"Al Ataque" is an excellent book that describes the preparation a bomb group goes through before being deployed overseas as well as the problems of shipping some five thousand men and supplies along with some eighty B-24 aircraft from a stateside base to a foreign country. The book then details the establishment of Torretta Field that was used by the 461st for the duration of the war in Europe. The 461st Bomb Group flew two hundred and twenty-three combat missions between April 1944 and April 1945. Each of these is described in the book. Personal experiences of veterans who were actually part of the 461st are included.

Written in a clear and engaging narrative style, this book analyzes the pivotal campaign in which Robert E. Lee drove the Union Army of the Potomac under George B. McClellan away from the Confederate capital of Richmond, VA, in the summer of 1862. The Seven Days' Battles: The War Begins Anew examines how Lee's Confederate forces squared off against McClellan's Union Army during this week-long struggle, revealing how both sides committed many errors that could have affected the outcome. Indeed, while Lee is often credited with having brilliant battle plans, the author shows how the Confederate commander mismanaged battles, employed too many complicated maneuvers, and overestimated what was possible with the resources he had available. For his part, McClellan of the Union Army failed to commit his troops at key moments, accepted erroneous intelligence, and hindered his campaign by refusing to respect the authority of his civilian superiors. This book presents a synthetic treatment that closely analyzes the military decisions that were made and why they were made, analyzes the successes and failures of the major commanders on both sides, and clearly explains the outcomes of the battles. The work contains sufficient depth of information to serve as a resource for undergraduate American history students while providing enjoyable reading for Civil War enthusiasts as well as general audiences.

The Shelf2Life WWI Memoirs Collection is an engaging set of pre-1923 materials that describe life during the Great War through memoirs, letters and diaries. Poignant personal narratives from soldiers, doctors and nurses on the front lines to munitions workers and land girls on the home front, offer invaluable insight into the sacrifices men and women made for their country. Photographs and illustrations intensify stories of struggle and survival from the trenches, hospitals, prison camps and battlefields. The WWI Memoirs Collection captures the pride and fear of the war as experienced by combatants and non-combatants alike and provides historians, researchers and students extensive perspective on individual emotional responses to the war.

Stern Magazine, the Black Scorpion: "we will aim at everything - even if it is not moving" Surrey Life magazine: "George S Boughton was an oil engineer in Nigeria during the 1967 to 1970 Biafran War and what emerges from this intense, emotional memoir is a withering indictment of governing elites and the destructive consequences of their out-of-control behaviour. Around a million people starved to death or were killed in the fighting; yet the news vacuum meant that Boughton and other expat workers were often in the dark about the true extent of what was going on. Black Gold Black Scorpion is a fascinating, first-hand account of how a nation at war with itself became a magnet for cold war politics as it sank into moral darkness". Recounted are the lives of a young oil engineer, his wife and newborn child, during the War, when they inadvertently lived through one of the worst episodes of African history. Working in an industry that has gone on to pollute massively with oil, theirs is a different story of Africa, oil and aid. The author describes the political elites and those, like Ojukwu and Adekunle, who fought them - having himself been captured and detained, one to one, by the mythically ruthless Black Scorpion; this, the strangest of events, enabling him to observe at close range the disintegration of a powerful personality. More especially, the author's and his family's interaction with the people of the area, the people of Igboland, serves to underline how most of Africa continues to be let down by the pillars of the modern world - political elites, capitalists, the media and warring world powers.

Edmund Allenby, Viscount Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe, as he became later, was the principal British military figure in the Middle East from 1917 to 1919. He fulfilled a similar proconsular role in Egypt from the latter year until 1925. In these two roles Allenby's eight years in the Middle East were of great impact, and in probing his life an especially revealing window can be found through which to observe closely and understand more fully the history that has resulted in the terminal roil afflicting the Middle East and international affairs today. In this biography Brad Faught explores the events and actions of Allenby's life, examining his thinking on both the British Empire and the post-World War I international order. Faught brings clarity to Allenby's decisive impact on British imperial policy in the making of the modern Middle East, and thereby on the long arc of the region's continuing and controversial place in world affairs.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Preface.

"Laboras Home Front is an outstanding contribution. Balanced and fair-minded, Kerstenas richly documented account puts the AFL at the center of wartime labor relations and domestic history generally. . . . Kersten also sheds new light on the key role of the AFL in the emergence of social democratic liberalism during the era of World War II."
--Robert H. Zieger, University of Florida

"Labor's Home Front is the work of a careful and thorough historian. Kersten establishes the centrality of the often neglected American Federation of Labor to the story of labor's uphill efforts during World War II to breathe life into the lofty ideals embodied in the Four Freedoms. He skillfully weaves his case studies--on gender, race, union rivalries, safety, the open shop, and postwar planning--into a narrative fully attentive to the evolution of the Federation's ideology and politics, poignantly conveying the spirit of sacrifice and suffering without romanticizing his subjects. This is a genuinely important book."
--Eric Arnesen, author of "Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality"

One of the oldest, strongest, and largest labor organizations in the U.S., the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had 4 million members in over 20,000 union locals during World War II. The AFL played a key role in wartime production and was a major actor in the contentious relationship between the state, organized labor, and the working class in the 1940s. The war years are pivotal in the history of American labor, but books on the AFL's experiences are scant, with far more on the radical Congress of Industrial Unions(CIO).

Andrew E. Kersten closes this gap with Labor's Home Front, challenging us to reconsider the AFL and its influence on twentieth-century history. Kersten details the union's contributions to wartime labor relations, its opposition to the open shop movement, divided support for fair employment and equity for women and African American workers, its constant battles with the CIO, and its significant efforts to reshape American society, economics, and politics after the war. Throughout, Kersten frames his narrative with an original, central theme: that despite its conservative nature, the AFL was dramatically transformed during World War II, becoming a more powerful progressive force that pushed for liberal change.

The war for the British life-line of the English Channel
Throughout history the English Channel has both preserved Britain and been its most vulnerable border. This short span of sea was dominated by the Royal Navy for over 150 years before the outbreak of the Great War. A new war-the first major conflict of the technological age-brought new dangers and challenges. A constant traffic of men and materials crossed the Channel to serve and supply the armies locked in a death struggle on the continent and this vital artery had to remain open and effective at all times to ensure victory and survival. Enemy submarines, surface flotillas and batteries of artillery remained dangerously close at hand, and well defended ports and harbours provided a continual threat to allied traffic and forces. This is the story of a fierce naval war fought in a narrow sea-way by one who experienced it. It is a story of naval battles and daring raids, of the bombing arm of the emergent air force and of the submarine service at its most daring. Above all it is a riveting story of human courage and endurance that will fascinate every student of the First World War.

The Great War in the Middle East as seen by a British artilleryman
Antony Bluett, a serving member of the Honourable Artillery Company, has given us a vital account of the Great War as it was fought in the Egyptian Desert, across the Sinai peninsula into Palestine, the capture of Jerusalem and on to victory in Lebanon and Syria. He tells his story as he saw the war from with his battery of guns-which played its part in this untypical theatre of fluid manoeuvring that brought about the fall of the declining Turkish Ottoman Empire. His was not simply a war of artillery duels and the ever present danger of bombs from enemy aircraft. The very environment was an enemy, fluctuating between searing daytime heat and freezing cold nights on difficult terrain. We are introduced to the difficulties of handling horses, guns and wagons in a war far different to that of the Western Front. The entire campaign is entertainingly recounted including lively accounts of the activities of the Welsh, Scottish and London infantry regiments, the colonial light horsemen and Cameliers together with the long suffering Egyptian labourers who carved camps, fortifications and roads out of the most inhospitable landscape.

"Fight of the Phoenix" is a historical personal account of duties as an Advisor in the Delta of Vietnam in 1972. The author counters claims of other Advisors and Academics and sets the record straight on the vicious nature of the Communist insurgency that killed their own people and the spectacular success of the Phoenix Program throughout the country and especially in the Delta Region MR-4 in targeting and neutralizing the enemy Viet Cong insurgents.

The War for Legitimacy in Politics and Culture 1936-1946 presents the first investigation of how the phenomenon of political legitimacy operated within Europe's political cultures during the period of the Second World War. Amidst the upheavals of that turbulent period in Europe's twentieth-century history, a wide variety of contenders for power emerged, each of which claimed to possess the right to rule.Exploring political discourse, state propaganda, and high and low culture, the book argues that legitimacy lay not with rulers, and still less in the barrel of a gun, but in the values behind differing approaches to "good" government. An important contribution to the study of the political culture of wartime Europe, this volume will be essential reading for both political scientists and twentieth-century historians.

The 'Normans' during the Great War in Europe
It would misleading and unfair to the entertainment value and writing ability of the author of this book to describe it as a regimental history. Nothing justifiably so classified began with the expletive, 'Fed up ' Nevertheless, this excellent account takes the reader to the heart of the light infantry regiment raised in Guernsey and from its nearby islands, a regiment of local men who were proud of their independence and their heritage as decedents of the Norman warriors who accompanied Duke William on the conquest of England-the country they all acknowledged as nothing less than their own. Blicq, the author, was one of their number-an ordinary soldier and proud to be one of the worst in the battalion So he predictably brings an element of humour into his graphic portrayal of his comrades and indeed, the text is full of wry period dialogue. Intimate portrait of life on the march, in camp and in the trenches is vividly painted giving the reader a picture of the Guernsey men's experience of life and death on the Western Front. The reader joins Blicq-half of the infamous 'Duo' into battle at Hendecourt, Cambrai, Marcoing, Masnieres through the near catastrophic German onslaught of 1918 to the Passchendaele sector and Doulieu-Estaires. This is a remarkable story of the men of a small island state who loyally and with humour and determination rallied to its call and, in many cases, sacrificed to the last full measure, leaving an appalling legacy of death and injury for the Channel Islands in the post war period. This is an unusual view of a unit at war on the Western Front from original sources and recommended. Available in softcover and hardcover with dust jacket.

Primary documents from the World War I era bring to life the causes, events and consequences of those tumultuous and violent years. Varied perspectives provide a valuable overview of the many and often complicated reactions by Americans to Pre-war European politics, Archduke Ferdinand's assassination, the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine, the major battles fought, and of the eventual and controversial entry into the war by the United States, among others. Will be a valued resource for researchers seeking to tap into contemporary attitudes toward events long gone.

When the Germans invaded her small Belgian village in 1914, Marthe Cnockaert's home was burned and her family separated. After getting a job at a German hospital, and winning the Iron Cross for her service to the Reich, she was approached by a neighbor and invited to become an intelligence agent for the British. Not without trepidation, Cnockaert embarked on a career as a spy, providing information and engaging in sabotage before her capture and imprisonment in 1916. After the war, she was paid and decorated by a grateful British government for her service. Cnockaert's is only one of the surprising and gripping stories that comprise Female Intelligence. This is the first history of the female spies who served Britain during World War I, focusing on both the powerful cultural images of these women and the realities, challenges, and contradictions of intelligence service. Between the founding of modern British intelligence organizations in 1909 and the demobilization of 1919, more than 6,000 women served the British government in either civil or military occupations as members of the intelligence community. These women performed a variety of services, and they represented an astonishing diversity of nationality, age, and class. From Aphra Behn, who spied for the British government in the seventeenth century, to the most well known example, Mata Hari, female spies have a long history, existing in juxtaposition to the folkloric notion of women as chatty, gossipy, and indiscreet. Using personal accounts, letters, official documents and newspaper reports, Female Intelligence interrogates different, and apparently contradictory, constructions of gender in the competing spheres of espionage activity.