turns out to carry the full weight of what the occupation actually requires. It requires patience and a willingness to treat the town’s grief over a bell with the same seriousness its residents do. It won the Pulitzer in 1945. Hersey went on to write Hiroshima, and the two books share one instinct. Both take the ordinary, specific burden of war seriously, not just the strategic outcome.

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I went in expecting a war novel and got something closer to a slow-motion tragedy about grief. Otto and Anna Quangel are an ordinary Berlin couple who lose their only son at the front. Instead of falling apart quietly, they begin writing anonymous anti-Hitler postcards and leaving them in stairwells and mailboxes around the city. Almost every one is turned in within hours. They keep writing them anyway, while a Gestapo inspector becomes increasingly consumed with finding the people behind them. Fallada based the novel on a real Gestapo case file and wrote it in just three and a half weeks. He died only months before it was published, and that urgency seems to run through every page. I couldn’t stop thinking about it after I finished: resistance with almost no chance of succeeding, undertaken anyway because the alternative was saying nothing.

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