Summer Reading 2026: Reading about World War II at a 9th Grade to 12th Grade Level

Here are five books about World War II written at the 9th- to 12th-grade level. These free ebooks have not been banned from classrooms. Rather, they are not available because administrators in state education departments do not believe that the volume of reading matters to high school students. They demand textbooks that students find boring and don’t read. Other administrators don’t have the budgets for print copies, and have not yet turned to free eBooks.

Each link provides a button to download the ebook and a short description of the content. The titles are:

The Rise of Hitler: Is Tomorrow Hitler’s? by H.R. Knickerbocker
U.S. Army in Western Europe: No Woman’s World by Iris Carpenter
Torpedoed in the Mediterranean: Purple Heart Valley by Margaret Bourke-White
Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly by Margaret Bourke-White: A Report on the Collapse of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Years’
U-505 by Daniel V. Gallery: A Captured German Submarine off the Coast of Africa

You can see longer descriptions of each book and many other titles at History for Everyone: Build a Nation of Readers with Free Ebooks.