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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > War & defence operations > Battles & campaigns
Two first accounts by early aviators
This special Leonaur 'good value' edition contains two accounts of
the early days of powered flight. The first book, written just
before the outbreak of the First World War, describes in depth the
training of French military pilots up to the point where they are
qualified. It contains much of historical interest and the process
is explained, in considerable detail, from the trainee pilot's
viewpoint as he grappled to master his machine. His numerous errors
and how the aircraft performed as they were made are elaborated.
The author came into contact with several types of aircraft and he
describes the characteristics, performance and mechanics of each.
So this book provides essential insights into the practicalities of
being a fighter pilot in the imminent conflict. The second work is
by a British pilot who was fully engaged in the air war over
France. He was shot down and captured by the 'Bosch, ' he escaped
and was again captured, and he underwent many other adventures
before finally returning to his homeland. Accounts of pilots and
aviation from the pioneer days of flying are comparatively few in
number and these two short first hand narratives, essential reading
for students of the subject, would have been unlikely to see
republication as individual books.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each
title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our
hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their
spines and fabric head and tail bands.
A young British soldier who went to war on two wheels
When the Great War broke out, the author of this book decided to
leave his university studies and join the struggle. What attracted
him immediately was the potential to combine his military service
with his love of motorcycles and so it was that he found himself
one of a select group of motorcycle despatch riders within the 5th
Division of the 'Contemptible Little Army' that went to France and
Belgium to halt the overwhelming numerical superiority of the
advancing German Army. This book, an account of his experiences in
the early months of the war, tells the story of a conflict of fluid
manoeuvre and dogged retreat. Together with congested roads filled
with military traffic and refugees, the ever present threat of
artillery barrage and changing front lines the author had to
constantly be aware of the presence of the deadly Uhlans-mounted
German Lancers-who were always ready to pitch horseflesh against
horsepower.
"Lean men, brown men, men from overseas,
Men from all the outer world; shy and ill at ease
" There were Canadian Mounties, American cowboys, Arctic explorers,
adventurers, rogues, big game hunters and sportsmen. There were
famous men like Cherry Kearton, the naturalist and explorer and the
grand old man of Africa-Frederick Selous himself. All these men had
come together under the Union Flag to do battle against colonial
Imperial Germany in East Africa. They came under the command of
Driscoll of Driscoll's Scouts who performed with renown during the
Boer War. These were the men of the 25th Royal Fusiliers-The Legion
of Frontiersmen-and their battlegrounds were to be the great plains
of Africa rich in wildlife and elemental danger. This is their
story through the years of the Great War told by one of their own
officers in vivid detail. It is a story of campaigns and hardship
which would be equal to the best of them and lay many a 'lean,
brown man' in a shallow grave in the red earth before it was
concluded.
In 1942, with a black-market chicken under his arm, Leo Marks left
his father's famous bookshop, 84 Charing Cross Road, and went to
war. He was twenty-two and a cryptopgraher of genius. In Between
Silk and Cyanide, his critically acclaimed account of his time in
SOE, Marks tells how he revolutionised the code-making techniques
of the Allies, trained some of the most famous agents dropped into
France including Violette Szabo and 'the White Rabbit', and why he
wrote haunting verse including his 'The Life that I have' poem. He
reveals for the first time the disastrous dimensions of the code
war between SOE and the Germans in Holland; how the Germans were
fooled into thinking a Secret Army was operating in the Fatherland
itself, and how and why he broke General de Gaulle's secret code.
Both thrilling and poignant, Marks's book is truly one of the last
great Second World War memoirs.
The quantity of journalism produced during World War I was unlike
anything the then-budding mass media had ever seen. Correspondents
at the front were dispatching voluminous reports on a daily basis,
and though much of it was subject to censorship, it all eventually
became available. It remains the most extraordinary firsthand look
at the war that we have. Published immediately after the cessation
of hostilities and compiled from those original journalistic
sources-American, British, French, German, and others-this is an
astonishing contemporary perspective on the Great War. This replica
of the first 1919 edition includes all the original maps, photos,
and illustrations, lending an even greater immediacy to readers a
century later. Volume I covers June through October 1914, from the
causes of the war-including how the local matter of the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria grew into a
global conflagration and the various declarations of war among the
world powers-through the early battles on the Western Front.
American journalist and historian FRANCIS WHITING HALSEY
(1851-1919) was literary editor of The New York Times from 1892
through 1896. He wrote and lectured extensively on history; his
works include, as editor, the two-volume Great Epochs in American
History Described by Famous Writers, From Columbus to Roosevelt
(1912), and, as writer, the 10-volume Seeing Europe with Famous
Authors (1914).
During the Iraq War, thousands of young Baghdadis worked as
interpreters for US troops, becoming the front line of the
so-called War on Terror. Deployed by the military as linguistic as
well as cultural interpreters-translating the ""human terrain"" of
Iraq-members of this network urgently honed identification
strategies amid suspicion from US forces, fellow Iraqis, and, not
least of all, one another. In Interpreters of Occupation, Campbell
traces the experiences of twelve individuals from their young
adulthood as members of the Ba'thist generation, to their work as
interpreters, through their navigation of the US immigration
pipeline, and finally to their resettlement in the United States.
Throughout, Campbell considers how these men and women grappled
with issues of belonging and betrayal, both on the battlefield in
Iraq and in the US-based diaspora. A nuanced and richly detailed
ethnography, Interpreters of Occupation gives voice to a generation
of US allies through their diverse and vividly rendered life
histories. In the face of what some considered a national betrayal
in Iraq and their experiences of otherness within the United
States, interpreters negotiate what it means to belong to a
diasporic community in flux.
The First Crusade was arguably one of the most significant events
of the Middle Ages. It was the only event to generate its own epic
cycle, the Old French Crusade Cycle. The central trilogy at the
heart of the Cycle describes the Crusade from its beginnings to the
climactic battle of Ascalon, comprising the Chanson d'Antioche, the
Chanson des Chetifs and the Chanson de Jerusalem. This translation
of the Chetifs and the Jerusalem accompanies and completes the
translation of the Antioche and makes the trilogy available to
English readers in its entirety for the first time. The value of
the trilogy lies above all in the insight it gives us to medieval
perceptions of the Crusade. The events are portrayed as part of a
divine plan where even outcasts and captives can achieve salvation
through Crusade. This in turn underlies the value of the Cycle as a
recruiting and propaganda tool. The trilogy gives a window onto the
chivalric preoccupations of thirteenth-century France, exploring
concerns about status, heroism and defeat. It portrays the material
realities of the era in vivid detail: the minutiae of combat,
smoke-filled halls, feasts, prisons and more. And the two newly
translated poems are highly entertaining as well, featuring a
lubricious Saracen lady not in the first flush of youth, a dragon
inhabited by a devil, marauding monkeys, miracles and much more.
The historian will find little new about the Crusade itself, but
abundant material on how it was perceived, portrayed and performed.
The translation is accompanied by an introduction examining the
origins of the two poems and their wider place in the cycle. It is
supported by extensive footnotes, a comprehensive index of names
and places and translations of the main variants.
Investigative reporter Patrick J. Sloyan, a former member of the
White House Press Corps, revisits the last years of John F.
Kennedy's presidency, his fateful involvement with Diem's
assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Civil Rights
Movement. Using recently released White House tape recordings and
interviews with key inside players, The Politics of Deception
reveals: The Politics of Deception is a fresh and revealing look at
an iconic president and the way he attempted to manage public
opinion and forge his legacy, sure to appeal to both history buffs
and those who were alive during his presidency.
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