Five best books: America's unsung war heroes

Robert Coram, a military historian, is the author of Brute: The Life of Victor Krulak, U.S. Marine.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books about America's unsung war heroes.

One title on the list:

The Peasant Prince
by Alex Storozynski (2009)

Few foreign volunteers in American fights have been as consequential as Thaddeus Kosciuszko was during the Revolutionary War. The Polish officer designed the cannon firing positions at Saratoga and the fort at West Point. (It was Kosciuszko's design for the fort that Benedict Arnold tried to sell to the British.) As Alex Storozynski notes in his excellent biography, "The Peasant Prince," Kosciuszko was an impassioned idealist who yearned to see the end of slavery in America; later, when he returned to Poland, he undertook the protection of Jews and serfs. When Kosciuszko made his second trip to America in the 1790s, George Washington welcomed him "to the land whose liberties you had been so instrumental in establishing."

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see: Sandi Toksvig's top ten unsung heroines.

--Marshal Zeringue