Avre Friday Briefing #69

It's summer — no time for jackets

It's warm, the sun's out, and it's really no weather for a jacket. So this week we're taking a break. Before we go, here's what we'd throw in the bag: six Second World War books worth your time. Two of them are ours. The rest we just wish we'd written.

Six books for the summer

To Hell and Back — Audie Murphy

Murphy was the most decorated American combat soldier of the Second World War, and this is his own account of it, first published in 1949. He later played himself in the film. Plain, unsentimental, and all the more affecting for it.

Wings on My Sleeve — Eric "Winkle" Brown. 

Brown was a Royal Navy test pilot who flew more types of aircraft than any other pilot in history — and lived to write about it. His memoir is a run of near-misses told with the calm of a man who genuinely never seemed fazed by any of them.

Operation Mincemeat — Ben Macintyre

The true story of the wartime deception that floated a dead man carrying fake invasion plans towards the Germans, and how on earth it worked. Macintyre tells it like a thriller because it reads like one.

Agent Zigzag — Ben Macintyre

The double life of Eddie Chapman: safecracker, convict, and one of the war's most unlikely double agents. If Mincemeat gets you going, this is the one to read next.

Cassino '44 — James Holland

Our own James on the five brutal months it took the Allies to break the Gustav Line and reach Rome. It's also the battle behind our Batch No. 2 smock — the fighting that Polish II Corps were in the thick of when they finally took Monte Cassino. The audiobook, as it happens, is read by Al.

Arnhem: Black Tuesday — Al Murray

Al's account of the worst single day at Arnhem, told hour by hour through the men who were there, without the benefit of hindsight. A fresh angle on a story you might think you already know.

So that's your summer reading sorted. We'll be back once the weather turns and jackets make sense again.

Back soon