True Military

Former Navy SEAL philanthropist Marco Gambini and his forever love, Shannon, are back together again after a harrowing rescue of Marco’s advance team in Africa, threatening to cancel their long-planned wedding at the Pink Palace owned by the Sultan of Bonin.

With the Battle of Britain won, Winston Churchill and his military chiefs faced an even more fearsome challenge in the Battle of the Atlantic. Thwarted in his plans to invade, Hitler decided he would starve Britain into submission instead. Operating in conjunction with U-Boats, long-range Condor aircraft manned by élite German airmen attacked Allied ships far beyond the range of any land-based RAF fighters, with devastating results.

Conscripted into the Polish army as Hitler’s forces draw closer, Jewish soldier Tolek Klings vows to return to his wife, Klara, and son, Juliusz. However, the army is rife with anti-Semitism and Tolek is relentlessly tormented. As the Germans invade Poland, he is faced with a terrible dilemma: flee home to protect his family - and risk being shot as a deserter - or remain a soldier, hoping reports of women and children being spared by the occupying forces are true.

The Mafia at War reconstructs the relationships between the Mafia and Allied intelligence organizations.

Discover how Jewish gangsters clashed with Nazis on the streets of New York; how Mafiosi nearly issued contracts to kill top Nazis, including Hitler; how Mafia-backed bandits conducted a guerrilla war for Sicilian independence; and how Eisenhower was happy to arm the Mafia during the Allied invasion of Sicily.

Hell Above Earth tells an unforgettable story of two World War II American bomber pilots who forged an unexpected but enduring bond in the flak-filled skies over Nazi Germany. But there's a twist: one of them was related to the head of the Luftwaffe, Reich Marshal Herman Goering, and the other had secret orders from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to kill him if anything went wrong during their missions.

In the early morning hours of April 1, 1970, more than four hundred North Vietnamese soldiers charged out into the open and tried to overrun FSB Illingworth. The battle went on, mostly in the dark, for hours. Exposed ammunition canisters were hit and blew up, causing a thunderous explosion inside the FSB that left dust so thick it jammed the hand-held weapons of the GIs. Much of the combat was hand-to-hand. In all, twenty-four Americans lost their lives and another fifty-four were wounded.

From the highly successful author of Lightning Boys and Lightning Boys 2, Richard Pike, comes a welcome addition to the Boys series, Hunter Boys. A fascinating insight into the experiences and affections of those who flew the iconic Hawker Hunter. Fifteen aircrew relate their individual recollections of the highs and lows, the dramas and demands of this incredible aircraft, which came into service in July 1951 and changed the future of fighter development.

Capturing history was Jonathan Alpeyrie's job, but he never expected to become a news story himself. For a decade, the French-American photojournalist weaved in and out of over a dozen conflict zones. But, during his third assignment to Syria, Alpeyrie was betrayed by his fixer and handed over to a band of Syrian rebels. For 81 days, he was bound, blindfolded, and beaten. Over the course of his captivity, Alpeyrie kept his spirits up and strived to see, without his camera lenses, the humanity in his captors.

This is the story of John Searancke's parents, told mostly from the side of his father, Eddie Searancke, from the time of his calling up in early 1940 to his release from a prisoner of war camp in Germany in 1945, thence his return to England to try to pick up the pieces of his old life. Nothing could ever be quite the same afterwards.

Tiny Dancer is the amazing true story of Zubaida Hasan, a nine-year-old girl from the remote deserts of Afghanistan who, in the summer of 2001, accidentally fell into a kerosene fire while heating water for a bath. Though she was horribly mutilated, her father refused to give up and exhaustively sought help to save his child.

Part Blackhawk Down, part The Riddle of the Sands, former MI6 officer Harry Ferguson has written an extraordinarily gripping non-fiction thriller. Operation Kronstadt not only reveals the early days of intelligence services but also uncovers a truly dramatic story from the Russian Revolution involving a daring rescue attempt and a "mission impossible" against the best defended naval target in Russia.

John Steele left his family and home at the tender age of 16 to join the Royal Navy. In a select branch of only 200, he subsequently qualified as the youngest clearance diver at that time. He then moved on to a life as a commercial oilfield diver, and for 22 years worked in the unforgiving depths of the North Sea and Persian Gulf. In 2004 a new industry was opening up. After an intense reeducation he secured a job with one of the largest private security companies working with the reconstruction of Iraq.

After the fall of France in the mid-1940s, Adolf Hitler faced a British Empire that refused to negotiate for peace. With total war looming, he ordered the Abwehr, Germany's defense and intelligence organization, to carry out Operation Lena - a program to place information-gathering spies within Britain. Quickly, a network of secret agents spread within the United Kingdom and across the British Empire. The stunning truth, though, was that every last one of these German spies had been captured and turned by the British.

Since 1595, The History Force has been editing our history from a station on the moon. How did it get there? Who's behind it? How have they changed Earth's history? Come with us to find out. It's the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories. And yet, it makes sense.

A slave determined to gain freedom, a widow battling poverty and despair, a man of God grappling with spiritual and worldly troubles, and a former Confederate soldier seeking a new life. They lived in the South during 1865 - a year that saw war, disunion, and slavery give way to peace, reconstruction, and emancipation. Between January and December 1865, these four people witnessed, from very different vantage points, the death of the Old South and the birth of the New South. Civil War historian Stephen V. Ash reconstructs their daily lives, their fears and hopes, and their frustrations and triumphs in vivid detail.

Mike and Kate Blaise fell in love during high school in small-town Macon, Missouri. Sharing a deep sense of patriotism, they both entered the US Army, she as a commissioned officer and he as an enlisted infantry soldier who later became a helicopter pilot with the Air Cavalry. Forced to accept the realities of a military marriage yet determined to stay with her husband, Kate passed up her dream assignment in the United States to be with Mike, who was deployed to Korea. But they never imagined a day like 9/11 or the military aftermath that sent them to Iraq.

In the autumn of 1943, André Boulloche became de Gaulle's military delegate in Paris, coordinating all the Resistance movements in the nine northern regions of France only to be betrayed by one of his associates, arrested, wounded by the Gestapo, and taken prisoner. His sisters carried on the fight without him until the end of the war. André survived three concentration camps and later became a prominent French politician who devoted the rest of his life to reconciliation of France and Germany.

On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed in the South Pacific by a Japanese submarine. An estimated 300 men were killed upon impact; close to 900 sailors were cast into the Pacific Ocean, where they remained undetected by the navy for nearly four days and nights. Battered by a savage sea, they struggled to stay alive, fighting off sharks, hypothermia, and hallucinations.

Ever since George Washington used them to help topple the British, spies and their networks have helped and hurt America at key moments in history. In this fascinating collection, Paul B. Janeczko probes such stories as that of Elizabeth Van Lew, an aristocrat whose hatred of slavery drove her to be one of the most successful spies in the Civil War; the "Choctaw code talkers," Native Americans who were instrumental in sending secret messages during World War I; and more.

In 1942 the young soldier Arthur Dodd was taken prisoner by the German Army and transported to Oswiecim in Polish Upper Silesia. The Germans gave it another name, now synonymous with mankind’s darkest hours. They called it Auschwitz. Forced to do hard labour, starved and savagely beaten, Arthur thought his life would end in Auschwitz. Determined to go down fighting, he sabotaged Nazi industrial work, risked his life to alleviate the suffering of the Jewish prisoners and aided a partisan group planning a mass breakout.