To me, some of the best parts of Band of Brothers were the interview segments with the actual men that fought the war. Are there any good books heavily focused on the men and their personal experiences in WWII?

How about documentaries with mostly interviews?

There are many to choose from. Some of my favorite books that are from the soldiers perspective are:

US perspective:
The Men of Company K
Helmet for my Pillow
To Hell and Back

German perspective:
Forgotten Soldier
Tigers in the Mud

Soviet perspective:
Tank Rider- Into the Reich with the Red Army

US and German perspective:
A Higher Call

That’s a start.

US:
Company Commander

German:
Panzer Commander

Canadian:
And No Birds Sang

With the Old Breed, by Eugene Sledge.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000...encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis.

I just got done reading "Shifty's War" by Shifty Powers, and "Easy Company Soldier" by Don Malarkey.

I have a whole library you could go throughout

If you have kindle unlimited they recently released all the Stackpole Book series for free.

A Soldier in the Cockpit: From Rifles to Typhoons in World War II (Stackpole Military History Series)
by Ron W. Pottinger

Company Commander: The Classic Infantry Memoir of WWII
by Charles B. MacDonald

By Tank into Normandy Stuart Hills

German Officer perspective: Soldat

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I thought "Black Edelweiss" was an interesting read. It was written by a Waffen-SS soldier.

Belton Cooper's "Death Traps" is a great read by an American maintenance officer in an armored division in the post-D-Day ETO. A cool memoir with a lot of interesting insight into both the logistics of keeping an armored division in the fight, as well as the struggle to keep the numerically superior but out-armored and out-gunned American tanks ahead of the curve.

Sepp Allerberger's "Sniper on the Eastern Front" is another good German one. He was a Gebirgsjager (mountain trooper) sniper.

Petr Mikhin's "Guns Against the Reich" is a good one by a Russian artillery forward observer in the southern sector of the Eastern Front.

And Bill Close's "Tank Commander" is a good one by a British tank officer in the post-D-Day ETO.

The Liberator by Alex Kershaw

Medic by Robert Franklin

Two of the best I have read

The Currahee series by Donald Burgett.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Burgett

Similar to Band of Brothers but written by someone who a soldier during that time.

I will second Black Edelweiss. I read it in Afghanistan between missions.

Belton Coopers Death Traps was the first book I ever read on maintenance and logistics during WW2. I have read military history books since i was little but it was always about combat arms units or first hand accounts of combat soldiers.

Death Traps was a real eye opener especially the ingenuity they used to create the hedgerow to attach to the front of tanks so they could cut through the Bocage.

Stuka Pilot by Hans-Ulrich Rudel

Bantam (publisher) had a whole series of paperbacks of WWII personal stories, a number of which I read as a teen. I'm looking in the back of my copy of "Helmet for My Pillow" at a list -- here are the ones I remember reading:

Brazen Chariots (Brit tanks in North Africa)
Coast Watchers (by CDR Feldt, who some of you might recognize from the Griffin Marine Corps series)
Cockleshell Heroes (Brit commandos)
Company Commander (already mentioned)
The Divine Wind
The First and the Last (by and about German fighter pilot Galland)
Escort Commander
Iron Coffins
Reach for the Sky
U-Boat Killer

Others I remember are:
With Rommel in the Desert
U505 by Dan Gallery -- his story of the capture of the German Uboat.
Night Action (Brit MTB action in the Channel)

Lots of others I can recall the story, but not the name of the book.

Going back to my childhood. My dad was USAAF and there was a first edition copy of “God is My Co-Pilot,” Col. Robert L. Scott in our house. He flew C-47s over The Hump into China and became a member of Chennault’s Flying Tigers. I loved that book.

Scott was a Brigadier General at retirement.

I just finished "Sniper on the Eastern Front". Like "Forgotten Soldier" and "Tigers in the Mud", there is some question in my mind as to the authenticity of the account, although a lot less than the later two. (Edited: Scratch what I said about "Tigers in the Mud". I'm thinking of another "Tiger" book by a German author that has made a career of peddling fiction as authentic accounts.)

"Death Traps" is good.

"If You Survive" by George Wilson is a great account of the "hard slog" in Western Europe.

"Every Man a Hero" by Ray Lambert.

If you've ever seen the footage of the duel in Cologne between the Pershing and the Panther and want to know more, "Spearhead" by Adam Makos is superb.

"A Footsoldier for Patton".

And lets not forget "To Hell and Back" by Audie Murphy.

I enjoyed "The Big Show" by Pierre Clostermann

Todd

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:
With the Old Breed, by Eugene Sledge.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000...encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

I'll second the recommendation for Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa and also add Robert Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow.

I really enjoyed "In Deadly Combat: A German Soldier's Memoir of the Eastern Front" by Gottlob Herbert Bidermann.