Showing titles in World War II

Published for the first time in the United States, Combat Diary is the war story of Dog Battery, also known US Army Gun Battalion D. Originally only published in Germany in 1945, it tells the tale of 150 US soldiers as they arrive in England in July of 1944. The battalion arrives on the beaches of Normandy, fights through France—and ultimately into Germany—at the time of the fall of the Nazi regime. It is an intimate account of the actions and endurance of the soldiers over those seven months.

During the Second World War, Flt Lt Richard Stevens led an extraordinary campaign as an RAF nightfighter. Known to contemporaries as "Cat's Eyes" and by the height of his success in July 1941 as the "Lone Wolf", Flt Lt Stevens was the RAF's highest scoring nightfighter pilot with 14 victories. What makes his story unique is that all this was achieved without the aid of radar or another crew member. Instead, Flt Lt Stevens used extraordinary skill, instinct, and innate marksmanship.

Between April and July 1944, Truman Smith flew 35 bombing missions over France and Germany. He was only 20 years old. Although barely adults, Smith and his peers worried about cramming a lifetime's worth of experience into every free night, each knowing he probably would not survive the next bombing mission. Written with blunt honesty, wry humor, and insight, The Wrong Stuff is Smith's gripping memoir of that time.

When Metcalfe boarded the C-47 which would drop him at Groesbeek Heights, just outside of Nijmegen, Holland, he was handed a box of twelve dozen condoms by an overconfident British lieutenant. He was to be among the first to jump into what should have been a picture-book meadow, free of German troops. Instead, it was defended by three German antiaircraft cannon emplacements. As he jumped into a hail of bullets and exploding shells, he watched his plane roll over and plummet into the ground.

March 1942: The world is at war. Too old to fight and with jobs scarce at home, Tom Phelps found work as a carpenter in the goldfields of the New Guinea Highlands. No one expected the Japanese to attack in the Pacific. But they did. Tom and his mates weren't going to hang around and wait to be killed. With escape routes bombed by the Japanese, their only option was to try to reach safety by foot, through some of the most rugged terrain on Earth - the Bulldog Track. Back home in Sydney, Rose Phelps, their son, George, and three daughters, Joy, Shirley and Ann, waited for news of Tom's fate.

An extraordinary firsthand account of the Battle of Midway by one of its key participants, timed to the 75th anniversary: American dive-bomber pilot "Dusty" Kleiss helped sink three Japanese warships (including two aircraft carriers), received the Navy Cross, and is credited with playing a decisive individual role in determining the outcome of a battle that is considered a turning point in World War II.

According to a recent international study, the Lightning is the fifth most popular military aircraft of all time. It has many thousands of devotees who are a ready market for this timely and entertaining book which, with over 20 individual stories from former Lightning pilots, relates the highs and lows, and the dramas and the demands of those who operated this iconic aircraft from the sharp end.

Marine general William H. Rupertus is best known today for writing the Corps' Rifleman's Creed. Rupertus was one of the outstanding Marines of the twentieth century, but he died in 1945, so his story has never been told. Rupertus "made his bones" in the USMC's "savage wars of peace" before World War II: Haiti for three years after World War I, China in 1929, and again in 1937.

Called up in 1940, Reg expected to be fighting Germans. Instead, he found himself caught up in the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. What followed were three years of hell, moving from one camp to another along the Kwai river, building the infamous Burma railway. Reg made the deadly jungle work for him. With an ingenuity that is astonishing, he trapped and ate lizards, harvested pumpkins from the canteen rubbish heap and with his homemade razor became camp barber.

Von einer Hölle in die nächste … Spüren Sie dem schier unvorstellbaren Martyrium des Soldaten Kurt K. Keller nach. Kurt K. Keller, Jahrgang 1925, trat im April 1943 seinen Dienst bei der Wehrmacht an – ihm sollte ein bewegtes Soldatenleben bevorstehen: Am 6. Juni 1944, dem D-Day, gehörte Keller zu den Verteidigern am blutigen Strandabschnitt Omaha Beach, wo Tausende US-Soldaten direkt in den deutschen Kugelhagel hineinrannten.

When called up to fight in yet another World War, Drum Major Jackson promised his beloved wife, Mabel, that he would return to lead his band and play for her once more. In May 1940, he was captured at Dunkirk and interned in several German forced labour camps throughout Poland. Two years later, he was transferred to Auschwitz IV. When his captors appointed Jackson their ‘Kapellmeister’ (man in charge of music), he seized the opportunity to provide entertainment for his fellow prisoners at rehearsals and cover for escapees during concerts.

A classic of WWII, this is the vivid memoir of Private Bowlby, who came through the North Africa campaign only to have to battle in bitter fighting against a stubborn and skilled German defence in Italy. It is a truly authentic account of what it was like to fight your way through one of the most gruelling and dangerous campaigns of the Second World War, where so often the hunters became the hunted.

Eddie Chapman was a womaniser, blackmailer and safecracker. He was also a great hero - the most remarkable double agent of the Second World War. Chapman became the only British national ever to be awarded an Iron Cross for his work for the Reich. He was also the only German spy ever to be parachuted into Britain twice. But it was all an illusion: Eddie fooled the Germans in the same way he conned his victims in civilian life. He was working for the British all along.

There were no mission limits for a pilot in the Pacific during World War II; unlike in Europe, you flew until it was time to go home. So it was for James "Jug" Curran, all the way from New Guinea to the Philippines with the 348th Fighter Group, the first P-47 Thunderbolt outfit in the Pacific. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Curran volunteered to try flying in the blue yonder and trained as an Army fighter pilot. He got his wish to fly the P-47 in the Pacific, going into combat in August 1943, in New Guinea, and later helping start the "Black Rams" fighter squadron.

2024 marks both the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, and the 150th anniversary of the birth of Churchill himself. This book brings together General Lord Dannatt, one of Britain's most respected contemporary military leaders, and former head of the British Army, with Allen Packwood, one of the world's foremost Churchill experts, the archivist responsible for the holdings at the landmark Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. Together they take us through the decision-making for the planning and execution of D-Day.

In Commanding the Pacific: Marine Corps Generals in World War II, Stephen R. Taaffe analyzes the 15 high-level Marine generals who led the Corps' six combat divisions and two corps in the conflict. He concludes that these leaders played an indispensable role in organizing, training, and leading their men to victory.

From historian and columnist in Leatherneck and Armor magazines, this is the exciting, personal account of a marine fighter squadron in the South Pacific during the critical days of 1943, when the tide turned against the Japanese. Based on individual interviews and wartime documents, this is a thrilling narrative of the marines who lived, and died, during the toughest battles of the entire war.

In 1944 and 1945, Tom Faulkner was a B-24 pilot flying out of San Giovanni airfield in Italy as a member of the 15th Air Force of the US Army Air Forces. Only 19 years old when he completed his 28th and last mission, Tom was one of the youngest bomber pilots to serve in the US Army Air Forces during World War II. Between September 1944 and the end of February 1945, he flew against targets in Hungary, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Yugoslavia.

Summertime, 1935. On a lake near Berlin, a young man is out sailing when he glimpses a woman reclining in the prow of a passing boat. Their eyes meet - and one of history's greatest conspiracies is born. Harro Schulze-Boysen had already shed blood in the fight against Nazism by the time he and Libertas Haas-Heye began their whirlwind romance. She joined the cause, and soon the two lovers were leading a network of antifascists that stretched across Berlin's bohemian underworld.

Many veterans of war, upon their return home, choose to never speak about their time serving in the military, hoping to put it behind them and forget. But some veterans don’t hesitate to share their stories and experiences with anyone who will listen. Whether talking about it is their way of coping with what they witnessed and endured, an effort to pass on to the next generation a small slice of history, or an attempt to preserve the memories for themselves, doesn’t really matter.