Military World War Ii

Nancy Wake, nicknamed 'the white mouse' for her ability to evade capture, tells her own story. As the Gestapo's most wanted person, and one of the most highly decorated servicewomen of the war, it's a story worth telling. After living and working in Paris in the 1930's, Nancy married a wealthy Frenchman and settled in Marseilles. Her idyllic new life was ended by World War II and the invasion of France. Her life shattered, Nancy joined the French Resistance and, later, began work with an escape-route network for Allied soldiers.

When a Serbian-backed assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, the world seemed unmoved. Even Ferdinand’s own uncle, Franz Josef I, was notably ambivalent about the death of the Hapsburg heir, saying simply, "It is God’s will." Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that the episode would lead to conflictmuch less a world war of such massive and horrific proportions that it would fundamentally reshape the course of human events.

It's 1942 and the Nazis are racing to be the first to build a weapon unlike any known before. They have the physicists, they have the uranium, and now all their plans depend on amassing a single ingredient: heavy water, which is produced in Norway's Vemork, the lone plant in all the world that makes this rare substance. Under threat of death, Vemork's engineers push production into overdrive. For the Allies, the plant must be destroyed.

Almost all accounts of D-Day are told from the Allied perspective, with the emphasis on how German resistance was overcome on June 6, 1944. But what was it like to be a German soldier in the bunkers and gun emplacements of the Normandy coast, facing the onslaught of the mightiest seaborne invasion in history? What motivated the German defenders, what were their thought processes - and how did they fight from one strong point to another, among the dunes and fields, on that first cataclysmic day?

The night of 16 May, 1943: Nineteen specially adapted Lancaster bombers take off from RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, each with a huge 9000-lb cylindrical bomb strapped underneath it. Their mission: to destroy three dams deep within the German heartland, which provide the lifeblood to the industries supplying the Third Reich's war machine.

The war has begun. While my brethren find mates with these new hyu’mankin, I want nothing to do with such relations. There is only one need within me and I have been waiting for a long time to sate it—a need for WAR.And I get a taste. It is a sweet fire that fills my soul as I destroy the beings who have ripped my world apart. I will know nothing sweeter…That is…until she wakes. When Mee’na escapes from Base Zero, I am the only one who can retrieve her. A traitor. She colludes with the very beings I have vowed to destroy. And my vengeance knows no bounds.

World War II did more than just change the fate of world history—in just six years, every corner of the globe became involved in some of the most violent crimes against humanity to ever occur. Whether you have a great fascination for history, or you’re just looking to uncover new facts, The Greatest Battles of World War II paints a picture of the battles of World War 2 and the impact of each on the course of the war and the future of global affairs.

Germany's winter campaign of 1941-1942 has commonly been seen as its "first defeat". In Retreat from Moscow, David Stahel argues that, in fact, it was its first strategic success in the east. Though the Red Army managed to push the Wehrmacht back from Moscow, the Germans lost far fewer men (one to six), frustrated their enemy's strategic plan, and emerged in the spring unbroken and poised to recapture the initiative.

Keith Lowe, an award-winning author of books on World War II, saw monuments around the world taken down in political protest and began to wonder what monuments built to commemorate WWII say about us today. Focusing on these monuments, Prisoners of History looks at World War II and the way it still tangibly exists within our midst. He looks at all aspects of the war, from the victors to the fallen, from the heroes to the villains, from the apocalypse to the rebuilding after devastation.

Whether it was military fortifications or grand cities designed to follow victory, Adolf Hitler turned to his loyal favorites for construction projects matching his imperial ambitions. Of the course of five years, he landed Organisation Todt, “the most impressive building programme since Roman times,” according to British intelligence. Headed by Albert Speer, the OT became a key partner to the SS and the Wehrmacht and led to the deaths of millions.

Prepare to be spellbound by the captivating chronicle of World War II. Step into a realm of courage, sacrifice, and strategic brilliance that wove the tapestry of history. In this meticulously crafted tome, you shall unearth hidden stories of gallant heroes and heroines, traverse the heart-pounding crescendos of historic battles, and delve into the minds of master tacticians. Woven with enchanting narratives, you shall unfurl a panoramic understanding of this epoch-defining era.

Septembre 1939. Alors que Varsovie est écrasée sous les bombes allemandes, les accords du "Nocturne en ut dièse mineur" de Chopin s'élèvent à la radio nationale. L'interprète s'appelle Wladyslaw Szpilman. Il est juif. Pour lui, c'est une longue nuit qui commence... Une longue nuit dont l'issue aurait pu être la mort, sans un officier allemand, Wilm Hosenfeld - le plus improbable des sauveteurs. Hanté par l'atrocité des crimes nazis, il va protéger et sauver le pianiste.

In the bleak moments after defeat on mainland Europe in winter 1939, Winston Churchill knew that Britain had to strike back hard. So Britain's wartime leader called for the lightning development of a completely new kind of warfare, recruiting a band of eccentric free-thinking warriors to become the first 'deniable' secret operatives to strike behind enemy lines, offering these volunteers nothing but the potential for glory and all-but-certain death.

Behind enemy lines on the island of Saipan - where firing a gun could mean instant discovery and death - the 40 Thieves killed in silence during the grueling battle for Saipan, the D-Day of the Pacific.

When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters.

For 113 terrifying days in 1940, Nazi Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, threw everything it had at Great Britain in hopes of early victory in World War II. The task of defending southern England from airborne attack fell to pilots in the Royal Air Force, supplemented in their darkest hour by more than 100 flyers from Canada. These Canadians, some from famous families, some straight off the farm, served in forty-seven different Battle of Britain squadrons.

In the spring of 1939, a top-secret organization was founded in London: Its purpose was to plot the destruction of Hitler's war machine through spectacular acts of sabotage. The guerrilla campaign that followed was every bit as extraordinary as the six men who directed it. One of them, Cecil Clarke, was a maverick engineer who had spent the 1930s inventing futuristic caravans. Now his talents were put to more devious use: He built the dirty bomb used to assassinate Hitler's favorite, Reinhard Heydrich.

As a Russian recruit in World War II, Ivan Makarov witnessed General Chuikov pull out his pistol and shoot their regimental commander as a traitor. That was on his first day at the front. Thrown into an open field to face German tanks and artillery fire, with only rifles and machine guns to defend themselves with, almost 2,000 men of his regiment were wiped out in only six days at the Eastern Front. At this rate, Ivan struggled to comprehend how he would survive the hundreds of battles that lay before him, with death seeming to be the only certainty.

This second volume in William Manchester's three-volume biography of Winston Churchill challenges the assumption that Churchill's finest hour was as a wartime leader. During the years 1932-1940, he was tested as few men are. Pursued by creditors (at one point he had to put up his home for sale), he remained solvent only by writing an extraordinary number of books and magazine articles.

On the morning of August 15, 1945, Captain Jerry Yellin flew the last combat mission of World War II out of Iwo Jima. Today, Captain Yellin is a sharp, engaging, 93-year-old veteran whose story is brought to life by best-selling author Don Brown.