Showing titles in World War II

'Endlessly fascinating. Cram's story sizzles with adventure.' Giles Milton, Sunday Times A genuinely new Second World War story, The 21 Escapes of Lt Alastair Cram is a riveting account of the wartime exploits of Alastair Cram, brilliantly told by the American author, David Guss. Cram was taken...

William Halsey was the most famous naval officer of World War II. His fearlessness in carrier raids against Japan, his steely resolve at Guadalcanal, and his impulsive blunder at the Battle of Leyte Gulf made him the "Patton of the Pacific" and solidified his reputation as a decisive, aggressive fighter prone to impetuous errors of judgment in the heat of battle.

Poland suffered terribly under the Nazis. By the end of the war, six million had been killed. On 1 August 1944 Andrew Borowiec, a 15-year-old volunteer in the Resistance, lobbed a grenade from a Warsaw apartment block onto some German soldiers below – he felt he had come of age. Over that summer Andrew faced danger at every moment. Wounded the day after his 16th birthday, he was captured as he lay in a makeshift cellar hospital. Here he learned a lesson: there were decent Germans as well as bad.

Packed with breathtaking air battles and ground tactics, this new addition to the Great Generals series features the controversial command and strategies of the former Air Force Chief of Staff. Curtis LeMay was a terrifying, complex, and brilliant general. In World War II, he ordered the firebombing of Tokyo and was in charge when atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.

After Germany's humiliating World War II defeat, numerous German generals published memoirs claiming that their country's brilliant military leadership had been undermined by the Führer's erratic decision making. The author of three highly acclaimed books on the era, Stephen Fritz upends this characterization of Hitler as an ill-informed fantasist and demonstrates the ways in which his strategy was coherent and even competent.

In the late summer of 1942, more than 10,000 members of the First Marine Division held a tenuous toehold on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal. As American marines battled Japanese forces for control of the island, they were joined by war correspondent Richard Tregaskis. Only one of two civilian reporters to land and stay with the marines, Tregaskis’ notebook captured the daily and nightly terrors faced by American forces in one of World War II’s most legendary battles - and it served as the premise for his best-selling book Guadalcanal Diary.

Published to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of General George Patton’s death, a gripping firsthand account of World War II written by a soldier with the American Third Army who served under the legendary warrior and participated in many of the most consequential events of the...

Just past midnight, on February 3, just hours from their destination, the Dorchester was torpedoed and sank, throwing its passengers into the frigid waters and creating the worst single loss of an American personnel convoy during WWII. Many of the survivors credit the four chaplains with saving their lives. Those chaplains would become known as the “Immortal Chaplains” for their heroism in making the ultimate sacrifice.

A born daredevil, John Homan joined the Army Air Forces after the Pearl Harbor attack. By 1944, he was co-piloting a B-24 Liberator over Nazi Germany, raining death and destruction on the enemy. This first-person account of his harrowing missions—chronicling deadly flights through skies of red-hot flak bursts and airmen bailing out with parachutes aflame—will leave listeners staggered by the determination and grit of World War II aviators.

In 1944, hundreds of Allied soldiers were trapped in POW camps in occupied France. The odds of their survival were long. The odds of escaping, even longer. But one man had the courage to fight the odds . . . An elite British S.A.S. operative on an assassination mission gone wrong. A Jewish...

Von der Aufstellung in Wismar an der Ostsee über Polen und Frankreich nach Russland schildert diese Chronik die ganze Härte der schweren Flak. Als Flugabwehr aufgestellt, müssen die Männer schnell erkennen, dass sie an vielen Frontabschnitten die Feuerwehr der Front sind. Schonungslos werden die erbitterten Kämpfe gegen Bunker, Panzer und den russischen Winter dargestellt. Die 3. Batterie der 1. Abteilung Flakregiment 61 durchlebt die Hölle des Krieges an ihren schweren 8,8 cm Kanone.

Le nom de Jean Moulin, sa figure sont devenus familiers à tous les Français. En ne parlant pas sous la torture, il a racheté les lâchetés de nombreux Français pendant l'Occupation. Mais qui était-il vraiment ? Pourquoi de Gaulle a-t-il décidé de faire de lui son représentant en France ? Était-il un sous-marin du Parti communiste, un agent soviétique ou américain ? Faut-il inscrire le tragique épisode de Caluire dans un combat fratricide ? Ce grand livre d'enquête de Pierre Péan, fourmillant de révélations, redonne à Jean Moulin une dimension humaine. Le héros était aussi un homme.

Legend: The Story of Witold Pilecki is a sweeping, immersive novel that traces the arc of a life lived in the crucible of war and oppression. From the embattled parlor of the Pilecki estate to the blood-soaked trenches of the Polish-Soviet War, from the clandestine cellars of occupied Warsaw to the unspeakable machinery of Auschwitz, this is the story of a man who chose to walk willingly into hell so that the world might know the truth.

SS Commander Reinhard Höhn was one of Nazi Germany's most brilliant legal minds, an archetype of the fervid technocrats that built the Third Reich. His story wouldn't be too different from that of other prominent Nazis, if not for the fact that the great majority of Germany's post-war business leaders were educated at his school. Is this a coincidence? Or is there a link between the forms of organization of Nazism and the principles of corporate management?

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER The “compelling,” untold story of the man who captured and brought to trial Rudolf Höss—one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious war criminals and subject of the Oscar-nominated film The Zone of Interest—“fascinates and shocks” (The Washington Post). May 1945...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The shocking true story of the USS Houston, FDR’s legendary lost cruiser, and the epic saga of the survivors who faced one of World War II’s most brutal ordeals—from the acclaimed author of The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors “Captivating [and]...

The story of the man who won the battle of Midway and avenged Pearl Harbor for the United States. During the Battle of Midway in June 1942, US Navy dive bomber pilot Wade McClusky proved himself to be one of the greatest pilots and combat leaders in American history, but his story has never been told - until now.

On a cold May morning in 1940, Adrian Vincent arrived in France with his battalion. His war didn’t last long. Within five days the Siege of Calais was over, and nearly all his comrades were killed, wounded or, like him, taken prisoner. After a brutal journey across the breadth of Germany, Vincent and his fellow survivors began their life in Stalag VIIIB, set to work in terrible conditions down a Polish mine. For the next five years, they waged a war not against enemy soldiers but instead versus monotony, disease, cruelty, starvation, and hopelessness.

One of New York Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of the Fall How far can a single leader alter the course of history? 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...

Black Tulip locates the ambiguous truth about Erich Hartmann and so much of the German Wehrmacht in general: that many of these men were neither full-blown Nazis nor impeccable knights. They were complex, contradictory, and elusive. This book portrays a complex human rather than the heroic caricature we're used to, and it argues that the tidy, polished hero stories we've inherited about men like Hartmann say as much about those who've crafted them as they do about the heroes themselves.