Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Military & War

This collection offers two dozen essays and sketches about one of the passions of Salter’s life, travel, a subject beloved by writers across the centuries. Over twenty years of skiing, hiking, climbing from Colorado to Japan to the Tyrol, from Austria and Switzerland to Germany and France, Salter is an engaging companion sharing his great enthusiasm and adventures.

In 1942, the Brooklyn-born Erickson was a millionaire oil mogul who volunteered for a dangerous mission inside the Third Reich: Locating the top-secret synthetic oil plants that kept the German war machine running. To fool the Nazis, Erickson played the role of a collaborator. He hung a portrait of Hitler in his apartment and "disowned" his Jewish best friend, then flew to Berlin, where he charmed Himmler and signed lucrative oil deals with the architects of the Final Solution.

Four weeks after Navy SEALs had killed Osama bin Laden, the President of the United States stood in Arlington National Cemetery. In his Memorial Day address, he extolled the courage and sacrifice of the two young men buried side by side in the graves before him: Travis Manion, a fallen US Marine, and Brendan Looney, a fallen US Navy SEAL. Although they were killed three years apart, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, these two best friends and former roommates were now buried together - "brothers forever".

The only Major League ballplayer whose baseball card is on display at the headquarters of the CIA, Moe Berg has the singular distinction of having both a 15-year career as a catcher for such teams as the New York Robins and the Chicago White Sox and that of a spy for the OSS during World War II. Here, Dawidoff provides "a careful and sympathetic biography" ( Chicago Sun-Times) of this enigmatic man.

On 25 May 1982, at a critical juncture in the Falklands War, the destroyer HMS Coventry was attacked by Argentinean aircraft. In a devastating strike, she was hit by three bombs, two of which exploded inside her hull, killing 19 of her crew and leaving many others badly injured. Within minutes Coventry had capsized, and would finally sink the following day. It was the first occasion since the Second World War that a British captain and crew had to abandon a stricken ship.

Figura indissociável da conquista da América, Hernán Cortez guarda muitas ambiguidades. Representa, ao mesmo tempo, o extermínio de um império indígena vasto e populoso e a origem do povo mestiço que constitui o México. A campanha liderada por Cortez no mundo asteca entraria para a História da cultura ocidental como um dos maiores símbolos do contato entre culturas e o consequente choque de valores de sociedades distintas. E foi a partir desse encontro que um novo mundo, aos poucos, se ergueu e outra sociedade, sincrética, nem europeia e nem indígena, começou a ser formada.

Rorke Denver trains the men who become Navy SEALs - the most creative problem solvers on the modern battlefield, ideal warriors for the kinds of wars America is fighting now. With his years of action-packed mission experience and a top training role, Lieutenant Commander Denver understands exactly how tomorrow’s soldiers are recruited, sculpted, motivated, and deployed. Now, Denver takes you inside his personal story and the fascinating, demanding SEAL training program he now oversees.

In early summer 1982 - winter in the South Atlantic - Argentina's military junta invades the Falklands. Within days, a Royal Navy Task Force is assembled and dispatched. This is the story of D Squadron, 22 SAS, commanded by Cedric Delves. The relentless tempo of events defies belief. Raging seas, inhospitable glaciers, hurricane-force winds, helicopter crashes, raids behind enemy lines - the Squadron prevailed against them all, but the cost was high.

As a young civil servant, Caroline Slocock became the first ever female private secretary to any British Prime Minister and was at Margaret Thatcher's side for the final 18 months of her premiership. A left-wing feminist, Slocock was no natural ally, and yet she became fascinated by the woman behind the Iron Lady façade and by how she dealt with a world dominated by men. As events inexorably led to Margaret Thatcher's downfall, Slocock observed the vulnerabilities and contradictions of the woman considered by many to be the ultimate anti-feminist.

Hired by the Tibetan government, Royal Air Force veteran Robert W. Ford put together a radio communications network for a nation that had up to this time relied on messages carried by foot over the highest mountains on the globe. More important, his radio connected the secluded nation to the outside world. When, in October, 1950, the Communist Chinese army began its march to subjugate Tibet, Ford risked his life by staying behind to send out reports over his radio to let the world know.

For eight months in 2008, US Army Capt. Matt Zeller served as an embedded combat adviser with the Afghan security forces in Ghazni, Afghanistan. Watches Without Time is a compilation of the emails and letters he sent home to family and friends during that period - so that, as he writes in the preface, "should anything have ever happened to me, they would know what I went through."

Surge is an insider's view of the most decisive phase of the Iraq War. Using newly declassified documents, unpublished manuscripts, interviews, author notes, and published sources, Surge explains how President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Ambassador Crocker, General Petraeus, and other U.S. and Iraqi political and military leaders shaped the surge from the center of the maelstrom in Baghdad and Washington.

Lt. Michael Patrick Murphy, commander of Navy SEAL Team 10, posthumously received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic actions on 28 June 2005 during a fierce battle with Taliban fighters in the remote mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Michael was the first recipient of the nation’s highest military honor as a result of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. He was also the first naval officer to earn the medal since the Vietnam War, and the first SEAL to be honored posthumously.

A few years after his release from a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp, in 1973, Colonel Joseph Kittinger retired from the Air Force. Restless and unchallenged, he turned to ballooning, a lifelong passion as well as a constant diversion for his imagination during his imprisonment. His primary goal was a solitary circumnavigation of the globe, and in its pursuit he set several ballooning distance records, including the first solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1984. But the aeronautical feats that first made him an American hero had occurred a quarter of a century earlier....

Written with flair and exuberance, Joan Rice's diary is a compelling and personal account of life and love in the Second World War. Including additional material from her husband's own diary, Sand in my Shoes is a record of one woman's coming-of-age.

Bob Kerrey grew up outside Lincoln, Nebraska, in the 1950s, and in his trademark style - serious, sometimes wry - he tells of his journey from that heartland to the dangers of Vietnam, to the hospitals where he recovered from his grievous injuries, and finally to the Nixon White House where he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Women have bravely served in the US Navy for nearly a century, but they have been allowed to serve in combat roles for only the last 25 years. When the combat exclusion law was lifted in 1993, women in the navy soon had a new range of opportunities available to them. The repeal of the law finally gave women the chance to serve on combatant ships for the first time. Among the first women to step onto these warships as a new crewmember was Joanna Sprtel Walters.

Col. Mark James Alexander was the only airborne officer to lead three different battalions into combat in World War II, successively commanding the 2nd and 1st Battalions, 505 Parachute Infantry Regiment, and the 2nd Battalion, 508 PIR, of the 82nd Airborne Division. A legend in his own time, he fought in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France, and even after being seriously wounded in Normandy, insisted on playing a role in the Battle of the Bulge.

On November 12, 1912, a rescue team trekking across Antarctica's Great Ice Barrier finally found what they sought - the snow-covered tent of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. Inside, they made a grim discovery: Scott's frozen body lay between the bodies of two fellow explorers. They had died just eleven miles from the depot of supplies which might have saved them.

On 20 October 1962, high in the Himalayas, on the banks of the fast-flowing Nam Ka Chu, over 400 Indian soldiers were massacred, and the valley was overrun by soldiers of China's People's Liberation Army. Over the course of the next month, nearly 4,000 soldiers were killed on both sides, and the Indian army experienced its worst defeat ever. The conflict (war was never formally declared) ended because China announced a unilateral ceasefire on 21 November and halted its hitherto unhindered advance across NEFA and Ladakh.