Military World War Ii

The Old Breed... The Complete Story Revealed brings to life an abundance of new material from the original manuscript of Eugene Sledge's classic memoir With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. By interspersing his own personal anecdotes throughout, Henry Sledge takes his father's work and gives it newfound context, sharing memories of conversations between father and son. The result is a flowing narrative that portrays an intimate look at a WWII veteran and his struggles to adapt to civilian life following the war.

In World War II, 59,000 women voluntarily risked their lives for their country as US Army nurses. For more than half a century these women's experiences remained untold, almost without reference in books, historical societies, or military archives. After years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews, Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee have created a dramatic narrative that at last brings to light the critical role that women played throughout the war.

Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, Last Witnesses is Alexievich’s collection of the memories of those who were children during World War II. They had sometimes been soldiers as well as witnesses, and their generation grew up with the trauma of the war deeply embedded - a trauma that would change the course of the Russian nation. Collectively, this symphony of children’s stories, filled with the everyday details of life in combat, reveals an altogether unprecedented view of the war.

As the Japanese swept across Asia in the early years of World War II, the retreating Allies looked for ways to keep up the fight. In Malaya and Burma, agents had been left behind to stir resistance behind enemy lines, building up anti-Japanese operations from the safety of the jungle. In China, the American Office of Strategic Services helped both Nationalists and Communists in resisting the Japanese.

Many consider the Battle of Midway to have turned the tide of the Pacific War. It is without question one of the most famous battles in history. Now, for the first time since Gordon W. Prange's best-selling Miracle at Midway, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully offer a new interpretation of this great naval engagement. Shattered Sword makes extensive use of Japanese primary sources. It also corrects the many errors of Mitsuo Fuchida's Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan It thus forces a major, potentially controversial reevaluation of the great battle.

Using archival records, in this book, David Stahel presents a history of Germany's summer campaign from the perspective of the two largest and most powerful Panzer groups on the Eastern front. Stahel's research provides a fundamental reassessment of Germany's war against the Soviet Union, highlighting the prodigious internal problems of the vital Panzer forces and revealing that their demise in the earliest phase of the war undermined the whole German invasion.

Here, in heart-stopping human detail, are 21 personal accounts told by the men themselves. They are the stories of men who lived in hell and lived to tell of it. The battles of Gavutu-Tanambogo, Tulagi, Tenaru, Matanikau, and Guadalcanal are all covered through these accounts, which take the listener right to the epicenter of the Pacific conflict.

World War II rises in its vastness and complexity over the rest of human history. A number of victims difficult to conceive, never surpassed by any other conflict; the masses of men, women, and resources mobilized in a conflict that shook even the most remote ends of the planet; the ideological battle between totalitarianism and democracy, between fascism and communism, the passions and hatred that it aroused; the unimaginable horror and fanaticism of the Holocaust; geopolitical games; the repetition of World War I on an even more dire scale.

The GIs called her Joey. Hundreds owed their lives to the tiny Filipina who stashed explosives in spare tires, tracked Japanese troop movements, and smuggled maps of fortifications across enemy lines. As the Battle of Manila raged, Josefina Guerrero walked through gunfire to bandage wounds and close the eyes of the dead. Her valor earned her the Medal of Freedom, but what made her a good spy was also destroying her: leprosy, which so horrified the Japanese they refused to search her.

In June 1944, an Allied army of British, American, and Canadian troops sought to open up a Second Front in Normandy. But they were not only fighting to bring the Second World War to an end. After decades of Anglo-American struggle for dominance, they were also contending with one another—to determine who would ascend to global hegemony once Hitler's armies fell. Marc Milner traces this bitter rivalry as it emerged after the First World War and evolved during the fragile peace which led to the Second.

Summoned to relieve destroyers that are bogged down by escort duty in the escalating Pacific Theater, the Hayward is met with a rather cold reception. In the eyes of Pacific Fleet sailors, North Atlantic convoy duty pales in comparison to the bloody, carrier-sinking battles of Savo Island and Guadalcanal. However, Atlantic Fleet ships have had to specialize in one thing: anti-submarine warfare. The Hayward is sent off into remote South Pacific operating areas with orders to find and destroy Japanese submarines—but with little expectation of success.

In 1938, Sarah Baring was enjoying life as a young debutante. Only a few years later, at the height of World War Two, she was working alongside some of the greatest minds of Britain in their code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park. How did she end up in the top-secret world of cyphers and codes?

Based on exclusive and unrestricted access to more than 5,000 pages of personal writings and family photos, this definitive biography of German physician and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef Mengele (1911-1979) probes the personality and motivations of Auschwitz's "Angel of Death". From May 1943 through January 1945, Mengele selected who would be gassed immediately, who would be worked to death, and who would serve as involuntary guinea pigs for his spurious and ghastly human experiments (twins were Mengele's particular obsession).

Established in 1918–19, in the wake of Germany’s catastrophic defeat in the First World War and the revolution that followed swiftly on its heels, the Weimar Republic ushered in widespread social reform, a radical cultural flowering and the most democratic conditions the German people had ever known. The Weimar Years is a vivid narrative of a dramatic period in German history. Year by year, from 1918 to 1933, Frank McDonough covers the major events in both domestic and foreign policy and the personalities who shaped them, together with developments in music, art, theatre and literature.

This is the extraordinary story of Vasily B. Emelianenko, the veteran pilot of one of the Soviet Union's most contradictory planes of the Second World War - the I1-2. Having flown 80 combat sorties against the Germans, Emelianenko was awarded the highest decoration - the Hero of the Soviet Union. He went on to complete a total of 92 sorties; his plane was shot down three times; and on each occasion, he managed to pilot the damaged aircraft home. Emelianenko's vivid memoirs provide a rare insight into the reality of fighting over the Eastern Front and the tactics of the Red Army Air Force.

1941. Audrey Coltrane has always wanted to fly. It's why she implored her father to teach her at the little airfield back home in Texas. It’s why she signed up to train military pilots in Hawaii when the war in Europe began. And it’s why she insists she is not interested in any dream-derailing romantic involvements, even with the disarming Lieutenant James Hart, who fast becomes a friend as treasured as the women with whom she flies. Then one fateful day, she gets caught in the air over Pearl Harbor just as the bombs begin to fall, and suddenly, nowhere feels safe.

In The Raider, Cundill Prize-winning historian Stephen R. Platt gives us the first authoritative account of Carlson’s larger-than-life exploits: the real story, based on years of research including newly discovered diaries and correspondence in English and Chinese, with deep insight into the conflicted idealism about the Chinese Communists that would prove Carlson’s undoing in the McCarthy era. Tracing the rise and fall of an unlikely American war hero, The Raider is a story of exploration, of cultural (mis)understanding, and of one man’s awakening to the sheer breadth of the world.

In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape.

What happens when you lose your freedom and the people who eventually get it back for you are no longer alive to thank? Set during the horrors of World War II, Remember Us by Robert Edsel—#1 New York Times bestselling author of The Monuments Men—opens in Limburg, a small, rural province at the southern tip of the Netherlands. In the pre-dawn hours of May 10, 1940, Hitler’s forces rolled through the city, shattering more than 100 years of peace in the Netherlands. The country fell one week later. The Dutch lived under German occupation for four-and-a-half years, until September 1944.

Although the United States declared war against Germany in December 1941, a successful assault on Nazi-occupied Europe could not happen until Germany’s industrial and military might were crippled. The first target was the Luftwaffe—the most powerful and battle-hardened air force in the world. The United States Army Air Forces joined with Great Britain’s already-engaged Royal Air Force to launch a strategic air campaign that ultimately brought the Luftwaffe to its knees. One of the standout units of this campaign was the legendary 303rd Bomb Group—Hell’s Angels.