IF A BEACH makes you think of the Normandy landings or US Marines storming ashore at Guadalcanal, if you wonder which fighters or bombers flew from your airport when it was an RAF airfield, or how your yacht would have fared in the storm after Trafalgar, then escapism in a peaceful summer read may not be for you. Here are seven books about war to inform, educate and entertain, and to remind of the truth of the Staff College motto: Tam Marte Quam Minerva - “as much by war as by wisdom”.

First is John Keegan's The Face of Battle (Pimlico, £8.99/offer £8.54). Professor Sir Michael Howard MC calls it “one of the half-dozen best books on warfare to appear in the English language since the end of the Second World War”. Published 30 years ago at a time when war books were more concerned with events than what fighting was like, Keegan takes three very different battles - Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme - and draws out the essence of what combat was and is. Sometimes equalled, it has never been bettered.

From the Times Archive: The 1976 review of 'The Face of Battle'

Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That (Penguin, £8.99/£8.54) is a beautifully written memoir of youth, a bitter rage against the worst of what the First World War had been. Graves was a natural soldier, conscientious, brave and enormously proud of his regiment. As the First World War becomes increasingly remote with the passing of the last of its veterans, Goodbye becomes an important key to that past.

From the Times Archive: The 1985 obituary of Robert Graves

To make sense of the whole business and machinery of war, no book can beat Field Marshal Slim's Defeat into Victory (Cooper Square Press, available from amazon.com or second-hand from abebooks.co.uk). Bill Slim's memoir of war with the Japanese, how the XIV Army - “the forgotten army” - was pushed out of Burma, held on tenaciously along the Indian border while recouping its strength, then fought its way back to Rangoon and beyond, is both a masterpiece and the least self-serving but informative histories yet written by one of its major shapers.

From the Times Archive: A 1956 advertisement for 'Defeat into Victory'

To read of those in peril on the sea is to read of the contrast with fighting on land - or, indeed, in the air. Patience, endurance, ice-cool courage, intense bursts of lethal kinetic battle - these are the characteristics of naval warfare.

There are no better descriptions of it than those of two Royal Naval Reserve officers of the Second World War. First, Ludovic Kennedy's Pursuit (available second-hand from abebooks.co.uk), the story of the sinking of the Bismarck, in which Kennedy himself played a part (Scharnhorst, Bismarck's sister battle cruiser, had sunk his father's ship with all hands). The account is, at the risk of cliché, utterly gripping from start to finish.

From the Times Archive: A 1974 advertisement for 'Pursuit'

It is a classic, as is that other portrait of war in the North Atlantic, Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea (Penguin, £8.99/£8.54), perhaps better known for Charles Friend's 1953 film version, with Jack Hawkins in the role of the single-minded convoy escort commander, and for which Eric Ambler wrote the screenplay. Ambler left out many of the gory bits, for it was not thought best for the public to know the real price of admiralty so soon after the war.

From the Times Archive: The 1954 review of the BBC Radio version of 'The Cruel Sea'

And what of those magnificent men in their flying machines? One of the finest VCs of the Second World War was Guy Gibson's, whose squadron of Lancasters bust the Ruhr dams. Gibson's Enemy Coast Ahead (Crecy, £10.95/£9.86) is a wonderful period piece as well as a fine tribute to the RAF's bomber crews. Its freshness and power 64 years after publication (Gibson was killed in the closing months of the war) is remarkable.

From the Times Archive: A 1946 advertisement for 'Enemy Coast Ahead'

RAF Fighter Command has no equal memoir, but there have been some fine accounts of the Battle of Britain. The best is Patrick Bishop's Fighter Boys (HarperPerennial, £7.99/£7.59). Those days in the summer of 1940, when so many owed so much to so few, are not easy to get close to, but Bishop is an accomplished war correspondent, and his instincts are sure. Fighter Boys does brave men justice.

“My subject is war, and the pity of war,” Wilfred Owen wrote. And so is the subject of these noble summer reads.

Allan Mallinson is a former soldier, military historian and author. His latest novel, Warrior, is out now.

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