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Works Set in World War II

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This page covers works set during World War II.

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Adolf
  • Barefoot Gen: A 1973-1974 manga that was adapted by Madhouse into two anime films in 1983 and 1986. The story mainly concerns the bombing of Hiroshima, and is well known for its very graphic and horrifying depictions of the dead and dying as a result of the bombing.
  • The Boy and the Heron: A film focusing on a young Japanese boy who evacuates to the countryside after his mother's death in a bombing raid.
  • The Cockpit: Vignettes by Leiji Matsumoto, often of ordinary Axis soldiers doing what they must. Usually very bitter in the end.
  • El Alamein no Shinden: Anthology manga about German troops
  • First Squad: Sci-Fi story of the teenage last survivor of a Soviet ESP experiment (re-)drafted to take on Nazi mad scientists in late 1941.
  • Grave of the Fireflies - The downward spiral a Japanese boy and his younger sister dying from starvation towards the end of the war. (No, that doesn't need a spoiler tag: you are told this at the start of the movie.) Based on the novel of the same name authored by Akiyuki Nosaka.
  • Hellsing: The Big Bad and his Mooks are SS troops who have since been turned into vampires. A prequel manga titled Hellsing: The Dawn, covers two major characters dropping into Poland to make sure their vampires don't see the frontlines.
  • Hetalia: Axis Powers, obviously, although it spans from the Roman Empire to the present day.
  • In This Corner of the World: A 2007-2009 manga that later received a 2011 Live-Action Adaptation and a 2016 anime film. Set mainly in Kure in 1944 and 1945, it starts out as a historical Slice of Life story but the war steadily intrudes further and further into the characters' everyday lives, the clock ticking down all the while to Little Boy.
  • Izetta: The Last Witch is an Alternate History version of WWII involving witches, magic, and Europe being terrorized by an alternate German Empire rather than one run by the Nazis.
  • Kurogane Pukapuka Tai, a yuri manga about an IJN cruiser crewed entirely by women (except for the captain).
  • Kutsuzure Sensen: The adventures of a pagan witch and her friend, a young NKVD officer, on Eastern war front.
  • Momotaro's Sea Eagles: 37-minute 1943 film, one of the oldest surviving examples of Japanese anime. Cute cuddly animals who are also Imperial Japanese Navy pilots blow the hell out of Pearl Harbor.
  • Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors: 1945 film, sequel to the above, oldest anime feature film. Cute cuddly animals become fearless paratroopers, and wind up invading a British-held island.
  • Rail of the Star: an Anime about Japanese civilians desperate to escape North Korea after the war that notably glosses over why Japanese civilians would be desperate to escape Korea after the war.
  • Space Battleship Yamato uses a famous World War 2 battleship as the protagonist ship, while enemy small craft are torpedo and dive bombers,and the whole "Quest for Iscandar" is basically a sci-fi, cathartic fantasy of Yamato's sucidal last mission actually succeeding.
    • Completely unrelated to the anime is the 2005 live action film "Otoko-tachi no Yamato", literally "The Men's Yamato" - depicting Operation Ten-Go and the IJN Yamato's final mission, the last major Japanese naval operation in the Pacific.
  • Strike Witches is an Alternate History version of WWII with aliens and girls who don't wear pants.
  • Who's Left Behind? Kayoko's Diary: animated Bio Pic about Kayoko Ebina and her experiences of living through WWII.
  • The Wind Rises: animated Bio Pic about Jiro Horikoshi, designer of the A 5 M "Claude" and the A 6 M "Zero" fighter planes. Set during the 1930s (The era of the Machurian incident) and teh start of the Second Sino-Japanse War.
  • Zipang: in a reverse of The Final Countdown a Japanese Aegis destroyer is sent back in time to the Battle of Midway.

    Comic Books 
  • Ace of Space fought Nazis a few times.
  • Assassin's Creed: Conspiracies is set during World War II, featuring the race for the atomic bomb and following the British Assassin Eddie Gorm, who influences the course of history.
  • Biggles appeared in a number of comics set in World War II.
  • Blake and Mortimer is mostly set in The '50s, but occasionally uses the conflict in its backstory. Its first story's plot, The Secret of the Swordfish, is basically World War II set 20 Minutes into the Future, when the villain is a thinly veiled Expy of Imperial Japan. The 2014 book Plutarch's Staff plot is set in 1944.
  • Block 109, an Alternate History comic book.
  • Captain America punched Hitler in his very first issue. Most Golden Age superheroes, since they were published during the war, fought Nazis at some point.
  • A time-travel story in Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! had the team's speedster Fastback forcibly sent back in time to Earth-C's D-Day, where he winds up briefly helping the Allies fight the Ratzis alongside Golden Age DC funny-animal hero, the Terrific Whatzit (who turns out to be Fastback's uncle).
  • Franco-Belgian series The Children Of The Resistance is set in France in the fictional rural town of Pontain-Lécluse. The main characters are three children (François, Eusèbe and Lisa) who fight the Nazi by posting flyers, spying on them, commiting acts of sabotage, saving refugees while remaining anonymous in a game of cat and mouse. While the series is aimed at children, it doesn't shy away from death and atrocities inflicted by the Third Reich.
  • Code Name: Gravedigger about the exploits of a black soldier deployed as a One-Man Army throughout the European theatre.
  • Combat Kelly and his Deadly Dozen: A Spin-Off of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos about a squad of Boxed Crooks undertaking suicide missions.
  • Creature Commandos: The Creature Commandos are a special military unit in the U.S. Army designed to protect America during World War II. The unit is made up of supernatural creatures like a vampire, werewolf and a gorgon.
  • A recent example is DC Comics Bombshells
  • The Desert Peach is a well-researched comic based in Africa, about the Desert Fox's fictional gay younger brother.
  • Duster (2015) is set on a farm in Texas near the end of World War II.
  • Fiends of the Eastern Front: A group of Rumanian soldiers participate during World War II, first fighting alongside the Germans, then with the Russians when Rumania switches sides in 1944.
  • Northern Irish writer Garth Ennis, through his series War Stories and Battlefields, along with DC books like Enemy Ace: War In Heaven and revivals of British titles like Battler Britton and Johnny Red.
  • The Haunted Tank centers on the ghost of 19th-century Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart, who is sent by the spirit of Alexander the Great to act as a guardian over his two namesakes, Lieutenant Jeb Stuart and the M3 Stuart he commands.
  • The Heap first rose from the the swamp in 1942 and the Muck Monster soon found itself battling the Axis forces.
  • Hunter's Hellcats is about a black ops team of Boxed Crooks deployed behind enemy lines in the closing days of WWII.
  • Il était une fois en France is a thriller centered around the life of Real Life historical figure Joseph Joanovici.
  • Kismet: Man of Fate chronicled the adventures of a Muslim combatant on the European resistance.
  • The Lone Warrior is a Superhero thwarting Nazi plots on a military base.
  • The Losers were an elite combat unit during World War II, named for their terrible luck and habit of surviving dangerous situations. They fought Nazis behind enemy lines in the European theater of operations. Prior to the formation of the group, each character had his own adventures in DC's war anthology comics.
  • Maus: The portions narrated by Art's father take place mostly in Poland during the Holocaust, while the framing story takes place in the modern day.
  • Raid of No Return, the seventh book in the Nathan Hales Hazardous Tales series, discusses the events of the Pearl Harbor attack and the Doolittle raid.
  • Pat Patriot: America's Joan of Arc was about a super heroine who acted as an inspirational figure among the Americans.
  • Snoopy from Peanuts showed up a few times; Charles Schulz (himself having been in the military in this time) had these show up around 06 June during the later years.
  • Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos was Marvel's WW2-set comic, and introduced Nick Fury.
  • Sgt. Rock, the Trope Namer for the Sergeant Rock.
  • Spirou & Fantasio has a handful of work in WWII:
    • The Diary of a Naive Young Man and its sequel Hope Despite Everything is a one-shot about Spirou in his younger teens months before the outbreak of the war and during the occupation of Belgium.
    • Another one-shot is Le Groom vert-de-gris. This time Spirou is an adult and works at the hotel Moustique as a groom (and a spy) which been used by the Nazis as their headquarters.
    • The Count of Champignac gets his own series in his younger years, titled Champignac. The Count is tasked of breaking the secret code of the Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt their messages.
  • Sturmtruppen is an Italian satiric comic focused on the life and misadventures of an anonymous German battalion in France (hinted in an early strip), though some late strips are set with the Afrika Korps.
  • Super-American had a patriot from the future time traveling to fight the Nazis.
  • Superman: Clark Kent was rated 4F (unfit for military service) due to poor vision because he accidentally used his X-Ray vision to read the eye chart in the next room. And since everyone knew Clark really, really needed his glasses he couldn't talk the military brass into letting it slide. Of course, all that meant was Superman kept showing up everywhere Clark Kent traveled as a war correspondent. Hmmm... nothing suspicious about that.
  • Terry and the Pirates.
  • Tif et Tondu has a three-part series about Monsieur Choc's life before the beginning of series, title Choc: The Ghosts of Knightgrave. The last part relate his time during WWII.
  • Über: An Alternate History with Alien Space Bats. Days before defeat comes to the Axis Powers, the Nazis successfully create Super Soldiers (the titular Ubers) that turn the tide of the war back in their favor. The Allies have to create their own super soldiers in the process, and things rapidly go From Bad to Worse for both sides. Author Kieron Gillen wrote this as a deconstruction of more traditional "super soldiers in WWII" stories.
  • Unknown Soldier was a U.S. Military operative active during World War II. He is a master of disguise who normally wears bandages, as his face was destroyed in an explosion. His identity has never been revealed, and his name is taken from the famous Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
  • Watchmen. In an Easter Egg during the course of the novel we learn that The Comedian saw action in his masked identity against the Japanese in the South Pacific in 1942. This was later elaborated on in Before Watchmen.
  • Willie and Joe: One panel comics by Bill Mauldin, about two US infrantrymen in the European Theater, originally published in The Stars and Stripes.
  • Wonder Woman:
    • In the original tales in Sensation Comics and Wonder Woman (1942) Diana leaves Paradise Island to aid the Allies during the war and return a the downed USAAF pilot Steve Trevor to the states.
    • In The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016) Diana leaves the island and gets mixed up with the supernatural elements trying to take advantage of the ongoing war, similar to her original debut.
    • Wonder Woman: Black and Gold:
      • Most of "I'm Ageless" is set during the war in 1944 France. The other sections have her reminicing about that time while paying her respects at the grave of one of the soldiers she met there.
      • "Wing Woman" has Diana, in her Invisible Jet, helping a Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) fend off a German Messerschmitt Me 262.
  • In Yoko Tsuno, the titular character travels back in time during the occupation of the Dutch East Indies by the Japanese Empire. Yoko hopes to find her great uncle, colonel Toshio, and answers to the discovery of Antimatter by the Japanese.

    Fanfiction 
  • Curious George Goes to Paris has the titular ape going to Paris and fighting Nazis.
  • The Children of Time episode "The Manhattan Conspiracy" takes place in New Mexico just before and during the first testing of the atomic bomb. The Cult of Skaro is looking to utilize the radiation of the bomb, and the Tenth Doctor & Co. arrive just in time to interfere.
  • Uplift is about quarians making contact with humanity in the middle of World War II.

    Literature 
  • 633 Squadron, a 1956 novel about a fictional Airstrike Impossible by RAF Mosquito fighter-bombers (which was more famously adapted into a film in 1964 that partly inspired A New Hope).
  • Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall is Spike Milligan's account of serving in the Royal Artillery in North Africa during the war.
  • Alistair MacLean wrote several novels based on his experiences in WWII, among them South by Java Head and HMS Ulysses.
  • All the Light We Cannot See takes place mostly in occupied France, specifically the walled city of Saint-Malo
  • The Animorphs book Elfangor's Secret has the heroes chasing a time-traveling Controller. By the time they get to World War II, things have been changed enough that Hitler is now a lowly jeep driver, though the war still happens, including the D-Day invasion happening on the same day.
  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: Joe Kavalier, one of the main characters, escapes from Prague in 1939 after Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia and takes refuge in New York City. He enlists in the US Navy and is shipped to Antarctica after the ship with refugees destined for New York City, in which his younger brother Thomas was travelling in, was destroyed by a German U-boat.
  • In Margery Benery-Isbert's The Ark, the actual events of World War II are in flashback, but only months earlier for the refugee characters; one son managed to return from the front, but the father has not.
  • Armored units in the Yugoslav battlefield 1941-1945 (Oklopne jedinice na jugoslovenskom ratištu 1941-45) by Bojan Dimitrijević and Dragan Savić describes in great detail the armored units of all warring factions in Yugoslavia (Wehrmacht, Waffen SS, Italians, Red Army, Partisans, Chetniks, Croatian Ustaše etc.).
  • Asiunia is based on the authors childhood in occupied Poland.
  • Atonement, or about two-thirds of the story - set in Dunkirk and the English homefront.
  • Auntie Mame and its sequel Around the World with Auntie Mame are partially set during the war.
  • Some of the novels in the Bernie Gunther series, the whole set of which follows German detective Bernie Gunther from 1928 to 1957.
    • Prague Fatale finds Bernie investigating a murder for Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1941, after having returned from the horrors of the Eastern Front.
    • A Man Without Breath is set in the spring of 1943, soon after the defeat at Stalingrad. Bernie is investigating the discovery of the corpses of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn forest.
    • The Lady From Zagreb has two parts; the first is set in the summer of 1942 shortly after the events of Prague Fatale, and the second part is set soon after A Man Without Breath, in summer 1943 when Bernie gets back from Katyn and winds up getting involved in some espionage activities.
    • Field Grey—about half the novel is set in 1954 but there are extensive flashbacks to Bernie's experiences in 1940 in occupied France, 1941 in the Ukraine as Bernie witnesses the Holocaust, and 1945 as Bernie is conscripted into the doomed defense of Konigsberg.
  • Biggles appears in a number of books set in WW2.
  • The war heavily figures in the ''Aunt Dimity'' series, although the books themselves are set in the present. Dimity Westwood and Lori's mother met and became friends in wartime London; following her mother's wishes expressed in a letter, Lori researches people in Dimity's past in the first book. Several of the residents of Finch were child evacuees who returned to live there as adults, and one Italian POW settled in the area, later fathering several children who appear in later books. In Aunt Dimity and the Lost Prince, Gracie Thames notes that she and her husband named three of their children for family members who were killed by the Nazis when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
  • Connie Willis wrote a series of novels (Blackout/All Clear) and short stories ('Firewatch' 'Jack') about the experiences of British citizens during the war (and especially London during the Blitz.)
  • The Blindness of the Heart (Die Mittagsfrau) takes place in Germany and starts out in the World War I era, and then things get worse for the characters when the war begins: at least one character dies in the camps, and the main character is forced to deny her Jewish heritage and carry falsified Aryan papers.
  • The Book Thief is about Liesel Meminger growing up in a foster home in WWII Nazi Germany. And with a foster family that ends up hiding a Jew in their basement, too.
  • La Brèche is a science-fiction novel about a history-themed Reality TV show from 2060 (it uses Time Travel) sending a war correspondent and a WWII historian to cover the Omaha Beach landing.
  • The fairytale adaptation Briar Rose by Jane Yolen is one of these. Definitely falls under True Art Is Angsty, even if it doesn't COMPLETELY manage a Downer Ending.
  • Caging Skies is the book Taika Watiti's Jojo Rabbit is based on
  • The Caine Mutiny. Set on the Pacific front, but hardly features any combat.
  • Camp X. Set in Canada, and based on Camp X.
  • Catch-22, a very dark Black Comedy set in the Mediterranean campaign.
  • The Guernsey / Armishire books in the Chalet School series are set during the Second World War, and the effects of the war on the school are a major part of the plots of The Chalet School in Exile, The Chalet School Goes To It and The Highland Twins at the Chalet School.
  • Charlotte Gray is about an Englishwoman who goes to France to join La Résistance and find her boyfriend, an airmen who went MIA there. Thought to be Very Loosely Based on the True Stories of Agents Nancy Wake and Pearl Cornioley.
  • In Chrono Hustle World War 2 is occasionally mentioned as one of the time periods the time doors can go to. Characters finally actually go there at the end of #10.
  • Code Name Verity revolves around a British spy in occupied France who's been captured by the Nazis and tortured into giving up the codes to the radios she was trying to smuggle to La Résistance. The second half revolves around her best friend, the pilot who flew her to France, who ends up working with La Résistance to accomplish the spy's true objective—the destruction of the prison she's being held in.
  • Constantine's crossing (Konstantinovo raskršće) by Dejan Stojiljković is a novel about Partisans, Chetniks and Ghostapo in search of the Spear of Destiny.
  • Courier From Warsaw
  • Cryptonomicon
  • The D Agency novel series follows a covert Japanese intelligence agency across the years 1939-1941.
  • The Barrett Tillman novel Dauntless set during Midway. One character killed during the story is the father of Bud Callaway, President in his earlier novel The Sixth Battle.
  • Death Is My Trade, fictionalized biography about Rudolf Höß, the Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz death camp.
  • Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series is set from early 1942 onwards, based around two Asiatic destroyers and the Japanese Battlecruiser Amagi and her crew sent to an alternate reality.
  • The Diary of a Young Girl (aka The Diary of Anne Frank) is a diary written by a Jewish girl who went into hiding during the war. She was eventually captured and killed, and her family had parts of her diary published posthumously.
  • Douglas Reeman has written at least twenty novels of the Royal Navy in WWII, including several set on the Pacific front (both The Pride and the Anguish and Strike from the Sea focus on the fall of Singapore).
  • Catherynne M. Valente's children's novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making takes place during and is affected by the war. The protagonist September is dealing with big changes in her home life while her father is away fighting and her mother works long hours in a factory.
  • The Emmy Lake Chronicles, starting with Dear Mrs Bird by AJ Pearce centres on the lives of women in World War II London.
  • The English Patient, set mostly in Italy and North Africa, with a bit of the 1941-45 Soviet-German war. A few US-made 1943-45 propaganda movies made about the Eastern Front glossed over many of the Soviet Union's more questionable activities, which would come back to haunt their creators and actors just a few years later during the late 40s to early 50s Red Scare.
  • The End of the Affair is about a writer pursuing an affair with the wife of a civil servant in London during the war.
  • The Final Solution: During the war, an elderly Sherlock Holmes meets a Jewish boy who's a refugee from Germany.
  • Future Times Three is a Time Travel novel set (and written) in Nazi-occupied France. Despite its Science Fiction nature, it takes great care in describing the day-to-day realities of civilian life during war, such as rationing.
  • The Garden of Evening Mists: The earliest of the three timelines is set during the Japanese occupation of Malaysia. The heroine and her sister are imprisoned in a Japanese camp, where her sister is gang-raped by soldiers.
  • Gerfaut war novels mostly take place during the war. Specifically, most are set on the Eastern Front and the War Is Hell trope is central to them.
  • The Gift of Rain is set before and during the Japanese invasion of Malaya.
  • Part of Gravity's Rainbow is set in the last months of the war.
  • Guard of Honor is a novel of the home front, taking place over three eventful days at an Army Air Force base in Florida, September 1943.
  • The Hiding Place is the telling of survivor Corrie ten Boom's experiences in occupied Europe.
  • Hope Stapleford Mysteries: The first book is set in 1939 just before the war. The later books are set during it.
  • Illegal Alien, a 1997 Doctor Who novel set in 1940, both in London and on Nazi-occupied Jersey.
  • Primo Levi's If This Is a Man details the author's survival in Auschwitz.
  • Jedenje bogova (Eating the Gods) by Goran Čučković is a short novella about the atrocities committed by Croatian fascists in German-occupied Yugoslavia. It is not an easy read, by any means.
  • The Just William stories by Richmal Crompton began long before the war (and were still coming out long after it ended) but several collections were written during the war and see William and his family and friends cope with life on the Home Front, dealing with rationing and hunting for imagined German spies.
  • Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. Maximilian Aue is an SS officer of French and German ancestry. He helps carry out massacres during the Holocaust and finally flees from Germany to start a new life in northern France. Aue is present during several of the major events of the war.
  • The Land Mine: The book is about a 13-year-old boy in 1943, having to move to his parents' home after the roof of his house is blown off by a land mine.
  • The League of Secret Heroes books are set during World War II, following the adventures of three girls who gain superpowers and join a secret organization dedicated to aiding the war effort from American soil by foiling plots by spies of both the Nazis and the Japanese Army.
  • Lelejska gora by Mihailo Lalić is an introspective novel about a Yugoslav Partisan named Lado Tajović.
  • Len Deighton's loose "war trilogy": City of Gold, set in North Africa; Bomber, all about a single bombing raid and its effects on a town in England and a town in Germany; and Goodbye Mickey Mouse about a bomber escort group. There's also SS-GB which is Alternate History where England is under Nazi occupation.
  • Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman is an epic novel which tells the struggle of Russian people against the German invasion. Since Grossman himself was a news reporter at the frontlines, his book is widely considered to be historically accurate. It portrays soldiers of the Red Army as heroes fighting against all odds, at the same time heavily criticizing Soviet bureaucracy. It was therefore banned in the Soviet Union for some time.
  • Dean Koontz's Lightning at least, that's Stefan's time period of origin and where various pivotal events take place. Other events range from 1955 to 1988.
  • The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: The Film of the Book turns a single sentence mentioning the Pevensie kids being sent to live in the country "because of the air raids" into a dangerous scene that takes place right in the middle of the London Blitz.
    • Something of a reality to that- there was a second evacuation of vulnerable Londoners during the Blitz as many had returned after the initial feared raids hadn't materialised.
  • Living Alone by Stella Benson.
  • Field marshall Erich von Manstein wrote Lost Victories as memoirs of his command over Wehrmacht in the Eastern front.
  • Mailed Fist deals with a troop of British Churchill tanks between D-Day and the war's end.
  • Elizabeth Enright's Melendy Quartet
  • Memoirs of a Geisha mainly took place during the Great Depression, though it was the start of the war that changed many things for the main character Sayuri.
  • The Midnight Guardians
  • Mr. Einstein's Secretary follows Hanna Fischer, a brilliant young German-American woman who, over the course of many years, becomes the secretary to various powerful and influential men, including the titular physicist, before becoming a Deep Cover Agent for the O.S.S. and going to work for high-ranking Nazi architect Albert Speer prior to the break-out of the war, allowing her a front-row seat to the rise and fall of the Nazi Party.
  • Mister Roberts takes place in the Pacific but features no action, to the great dissatisfaction of the title character.
  • The Naked and the Dead, set on a fictional island at the Pacific.
  • Night by Elie Wiesel, an autobiography about his time in the concentration camps and on the way there.
  • The Night Garden is set on a farm in Vancouver in 1945, and the third act deals with the protagonists trying to cover up their involvement in crashing an experimental army plane.
  • The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah is about two sisters in occupied France.
  • Also, Number the Stars takes place in Denmark, World War II.
  • Poul Anderson's alternate history Operation Chaos. In fact, one of the first things the narrator says is, better too much information than too little, and if you already know who won World War II, let me say it anyhow. Turns out you don't even know who fought World War II or where. (The timelines diverged early in the twentieth century.)
  • Otto: Autobiography of a Teddy Bear: A children's picture book about the odyssey of a teddy bear that belonged to a young Jewish boy before, during and after World War II.
  • Los Pájaros de Fuego, which centres on a elite, Hispanophone Filipino family shocked by the Japanese invasion and occupation (the title, in fact, refers to Japanese Zero fighters).
  • Perilous Passage by Bruce Nicolaysen, which is about fleeing from the Nazis through the icy Spanish mountains.
  • Peyton Place begins in the late 1930s and continues into the war years.
  • Reds!: A Revolutionary Timeline features a much bloodier war opposing the Axis, including OTL members plus Brazil, Spain, Sweden and Turkey among others, to the United Nations, composed of the Western Allies led by the Franco-British Union and the communist Vladivostok Compact led by the Soviet Union and the Union of American Socialist Republics. The war starts in 1940 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union, as inaction from France and the United Kingdom allowed the German Reich to conquer Poland (required by the narrative, along the expanded Axis, in order for the war to not simply be a Curb-Stomp Battle for the Allies). The inclusion of Brazil under Integralist rule in the Axis also adds a South American Theatre to the war.
  • Mildred D. Taylor:
    • The Road To Memphis takes place in 1941, shortly before the US enters World War II, and while the war is more of a background subject, it's certainly on Cassie's mind. Cassie and company even learn about the attack on Pearl Harbor happening once they reach Memphis, and Jeremy Simms heads off to fight at the very end of the book, with Cassie implying in the narration that he ends up dying during the war.
    • The prologue of All the Things Past, All the Things to Come takes place in 1944 as Cassie and Little Man have to deal with racist bus drivers trying to force them to the back of the bus.
  • Robert Ludlum has a few too.
  • Robert Westall set several of his books and short stories during World War II, most famously The Machine Gunners but also, Blitzcat, The Blitz, and Blackham's Wimpey from the anthology Break of Dark.
  • Rose Under Fire is set in Ravensbrück, a concentration camp, during the last year of the war.
  • The Secret of Crickley Hall, while set mainly in 2006, is driven by a 1943 atrocity, in whose wake linger the spirits of several Blitz Evacuees. Some scenes directly narrate the wartime events.
  • The Secret of Santa Vittoria
  • A Separate Peace is set in 1942–43, and the prospect of the teenage protagonist and his friends fighting in the war in the near future provides part of the narrative backdrop.
  • Shanghai Girls starts out in China in 1937, around the time Japanese soldiers invade.
  • Sharks and Little Fish, written by former German submariner Wolfgang Ott, based of his experiences, and is centered around the sailor Teichmann as he experiences life at sea on a U-Boot.
  • Vercors' Le Silence de la mer, which was written in 1942 and secretly published in Occupied Paris.
  • Silent Gunpowder by Branko Ćopić tells the story of a WW2 Serbian village located in central Yugoslavia (now Bosnia) whose inhabitants are forced to choose between alligning with royalist Chetniks or communist Partisans.
  • Silent Ship, Silent Sea: A coming of age story aboard a damaged destroyer at Guadelcanal.
  • Skärvor av kristall by Solveig Olsson-Hultgren takes place in 1938 and 1939. The new great war hasn't started quite yet, but many people know that it's just around the corner. Louise's boyfriend is a Jewish refugee from Germany.
  • Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, in part based on his experiences during the bombing of Dresden.
  • Snow Treasure by Marie McSwigan is based on a true story about a bunch of Norwegian kids that snuck their country's gold past Nazis in the winter of 1939-1940 and adults who got it to America.
  • Soldier Dogs: Each book takes place somewhere during World War II.
  • Special Operations follows three Norwegian teenagers involved in La Résistance. They end up fleeing to England after their actions are exposed and go on to take part in covert operations in France and Holland.
  • Stepping on the Cracks
  • Stuka Pilot, the memoir of Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the top scoring pilot in Germany and, single-handedly, the deadliest man in an airplane: the Ju 87 Stuka dive-bomber.
  • The French novel Suite Française by the Ukrainian-French writer Irène Némirovsky, set in the German occupied France. The author was planning 5 volumes of which she managed to complete only 2 before being deported and killed in Auschwitz as a Jew.
  • Summer of My German Soldier, a YA novel about a Jewish-American girl who befriends a German POW in wartime Arkansas.
  • The novels by Sven Hassel on the 27th Penal Panzer Regiment.
  • The protagonist of A Tale of Time City is a Blitz Evacuee who gets pulled outside of time on her way out of London.
  • Tales of the South Pacific is a short story collection by James Michener meant to give an idea of what it was like to experience the war from one of the many dinky islands used as remote, isolated bases in the South Pacific. Two of the stories contained within were adapted into the famous musical South Pacific.
  • Third Reich Victorious: an anthology edited by Peter G. Tsouras, containing ten self-contained scenarios in which Germany ends up winning the war.
  • A Thread of Grace takes place in the year and a half between Italy's surrender and V-E day.
  • To Know Oneself in Combat (Poznat sebya v boyu), memoirs of Alexander Pokryshkin, Soviet Air Force Marshall and official Hero of the Soviet Union, who fought against the German Luftwaffe.
  • Harry Turtledove:
  • The Unwomanly Face of War is a collection of memories of hundreds of Soviet women who enlisted in the Red Army.
  • War Eagles, Just before World War II, An Air Force test pilot is court-marshalled and publicly humiliated after a stunt endangers Present Roosevelt but manages to get a job flying a plane from the north to South Pole, however his plane is attacked by a giant white eagle and he crash lands on an undiscovered island populated with Living Dinosaurs and Vikings and learns that the nazis have built a new super-weapon.
  • What Did You Do In The War, Sister? is a fictionalized account of real events which happened to a specific convent of nuns in occupied Belgium.
  • Where Eagles Dare by Alistair MacLean
  • The Winds Of War and War And Remembrance is practically a grand tour of World War II.
  • The Wing Commander novelizations are explicitly intended as sci-fi remakes of certain key points in WW2.
  • Ken Follett's Winter of the World begins in 1933 and ends in 1949, more than half of the action describes the Second World War from the perspective of several protagonists from several origins (American, British, Russian, and German).
  • Without Seeing The Dawn – depicts a Filipino (specifically, Visayan/Ilonggo) farming community that's quickly, and savagely, drawn into the war with the Japanese occupation bursting in midway through the novel. The protagonist joins the U.S. colonial Armed Forces to fight the Japanese, and upon returning to his hometown becomes a guerrilla.

    Music 
  • About half to two-thirds of Sabaton's output is based on events and figures from World War II. The band's Horrible History Metal theme, in fact, came about when frontman Joakim Brodén wrote a song but couldn't figure out what to use for lyrics, then he watched Saving Private Ryan and decided to write about D-Day, which became the song "Primo Victoria".
  • Songs about longing for an absent lover's return have always been popular, but those from the Forties – "Till Then", "I'll Be Seeing You", "Waiting For The Train To Come In", etc. – take on greater significance when you think about what was going on when they were recorded.
  • Iron Maiden has made "Aces High" (about the Battle of Britain), "The Longest Day" (about the Normandy landings), and "Brighter than a Thoudand Suns" (about the Manhattan Project).

    Podcasts 
  • Dan Carlin's Hardcore History has had a few episodes centered around, or related to, the conflict such as the Eastern European Front, the Pacific Theater, and morality of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

    Radio 
  • The Adventures of Harry Nile has a 2017 series "Harry Nile Goes To War", set in Dec 1941 though early 1942, as the Private Detective deals with issues in panicked Los Angeles in teh first montsh of the war.
  • X Minus One: "Project Trojan" is set during the war, and is about a team of counter-intelligence operatives trying to trick the Germans into chasing a fake scientific development.

    Tabletop Games 
  • In the 1960s through the 1980s, Avalon Hill and SPI thrived on tabletop games about WWII: Third Reich, Afrika Korps, Patton's War, Midway, Battle of the Bulge, and a zillion others.

    Theatre 
  • The most notable theatre adaptation of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl was written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett.
  • The best known play by Germain Muller, Enfin...Redde m'r nimm devon (At last... let's not talk about it anymore), takes place during the de facto annexation of Alsace by Nazi Germany and deals with the war as experienced by the locals, including the conscription of (French-born) people in the German armies.
  • Imagine This- a musical set in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942.
  • The Long And The Short And The Tall is a play about a section of Britsh infantrymen trapped behind enemy lines in Burma.
  • Mister Roberts takes place in the Pacific but far from combat. V-E Day happens during the course of the play's action.
  • A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: A borderline case. Set in October 1941, the war in Europe has been ongoing for two years, but it's yet to formally begin in the Philippines, then a U.S. colonial territory (of course, the Pacific theatre begins with Pearl Harbour in December 1941—Hawaii itself being an out-and-out U.S. colony—and reaches Manila itself a few weeks later). The spectre of war hangs over the entire city, however, with practice blackouts, air-raid sirens, and news of Americans being evacuated in advance.
  • South Pacific is likewise set far from the action in a backwater Pacific island.
  • There Shall Be No Night is a play set in Finland as the Finns battle to save themselves during the 1939-40 Winter War.
  • Luis Valdez's Valley of the Heart, which revolves around two Star-Crossed Lovers, the daughter of a wealthy Japanese American land owner and a Mexican American farm hand. After she and her family are rounded up and locked up in an internment camp, his father reluctantly agrees to take care of the farm until they return.
  • Lost in Yonkers is a Coming of Age Story set on the home front.

    Visual Novels 

    Web Comics 

    Web Original 
  • One episode of Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel) has the first half set late in the European War, where American soldiers discover an abandoned town hall just outside Hanover during the push into Germany. And it's heavily implied that the Nazis were doing research into the occult in the building's basement.
    • Another episode, "The Curse of the Ourang Medan", while not set in World War II proper, makes mention of activities during and after the war, such as Operation Paperclip, the Allied effort to recruit German scientists to the West, as well as a German chemical weapon called Tabun, which is considered to be the most likely suspect in making the titular cargo ship sink.
    • Season 4 has the Flight 19 incident, which takes place just months after the Japanese surrender, involving five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers going missing. The lead pilot of the flight, Lt. Charles Carroll Taylor, is even mentioned to have fought in the Pacific Theater during the war, as well as the fact that the narrator mentioned the Avenger's greatest World War II achievement of sinking both Yamato-class battleships.
    • "The Skies over Kecksburg" makes mention of the Nazi wonder weapon programs, specifically one called "Die Glocke", a mysterious bell-shaped device said to be able to travel through time and space. "For Whom The Bell Tolls" further expands on the device, specifically its background and possible purposes.
    • "Evil Under the Ice" is set in the immediate aftermath of the war, detailing Operation Highjump and Nazi forces allegedly making bases in the Antarctic long after the German surrender.
    • "The New York Nuke" brings up the possibility of the existence of the German nuclear weapons program, as well as the Junkers Ju 390 and it's ability to reach the East Coast of the United States.
    • "The Peculiar Death of Peter Gibbs" mentions the titular ex-RAF pilot's career during World War II, flying Supermarine Spitfires from 1944 until the end of the war in Europe.
    • "The Disappearance of the Nanjing Battalion" features the China-Burma-India campaign, specifically the disappearance of some 500 or so Japanese Army soldiers during the landings at Ramree Island.
    • "Ghosts of Kadena Airbase" discusses the Battle of Okinawa, and how the massive losses of life led to several areas on the island becoming haunted, including the titular airbase.
  • Emperor Tigerstar has videos depicting the changing front lines in World War II for both theatres separately or altogether in a single video every single day.
  • Reds!: A Revolutionary Timeline: Part 3, "The Great Crusade" is set in an alternate World War II.
  • Wartime Stories, being a series about horrifying events taking place During the War, inevitably covers World War II. Among the cases they've covered thus far are a mysterious disappearance off the West Coast in 1942, as well as The Holocaust and the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Nazi doctors.
  • Unclassified Encounter is a series set during World War II...with supernatural and paranormal creatures attacking both Allied and Axis Forces and threatening the world in the process.
  • World War II covers the events of the war summarized on a weekly basis in real time seventy-nine years after they occurred.

    Western Animation 

Wartime Animation

Many theatrical cartoons made during World War II had popular characters like Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Popeye doing their part in the war effort.

  • Any Bonds Today?: Propaganda short starring Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd promoting war bonds.
  • Blitz Wolf: A Tex Avery short in which The Three Little Pigs is spoofed with the wolf representing Hitler.
  • Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips: Bugs defeats an entire Japanese regiment.
  • Daffy the Commando: Daffy tries to get behind Nazi enemy lines and beats Hitler over the head with a mallet near the end.
  • The Ducktators: A satire on the rise of the Axis set in a barnyard with caricatures of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo.
  • Education for Death: A Disney cartoon showing how Nazis are brainwashed.
  • Der Fuehrer's Face: Donald dreams he is a Nazi working in a Nazi factory.
  • Herr Meets Hare: Bugs Bunny battles Nazi leader Hermann Göring. Hitler makes a cameo near the end.
  • The New Spirit: Donald is motivated by his radio to pay his income taxes and support the war effort.
  • Plane Daffy: Daffy fights off a female Nazy spy. Cameos by Hitler, Göring and Goebbels.
  • Russian Rhapsody: Hitler decides to bomb Moscow himself and gets beaten up by Gremlins.
  • Scrap Happy Daffy: Daffy collects scrap iron for the Allied war effort. Hitler tries to destroy it by sending an Extreme Omni-Goat.
  • The Spirit of '43: Donald's conscience is put to the test by a thrifty Scot and a spentworthy man who want him to spent his money to their causes. Donald eventually pays to support the war effort.
  • Tokio Jokio: A horribly racist anti-Japanese cartoon.

Post-War Animation

Alternative Title(s): Works Set In Worldwar 2

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