Pressing Questions: Are there any good based-on-eyewitness-accounts books along the lines of Cornelius Ryan's 'The Longest Day'?

There are plenty of books about modern warfare based on “first-hand” sources, oral histories, field notes, and official records written pretty much in the same style as Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day.

For instance, Ryan wrote what you might call a sequel to The Longest Day, 1966’s The Last Battle. That book delves into the “race” to capture Berlin in the spring of 1945.

There were plans to make a film adaptation of The Last Battle, but they were canceled before production began.

Ryan also wrote another sequel to The Last Battle titled A Bridge Too Far. The third book in an unofficial “World War II Trilogy,” it tells the story of Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ failed attempt to obtain a bridgehead over the Rhine in September 1944.

Like The Longest Day, it was made into one of those “all-star cast” spectacular war films. I think it’s better than TLD, but it wasn’t a big hit in the States when it was in theaters in 1977.

For more recent conflicts, I recommend Rick Atkinson’s Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War:

And, of course, Mark Bowden’s classic work on the Mogadishu disaster of October 1993: