I read Atkinson's Liberation trilogy, which sounds like a pulp sci-fi series but is actually a really well-written history of world war 2, especially from the unsexy perspective of American logistics. He begins with North Africa and paints the picture of a pretty inept United States as she bumbles her way through. He then moves to the invasions of Sicily and North Africa, and then ultimately to Europe after D-Day. Atkinson was a Washington Post reporter before being a writer, and his penchant for gathering evidence shows. The book also has extensive notes and citations, unlike most books of this kind. He won a pulitzer for the first one, Army at Dawn.

What sets these books apart from the many others, for me, is the focus on the logistics. Atkinson fills the pages with mind-blowing statistics and numbers that really paint a picture of the United States as not so much a nation of brave warriors, but rather a nation of sheer industrial output and industrious clerks. His description of the American bureaucratic apparatus descending on and quite literally occupying Paris is fantastic.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors and Neptune's Inferno, both by James Hornfischer. Hornfischer was a fantastic writer, can't say enough good things about his work. As far as the naval aspect of the Pacific goes, I think he's pretty hard to beat. Highly detailed, lots of individual accounts, great sources of information. It isn't dry or overly technical like you can sometimes get with nonfiction work, it feels like you're reading a fiction novel at times. There's typically a good bit of setup at the beginning which can turn some people off, but once things really get going, Hornfischer will have you hanging onto every word and you just can't put the book down.

And for something from the Japanese perspective, Japanese Destroyer Captain by Tameichi Hara. It's a rare and very interesting look at the war from the only Japanese destroyer captain to have survived the entirety of it.

If you're looking for primary accounts of the war from the perspective of the soldiers who fought, I couldn't recommend these two books highly enough: Poilu by Louis Barthas (French), and Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger (German). The former's author is a fierce pacifist and opposes the War he's forced to fight in, while the latter is a zealous fighter who relishes the prospect of combat. I hope you read both, and if you do, please read Poilu first, as it's a little slower-paced and will be hard to appreciate after reading the action-packed Storm of Steel. Both, however, are wonderful insights into the experiences of the soldiers fighting in the war.

I recently read Antony Beevor’a Russian Revolution book however while I learnt lots of information and enjoyed it I noticed there where a few facts glossed over that even someone with my intermediate knowledge noticed. Would you recommend him and his books?

Hi there anyone interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a title to share, this is still a thread on /r/AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably, OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted a non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy, or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular podcast/book/novel/documentary/etc, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.