On Monday, May 29, Americans will observe Memorial Day, commemorating the U.S. men and women whose lives were lost, and continue to be lost, in military service for their country. The day marks a fitting occasion to look back at the wars which have defined our nation’s history and the American soldiers who fought and died in them to ensure our way of life.

The Battle of Midway is considered the greatest U.S. naval victory of World War II, which turned the tide of the war in the Pacific. Behind the luster, however, is the devastation of the American torpedo squadrons. The Unknown Battle of Midway: The Destruction of the American Torpedo Squadrons, written by Alvin Kernan, a survivor of the battle, tells the wrenching story of the devastating losses to America’s torpedo squadrons: Of the 51 planes sent to attack Japanese carriers only 7 returned, and of the 127 aircrew only 29 survived. Not a single torpedo hit its target.

From John Lukacs, the renowned best-selling author of Five Days in London, comes June 1941: Hitler and Stalin, an unparalleled drama of the momentous confrontation between these two leaders in June 1941. “A fascinating and masterfully researched book” (Henry Kissinger),” June 1941 vividly describes the strange, calculating, and miscalculating relationship between Hitler and Stalin before the German invasion of Soviet Russia, with its gigantic (and unintended) consequences.

Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the 20th Century traces the origins of the current fascination with memory back to World War I. Historian Jay Winter discusses how images, languages, and practices that developed in the wake of the Great War shaped the way later conflicts and victims were remembered both publicly and privately. The result is a “highly original” book, says John Horne, which “will stand alone as the contribution by a leading historian of the Great War to the field.”

In the midst of the most heated crisis of the Second World War, Roosevelt and Stalin secretly exchanged three hundred letters. My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin, edited with commentary by Susan Butler, is the first publication in any language that contains the entire collection of hot-war messages passed between the two men. The book is “a history junkie’s delight” (Publishers Weekly) that will serve as an invaluable primary source for understanding the relationship that developed between these two great leaders during a time of supreme world crisis.

1945: The War That Never Ended, by Gregor Dallas, is a monumental, multi-dimensional history of the end of World War II. Dallas narrates in meticulous detail the conflicts, contradictions, motives, and counter-motives that marked the end of the greatest military conflict in modern history and established lasting patterns of deceit, uncertainty, and distrust out of which the Cold War was born. “This is a not-to-be-forgotten read,” says Noble Frankland in The Spectator, “by an author of outstanding quality.”