# The 19 Greatest American War Novels

> Trench realism sits against black comedy here, alongside the Vietnam books written decades after the shooting stopped.

*By YPB Team · Published September 8, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-19-greatest-american-war-novels*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Catch-22** — score 1000/1000
   Joseph Heller's 1961 satire of a bomber squadron trapped by its own regulations.
2. **Slaughterhouse-Five** — score 649/1000
   Vonnegut's 1969 novel of Billy Pilgrim, the Dresden firebombing and time coming unstuck.
3. **Johnny Got His Gun** — score 525/1000
   Dalton Trumbo's 1939 novel narrated by a soldier left without limbs, face or voice.
4. **The Caine Mutiny** — score 525/1000
   Herman Wouk's 1951 Pulitzer winner about a minesweeper crew and a captain they push out.
5. **Going After Cacciato** — score 525/1000
   Tim O'Brien's 1978 National Book Award winner, in which a squad chases a deserter walking to Paris.
6. **The Naked and the Dead** — score 444/1000
   Norman Mailer's 1948 debut, a platoon novel drawn from his own Pacific service.
7. **For Whom the Bell Tolls** — score 444/1000
   Hemingway's 1940 novel of an American dynamiter behind fascist lines in the Spanish Civil War.
8. **Gravity's Rainbow** — score 444/1000
   Pynchon's 1973 National Book Award winner, V-2 rockets and paranoia across the last months of the war.
9. **A Farewell to Arms** — score 444/1000
   Hemingway's 1929 novel of an American ambulance driver and a British nurse on the Italian front.
10. **Cold Mountain** — score 345/1000
   Charles Frazier's 1997 novel of a wounded Confederate walking home across the Carolinas.
11. **Matterhorn** — score 345/1000
   Karl Marlantes's 2010 novel of a Marine company taking and abandoning a hill in Vietnam.
12. **The Yellow Birds** — score 345/1000
   Kevin Powers's 2012 debut about two young soldiers in Al Tafar and the promise one of them breaks.
13. **The Thin Red Line** — score 345/1000
   James Jones's 1962 Guadalcanal novel, later filmed by Terrence Malick.
14. **The Things They Carried** — score 222/1000
   Tim O'Brien's 1990 linked stories of an infantry platoon in Vietnam and what fiction can carry that fact cannot.
15. **The Killer Angels** — score 222/1000
   Michael Shaara's 1974 Pulitzer winner, the battle of Gettysburg told from both commands.
16. **Tree of Smoke** — score 222/1000
   Denis Johnson's 2007 National Book Award winner, intelligence work unravelling across Vietnam.
17. **From Here to Eternity** — score 222/1000
   James Jones's 1951 National Book Award winner about the peacetime army at Schofield Barracks before Pearl Harbor.
18. **Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk** — score 222/1000
   Ben Fountain's 2012 satire of a decorated Iraq squad paraded at a Dallas Cowboys game.
19. **The Red Badge of Courage** — score 222/1000
   Stephen Crane's 1895 novel of a young Union soldier's first battle, written by a man who had seen none.

Tags: usa, books, war, classics