In honor of Memorial Day, we’ve asked a simple question: What is your favorite work of military history?

CHARLOTTE ALLEN

I vote for Xenophon’s Anabasis, which was assigned in my elementary Greek course as a college classics/English major. It’s a fascinating account of a unit of Greek mercenaries who must fight their way back from Persia and includes salient tidbits of cultural literacy. I learned, for example, that the word “myriad” derives from the Greek word for “ten thousand” (the number of Greek soldiers in Xenophon’s unit). The Anabasis was one of those many works, starting with the Odyssey, in which the ancient Greeks celebrated their individualistic, freedom-loving culture in contrast to the cultures of barbarian outsiders.

The Anabasis was the literary basis of the hugely successful, although critically derided, 1979 film The Warriors, in which a multi-ethnic New York street gang wrongly accused of the murder of a rival gang leader uses its wits to fight its way outnumbered through the New York subway system from the Bronx to the Warriors’ home turf on Coney Island. I always see the seven proud and fundamentally decent Warriors as harbingers of the Reagan Revolution that followed the next year. A similar theme underlay the 2005 film 300, another mega-hit that the critics hated with its story of outnumbered Greeks versus barbaric Persians. Stories about liberty-loving Westerners arrayed against tyrannical outsiders never seem to lose their appeal.

– Charlotte Allen is the author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus.

RICHARD BROOKHISER

The clearest book I have ever read on tactics is a novel, Count Belisarius, by Robert Graves, about the 6th-century Roman general who served Justinian. Graves typically follows his ancient sources slavishly, so I imagine it is accurate enough. The descriptions of battle are quite clear. Two of the repeating lessons are the importance of training, and of innovation in equipment. One of Belisarius’s memorable lines is that most commanders cannot maneuver 20,000 men; how can they expect to maneuver 50,000? Extra bonus: It is a ripping yarn, with a deeply moving ending.

The best book I have ever read on strategy is Winston Churchill’s Marlborough and His Times, the multi-volume biography of his ancestor who led Britain and Holland against Louis XIV. I suspect it falls short as history — Churchill’s partisanship is blatant and unrelenting — but it gives a good sense of the problems that arise in long, coalition wars. I was reading it on 9/11, and it well foreshadowed much of what we have been through in both Afghanistan and Iraq, with our friends, and our “friends.”

– Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor at National Review, is author most recently of Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement.

H. W. CROCKER III

My favorite work of military history is the collected Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser. But if novels don’t count, I’d probably have to opt for Byron Farwell’s Eminent Victorian Soldiers — at least it’s the most dog-eared book in my military-history collection. Farwell wrote many fine books on the British Army in its Victorian glory and a handful of worthy books on American military history. Nothing fancy, but good, solid stuff.

– H. W. Crocker III is the author most recently of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War.

MATTHEW DALLEK

Lewis Puller, Jr., committed suicide in 1994, but his life continues to haunt, inspire, and stir powerful memories, thanks to his Pulitzer Prize–winning Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet. While only the first 200-odd pages of the book focus on his father’s combat in Korea and his own fighting in Vietnam, his riveting autobiographical account fuses military history with themes of filial love, patriotic pride, and combat heroism.

Fortunate Son should resonate with conservatives and liberals alike; it is neither an antiwar screed nor a simple celebration of battlefield valor. In understated prose, Puller describes his deep affection for his decorated father, Marine Gen. Lewis B. (Chesty) Puller, and his own transformation from a “carefree . . . undergraduate life” at William and Mary to his elation at becoming a Marine Corps officer.

His description of the moment when he stepped on a booby-trapped howitzer is catastrophic and surreal: “I had no idea that the pink mist that engulfed me had been caused by the vaporization of most of my right and left legs.” Puller’s chronicle of his struggle to survive helps us to rethink what it means to write a “military history.”

– Matthew Dallek is a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center and the author of The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics.

HUMBERTO FONTOVA

Grayston Lynch carried scars from Omaha Beach, the Bulge, and Korea’s Heartbreak Ridge. He received two Purple Hearts, two Silver Stars, and the Bronze Star with V for Valor. But the only battle that inspired him to write a memoir — Decision for Disaster – was the dust-up at Cuba’s Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs). Lynch had then retired from the Army and was serving as a CIA officer. He helped train the invading Cuban freedom-fighters, whom he described as “brave boys who had never before fired a shot in anger,” but who inflicted massive losses against their Soviet-led enemies. “They fought like tigers,” writes Lynch, “but their fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach.”

Sadly, Lynch’s book crashed against the liberal media’s love affair with Castro. To this day, the ahistorical idiocies parroted on the History Channel and PBS regarding the Bay of Pigs owe much to these lingering sentiments. Lynch’s book sets the record straight — and from a participant in the middle of a ferocious and tragic battle.

– Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.

JIM FOWLER

There are countless volumes devoted to Alexander the Great, but Alexander of Macedon, 356–323 B.C., by Peter Green, is probably the best blend of serious, modern scholarship and enjoyable prose — a must-read for those interested in understanding the actions and motives of the greatest military commander in history.

– Jim Fowler is National Review Online’s advertising director.

ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY

It is difficult to choose only one book, but I think it has to be John Keegan’s The Face of Battle. The first reason is that every time I come back to read it, I still find it stimulating and a healthy reminder that as historians we ought to try and explain what actually happened — in this case, on the battlefield itself. The wider context of a campaign, the higher levels of command, communication, and control are all very important topics, but if we fail to understand how troops clash and how they behave as individuals and groups then we are missing something very basic. The second reason is that Keegan’s prose shows us that good history can be both readable and elegant.

– Adrian Goldsworthy is the author of How Rome Fell and Caesar.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

John Keegan’s The Face of Battle — which uses Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme to explain how history perceives battle — remains my favorite military history. It is beautifully written, and it ushered in an entirely new perspective on how to marry the experience of combat with the narrative tradition of military history. Keegan has a unique knack for juxtaposing disconcerting descriptions of gore next to more abstract discussions of historiography. And the result is that he finds the rare middle ground between stuffy academic prose and sensationalist’s blood and guts. When it came out over 30 years ago, The Face of Battle was recognized as a classic, and its reputation has only grown. Its prose reminds me of the great narrative historians like Edward Gibbon and W. H. Prescott; he tells a story like Alistair Horne and Cornelius Ryan, and his historical insight is on par with Michael Howard or Russell Weigley. A book for the ages.

– Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of The Soul of Battle, The Western Way of War, and other books.

JOHN HOOD

I love military history. I read it constantly, use it sometimes (as a wargamer), and write on it occasionally for history magazines. I appreciate almost all of the giants of the genre, from Sun Tzu and Thucydides to John Keegan and NRO’s own Victor Davis Hanson.

But today, let me hold up two books for special appreciation. One is a work of traditional if pathbreaking military history, Mark Moyar’s Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. Moyar, a sometime NRO contributor, is at the forefront of efforts to use files from former Communist countries to correct the record about America’s Cold War conflicts. Moyar explores the strategic importance of Vietnam, with a particular emphasis on the fate of Communist insurgencies in nearby countries such as Indonesia. It’s a fascinating read, guaranteed to challenge your assumptions.

The other book isn’t strictly a military history, though much of it reads like one. A Short History of the Arab Peoples, by the late Sir John Glubb, was published in 1969 and written in unapologetically blunt prose that would probably mortify modern editors, Glubb traces the interrelated histories of Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, North Africa, and Arabia itself. In describing the Arab ways of war, Glubb knew what he was talking about — after service in France during World War I, he became an officer of the British-organized Arab Legion in 1930, commanded Bedouins and Arab armies until the end of World War II, and then, as “Glubb Pasha,” led the Legion into Palestine to occupy the West Bank during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

– John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina think tank.

RUSSELL JENKINS

One thing Eric M. Bergerud doesn’t do in Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific is provide the reader with a linear campaign history. Instead, it puts armies under a microscope, examining everything from weaponry and morale to weather and environmental conditions. The book was a real eye-opener for me, as was its companion volume on the air war in the same theater, Fire in the Sky, which provides a similar treatment. On a personal note, no treatment of WWII had a greater impact on me than James Jones’s World War II. A very naïve 14-year-old steeped in 1940s war movies, I discovered that Americans back then swore like sailors, enjoyed sex, and had venal interests when it came to the war effort: Who’da thunk? Disillusioned and somehow liberated all at once, I found that after reading it, I didn’t look at my father (a WWII vet) in quite the same way again.

– Russell Jenkins performs various IT duties for National Review.

JOHN J. MILLER

There’s no shortage of good writing on the Civil War, but I’ve always had a special fondness for Bruce Catton. Part of it stems from our shared Michigan roots and a bit of family history — we read a passage from one of Catton’s books at my grandfather’s funeral. Catton wrote much and he wrote well; it’s hard to go wrong with anything that carries his byline. The volume that captured my imagination as a boy was The Golden Book of the Civil War, a children’s version of a book that has since been updated and reissued as The American Heritage New History of the Civil War. I loved it more for the battlefield pictures than Catton’s words, it must be said. For an actual Catton narrative, This Hallowed Ground is an excellent, one-volume account of the war.

– John J. Miller is national political reporter for National Review and co-author of Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship with France.

MARK MOYAR

It’s hard to pick one favorite, so I’ll select my favorite from the war I know best, the Vietnam War, and even then it’s a difficult choice. I’m picking Stolen Valor, by B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley. In one fell swoop, this book decimated the left-wing mythologies surrounding Vietnam veterans. Through meticulous research of personnel records, Burkett and Whitley proved that much of what journalists and historians had claimed about Vietnam came from bogus veterans who sought stardom, sympathy, or promotion of the antiwar stereotype of veterans as either war criminals or victims of a bad war. Stolen Valor discredited the depiction of veterans as homeless, unemployed, and suicidal and debunked many reported atrocities by showing the alleged witnesses to be individuals who never served in Vietnam. Burkett and Whitley also showed that the VA was encouraging fraudulent veterans to claim post-traumatic stress disorder to produce more patients, and that these frauds cost U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars. When Burkett spoke about the book to the Society for Military History, it produced more excitement and fascination than I have ever seen among military historians. The book led to passage of the Stolen Valor Act and other anti-fraud initiatives.

– Mark Moyar is the author of Triumph Forsaken, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey, and the forthcoming A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq.

FRED SCHWARZ The Age of Fighting Sail, by C. S. Forester, describes how in the War of 1812, the under-resourced U.S. Navy fought Britain’s vaunted Royal Navy (which, to be fair, had other frogs to fry) to more or less a draw. This allowed the Americans to come out even in a war that, like the Revolution, they might very easily have lost. Forester does an excellent job of explaining the tactics of slow-motion sea battles, in which one vessel might gain on another by a few hundred yards in an hour, and sudden wind shifts could ruin the best-laid plans.

Another favorite, of a completely different sort, is Goodbye to All That, in which Robert Graves, the great novelist of ancient Rome (I, Claudius), describes in vivid but matter-of-fact prose his life as a 20-year-old British infantry officer in World War I. Graves’s narration takes place at ground level — or rather, below it, in the trenches — and drives home the overwhelming weariness and boredom, punctuated by “shows” (human-wave assaults like that at the Somme, where Graves was seriously injured), that made it routine for three-quarters of the captains joining his regiment to be killed within a year.

– Fred Schwarz is a National Review deputy managing editor.

KALEV I. SEPP

A battle memoir written by one of the most famous American generals as he was slowly dying would be of interest enough to students of war. But the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant stands on its own as a remarkable military history of a leader, an army, and a nation. Although he personally led the Union armies to victory over the rebellious Confederacy in the Civil War, Grant is sometimes dismissed in contemporary classrooms as a failed businessman, a callous and hard-drinking officer, and an inept president. This autobiography instead reveals a striking intellect with keen powers of insight and recollection, a masterful and deeply moral military commander, and a superb writer. The included wartime correspondence between Grant and his best-known battlefield opponent, Gen. Robert E. Lee, by itself qualifies this as one of the most valuable records of Americans in combat ever produced. Mark Twain, who published the memoirs, lauded Grant’s “clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike . . . General Grant’s book is a great, unique, and unapproachable literary masterpiece.” Grant never heard this praise; he died of cancer five days after he penned the final pages of his manuscript.

– Kalev I. Sepp, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations, teaches at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

BRAD THOR

Having recently completed research for my new thriller, The Apostle, I spent a lot of time studying our operations in Afghanistan. Two of the best books I have read on the subject have also become two of my all-time favorites of military history: Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda, by senior Army Times writer Sean Naylor, and First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan, by former CIA operative Gary C. Schroen.

Not a Good Day to Die was given to me by a good friend and Delta Force master sergeant involved in Operation Anaconda. He thought Naylor did a superb job in describing America’s first battle of the 21st century, and I wholeheartedly agree. Naylor is hands-down one of the finest military writers of our age.

Gary C. Schroen’s First In is a fascinating account of a small band of determined CIA agents covertly inserted into Afghanistan immediately after 9/11. You can call them the “dirty half-dozen,” and Schroen is masterful at describing how this patchwork team of patriots laid the groundwork for the American assault and ultimate defeat of the Taliban. This book has blockbuster Hollywood movie written all over it.

– Brad Thor is the bestselling author of The Last Patriot and other thrillers. His next novel, The Apostle, comes out on June 30.