Showing titles in World War II

The New York Times bestselling author of Fly Girls shares the riveting story of an unsung World War II hero who saved countless American lives in the Philippines. When Florence Finch died at the age of 101, few of her Ithaca, NY neighbors knew that this unassuming Filipina native was a...

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut fictionalised his time as a prisoner of war in Dresden in 1945. Vonnegut was imprisoned in a cellar while the firestorm raged through the city, wiping out generations of innocent lives. Victor Gregg remained aboveground throughout the firebombing. This is his true eyewitness account of that week in February 1945. Already a seasoned soldier with the Rifle Brigade, Gregg joined the 10th Parachute Regiment in 1944. He was captured at Arnhem, where he volunteered to be sent to a work camp rather a POW camp.

For Dutton Caliber's American War Heroes series, the riveting true story of United States Air Force officer, flying ace, and record-setting test pilot Chuck Yeager. Bold, brash, and brimming with courage, Chuck Yeager burst onto the scene as a national hero in 1947, when he became the first to...

Stilwell and Mountbatten in Burma explores the relationship between American General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell and British Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten in the China-Burma-India Theater (CBI) and the South East Asia Command (SEAC) between October 1943 and October 1944, within the wider context of Anglo-American relations during World War II. Jonathan Templin Ritter discusses the military, political, and diplomatic aspects of Anglo-American cooperation, the personalities involved, and where British and American policies both converged and diverged over Southeast Asia.

In this long awaited work one of the squad’s integral members - and probably its best soldier - reveals his own inside account of fighting as a spearhead of the Screaming Eagles in Normandy, Market Garden, and the Battle of the Bulge.

With a single daring leap from an Italian train carrying prisoners of war, John Miller jumped out of the war of soldiers and into the war as lived by Italian civilians - many of whom risked their lives to help him. The year was 1943 and Captain Miller had been in captivity for over a year. Italian anti-fascists harboured and fed him, first in a remote mountain village, then in Rome itself.

In his critically acclaimed account of one of Europe’s most important but often forgotten figures, former BBC foreign correspondent and EU insider Martyn Bond tells the extraordinary story of Richard Count Coudenhove-Kalergi. Known as “The Grandfather of Europe”, he was a personal friend of Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer and also served as the model for the fictional resistance hero Victor Laszlo in the film Casablanca. Actor Christopher Kent narrates this compelling new audiobook version of Martyn Bond’s original biography.

Durch Görings Leben zieht sich wie ein roter Faden das Streben nach Macht und Geltung, von der Kindheit bis zur Verurteilung beim Nürnberger Kriegsverbrechertribunal und dem Selbstmord in der Gefängniszelle. Andreas Molitor zeigt, dass der selbsternannte «Mann der Tat» mit der «Entjudung der deutschen Wirtschaft» den wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Niedergang der deutschen Juden besiegelt und bei der Vorbereitung des Holocaust eine Hauptrolle gespielt hat.

In late 1940 a group of five young Australian soldiers set out on a secret mission: one of the Second World War’s most daring operations and the first for Britain’s legendary Special Operations Executive. Leading a small force of Ethiopian freedom fighters on an epic trek across the harsh African bush from the Sudan, the small incursion force entered Italian-occupied Ethiopia and began waging a guerilla war against the 250,000-strong Italian army. One of these men, Ken Burke, was Duncan McNab's uncle.

Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Channel Dash, North Africa, Sicily, Dieppe, D-Day, and the fight against the V1 menace—Group Captain Bobby Oxspring saw action in many of the most famous battles of the Second World War. His memoir, Spitfire Command, is a remarkable account of life as one of The Few, charting his journey through the war, flying all marks of the Spitfire—from the Mk I to the Mk XIV—right through to when he ended operational duty just a week before the war ended.

As smoke billows skyward from Pearl Harbor, Japan throws its full military might against the outnumbered and under-equipped Filipino forces. Admiral Hart sends his US Asiatic Fleet south, to the safety of Allied waters. When remnants of PBY Patrol Wing 10 depart with the fleet, Charles Beckner, corpsman for Squadron 102, is left behind with no apparent avenue for escape.

Picking up where his previous memoir leaves off, Sledge, a young marine in the First Division, traces his company's movements and charts his own difficult passage to peace following his horrific experiences in the Pacific. He reflects on his duty in the ancient city of Peiping (now Beijing) and recounts the difficulty of returning to his hometown of Mobile, Alabama, and resuming civilian life haunted by the shadows of close combat.

The Nazis kept extensive files on practically everybody in the Third Reich. Now author Paul Roland turns the tables with this brilliant new exposé—a fascinating psychological profile of the leading Nazis and their lesser-known associates.

The Third Reich's Luftwaffe began World War II with significant advantages over other European air forces, playing a critical role in the German war machine's swift, powerful advance. By war's end, however, the Luftwaffe had been decimated by combat losses and crippled by poor decisions at the highest levels of military decision-making, and it proved unable to challenge Allied air superiority despite a last-minute upsurge in German aircraft production.

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer told the story of the man who built the bomb. The Light of a Thousand Suns tells the story he couldn't see—the grandmother who became a shadow on stone, the doctor who crawled through the ruins searching for his wife, the children who played in radioactive snow, and the soldiers who watched their own skeletons through closed eyelids.

From the acclaimed Modern Library Chronicles comes an exploration of a promising theory that when put to practice wreaked havoc on the world. An expert on communism, Richard Pipes follows the history of the Soviet Union from the 1917 revolution to the Cold War, and finally, to its deterioration and collapse.

“Vividly drawn and emotionally gripping." —Daniel James Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat From the author of The Ghost Ships of Archangel, one of the last unheralded heroic stories of World War II: the U-boat assault off the American coast against the men of...

Assigned to the 504th Bombardment Group in the Pacific Theater, Hanley became a flight engineer on a B-29 bomber squad. On his seventh mission, he and his crew were shot down over Japan. In Accused War Criminal, Hanley shares his experiences from his training and commissioning to his deployment on a failed mission that led to his capture. He recounts how he managed to survive as a prisoner of war until his eventual rescue and recovery. With candid honesty and telling details, this is a humbling and harrowing tale of one man's bravery under unimaginable circumstances. 

Tank Driver is the story of a young man’s combat initiation in World War II. Based on letters home, the sparse narrative has the immediacy of on-the-spot reporting. Ted Hartman was a teenager when he was sent overseas to drive a Sherman tank into combat to face the desperate German counterattack known as the Battle of the Bulge. Hartman gives a riveting account of the shifting tides of battle and the final Allied breakout. He tells about the concentration camps, the spectacle of defeated Germans, and the encounter with Russian soldiers in Austria that marked combat’s end.

Harold Guard became a war correspondent quite by chance, after he had been invalided out of the navy following a submarine accident. Thereafter, working for United Press, he gained a front row seat to many of the most dramatic battles and events of the century. In March 1942 Guard arrived in Australia, having narrowly escaped from Japanese forces invading Singapore and Java. His dispatches from that disastrous front prompted one observer to comment on “the crisis days when everybody except Harold Guard was trying to hush up the real situation.”