World War Ii Memoir

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.

Called "A significant Holocaust memoir," Edith's Story is often compared to Anne Frank's diary. In occupied Holland, Edith, from a lively, loving Jewish family in The Hague, went into hiding the same month as Anne Frank. Both Edith and Anne kept diaries, which are remarkably similar in their pre-war teen preoccupations with boys, school and parties. But Edith's world gradually darkens. When Nazi laws forbid her from attending school, riding her bike or even going to the beach, she wears the yellow star as a badge of honor, prompting people in the street to tell her to keep her chin up.

One of his biographers called him "a complex man: a born leader, a brilliant soldier, a devoted husband, a proud father; intelligent, instinctive, brave, compassionate, vain, egotistical, and arrogant." As that description suggests, every account of Erwin Rommel's life must address what appears to be its inherent contradictions.

Traveling 40,000 miles and inspiring love and despair in equal measure, Lt. Minter Dial's lost Annapolis ring altered the lives of many. The spellbinding account of one man's obsession with a family mystery - and the product of decades of research and inquiries - The Last Ring Home explores author Minter Dial's pursuit of the true story of his namesake, his late grandfather Lt. Minter Dial, USN, a celebrated war hero whose suffering and trauma nearly buried his memory forever.

A born daredevil, John Homan joined the Army Air Forces after the Pearl Harbor attack. By 1944, he was co-piloting a B-24 Liberator over Nazi Germany, raining death and destruction on the enemy. This first-person account of his harrowing missions—chronicling deadly flights through skies of red-hot flak bursts and airmen bailing out with parachutes aflame—will leave listeners staggered by the determination and grit of World War II aviators.

In Commanding the Pacific: Marine Corps Generals in World War II, Stephen R. Taaffe analyzes the 15 high-level Marine generals who led the Corps' six combat divisions and two corps in the conflict. He concludes that these leaders played an indispensable role in organizing, training, and leading their men to victory.

Fighting in the Great Crusade combines the terse clarity of George E. Schwend's World War II combat journals with Gregory Daddis's expert commentary on the greater context of that conflict. The result is the rare military work that counterpoints historical and strategic analysis against a foxhole-level view of the war in Europe as US soldiers experienced it. Schwend's story, which typifies that of young American citizen soldiers on whom the Allied cause depended, follows a draftee through the rigors of basic training and Officer Candidate School and into the grim theater of the European campaigns in 1944 and 1945. The accretion of detail forms a grittily realistic day-to-day account of military life, while Daddis's expansive historical backdrop invests with poignance even such routines as Schwend's faithful attendance at movie screenings as the soldier - and listeners - anticipate the fateful Normandy invasion.

>In the months before Pearl Harbor, Kerns had passed the Army's flight training admission exam with flying colors. But because he lacked a high school diploma, the Army refused to give him flying lessons. Undaunted, Private Kerns took lessons with a civilian flying school and was actually scheduled for his first solo flight on the afternoon of December 7, 1941. Notwithstanding his lack of diploma, Kerns graduated from Officer Candidate School and then completed flight training in the L-4 Piper Cub in late 1942.

In 1940, native West Texan Roy H. Elrod joined the Marine Corps. By the time his unit, the 8th Marine Regiment, went into the fight at Guadalcanal, he was commanding a platoon of 37 mm gunners. They endured Japanese attacks, malarial tropical weather, and starvation rations. His combat leadership earned him a Silver Star and a battlefield promotion. Based on more than 50 hours of interviews, this book is a view of the war from the perspective of a young Marine infantry officer, a job that had an extremely low survival potential.

The World War II era produced many leaders of titanic determination, men whose strengths and weaknesses left an extraordinary imprint on historical affairs. Josip Broz Tito, better known to history as Marshal Tito, was undoubtedly one of these figures. Originally a machinist, Tito leveraged his success in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) and a number of extraordinary strokes of luck into dictatorial rule over Yugoslavia for a span of 35 years. World War II proved the watershed that enabled him to secure control of the country.

Following the Front is a compilation of WWII dispatches written by Sidney A. Olson for TIME and LIFE magazines, 1944-1945. Olson, who joined Time Inc. in 1939 and served as a senior editor there, asked to be assigned overseas as a war correspondent. In mid-December, 1944, he received his accreditation from the War Department and sailed for London. Attached to the European Theater of Operations (ETO), Olson followed the Allied Forces as they pushed the Nazis back into Germany. He typed up his reports and cabled them to his editors in New York.

Erwin Rommel, soprannominato "La volpe del deserto", è senza dubbio uno dei più celebri generali della Germania di Hitler durante la Seconda guerra mondiale. Il saggio storico ripercorre la carriera del comandante tedesco, dagli inizi come soldato sul fronte occidentale nella Prima guerra mondiale, al suo ruolo determinante nella campagna italiana a Caporetto, fino alla campagna d'Africa. Con una carriera così eccellente, quali sono state le cause che lo hanno spinto a provocare la sua stessa morte?

There are few names in the annals of military history that evoke such emotion, and in some cases controversy, as the small Belgian town of Bastogne. The 101st Airborne are the best known defenders of Bastogne, but they only constituted one third of the eventual force that saved the city from total annihilation. This book digs deeper into the defense of Bastogne, revealing more details about those indomitable "Screaming Eagles" and the other units that stood with them during that punishingly bitter cold winter of 1944/45.

In late 1944 the Allies invaded the Japanese-held Philippines, and soon the end of the Pacific War was within reach. But for the last 150 American prisoners of war still held on the island of Palawan, there would be no salvation. As soldiers, sailors, and marines were herded into shallow air raid shelters, Japanese soldiers doused them with gasoline and set them on fire. By the next morning, only 11 men were left alive - but their desperate journey to freedom had just begun.

In this memoir of his experiences as a teenage infantryman in the US Third Army during World War II, Kotlowitz brings to life the harrowing story of the massacre of his platoon in northeastern France, in which he—by playing dead—was the only one to survive.

Landing on the Anzio beachhead in February 1944, Phil is put in charge of an Ammunition Pioneer Platoon in the 3rd Infantry Division. Their job: deliver ammunition to the frontline foxholes—a dangerous assignment involving regular forays into No Man’s Land. As Phil fights his way up the Italian boot, into Southern France and across the Rhine River into Germany, he is caught up in some of the most intense combat ever. But it’s what happens in the final stages of the war and his homecoming that makes Phil’s story incredibly special and heartwarming.

John R. Deane, Jr. (1919-2013) was born with all the advantages a man needs to succeed in a career in the US Army, and he capitalized on his many opportunities in spectacular fashion. The son of one of George C. Marshall's closest assistants, Deane graduated from West Point with the first class of World War II and served in combat under the dynamic General Terry de la Mesa Allen, Sr.

This intrepid autobiography was written by Douglas Baker after having agreed, at the invitation of the Imperial War Museum, to give a series of personal interviews to tell his story, as at that time he was one of the remaining survivors of World War II. Not another run-of-the-mill rendering of war stories, this is the story of a 16-year-old youth who began his journey to manhood when he volunteered to fight on the war front in the desert of northern Africa, as well as in Italy, against the inhumanity of Hitler's fascism.

Into Enemy Waters is the story of World War II's most elite and daring unit of warriors, the direct precursors to the Navy SEALs, told through the eyes of its last living member, ninety-five-year-old George Morgan. Morgan was just a wiry, seventeen-year-old lifeguard from New Jersey when he joined the Navy's new combat demolition unit, tasked to blow up enemy coastal defenses ahead of landings by allied forces. His first assignment: Omaha Beach on D-Day. When he returned stateside, Morgan learned that his service was only beginning.

At ten years old, young Douglas M. Gebbie witnessed the igniting spark of World War II firsthand. As Douglas and his family listen intently to the BBC radio broadcast, the world-altering news rings out: Hitler has invaded Poland.