World War Memoir

Hamilton McWhorter III's service to family and country make him a standout among America's Greatest Generation. A Georgia native whose family roots date from that region's settlement during the 1700s, McWhorter was a naval aviation cadet undergoing training when Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan on December 7, 1941. After earning his Wings of Gold in early 1942, Ensign McWhorter was trained as a fighter pilot in the robust but technologically outmoded F4F Wildcat. Initially assigned to VF-9, he saw first combat in November 1942 against Vichy French forces in North Africa.

Most histories of the US Army in World War II view the Mediterranean Theater of Operations primarily as a deadly training ground for very green forces, where lessons learned on the beaches of Oran, in the hills of the Kasserine Pass area, and at the collapse of the Tunis bridgehead all contributed to later success in Western Europe. Steven Barry, however, contends that victory in the MTO would not have materialized without the leadership of battalion-level commanders. They operated at a high level, despite the lack of combat experience for themselves and their troops.

Errett Lujan served during World War II with the U.S. Army 200th/515th Coast Artillery (Anti-aircraft) Regiment in the Philippines, the largest regiment on the islands when the Japanese invaded just hours after Pearl Harbor. The regiment was credited as both the first and the last to fire on the enemy before surrendering. Lujan survived the invasion, the Bataan Death March and more than three years in POW camps. After the war, he said little to his family about his harrowing experiences.

Born and raised in Mississippi, Peter K. Lutken, Jr. (1920–2014) joined the army in 1941 and was assigned to the Coast Artillery. Originally sent to India to guard airfields, he was reassigned to the British V Force, then the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services and precursor to the CIA) after he volunteered for reconnaissance missions behind Japanese lines. Skills he had learned as a boy in the backwoods and swamps around the Pearl River stood him in good stead, and by the end of the war, he attained the rank of major, commanding an entire battalion of ethnic Kachins and other local people of northern Burma (now called Myanmar).

In this audiobook, you will learn more about the life of Eichmann, someone who had been slowly getting used to the idea that supposedly, the Jews were inferior and were allegedly a problem for the German civilization. He would become devoted during World War II, to solve this “problem” and find many Jews to arrange for their transportation to death camps and gas chambers in Poland. Adolf Eichmann is a typical of example of what can go wrong with a culture of hate, propaganda, and gradual brainwashing techniques that dehumanize entire populations or peoples.

When the name General Patton comes to mind, we are automatically inundated with themes of strength and tough resolution. Patton was a man who seemed to embody the old American ethos of the rugged individual who shattered all expectations, decimated the status quo, and pulled himself up by his bootstraps. In order to understand Patton, you can’t focus on just one side of this larger-than-life personality; you have to take in the whole picture. This audiobook allows you to do just that.

He was known as the "Desert Fox", and outfox his enemies he often did, leaving whole armies confounded and demoralized in his wake, and yet, the one adversary that Erwin Rommel could not outfox was his own government. On that rather unlucky day of October 14, 1944, when the SS came knocking on Rommel’s door, even his legendary heroism couldn’t save him from the monstrous regime for which he had once fought so hard.

One of the most popular accounts by an Australian veteran of WWI - written entirely from the private soldier's point of view.

* AN OBSERVER AND DAILY MAIL "BOOKS OF 2022" PICK * Melvyn Bragg's first ever memoir - an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which lyrically evokes a vanished world. In this captivating memoir, Melvyn Bragg recalls growing up in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton, from...

At the age of 17, Adolfo Kaminsky had narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz and was living in Nazi-occupied Paris, using forged documents to hide in plain sight. Due to his expert knowledge of dyes and his ability to masterfully reproduce official documents with an artistic eye, he was recruited to join the Jewish underground. He soon became the primary forger for the Resistance in Paris, working tirelessly with his network to create papers that would save an estimated 14,000 men, women, and children from certain death.

The breaking of the Enigma machine is one of the most heroic stories of the Second World War and highlights the crucial work of the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, which prevented Britain's certain defeat in 1941. But there was another German cipher machine, used by Hitler himself to convey messages to his top generals in the field. A machine more complex and secure than Enigma. A machine that could never be broken.

The vivid and emotional story of one soldier's heroic struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.1944: Norm Bussel, an introspective and happy-go-lucky teen from Memphis, finds himself bailing out of a burning B-17 bomber just months after his 19th birthday. Touching-down in a field outside Berlin, Norm was immediately seized by local farmhands, who were in the process of lynching him when a passing German soldier put a stop to the execution.

West Point's class of 1915 is the academy's most important in history. The cadets of the United States Military Academy, West Point, are intimately twined with the country's history. The graduating class of 1915, the class the stars fell on, was particularly noteworthy. Of the 164 graduates that year, 59 (36 percent) attained the rank of general, the most of any class.

Buddha's Child will flood the shadowy corners of South Vietnam's Byzantine political world with the bright light of truth. Ky will describe the Americans and their activities from the perspective of the Vietnamese patriot.

Condemned by US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as "the absolute bottom of the barrel," Ky was not expected to survive a week in the office into which he was thrust. Instead, he lasted three years, until he wrote himself out of office by penning the country's first constitution.

Vera Brittain and the First World War tells the remarkable story of the author behind Testament of Youth while charting the book's ascent to become one of the most loved memoirs of the First World War period. Such interest is set to expand even more in this centenary year of the war's outbreak.

Delivery Man: The Enemy-Alien Nisei Translator Who Saved His Battalion is the suspenseful, tragic, and true story of a combat translator in a pioneering American special operations force, sent into the heart of a forgotten jungle war in which he fought soldiers of his own ancestry and put his life on the line to save hundreds of his brothers.

Born into the minor aristocracy (as Eugenia Peterson), Devi grew up in the midst of one of the most turbulent times in human history. Forced to flee the Russian Revolution as a teenager, she joined a famous Berlin cabaret troupe, dove into the vibrant prewar spiritualist movement, and, at a time when it was nearly unthinkable for a young European woman to travel alone, followed the charismatic theosophical leader Jiddu Krishnamurti to India.

It's time to revisit 1945 and the final days World War II in a way that no one else ever has. Grab your thinking cap and join author Steve Ubaney in volume two of his five volume "Who Murdered?" book series, where he probes every part of FDR's mysterious death. We have been told all the lies for decades, and now it's time to answer some very pointed questions.

In the World War II era, Geoffrey Pyke was described as one of the world's great minds - to rank alongside Einstein. Pyke was an inventor, adventurer, polymath, and unlikely hero of both world wars. He earned a fortune on the stock market, founded an influential pre-school, wrote a bestseller, and came up with the idea for the US and Canadian Special Forces. Henry Hemming is the first reporter to sift through this extraordinary new information and finally tell Pyke's astonishing story in full: his brilliance, his flaws, and his life of adventures, ideas, and secrets.

Xenophon, after being exiled from Athens, spent the last years of his life hunting, writing, and recalling in his books the great days of the Persian expedition. This record of one of the most famous marches in history contains an account of the day-to-day life of ordinary men and soldiers. Translated by Rex Warner.