True Military

From 1951 to 1967 Egypt pursued a secret program to build military rockets that could have conceivably posed a threat to neighboring Israel. Because such an ambitious project required Western expertise, the Egyptian leader President Nasser hired West German scientists, many of them veterans of the Nazi rocket program at Peenemünde and elsewhere. These covert plans soon came to the attention of Israel’s legendary secret service, Mossad, and caused deep alarm in Tel Aviv.

During World War II, the United States maintained two secret interrogation camps in violation of the Geneva Convention - one just south of Washington, D.C., and the other near San Francisco. German POWs who passed through these camps briefed their fellow prisoners, warning them of turncoats who were helping the enemy - the United States - pry secrets from them. One of these turncoats, Werner Drechsler, was betrayed and murdered by those he spied on.

The gripping true story of Klaus Fuchs: the spy who sold the nuclear secrets to the Russians. When the three leaders of the victorious allies, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, met at Potsdam in July 1945, President Truman announced to Stalin that the US had a new and devastating weapon. Observers report that Stalin paid no attention to this remark. In fact, Stalin was well aware of the existence of the atomic bomb, and the Soviet Union was rapidly developing its own.

Ever since he was a young boy growing up on the streets of Staten Island, New York, Michael Ollis wanted to be a soldier. Inspired by his father, who fought in Vietnam, Mike’s deep desire to serve was cemented on the day his beloved city was attacked. From 9/11 onward, Mike’s one and only mission was to save lives.

A Holocaust historian, archivist, and history blogger adds a new dimension to the story of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II, shining a long overdue spotlight on five young, Polish Jewish women—champions who helped lead the resistance, sabotage the Nazis, and aid Jews in hiding across occupied Poland and Eastern Europe.

Nine thousand men of the First British Airborne Division were parachuted into the peaceful countryside that surrounded Arnhem. Their objective was to capture and hold the bridge over the Rhine ahead of the advancing British Second Army. Nine days later, after some of the fiercest street-fighting of the war, 2,000 paratroopers managed to escape to safety.

On the morning of October 24, 1944, in the Sibuyan Sea amidst the Philippine Islands, VT-18, a close-knit squadron of six young American torpedo bomber pilots, departed the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid on a search and destroy mission. Their target: the super-battleship Musashi, the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The pilots were tasked with preventing the immense enemy warship and the huge naval armada of which she was a part from inflicting unspeakable damage.

Do you want to learn more about the great military leader Hannibal, but don’t have time to read huge, long biographies? Then let The History Journals take you on an hourly history tour of his life. When it comes to great military leaders few will inspire the imagination of each new generation more than Hannibal, the mighty Carthaginian who marched 37 war elephants across the Alps in a bid to take on the Roman Empire. Even today this would be a daring and perilous adventure, but the fact that Hannibal succeeded in his mission in 218BC makes it all the more incredible.

In 2018, fourteen-year-old Claire Sarnowski stood with ninety-two-year-old Alter Wiener in front of the Oregon state senate to champion a cause the two friends both believed in: making Holocaust education mandatory in their state’s public school curriculum. Theirs was an unexpected friendship—she was in elementary school when they met, and he was an aging Holocaust survivor whose memoir she had read—and together they were going to change the American education system.

Committed in utmost secrecy in April-May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly 50 years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi crime, their story unchallenged by Western governments fearful of upsetting a powerful wartime ally and Cold War adversary. Surviving Katyn explores the decades-long search for answers, focusing on the experience of those individuals with the most at stake.

In early 1967, a bored, adventurous photojournalist on an Air Force base in Texas is offered a Temporary Duty (TDY) assignment somewhere overseas. The mission is steeped in secrecy, but Pete is promised a large bonus and hazardous duty pay. So he agrees. He and a small group of photojournalists, each with a special skill, are isolated on a Special Forces base where they are kept under constant surveillance by a group of highly trained and menacing soldiers.

Who were the unsung heroes that shaped the outcome of World War II? What acts of bravery went unnoticed in the chaos of battle? How did ordinary Americans become extraordinary warriors? Discover the incredible, untold stories of bravery, sacrifice, and heroism in American Heroes of World War II: True Stories of Individual Bravery From the Battlefields of World War II. This gripping collection shines a light on lesser-known American heroes who played pivotal roles in the Allies' victory.

In his riveting debut, Where the Birds Never Sing, Jack Sacco recounts the realistic, harrowing, at times horrifying, and ultimately triumphant tale of an American GI in World War II. Told through the eyes of his father, Joe Sacco—a farm boy from Alabama who was flung into the chaos of Normandy and survived the terrors of the Bulge—this is no ordinary war story. As part of the 92nd Signal Battalion and Patton’s famed 3rd Army, Joe and his buddies found themselves at the forefront—often in front of the infantry or behind enemy lines—of the Allied push through France and Germany.

Seize and Hold vividly demonstrates how military objectives can be seized by clever tactics and ruthless action. From the First World War to Vietnam, this collection gives exciting, atmospheric descriptions of 11 20th-century battlefield triumphs. Portraying military skills at their most daring and inventive, Seize and Hold is full of more drama and excitement than Hollywood could ever invent.

At All Costs transports you to the battlefront for more than two centuries of astonishing military confrontations. From the Battle of Minden in 1795 to dramatic Second World War stories and the Battle for Goose Green in the Falklands, Bryan Perrett gives astoundingly vivid accounts of international forces in daring actions, achieving victory against the odds.

At the pinnacle of a soaring career in the U.S. Army, Lt. Col. Mark M. Weber was tapped to serve in a high-profile job within the Afghan Parliament as a military advisor. Weeks later, a routine physical revealed stage IV intestinal cancer in the 38-year-old father of three. Over the next two years he would fight a desperate battle he wasn’t trained for, with his wife and boys as his reluctant but willing fighting force....

John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college tuition; it had seemed a small sacrifice to give up one weekend a month and two weeks a year in exchange for a free education. But one semester short of graduating, and newly married, he was called to active duty, to serve in Kuwait, then on the front lines of the invasion of Iraq, and ultimately in Baghdad. While serving in Iraq, Crawford began writing short nonfiction stories, his account of what he and his fellow soldiers experienced.

A thrilling dive into the little-known, darker side of a revered president’s history, Lincoln’s Lie untangles the threads behind a mysterious 1864 newspaper article to reveal how Lincoln manipulated the media during the Civil War, shining new light onto today’s issues of fake news and presidential conflict with the press.

In the spring of 1942, the United States government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona and sent them to incarceration camps across the West. Nearly 14,000 of them landed on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, at the base of Heart Mountain. Behind barbed wire fences, they faced racism, cruelty, and frozen winters. Trying to recreate comforts from home, they established Buddhist temples and sumo wrestling pits. Kabuki performances drew hundreds of spectators — yet there was little hope.

Hungary, 1944. Almost half a million Jewish Hungarians are deported to Auschwitz. Among the few surviving Hungarian Jews from this era were young men who, like Ervin Wolf, were forced into the brutal Labor Service where they were cut off from the outside world and forced to endure inhumane brutalities and servitude. Once freed, a new oppression took hold as communist rule under Stalin turned friends to foes, enveloped the nation in fear and suspicion, and tested everyone’s character and strength.