World War Memoir

From one of the leading historians of twentieth-century Europe and the author of the definitive biography of Hitler, Personality and Power is a masterful reckoning with how character conspired with opportunity to create the modern age’s uniquely devastating despots—and how and why other countries found better paths. The modern era saw the emergence of individuals who had command over a terrifying array of instruments of control, persuasion and death. Whole societies were reshaped and wars were fought, often with a merciless contempt for the most basic norms.

The personal account of a guerrilla fighter in the French Foreign Legion reveals the Nazi Battalion's inhumanities to Indochinese villagers.

Like many Germans, Berlin schoolboy Erwin Bartmann fell under the spell of the Zeitgeist cultivated by the Nazis. Convinced he was growing up in the best country in the world, he dreamt of joining the Leibstandarte, Hitler's elite Waffen SS unit. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, and just 17-years-old, Erwin fulfilled his dream on Mayday 1941, when he gave up his apprenticeship at the Glaser bakery in Memeler Strasse and walked into the Lichterfelde barracks in Berlin as a raw, volunteer recruit.

A fourth-generation soldier tells the story of his father’s tank battalion, the “Spearhead,” that selflessly led the charge on the front lines from Normandy into Germany—against impossible odds, technologically superior weaponry, and a fanatical enemy on its home turf—and the heroes whose sacrifice won World War II.

The story of Tang and her gallant crew ranks with the most amazing of naval history. Between August 1943 when she was commissioned and her loss in fall 1944, Tang completed four missions and was on her fifth in the Formosa Strait, single-handedly demolishing a convey. During this time, Tang had one captain: Commander Richard Hetherington O'Kane. Together, Tang, her crew of 86 men, and her captain sank more tonnage and more enemy ships than any other submarine on active patrol.

He was one of America's most exciting and secretive generals - the man Franklin Roosevelt made his top spy in World War II. A mythic figure whose legacy is still intensely debated, "Wild Bill" Donovan was director of the Office of Strategic Services (the country's first national intelligence agency) and the father of today's CIA. Donovan introduced the nation to the dark arts of covert warfare on a scale it had never seen before.

Panzer Gunner is a unique memoir of a Canadian serving in a German armored division. Bruno Friesen explains what it was like to fight in a tank on the Eastern Front and provides details on the battlefield performance of the Panzer IV tank. Six months before World War II erupted in 1939, Bruno Friesen was sent to Germany by his father in hopes of a better life. Friesen was drafted into the Wehrmacht three years later and ended up in the 7th Panzer Division. Friesen experienced intense combat against the Soviets in Romania, Lithuania, and West Prussia.

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.

There is a great debate among historians about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's actions during the Holocaust. Was FDR the hero that defeated the Germans, or did he turn a blind eye to the plight of the Jews as long as he possibly could? In Roosevelt and the Holocaust, Robert Beir analyzes specific actions and legislation to get at the truth behind Roosevelt's role in the Holocaust. Beir has a unique perspective. He is a Jew who was raised during the extreme anti-Semitism of the Great Depression. Having witnessed the fruits of the New Deal firsthand, Beir became a Roosevelt scholar.

Reinhard Heydrich is widely recognized as one of the great iconic villains of the 20th century, an appalling figure even within the context of the Nazi leadership. Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service, and the Gestapo, ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and leading planner of the "Final Solution," Heydrich played a central role in Hitler's Germany.

After some two years at war, the Army in the Pacific held ground across nearly a third of the globe, from Alaska’s Aleutians to Burma and New Guinea. The challenges ahead were enormous: supplying a vast number of troops over thousands of miles of ocean; surviving in jungles ripe with dysentery, malaria, and other tropical diseases; fighting an enemy prone to ever-more desperate and dangerous assaults. Yet the Army had proven they could fight. Now, they had to prove they could win a war.

Four days after Germany’s surrender in May 1945, a young British officer hopped in a Jeep and headed east into Germany. But this was no ordinary soldier. Manfred Gans was searching for his family. As a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany, Manfred Gans had fled to England. As soon as he could, he signed up to fight, serving in the legendary British “Three Troop,” an elite unit made up of German-speaking refugees, and joining in the D-Day Normandy landings.

He was called the Hangman of the Gestapo, the "butcher of Prague", with a reputation as a ruthlessly efficient killer. He was the head of the SS, and the Gestapo, second-in-command to Heinrich Himmler. His orders set in motion the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 and, as the lead planner of Hitler's Final Solution, he chaired the Wannsee Conference, at which details of the murder of millions of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe were toasted with cognac.

A tale that redefines the ordinary soldier in the Second World War, The Deserters is a breathtaking work of historical reportage, weaving together the lives of forgotten servicemen even as it overturns the assumptions and prejudices of an era. The Deserters reveals that ordinary soldiers viewed "desertion" as a natural part of conflict, as unexpected and inexplicable as bravery. The Deserters moves beyond the false extremes of courage and cowardice to reveal the true experience of the Allied soldier.

In 1942, a rational fear was mounting that New York Harbor was vulnerable to sabotage. If the waterfront was infested with German and Italian agents then the US Navy needed a recourse just as insidious to secure it. Naval intelligence officer Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden had the solution: recruit as his own spies, members of La Cosa Nostra. Pier to pier, no one terrified the longshoremen, stevedores, shopkeepers, and boat captains along the harbor better than the Mafia gangs of New York, who controlled the docks in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

It's no secret that federal agencies are waging a broad global war against terror. But, for the first time, in this memoir, an active Muslim American federal agent reveals his experience infiltrating and bringing down a terror cell in North America. Due to his ongoing work for the FBI, Elnoury writes under a pseudonym. An Arabic-speaking Muslim American, a patriot, a hero: To many Americans, it will be a revelation that he and his team even exist, let alone the vital and dangerous work they do keeping all Americans safe.

Poland, 1944. The train slowed and halted with a squeal of the breaks. It felt like we waited in the carriage for an eternity, but eventually, the heavy doors opened, directly into the chaos inside. Sara Leibovitz, a 16-year-old Jewish girl, was a passenger on the train with her family. They spent their final moments together on the platform in Auschwitz before their horrific fates were sealed. Sara’s mother and baby brothers were sent straight to their deaths.

In this groundbreaking biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete, unvarnished look at the enigmatic leader whose 63-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world. Never before has the full life of this controversial figure been revealed with such clarity and vividness. Bix describes what it was like to be trained from birth for a lone position at the apex of the nation's political hierarchy and as a revered symbol of divine status.

Once a Hussar is a vivid account of the wartime experiences of Ray Ellis, a gunner who in later life recorded this well-written, candid, and perceptive memoir of the conflict he knew as a young man seventy years ago. His story is an honest and moving memoir that relays graphic eyewitness accounts of the horrors of warfare, but it also reveals the surprising triumphs of the human spirit in times of great hardship. Ellis's self-deprecating humor skillfully counters the harsh realities related in a personal recollection of a war that claimed so many young lives.

A riveting new account of Theodore Roosevelt's impassioned crusade for military preparedness as America fitfully stumbles into World War I, spectacularly punctuated by his unique tongue-lashings of the vacillating Woodrow Wilson, his rousing advocacy of a masculine, pro-Allied "Americanism", a death-defying compulsion for personal front-line combat, a gingerly rapprochement with GOP power brokers - and, yes, perhaps, even another presidential campaign.