War novel
He served in the cavalry in 1940 and even took part in an attack on horseback against tanks. "The finest of all those novels is the one in which his own brief experience of warfare is used to tremendous effect: La Route Des Flandres (The Flanders Road, 1960) [...] There, war becomes a metaphor all too suitable for the human condition in general, as the forms and protocols of the social order dissolve into murderous chaos.'" French philosopher and novelist,

The bombing of London in 1940-1 is the subject of three British novels published in 1943; Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear, James Hanley's No Direction, and Henry Green's Caught. Greene's later The End of the Affair (1951) is set mainly during the flying bomb raids on London of 1944.  According to Bernard Bergonzi "[d]uring the war the preferred form of new fiction for new fiction writers [in Britain] was the short story". Although John Cowper Powys's historical novel Owen Glendower is set in the fifteenth century historical parallels exist between the beginning of the fifteenth century and the late 1930s and early 1940s: "A sense of contemporataneousness is ever present in Owen Glendower. We are in a world of change like our own". The novel was conceived at a time when the "Spanish Civil War was a major topic of public debate" and completed on 24 December 1939, a few months after World War II had begun. In the "Argument" that prefaced the (American) first edition of 1941, Powys comments "the beginning of the fifteenth century [...] saw the beginning of one of the most momentous and startling epochs of transition that the world has known". This was written in May 1940, and "[t]here can be no doubt" that readers of the novel would have "registered the connection between the actions of the book and the events of their own world".
Fair Stood the Wind for France is a 1944 novel by H. E. Bates, which is concerned with a pilot of a Wellington bomber, who badly injures his arm when he brings his plane down in German-occupied France at the height of the Second World War. Eventually he and his crew make the hazardous journey back to Britain by rowing boat, bicycle and train. Bates was commissioned into the Royal Air Force (RAF) solely to write short stories, because the Air Ministry realised that the populace was less concerned with facts and figures about the war, than it was with reading about those who were fighting it.
British novelist Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags (1942) is set during the "Phoney War", following the wartime activities of characters introduced in his earlier satirical novels, and Finnish novelist Väinö Linna's The Unknown Soldier (1954) set during the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union telling the viewpoint of ordinary Finnish soldiers. Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961) (published as The End of the Battle in the US), loosely parallel Waugh's experiences in the Second World War. Waugh received the 1952 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Men at Arms.
Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day (1948) is another war novel. However, even though events occur mainly during World War II, the violence of war is usually absent from the narration: "two years after the Blitz, Londoners, no longer traumatised by nightly raids, were growing acclimatised to ruin." Rather than a period of material destruction, war functions instead as a circumstance that alters normality in people's lives. Stella confesses to Robert: "'we are friends of circumstance⎯war, this isolation, this atmosphere in which everything goes on and nothing's said." There are, however, some isolated passages that deal with the bombings of London:
More experimental and unconventional American works in the post-war period included Joseph Heller's satirical Catch-22 and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, an early example of postmodernism. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, and James Jones' The Thin Red Line, all explore the personal nature of war within the context of intense combat.
The English Patient is a 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel by Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje. The book follows four dissimilar people brought together at an Italian villa during the Italian Campaign of World War II. The four main characters are: an unrecognisably burned man—the titular patient, presumed to be English; his Canadian Army nurse, a Sikh British Army sapper, and a Canadian thief. The story occurs during the North African Campaign and is about the incremental revelations of the patient's actions prior to his injuries and the emotional effects of these revelations on the other characters.
The decades following World War II period also saw the rise of other types of war novel. One is the Holocaust novel, of which Canadian A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll, Italian Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and If Not Now, When?, and American William Styron's Sophie's Choice are key examples. Another is the novel of internment or persecution (other than in the Holocaust), in which characters find themselves imprisoned or deprived of their civil rights as a direct result of war. An example is Joy Kogawa's Obasan, which is about Canada's deportation and internment of its citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. 
Similarly, the life story of a Ukrainian boy who is at first interned in a labour camp and then drafted to fight for Russia is depicted in UKRAINE - In the Time of War, by Sonia Campbell-Gillies.
Black Rain(1965) by Masuji Ibuse is a novel based on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The Sea and Poison (1957) by Shusaku Endo is about Japanese medical experimentation on an American POW.

Korean war: Almost immediately following World War II was the Korean War (1950–1953). The American novelist's Richard Hooker's MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors is a black comedy set in Korea during the war; it was made into a movie and a successful television series. In his "A World Turned Colder: A Very Brief Assessment of Korean War Literature", Pinaki Roy attempted in 2013 to provide a critical overview of the different publications, principally novels, published on the war.

Vietnam and later wars: After World War II, the war that has attracted the greatest number of novelists is the Vietnam War. Graham Greene's The Quiet American was the first novel to explore the origins of the Vietnam war in the French colonial atmosphere of the 1950s. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is a cycle of Vietnam vignettes that reads like a novel. The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh is a poignant account of the war from the Vietnamese perspective.
In the wake of postmodernism and the absence of wars equalling the magnitude of the two world wars, the majority of war novelists have concentrated on how memory and the ambiguities of time affect the meaning and experience of war. In her Regeneration Trilogy, British novelist Pat Barker reimagines World War I from a contemporary perspective. Ian McEwan's novels Black Dogs and Atonement take a similarly retrospective approach to World War II, including such events as the British retreat from Dunkirk in 1940 and the Nazi invasion of France. The work of W. G. Sebald, most notably Austerlitz, is a postmodern inquiry into Germany's struggle to come to terms with its troubled past.
Some contemporary novels emphasize action and intrigue above thematic depth. Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October is a technically detailed account of submarine espionage during the Cold War, and many of John le Carré's spy novels are basically war novels for an age in which bureaucracy often replaces open combat. Another adaptation is the apocalyptic Christian novel, which focuses on the final showdown between universal forces of good and evil. Tim LaHaye is the author most readily associated with this genre. Many fantasy novels, too, use the traditional war novel as a departure point for depictions of fictional wars in imaginary realms.
Iran–Iraq War was also an interesting case for novelists. Events and memoirs of Iran–Iraq War has led to unique war novels. Noureddin, Son of Iran and One Woman's War: Da (Mother) are among the many novels which reminds the horrible situation of war. Many of these novels are based on the interviews performed with participants and their memoirs.
The post 9/11 literary world has produced few war novels that address current events in the War on Terrorism. One example is Chris Cleave's Incendiary (2005), which made headlines after its publication, for appearing to anticipate the 7 July 2005 London bombings.

See also: Epic poetry
War poet
Nautical fiction
Historical fiction
The Holocaust in popular culture
Category:War novels

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References: 

Further reading: Beidler, Philip D., American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam (U Georgia Press, 1982) ISBN 0820306126
Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (Coward-McCann, 1965).