Five Best World War II Fiction

1 Life and Fate
By Vasily Grossman
Harper & Row, 1984

Vasily Grossman's "Life and Fate" is the "War and Peace" of Stalinism
and the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets called World War II. This
deliberate act of literary homage to Tolstoy uses the Battle of
Stalingrad in the place of the Battle of Borodino, and there are several
parallels in construction. But the characters in "Life and Fate" and the
dilemmas they face when confronted by the moral distortions of the
system are entirely the product of what the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam
called the "wolfhound age." Grossman, who had covered World War II from
the front for a Red Army newspaper, accumulated stories, incidents and
extraordinarily powerful vignettes in his notebooks for later use in his
novels. The anti-Semitism that emerged in Stalin's later years convinced
Grossman of the parallels between Nazism and Stalinism. This similarity
became a covert but recognizable theme in his great novel. Grossman
naïvely believed that it could be published during the Khrushchev thaw,
but he was soon disabused. The KGB "arrested" the book in 1961 after
Mikhail Suslov, the ideological chief of the Central Committee, declared
that it must not be published for 200 years. The secret police even took
Grossman's carbons and typewriter ribbons. He died a broken man, but an
early copy of the manuscript had survived, and it was smuggled out to be
published abroad.

2 Catch-22
By Joseph Heller
Simon & Schuster, 1961

"Catch-22" is probably the most devastating satire ever written about
the lunacy of war and military bureaucracy. Set in Italy toward the end
of World War II, the novel is a triumph of construction, with its
fiendishly unbreakable circle of counter-logic, as a U.S. bomber
squadron is sent on more and more missions by ambitious officers trying
to exceed their objectives. In a way, the officers' double-think is
similar to that of the para-Stalinist system evoked in George Orwell's
dystopia, "1984." Joseph Heller's protagonist, Yossarian, bemused by the
self-perpetuating madness all around him, is one of the great
anti-heroes of modern literature.

3 Sword of Honour
By Evelyn Waugh
Little, Brown, 1951-61

Loosely based on Evelyn Waugh's own experiences as a soldier, the
trilogy "Sword of Honour" savages the amateurishness in much of the
British war effort, especially the unnecessary disaster of the Battle of
Crete, which Waugh himself survived with embittered feelings. His
protagonist, Guy Crouchback, a conservative Catholic like Waugh, is
appalled by the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, which he sees as
no less evil than the Nazi regime. Waugh's honed prose, with deceptively
understated dialogue, verges on the edge of outright satire, yet his
purpose is deadly serious, even with some of his outlandish characters,
such as the ludicrously pugnacious Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. The three
novels here—"Men at Arms," "Officers and Gentlemen" and "Unconditional
Surrender"—are arguably Waugh's most powerful work.

4 The Fortunes of War
By Olivia Manning
1960-65, 1977-80

"The Fortunes of War" encompasses Olivia Manning's "The Balkan Trilogy"
and "The Levant Trilogy," a six-volume compendium covering the Nazi
invasion of the Balkans, life in wartime Cairo and the fighting in the
Western Desert of North Africa. The novels are based on Manning's own
experiences, escaping with her husband, Reggie Smith, from Romania and
Greece just ahead of the advancing German army and finally reaching
Egypt by separate ways. The second trilogy consists of romans à clef,
with many characters so thinly disguised that nobody was fooled. The
trouble was that Manning, a woman easy to take offense, used these
novels for vengeance on anyone who she felt had slighted her. (Lawrence
Durrell, for instance, who had once described her as "a hook-nosed
condor.") But this edge adds a piquancy to her very sharp observation of
character. "The Fortunes of War" was brilliantly adapted in 1987 for a
BBC miniseries starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson.

5 The Kindly Ones
By Jonathan Littell
Harper, 2009

The "kindly ones" of Jonathan Littell's title are the Eumenides, or the
Furies, in a novel structured as a classical Greek tragedy: The German
Sixth Army, involved in the massacre of Babi Yar near Kiev, meets its
fate in Stalingrad. The book is written as the defiant confession of Dr.
Max Aue, an SS officer deeply involved in the Final Solution. Aue, a
half-German and half-French lawyer and intellectual, is sent on a
variety of missions, enabling him to act in the book as a sort of video
camera with a biting voice-over. Littell's ambitious work goes where no
historian dares to tread, with well-researched speculation about the
mentality of those involved in the world's greatest crimes. The author
is particularly strong in his depiction of the Nazi and SS bureaucracy,
with their rival departments. They are all trying to control a monstrous
death industry without any sense of objective factors, such as whether
their decisions are helping the war effort and thus allowing the regime
as a whole to survive. It is indeed a case of "those whom the gods wish
to destroy, they first make mad."
—Mr. Beevor is the author of "Stalingrad" and "The Fall of Berlin
1945." His most recent book, "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy," has just
been published by Viking.