World War Memoir

In this first volume of a new chronicle, Frank McDonough charts the rise and fall of the Third Reich under Hitler's hand, ending on Germany's comprehensive military defeat of Poland in 1939.

Kenneth Macksey's highly regarded biography of Generaloberst Heinz Guderian gives clear insight into the mind and motives of the father of modern tank warfare. Panzer General shows Guderian as a man of ideas equipped with the ability to turn inspiration into reality. A master of strategy and tactics, he was the officer most responsible for creating blitzkrieg in World War II.

Between dusk and dawn on the night of March 24-25, 1944, a small army of Allied soldiers crawled through tunnels in Germany in a covert operation the likes of which the Third Reich had never seen. The prison break from Stalag Luft III in Eastern Germany was the largest of its kind in the Second World War. Seventy-nine Allied soldiers and airmen made it outside the wire - but only three made it outside Nazi Germany. Fifty were executed by the Gestapo.

"Cold Crematorium is an indispensable work of literature, and a historical document of unsurpassed importance. It should be required reading." —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated The first English language edition of a lost memoir by a Holocaust survivor, offering a...

Perhaps the most important book on military strategy ever written, Carl von Clausewitz's On War has influenced generations of generals and politicians, has been blamed for the unprecedented death tolls, and is required reading at military academies to this day. But On War, which was never finished and was published posthumously, is obscure and fundamentally contradictory. Hew Strachan, one of the world's foremost military historians, answers these problems in this fascinating book.

Christa Schroeder est une "ancienne" : membre du secrétariat de Hitler dès 1933, elle y est restée jusqu'au 20 avril 1945 – dix jours avant l'effondrement final du Troisième Reich. Pendant douze ans, elle a accompagné le Führer dans tous ses déplacements entre la capitale, le Berghof et ses divers quartiers généraux de campagne dans l'ouest de l'Allemagne, en Prusse-Orientale et en Ukraine. C'est principalement sur la personnalité de Hitler que Christa Schroeder a reporté toute son attention pendant plus d'une décennie, et c'est ce qui rend son témoignage inestimable.

Robert Oppenheimer had a lot resting on his shoulders. During the Second World War, he was tasked with directing the development of the world’s first nuclear arsenal. Known as the Manhattan Project, this super-secretive wartime project had the stoic visage of Oppenheimer overseeing the greatest experiment ever conducted by humankind. Much had happened in Oppenheimer’s life to lead him to this point, and much would subsequently take place after, but this moment was indeed the pinnacle of his career and his life.

A USA TODAY BESTSELLER! From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Queen and Diana, a groundbreaking story of the riveting hot-and-cold relationship between the House of Windsor and Winston Churchill. From an early age, Winston Churchill was convinced that he was a man of destiny...

Flyboys is the true story of young American airmen who were shot down over Chichi Jima. Eight of these young men were captured by Japanese troops and taken prisoner. Another was rescued by an American submarine and went on to become president. The reality of what happened to the eight prisoners has remained a secret for almost 60 years.

From the Japanese soldiers' carefully calculated - and ultimately foiled - attempt to build a series of impregnable island forts on the ground to the tireless efforts of the Americans who struggled against a tenacious adversary and the temperature and terrain of the island itself, Robert Leckie captures the loneliness, the agony, and the heat of 24-hour-a-day fighting on Guadalcanal.

She was peaches-and-cream innocence; he was a handsome war hero. Both had royal blood coursing through their veins. The marriage of Britain's Princess Elizabeth to Lt Philip Mountbatten in November 1947 is remembered as the beginning of an extraordinary lifelong union but success was not guaranteed. Elizabeth and Philip: A Story of Young Love, Marriage and Monarchy plunges us back into 1940s Britain where a teenage Princess fell in love with a foreign Prince.

In the spring of 1918, German forces broke through Allied lines in a last-ditch attempt to overcome their enemies. To hold back this tide, inexperienced young men from France, Britain, the United States, Australia, and Canada were sent into war. What was it like to be an eighteen-year-old and sent to the frontlines in the First World War? Frederick James Hodges was one of these young men and his book, Men of 18 in 1918, provides insight into the ordeals of an ordinary soldier who left Britain as a teenager but returned as a man having witnessed the full horrors of war.

Of all the heroic stories to come out of World War II, few are as extraordinary as that of Major Rocky Gause, who was captured by the Japanese, escaped from the infamous Bataan Death March, and, with a fellow soldier, endured a harrowing voyage across the enemy-held Pacific in a leaky, hand-crafted boat. In the battered notebook he kept throughout his journey, Gause traced his steps from the besieged city of Manila on New Year's Eve, 1941, to his safe landing on the Australian coast ten months later.

During the German occupation of Rome from 1942-1944, Irishman Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty ran an escape organization for Allied POWs and civilians, including Jews. Safe within the Vatican state, he regularly ventured out in disguise to continue his mission, which earned him the nickname 'The Pimpernel of the Vatican'. When the Allies entered Rome, he and his collaborators - priests, nuns, and laypeople of numerous nationalities and religious beliefs - had saved the lives of over 6,500 people.

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.

More than seven decades after the end of the Second World War, the era of the Nazi hunters is drawing to a close as they and the hunted die off. Their saga can now be told almost in its entirety. After the Nuremberg trials and the start of the Cold War, most of the victors in World War II lost interest in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Many of the lower-ranking perpetrators quickly blended in with the millions who were seeking to rebuild their lives in a new Europe, while those who felt most at risk fled the continent.

At the height of World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was home to 75,000 residents, consuming more electricity than New York City. But to most of the world, the town did not exist. Thousands of civilians - many of them young women from small towns across the South - were recruited to this secret city, enticed by solid wages and the promise of war-ending work. Kept very much in the dark, few would ever guess the true nature of the tasks they performed each day in the hulking factories in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains.

The Marine Corps is known for its heroes, and Lieutenant General Lewis B. Puller has long been considered the greatest of them all. His assignments and activities covered an extraordinary spectrum of warfare. With his bulldog face, barrel chest (which earned him the nickname Chesty), gruff voice, and common touch, Puller became - and has remained - the epitome of the marine combat officer. Author Jon Hoffman has been given special access to Puller's personal papers as well as his personnel record. The result will unquestionably stand as the last word about Chesty Puller.

Stuart Hills embarked his Sherman DD tank on to an LCT at 6:45 a.m., Sunday, June 4th, 1944. He was 20 years old, un-blooded, fresh from a public-school background, and officer cadet training. He was going to war. Two days later, his tank sunk; he and his crew landed from a rubber dinghy with just the clothes they stood in. After that, the struggles through the Normandy bocage in a replacement tank, engaging the enemy in a constant round of close encounters, led to a swift mastering of the art of tank warfare and remarkable survival in the midst of carnage and destruction.

The story of eight courageous women who had the courage and strength for which the Anzacs are renowned and the compassion and tenderness that only a woman can bring. One brave nursing sister, Hilda Samsing, became a whistle blower. Nursing aboard the hospital ship Gascon, outraged by the bungled evacuation of wounded Anzacs which was censored out of the press, she let her diary be shown in high places, which raised questions in the House of Commons.