Books by Cornelius Ryan

“By the time Arnhem became a focus for the battle to liberate Europe in 1944, my father and his family had been evacuated. But World War II would forever remain a huge event in his life, the subject of endless dinner table debates and discussions. In 2012, a couple of years before my father died—and when he was in a wheelchair because of the cancer that had spread to his bones—we went back to Arnhem together. We stayed at a guesthouse near his old house and explored some of the places he’d known as a boy. We visited the Airborne Museum. The most well-known book about the Battle of Arnhem is Irish war correspondent Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far. The movie of the book, directed by Richard Attenborough and with Sean Connery, Robert Redford and a star-studded cast, is unmissable.” Read more...

VE Day Books: A Personal List

Sophie Roell, Journalist

“A lot of people know about The Longest Day because it became a very expensive (and long) movie but it’s actually a pretty short book. You can read it in the time it takes you to get across the English Channel on the ferry. So if anybody is going to the Normandy beaches, they can just take The Longest Day. It’s the ultimate primer on D-Day and you can read it while sipping a beer or cup of tea in the bar on the cross-channel ferry. Cornelius Ryan interviewed hundreds of people for the book. It’s almost history as pointillism. He had access to an enormous amount of information. He sent out questionnaires. If you look at the Ryan archive, it shows you all the material that he gathered for The Longest Day, and it’s really impressive…as an introduction to D-Day that gives you the overall picture, that captures the drama and the enormity of it, and the heroism, and covers the German side as well as the Allied side, there’s nothing better. And I don’t think there ever will be.” Read more...

The best books on World War II Battles

Alex Kershaw, Historian