Showing results by publisher "HarperCollins Publishers Limited" in Military

In 1967, veteran travel writer Eric Newby and his heroic wife, Wanda, fulfilled their dream of a return to life in the Italian hills where they first met during World War II. But this fulfillment would not come easy. The dream materialised in the form of I Castagni ('The Chestnuts'), a small, decrepit farmhouse with no roof, an abandoned septic tank and its own indigenous wildlife reluctant to give up their home. But in the foothills of the Apuan Alps on the border of Liguria and Northern Tuscany, this ramshackle house would soon become a hub of love, friendship and activity.

Soldier, spy, lawyer, politician - Airey Neave was assassinated in the House of Commons car park in 1979. Forty years after his death, Patrick Bishop’s lively, action-packed biography examines the life, heroic war and death of one of Britain’s most remarkable 20th-century figures.

Target Tirpitz is gripping WW2 storytelling at its best and a return to the RAF territory of Patrick Bishop’s bestselling Bomber Boys and Fighter Boys. The Tirpitz, Hitler’s greatest weapon, was reputed to be unsinkable and the battleship inflamed an Allied obsession: to destroy her at any cost. More than thirty daring operations were launched against the 52,000 ton monster.

In a return to sweeping social history of wartime, Patrick Bishop explores the lives and wartime experiences of thousands of men and women who served in all units of the air force. On 1st April 2018, the Royal Air Force will be 100 years old - a short life by military standards but an extraordinarily important and eventful one. From the start it was special, standing sometimes awkwardly but always proudly a little apart from the existing services.

From best-selling author of Tail-End Charlie and Tornado Down comes this powerful and deeply moving account of Bomber Command’s 1944 Nuremberg Raid – the RAF’s bloodiest night of the Second World War.

Best-selling author Charlie Connelly returns with a First World War memoir of his great uncle, Edward Connelly, who was an ordinary boy sent to fight in a war the likes of which the world had never seen. But this is not just his story; it is the story of all the young forgotten soldiers who fought and bravely died for their country. The Forgotten Soldier tells the story of Private Edward Connelly, aged 19, killed in the First World War a week before the Armistice and immediately forgotten, even, it seems, by his own family.

On the trail of Soviet infiltrator Agent Blériot, Svetlana Lokhova takes the reader on a thrilling journey through Stalin’s most audacious intelligence operation. On a sunny September day in 1931, a Soviet spy walked down the gangplank of the luxury transatlantic liner SS Europa and into New York. Attracting no attention, Stanislav Shumovsky had completed his journey from Moscow to enrol at a top American university. He was concealed in a group of 65 Soviet students heading to prestigious academic institutions. But he was after far more than an excellent education.

An unprecedented, captivating narrative of the Nazi rise to power, the Holocaust, and Hitler's postinvasion plans for Russia told through the recently discovered lost diary of Alfred Rosenberg - Hitler's 'philosopher' and architect of Nazi ideology. Only recently discovered by former FBI agent Robert Wittman, the diary of Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, who led the Nazi party when Hitler was interned in 1923, is a groundbreaking document and an object of rumour, obsession and evil.

The personal accounts of three young women who joined up in 1940. In the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone against Germany. The British Army stood at just over one and a half million men, while the Germans had three times that many, and a population almost twice the size of ours from which to draw new waves of soldiers. Clearly, in the fight against Hitler, manpower alone wasn't going to be enough.

The story of a fascinating man who connected the great politicians, artists and thinkers at the height of British global power and influence. A famed aesthete and patron, Philip Sassoon's world was one of luxury and classic English elegance with oriental flair. He gathered a social set that would provide inspiration for Brideshead Revisited.

>Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. From the first slaves arriving in Jamestown in 1619, the cotton fields in the Southern States, and shipbuilding in New England, to the slaves who laid down their lives in war so that Americans could be free, American Slavery in an Hour covers the breadth of the subject without sacrificing important historical and cultural details. An important and dark time in Black - and American - history, the era of American slavery is explored in American Slavery in an Hour, which will explain the key facts and give you a clear overview of this much discussed period of history, as well as its legacy.

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. The Holocaust, in which 11 million people died, was the largest atrocity of the 20th century and perhaps the hardest to understand. Approximately 6 million Jews and 5 million others including Roma people, Poles, Russian prisoners of war, political prisoners, homosexuals, people of colour, Jehovah's Witnesses, and various other minorities were first persecuted and then murdered. How, both morally and logistically, had this came to happen?

Tolkien and the Great War tells for the first time the full story of how he embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe. This biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme and introduces the circle of friends who spurred his mythology to life.

The story of young German Jews who escaped the Nazis, most often without their families, only to return a few years later to war-torn Europe as members of an elite secret US Army unit. The young men who would become known as The Ritchie Boys arrived in America as 'enemy aliens', and although they were allowed to enlist in the US military, they were distrusted by everyone. So, in effect, they became outsiders all over again. Until one day in 1942, when the Pentagon woke up to the incredible asset they had on their hands.

In January 2003, 28-year-old GCHQ translator Katharine Gun received an email from the US National Security Agency that would turn her world upside down. The message requested Katharine’s assistance in coordinating an illegal US-UK spy operation which would secure UN authorisation for the Iraq invasion. Horrified, she decided to leak the information to the British press. Katharine’s decision would change her life forever, as she was arrested under the Official Secrets Act whilst becoming a cause célèbre for political activists.

In the tradition of 'Agent Zigzag' comes a breathtaking biography of WWII's 'Scarlet Pimpernel' as fast-paced and emotionally intuitive as the best spy thrillers. This celebrates unsung hero Robert de La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat turned anti-Nazi saboteur, and his exploits as a British Special Operations Executive-trained resistance fighter.

From best-selling and award-winning author of A Brilliant Little Operation comes the long neglected D-Day story of the Resistance uprising and subsequent massacre on the Vercors massif - the largest action by the French Resistance during the Second World War. In early 1941, three separate groups of plotters - one military, one political, one intellectual - began to organise and plan on and around the forbidding mountainous plateau near Grenoble - the Vercors.

In April 2006, the elite 3 Para battlegroup was dispatched to Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. They were tasked with providing security to reconstruction efforts, a deployment it was hoped would pass off without a shot being fired. In fact, over the six months they were there, the 3 Para battle group saw near continuous combat, one gruelling battle after another, in what would become one of the most extraordinary campaigns ever fought by British troops.

In Where Shall We Run To?, Alan Garner remembers his early childhood in the Cheshire village of Alderley Edge: life at the village school as ‘a sissy and a mardy-arse'; pushing his friend Harold into a clump of nettles to test the truth of dock leaves; his father joining the army to guard the family against Hitler; the coming of the Yanks, with their comics and sweets and chewing gum. From one of our greatest living writers, it is a remarkable and evocative memoir of a vanished England.

The SAS Survival Guide is an essential companion for adventurers everywhere. From making camp and finding food in the wild to security and self-defence in the streets, be prepared on land or sea. This unrivalled guide from SAS legend John ‘Lofty’ Wiseman’s will cover Climate and Terrain and On the Move - the characteristics and climates of different regions and zones (including polar, arid, and tropical), how to plan a route, and where to travel.