Visitors to Stone & Stone's Second World War Books website have over the last two months nominated and voted for almost fifty of the best non-fiction WWII-related titles published in 1997 (not to mention the absent-minded nominations and votes for pre-1997 titles which had to be disallowed). Given the large number of great new books published in '97, and the highly divergent tastes and specializations of readers, researchers, veterans, hobbyists, collectors, and other visitors to our site, it's no wonder that votes were spread over so many different titles.

Still -- as with last year's polling -- some very interesting patterns emerged: many ballots for panzers and the Russian front; considerable interest in the SS; many supporters of books on aircraft and air operations; a considerable upsurge in voting for titles about the submarine war. Like last year, there were relatively few votes for the Pacific war or for "social" themes.

Balloting was halted at the stroke of the New Year (California time) and tallying of votes is now complete. Three books in particular staked significant leads and easily sailed to victory. Although we had substantially more ballots cast than last year, a pack of about two dozen candidates remained bunched remarkably close together, many separated by just one or two votes, until the very end. Despite the fact that many titles came within a few votes of the front of that pack, and many deserving books just missed the top tier, when the smoke cleared ten highly appropriate winners emerged.

Here, then, are the Top Ten Books of 1997 as selected by visitors to these webpages, in alphabetical order by author:

Dunn, Walter Scott. Kursk: Hitler's Gamble. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997

Foreman, John. Fighter Command War Diaries: September 1939 - September 1940. Walton-on-Thames, UK: Air Research Publications, 1997

Kemp, Paul. U-Boats Destroyed: German Submarine Losses in the World Wars. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997

Nipe, George. Decision in the Ukraine. Winnipeg: J.J. Fedorowicz Publishing, 1997

Pegg, Martin. Hs 129 Panzerjaeger!. Burgess Hill, UK: Classic Publications, 1997

Prien, Jochen. Jagdgeschwader 53: March 1937 - May 1942. Atglen: Schiffer Military History, 1997

Reynolds, Michael. Steel Inferno: I SS Panzer Corps in Normandy. New York: Sarpedon, 1997

Rohwer, Jurgen. Allied Submarine Attacks of World War Two: European Theatre of Operations, 1939-1945. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997

Urwin, Gregory J. W. Facing Fearful Odds: The Siege of Wake Island. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997

Yerger, Mark C. Waffen-SS Commanders: The Army, Corps, and Divisional Leaders of a Legend. Atglen: Schiffer Military History, 1997

Thanks also to all the visitors to Stone & Stone's Second World War Books website who helped select these winners and made 1997 such a great year for us.

Now let's start searching for the best new books of 1998!

A note on methodology

Last year's voting was conducted by email, which simplified the task of validating the ballots but may have had a dampening effect on the number of votes cast. This year we decided to build an online "voting machine" to automate the balloting. As anyone who has been on the Net for any length of time knows, this kind of Net-based voting can be subject to the worst kind of electronic ballot-stuffing spam, so we took great pains to write "Jimmy Carter" algorithms for the voting machine program to ensure a clean election.

Although it might not have been immediately evident ("Jimmy" is a pretty subtle kind of guy), in addition to counting votes, the voting machine was also carefully monitoring the election. Visitors could vote as often as they wanted, but no more than ten total votes per visitor were actually tallied; excess votes from a visitor were disallowed. "Jimmy" was able to detect and disallow certain kinds of fraudulent voting patterns automatically; meanwhile, everything else was forwarded to the "voting commission" for review, and if necessary, manual adjustments.

We had hoped that all our hard work in this area would be unnecessary, but that proved not to be the case. Some examples: One individual cast over 100 votes in the election. Another visitor cast 18 straight votes for a single title in the span of about ten minutes. One very disciplined voter appeared every morning and evening like clockwork for weeks, voting each time for the same slate of books from a single publisher. Someone else arrived regularly to vote repeatedly for two books from one author.

All this ballot-stuffing spam was disallowed and we're confident that we conducted a certifiably clean, fair election. Thank you, "Jimmy Carter".