World War Ii Memoir

So often, we remember war heroes as men completing great feats of strength on the battlefield, saving the lives of their fellow soldiers. The stories that are all too often forgotten are those of the women. These are true stories of female prisoners of war, courageous nurses taken prisoner while serving in the military to take care of those soldiers. They are the women who risked life and limb to do what they could to stop the spread of fascism. Within the minutes of this book lie the stories of five incredible women prisoners of war during World War Two.

Escaping certain death, not once but several times, lies at the core of this riveting, real-life story of an American soldier during World War II. In One Man's War: The WW II Saga of Tommy LaMore, a B-17 airman vividly details his experiences in war-ravaged Europe, from the horrific to the romantic and beyond.

Aside from FDR, no American did more to shape World War II than Admiral William D. Leahy - not Douglas MacArthur, not Dwight Eisenhower, and not even the legendary George Marshall. No man, including Harry Hopkins, was closer to Roosevelt, nor had earned his blind faith, like Leahy. Through the course of the war, constantly at the president's side and advising him on daily decisions, Leahy became the second most powerful man in the world.

Between April and July 1944, Truman Smith flew 35 bombing missions over France and Germany. He was only 20 years old. Although barely adults, Smith and his peers worried about cramming a lifetime's worth of experience into every free night, each knowing he probably would not survive the next bombing mission. Written with blunt honesty, wry humor, and insight, The Wrong Stuff is Smith's gripping memoir of that time.

In Churchill's D-Day, Allen Packwood and Richard Dannatt narrate and analyze Sir Winston Churchill's emotional turmoil and epic decision-making before, during, and after the world-defining action of D-Day. Culled from the official Churchill Papers at the Churchill Archives Centre, the book features historical documents, letters, and more, for a Churchillian experience of D-Day leadership, military strategy, and humanity.

Simon Wiesenthal was the legendary “Nazi hunter” and Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to the punishment of Nazi criminals. A hero in the eyes of many, he was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget. For this definitive biography, Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal’s hundreds of thousands of private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish, and East German secret services.

Paris in the 1940s was a place of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation, and secrets. During the occupation, the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and danger lurked on every corner. While Parisian men were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories, the women of Paris were left behind where they would come face to face with the German conquerors on a daily basis, as waitresses, shop assistants, or wives and mothers, increasingly desperate to find food to feed their families as hunger became part of everyday life.

In these compelling, award-winning, Holocaust memoirs, Nanette Blitz Konig relates her amazing story of survival during the Second World War when she, together with her family and millions of other Jews, was imprisoned by the Nazis with a minimum chance of survival. Nanette (b. 1929) was a class mate of Anne Frank in the Jewish Lyceum of Amsterdam. They met again in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before Anne died.

They are the most famous and controversial directors the CIA has ever had - Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey. Disciples is the story of these dynamic agents and their daring espionage and sabotage in wartime Europe under OSS Director Bill Donovan.

In this book, the first to draw from recently released archives, Robert Conquest gives us Stalin as a child and student; as a revolutionary and communist theoretician; as a political animal skilled in amassing power and absolutely ruthless in maintaining it. He presents the landmarks of Stalin's rule: the clash with Lenin; collectivization; the Great Terror; the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Nazi-Soviet war; the anti-Semitic campaign that preceded his death; and the legacy he left behind.

The dawn of 1945 finds a US Army at its peak in the Pacific. Allied victory over Japan is all but assured. The only question is how many more months—or years—of fight does the enemy have left. John C. McManus’s magisterial series, described by the Wall Street Journal as being “as vast and splendid as Rick Atkinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Liberation Trilogy,” returns with this brilliant final volume.

After her mother’s death, Eva Taylor discovered an astounding collection of documents, photos and letters from her time as a resistance fighter in Nazi-occupied Holland. Using the letters, she reconstructed her mother's experience in the underground resistance movement and then as a prisoner in the Amersfoort, Ravensbruck and Mauthausen concentration camps.

Omar Nelson Bradley was the youngest and last of nine men to earn five-star rank and the only army officer so honored after World War II. This new biography by Steven L. Ossad gives an account of Bradley’s formative years, his decorated career, and his postwar life. Bradley’s decisions shaped the five Northwest European Campaigns from the D-Day landings to VE Day. As the man who successfully led more Americans in battle than any other in our history, his long-term importance would seem assured.

General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the US Army during World War II, faced the daunting task not only of overseeing two theaters of a global conflict but also of selecting the best generals to carry out American grand strategy. Marshall and His Generals is the first and only book to focus entirely on that selection process and the performances, both stellar and disappointing, that followed from it. Stephen Taaffe explores how and why Marshall selected the Army's commanders.

On the front lines of the Second World War, a contingent of female journalists were bravely waging their own battle. Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms with men.

Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a hero. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began. In 1941, after training as a German spy in occupied France, Chapman was parachuted into Britain with a revolver, a wireless, and a cyanide pill, with orders from the Abwehr to blow up an airplane factory. Instead, he contacted MI5, the British Secret Service.

In 1940, as World War II is raging in Europe, Boudewijn van Oort Sr., a Dutch immigrant living with his wife, Wilhelmina, and young son, Boudewijn Jr. (the author), in South Africa, decides to move his family to the Dutch colony of the Dutch East Indies, today known as the Republic of Indonesia. Van Oort Sr. made the move wanting to support and strengthen his mother country Holland against Japan, the threatening and belligerent aggressor. Two years after having settled down comfortably on the island of Java, Japan invades the entire Dutch East Indies archipelago.

Elida Friedman was not supposed to have been born. In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth. Yet, despite the fear of death, Dr. Jonah Friedman and his wife Tzila choose to bring a daughter into the world, a little girl they name Elida—meaning non-birth in Hebrew.

Colditz - the dreaded POW camp was supposed to be impregnable. It was the German fortress from which there was no escape. It had been escape-proof in the 1914-18 war and was to be again in the Second World War, according to the Germans... This is the true story that has passed into legend: the story of the incredible courage and daredevil ingenuity of those who refused to admit defeat - those who burrowed, leapt and ran their way to freedom.

For five brief, glorious days in the autumn of 1956, the Hungarian revolution gave its people a glimpse at a different kind of future - until, at four o’clock in the morning on a Sunday in November, the citizens of Budapest awoke to the shattering sound of Russian tanks ravaging their streets. The revolution was over. But freedom beckoned in the form of a small footbridge at Andau, on the Austrian border. By an accident of history, it became, for a few harrowing weeks, one of the most important crossings in the world, as the soul of a nation fled across its unsteady planks.