A breathtakingly prolific author, who wrote more than 350 novels and historical works, under his own name and a number of pseudonyms, Charles Whiting was particularly at home in the Second World War. He began writing in the 1950s with The Frat Wagon (1954) and published four novels in as many years. In the 1970s he gave up teaching and training commitments and settled to full-time writing.

Getting well into his stride, between 1970 and 1976 he produced 34 books, most of them nonfiction works, about the last months of the campaign against Germany in northwest Europe. Among his aliases were Dun-can Harding, John Kerrigan, Klaus Konrad and Leo Kessler, who was the author of a popular series of novels, appearing from 1974 onwards, which followed the fortunes of Assault Regiment Wotan, a crack SS unit.

To those who doubted that quality and authenticity could accompany such a torrential output, Whiting had a ready answer. “I wanted my books to be different from the typical military histories of the day. I didn’t want them to be about strategy or the daily comings and goings of the top brass. No, they were going to be about the ordinary squaddie and what it was like to sleep, eat, live – and perhaps die – in a muddy hole in the ground.” Rip-roar-ing and violent, Whiting’s books had an immense following.

Charles Whiting was born in York in 1926. He left school at 16 and, lying about his age, enlisted in the Army in time for the northwest Europe campaign after D-Day. He took part with an armoured reconnaisance regiment in the advance through northern France and Belgium into Germany, becoming aware in the process, as he said, of the developing differences between British and American expectations of the outcome of the conflict. The theme of British scepticism about American trust in Stalin formed the background to a number of his books.

Demobbed in 1948, he went to the University of Leeds to read history, and began his first novel, set in Germany at the end of the war. The Frat Wagon was seized upon by Jonathan Cape. It was followed by Lest I Fall (1956), which won a prize at the 1958 Cheltenham Literary Festival; Journey to No End(1957), about the 1953 workers’ uprising in East Germany; and The Mighty Fallen (1958), set in an Arab state.

These books did not emancipate him from the necessity to earn a living, and he worked as a university teacher, in the UK and in Germany. He also taught military history to the US Army in Germany, where he was also a correspondent for Time magazine.

While living in a small Belgian village in the 1970s he began to increase his output of nonfiction, and from then on he never looked back. Titles ranged from Battle of the Ruhr Pocket (1970); through Hunters from the Sky: History of the German Parachute Regiment (1974) and SS Werewolf: Story of the Nazi Resistance Movement, 1944-45 (1982); to Three Star Blitz: Baedeker Raids and the Start of Total War, 1942-45 (1987) and Disaster at the Kasserine: Ike and the 1st (US) Army in North Africa, 1943 (2003). By that time Whiting had been long settled in York, and one of his books, York Blitz (1986), described the bombing of the city in 1942. It is to be republished under the title Fire Over York.

Among his later novels were Death on the Rhine (1994) and The Balkan Chase (1996).

Whiting’s first wife, Irma, died in 2001. He is survived by his second wife, Gill, whom he married in 2005, and by a son from his first marriage.

Charles Whiting, author, was born on December 18, 1926. He died on July 24, 2007, aged 80