Two themes link the best of this year’s military titles — the high price of intervention in other countries’ affairs without a clear plan of action, and the long-term effects of the shift of the geopolitical tectonic plates between East and West.

In Vietnam: The Definitive Oral History (Ebury £19.99) Christian G Appy has persuaded 135 combatants and victims of that war to relive their harrowing experiences. They include a “whistle-blower” on the My Lai massacre, “the Vietnamese Napoleon” General Vo Nguyen Giap (recorded just before his death), the widow of an anti-war protester who burnt himself to death in front of the White House, and presidential hopeful John McCain. Appy is correct to draw the parallels with the current imbroglio in the Middle East and I unhesitatingly nominate his book as my military title of the year.

Paul Cartledge gives us a timely reminder in Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World (Macmillan £20) that “we in the West don’t necessarily have all the best tunes. Concepts and practices often imagined to be uniquely western such as reason, freedom and democracy have their active counterparts within Eastern cultures”. While in no way diminishing the importance of Leonidas and his Spartans’ stand for what only subsequently came to be known as western values, Cartledge points out that more Greeks fought for Xerxes than against him in 480BC. This elegant and incisive reappraisal of a great turning point in western history should be read in tandem with Robin Waterfield’s Xenophon’s Retreat (Faber £16.99), which retraces the route taken in 401BC by the retreating Greek mercenaries before the massed forces of the Persian empire.

Antony Beevor’s second stab at the Spanish civil war, The Battle for Spain (Weidenfeld £25), has deservedly proved a publishing sensation, drawing as it does on newly declassified documents in the Russian and Spanish archives. A satirist described the conflict as a case of “the democracies managing only to refrain from intervening in the intervention of others”. The broad outline of this curtain-raiser to the second world war is familiar, but, to quote El Pais, “Beevor has put us right back in the war amid the flames of those years”.

One intervention in the Iberian peninsula is about to be celebrated, however, as the 200th anniversary of Wellington’s victories in the Peninsular war looms. In The War for All the Oceans (Little, Brown £20) Roy and Lesley Adkins tell the rousing tale of the overall British naval effort in the Napoleonic wars with great panache.

Intervention was fatally one-sided in Spain in 1936 — but in Russia in 1919 it could have jeopardised Winston Churchill’s political career. As Clifford Kinvig states in Churchill’s Crusade: The British Invasion of Russia 1918-1920 (Hambledon Continuum £25), war minister Churchill’s single-minded attempt to “strangle the Bolshevik infant in its cradle” constituted “unpopular, illegitimate military intervention”. The campaign that, the author says, employed poison gas provoked Lenin into using more extreme measures and prolonged the suffering of the Russian civil war.

By 1941, the Bolshevik infant had grown apace and had become a begrudged ally. But when the Nazis invaded Russia they found themselves up against a determined foe united by patriotism rather than communism. The crunch came just before Christmas, with the panzers ranging on the capital’s suburbs. The new openness in Russian archives has helped former British ambassador in Moscow Rodric Braithwaite to write a searingly compassionate account, Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War (Profile £20).

Russia lost 3m POWs, many to starvation and brutality. The western allies fared somewhat better, and Adrian Gilbert has related their touching but often amusing stories in POW: Allied Prisoners in Europe 1939-1945 (J Murray £20). There would have been many more if the rearguard of the outnumbered and outgunned BEF had not put up such a magnificent fight to allow more than 300,000 of their comrades to escape from Dunkirk. This epic has been worthily recorded by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore in Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man (Viking £25).

Top five

VIETNAM by Christian G Appy (Ebury £19.99)

THERMOPYLAE by Paul Cartledge (Macmillan £20)

THE BATTLE FOR SPAIN by Antony Beevor (Weidenfeld £25)

CHURCHILL’S CRUSADE by Clifford Kinvig (Hambledon Continuum £25)

MOSCOW 1941 by Rodric Braithwaite (Profile £20)

Bestsellers

1 Vulcan 607 by Rowland White (Bantam Press) 41,645

2 The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor (Weidenfeld) 21,526

3 Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942 (Bodleian Library) 20,851

4 Instructions for British Servicemen in France 1944 (Bodleian Library) 16,196

5 Dunkirk by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore (Viking) 10,996

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