World War II book recommendations

One of our faithful readers has requested some book recommendations on the Second World War.  I have a few titles in mind; however, none are as all-encompassing as Meyer's A World Undone about the First World War.

WW2 was so expansive in every facet--geographically, economically, militarily--that it is difficult to cover in one volume.  More so than the preceding conflict, WW2 was truly a world war.  There was combat on 3 continents, on at least 4 major bodies of water, and on both sides of the equator.  I'm sure there are probably single books devoted to covering the whole war, but I've never read any.

Here are a few that I have read, and would recommend:

An Army at Dawn, by Rick Atkinson:  this is an excellently written, thoroughly researched, Pulitzer-prize winning book about the conflict in North Africa in 1942-1943.  To me, the North African theater is a largely forgotten battlefield of WW2; most of the attention, especially for this period of the war, is taken up by the large-scale naval battles in the Pacific and the bombing campaigns over Europe.  But North Africa is where the British and Americans first learned to fight together against a common enemy--and what a learning experience it was.  Atkinson sums it up in these last sentences from the prologue, which still give me goosebumps:

"The Allies were not yet winning, but they were about to begin winning.  Night would end, the tide would turn, and on that turning tide an army would wash ashore in Africa, ready to right a world gone wrong."

Band of Brothers, by Stephen Ambrose:  the term "band of brothers" has, I think, significantly gained popularity since this book was published and HBO made a miniseries out of it (which I would HIGHLY recommend watching).  This book follows E Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, from their training in Georgia through the end of the conflict in the European theater.  Ambrose interviewed all of the remaining veterans from the unit, and tells the story as they saw it.  E Company jumped into Normandy the night before Operation Overlord ("D-Day"), and fought all the way to Hitler's Eagle's Nest.  Read the book, watch the miniseries (which was done by the same team that did "Saving Private Ryan").

30 Seconds over Tokyo, by Ted Lawson:  I actually read this book when I was a kid, and really enjoyed it (most 8 year old boys stayed up at night reading comic books under the covers with a flashlight; I did the same thing, except I was reading about the carrier wars in the Pacific theater).  Lawson was a pilot in "Doolittle's Raid", which occurred in April 1942.  The raid was designed to be more symbolic than militarily effective:  Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle cooked up an idea to fly B-25 bombers (medium-sized, twin engine aircraft NOT designed for carrier use) off the aircraft carrier Hornet and bomb strategic targets in Japan, in response to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.  The bombers didn't have the range to fly back to the carriers after the raid; they would go on to land in China, where the crews would link up with Chinese resistance fighters and eventually make their way home.  This is a tale of true American ingenuity and bravery--there were about a million reasons why this plan should not have worked, and yet it did.  There was a movie made about it in 1944; it's a little corny, but I thought it did a good job of capturing the spirit of what happened.  For those of you that saw that travesty of a movie Pearl Harbor (which was more about the love triangle between Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, and Ben Affleck than the actual attack on Pearl Harbor), the Doolittle Raid occurred at the end of the movie.  (I would NOT recommend that movie, if you haven't already seen it.)

So there they are.  Happy reading!