A TRUE CELEBRATION OF HEROISM AND BRAVERY

From America's preeminent military historian, Stephen E. Ambrose, comes a brilliant telling of World War II in Europe, from D-Day, June 6, 1944, to the end, eleven months later, on May 7, 1945. The author himself drew this authoritative narrative account from his five acclaimed books about that conflict, to yield what has been called "the best single-volume history of the war that most of us will ever read."

The story of the African-American crew of the USS Mason that made history in World War II when they escorted six convoys across the Atlantic.

In the early morning hours of May 18, 1944 the Russian army, under orders from Stalin, deported the entire Crimean Tatar population from their historical homeland. Given only fifteen minutes to gather their belongings, they were herded into cattle cars bound for Soviet Central Asia. Although the official Soviet record was cleansed of this affair and the name of their ethnic group was erased from all records and official documents, Crimean Tatars did not assimilate with other groups or disappear. This is an ethnographic study of the negotiation of social memory and the role this had in the growth of a national repatriation movement among the Crimean Tatars. It examines the recollections of the Crimean Tatars, the techniques by which they are produced and transmitted and the formation of a remarkably uniform social memory in light of their dispersion throughout Central Asia. Through the lens of social memory, the book covers not only the deportation and life in the diaspora but the process by which the children and grandchildren of the deportees returned and anchored themselves in the Crimean Peninsula, a place they had never visited.

A collection of articles which offer an insight into the opinions and attitudes of the German population, the East Europeans and the Poles towards Jews during the period of Nazi persecution. Historians are able to make important distinctions between various periods, groups and regions. At the close of this study is a selection of articles that deal with support for the Jews.

A collection of articles which offer an insight into the opinions and attitudes of the German population, the East Europeans and the Poles towards Jews during the period of Nazi persecution. Historians are able to make important distinctions between various periods, groups and regions. At the close of this study is a selection of articles that deal with support for the Jews.

The most complete portrait ever drawn of the complex emotional connection between two of history’s towering leaders

Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of “the Greatest Generation.” In Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II. It was a crucial friendship, and a unique one—a president and a prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together (113 days during the war) and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid cocktails, cigarettes, and cigars, they met, often secretly, in places as far-flung as Washington, Hyde Park, Casablanca, and Teheran, talking to each other of war, politics, the burden of command, their health, their wives, and their children.

Born in the nineteenth century and molders of the twentieth and twenty-first, Roosevelt and Churchill had much in common. Sons of the elite, students of history, politicians of the first rank, they savored power. In their own time both men were underestimated, dismissed as arrogant, and faced skeptics and haters in their own nations—yet both magnificently rose to the central challenges of the twentieth century. Theirs was a kind of love story, with an emotional Churchill courting an elusive Roosevelt. The British prime minister, who rallied his nation in its darkest hour, standing alone against Adolf Hitler, was always somewhat insecure about his place in FDR’s affections—which was the way Roosevelt wanted it. A man of secrets, FDR liked to keep people off balance, including his wife, Eleanor, his White House aides—and Winston Churchill.

Confronting tyranny and terror, Roosevelt and Churchill built a victorious alliance amid cataclysmic events and occasionally conflicting interests. Franklin and Winston is also the story of their marriages and their families, two clans caught up in the most sweeping global conflict in history.

Meacham’s new sources—including unpublished letters of FDR’s great secret love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman, and interviews with the few surviving people who were in FDR and Churchill’s joint company—shed fresh light on the characters of both men as he engagingly chronicles the hours in which they decided the course of the struggle.

Hitler brought them together; later in the war, they drifted apart, but even in the autumn of their alliance, the pull of affection was always there. Charting the personal drama behind the discussions of strategy and statecraft, Meacham has written the definitive account of the most remarkable friendship of the modern age.

In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, a small detachment of British airborne troops stormed the German defense forces and paved the way for the Allied invasion of Europe. Pegasus Bridge was the first engagement of D-Day, the turning point of World War II. This gripping account of it by acclaimed author Stephen Ambrose brings to life a daring mission so crucial that, had it been unsuccessful, the entire Normandy invasion might have failed. Ambrose traces each step of the preparations over many months to the minute-by-minute excitement of the hand-to-hand confrontations on the bridge. This is a story of heroism and cowardice, kindness and brutality -- the stuff of all great adventures.

When World War II broke out in Europe, the American army had no specialized division of mountain soldiers. But in the winter of 1939-40, after a tiny band of Finnish mountain troops brought the invading Soviet army to its knees, an amateur skier named Charles Minot "Minnie" Dole convinced the United States Army to let him recruit an extraordinary assortment of European expatriates, wealthy ski bums, mountaineers, and thrill-seekers and form them into a unique band of Alpine soldiers. These men endured nearly three years of grueling training in the Colorado Rockies and in the process set new standards for both soldiering and mountaineering. The newly forged 10th Mountain Division finally faced combat in the winter of 1945, in Italy's Apennine Mountains, against the seemingly unbreakable German fortifications north of the Gothic Line. There, they planned and executed what is still regarded as the most daring series of nighttime mountain attacks in U.S. military history, taking Mount Belvedere and the sheer, treacherous face of Riva Ridge to smash the linchpin of the German army's lines.
Drawing on unique cooperation from veterans of the 10th Mountain Division and a vast archive of unpublished letters and documents, The Last Ridge is written with enormous warmth, energy, and honesty. This is one of the most captivating stories of World War II, a blend of Band of Brothers and Into Thin Air. It is a story of young men asked to do the impossible, and succeeding.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Historic WWII reproduction map. A detailed map of Normandy at a scale of 1:200,000 showing the main sites of the summer 1944 battle. This map is an antique-feeling reproduction of the map originally published by Michelin in 1947. The main map includes place names and features special icons denoting battle dates and parachute drops, as well as an inset showing the broader movements of the military forces.

Cultural Writing. Asian-American Studies. Shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans were uprooted from their homes and communitites and banished to remote internment camps. This collection of haunting reminiscences, letters, stories, poems, and graphic art gives voice to the range of powerful emotions with which these victims of wartime hysteria struggled. ONLY WHAT WE COULD CARRY gathers together the voices of internement -- private, personal stories that could have been lost, but will now be heard and felt. It's a if we have a seat at a family dinner, listening to stories passed down from one generation to another, feeling the pian and the spirit of hope -- David Mas Masumoto. Edited by Lawson Fusao Inada, with a preface by Patricia Wakida and an afterword by William Hohri.

In 1943, on orders from the German Air Ministry, young physicist Peter P. Wegener left the Russian front and reported to the Baltic village of Peenemunde. His assignment was to work at the supersonic wind tunnels of the rocket laboratories of the German Army. Here Wernher von Braun led a team that developed the V-2, the world's first large rocket-powered guided missile, and laid much of the groundwork for postwar rocket development.;In this book, Wegener recounts his experiences during Hitler's time, World War II, and his years at Peenemunde. He tells how he was working one night in August 1943 when the allies bombed the laboratories, but left the wind tunnels undamaged. The tunnels were moved to Bavaria, and Wegener was ordered to follow in 1944. After the war, the tunnels were moved again - this time to the United States, accompanied by the author and other German scientists. Shortly before the end of the war, Wegener visited Germany's underground V-2 production plant to retrieve archival material on aerodynamics that had been stored in caves for safekeeping.;He described the appalling history of the concentration camps where SS guards watched over inmates who toiled underground in inhuman conditions and often did not survive. A photo essay enhances this memoir.

Set in the tumultuous moments of 1944-45 Budapest, this work discusses the operations of the Budapest Relief and Rescue Committee. Drawing out the contradictions and complexities of the mass deportations of Hungarian Jews during the final phase of World War II, Szita suggests that in the Hungarian context, a commerce in lives ensued, where prominent Zionists like Dr. Rezso Kasztner negotiated with the higher echelons of the SS, trying to garner the freedom of Hungarian Jews. Szita's portrait of the controversial Kasztner is a more sympathetic rendition of a powerful Zionist leader who was later assassinated in Israel for his dealings with Nazi leaders. Szita reveals a story of interweaving personalities and conflicts during arguably the most tragic moment in European history. The author's extensive research is a tremendous contribution to a field of study that has been much ignored by scholarship-the Hungarian holocaust and the trade in human lives.

In this riveting account, historian Stephen Ambrose continues where he left off in his #1 bestseller D-Day. Ambrose again follows the individual characters of this noble, brutal, and tragic war, from the high command down to the ordinary soldier, drawing on hundreds of interviews to re-create the war experience with startling clarity and immediacy. From the hedgerows of Normandy to the overrunning of Germany, Ambrose tells the real story of World War II from the perspective of the men and women who fought it.

Magic was the name given to the American decoding of the secret Japanese codes used in diplomatic communications before and during the Pacific War of 1941-45. Presenting a Japanese perspective, this work argues that, in the final phase of the eight months of US-Japan talks leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor, serious mistranslations in Magic were a significant factor in the cumulative effect of mutual misunderstandings which grew between the two sides over a longer period.

Stephen E. Ambrose draws from more than 1,400 interviews with American, British, Canadian, French, and German veterans to create the preeminent chronicle of the most important day in the twentieth century. Ambrose reveals how the original plans for the invasion were abandoned, and how ordinary soldiers and officers acted on their own initiative.

D-Day is above all the epic story of men at the most demanding moment of their existence, when the horrors, complexities, and triumphs of life are laid bare. Ambrose portrays the faces of courage and heroism, fear and determination -- what Eisenhower called "the fury of an aroused democracy" -- that shaped the victory of the citizen soldiers whom Hitler had disparaged.

Critical acclaim for William B. Breuer

"A first-class historian."–Wall Street Journal

For Top Tales of World War II

"As evidenced time and again by the prolific Breuer, WWII continues to be a source of absorbing espionage tales. . . . This is a book for rainy days and long solitary nights by the fire. If there were a genre for cozy nonfiction, this would be the template."–Publishers Weekly

"A perfect book for the curious and adventure readers and those who love exotic tales and especially history buffs who will be surprised at what they didn’t know. Recommended for nearly everyone."–Kirkus Reviews

For Secret Weapons of World War II

"Rip-roaring tales . . . a delightful addition to the niche that Breuer has so successfully carved out."–Publishers Weekly

Historians and reviewers worldwide have hailed Antony Beevor's magisterial Stalingrad as the definitive account of World War II's most harrowing battle. In August 1942, Hitler's huge Sixth Army reached the city that bore Stalin's name. In the five month siege that followed, the Russians fought to hold Stalingrad at any cost, then caught their Nazi enemy in an astonishing reversal. As never before, Stalingrad conveys the experience of soldiers on both sides as they fought in inhuman conditions, and of civilians trapped on an urban battlefield. Antony Beevor has interviewed survivors and discovered completely new material in a wide range of German and Soviet archives, including reports of prisoner interrogations, desertions, and executions. The battle of Stalingrad was the psychological turning point of World War II; as Beevor makes clear, it also changed the face of modern warfare. As a story of cruelty, courage, and human suffering, Stalingrad is unprecedented and unforgettable.

El Alamein was the World War II land battle Britain had to win. By the summer of 1942 Rommel's German forces were threatening to sweep through the Western Desert and drive on to the Suez Canal, and Britain was in urgent need of military victory. Then, in October, after 12 days of attritional tank battle and artillery bombardment, Montgomery's Eighth Army, with Australians and New Zealanders playing crucial roles in a genuinely international Allied fighting force, broke through the German and Italian lines at El Alamein. It was a turning-point in the war after which, in Churchill's words, "we never had a defeat". Stephen Bungay's book is as much at home analysing the crucial logistics of keeping desert armies supplied with petrol and tank parts as it is reappraising the combat strategies of Montgomery and Rommel, and ranges widely from the domestic political pressures on Churchill to the aerial siege of Malta, key to the control of the Mediterranean. And in a chapter on "The Soldier's War", Bungay graphically evokes the phantasmagoric blur of thunderous cannonade and tormenting heat that was the lot of the individual men who actually fought and died in the desert.

When Chief Gunner Hashiro Hayashi took dead aim on British Columbia's Estevan Point Lighthouse and wireless station on a June morning in 1942, the realities of war had come to North America. Sixty years later, the fascinating events of that era and their impact on both the Canadian and American psyches remain unknown to much of the world.After conducting decades of research and interviews with veterans on both sides of the conflict, author Brendan Coyle now reveals the campaign that included three attacks on British Columbia, an air raid on Portland, Oregon, and the harsh battles fought in Alaska. From the foreword: "Brendan Coyle has done a magnificent job in this comprehensive review of the war on the West Coast. No other single volume has so neatly tied together the myriad stories of how the war affected people in British Columbia, California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska,"-Jim Delgado, Executive DirectorVancouver Maritime Museu

This is the most comprehensive account of the Air Forces in Malta during Word War II. Malta was a vital base from which Allied aircraft could inflict serious damage on the crucial Axis supply route to Rommel in North Africa. In order to secure that route, the might of the Luftwaffe and Italian Air Forces were thrown together against the tiny island, affecting not just the defending servicemen and women, but the entire population. This book vividly describes how the fighters, bombers, torpedo, and reconnaissance aircraft of the RAF and FAA took the fight to the enemy and triumphantly succeeded with every odd stacked against them.

From Pearl Harbor to D-Day and beyond and all-star examination of the conflict that shaped the modern world from World War II Magazine.

It was a war that defined a generation of the world, a war that saw America transform itself from an inward-looking isolationist nation to an arsenal of democracy whose reach spanned the globe. The World War II Reader presents in one extraordinary book the thrilling story of the greatest generation in its finest hour in the best essays from the world's most distinguished historians compiled by World War II Magazine, the only magazine that brings the history and drama of the 20th Century's defing conflict to life.

The World War II Reader includes insightful essays on the larger-than-life leaders who made life-and-death decisions that shaped grand strategy and crucial battles. In addition, this book cuts through the fog of war and presents though-provoking revelations of little known events that had far-reaching consequences, including the Niihau Incident, that tragically affected the fate of Japanese-Americans in Hawaii and mainland America.

The World War II Reader is a must-have for every history enthusiast, and for the person serching for the one book that not just tells the story of America's greatest conflict, but makes World War II come vividly alive as if it happened yesterday.

This book tells the story of German nurses who, directly or indirectly, participated in the Nazis' "euthanasia" measures against patients with mental and physical disabilities, measures that claimed well over 100,000 victims from 1939 to 1945. How could men and women who were trained to care for their patients come to kill or assist in murder or mistreatment? This is the central question pursued by Bronwyn McFarland-Icke as she details the lives of nurses from the beginning of the Weimar Republic through the years of National Socialist rule. Rather than examine what the Party did or did not order, she looks into the hearts and minds of people whose complicity in murder is not easily explained with reference to ideological enthusiasm. Her book is a micro-history in which many of the most important ethical, social, and cultural issues at the core of Nazi genocide can be addressed from a fresh perspective.

McFarland-Icke offers gripping descriptions of the conditions and practices associated with psychiatric nursing during these years by mining such sources as nursing guides, personnel records, and postwar trial testimony. Nurses were expected to be conscientious and friendly caretakers despite job stress, low morale, and Nazi propaganda about patients' having "lives unworthy of living." While some managed to cope with this situation, others became abusive. Asylum administrators meanwhile encouraged nurses to perform with as little disruption and personal commentary as possible. So how did nurses react when ordered to participate in, or tolerate, the murder of their patients? Records suggest that some had no conflicts of conscience; others did as they were told with regret; and a few refused. The remarkable accounts of these nurses enable the author to re-create the drama taking place while sharpening her argument concerning the ability and the willingness to choose.

The Complete, True, and Initially-Suppressed Story of General George Patton's Boldest and Bloodiest Mission in World War II

On a dark night in March 1945, Task Force Baum dashed through a break in the German Army lines created by troops of the U.S. Third Army and embarked on one of the most dramatic and dangerous rescue missions of World War II. Their target, the Allied POW camp 60 miles behind enemy lines near the German town of Hammelburg. Unknown to all but one member of the 300 men in Task Force Baum was the real reason for the rescue: the POW camp at Hammelburg contained Lieutenant Colonel John Waters -- General Patton's son-in-law! This is the gripping, true, and long-suppressed full story of what exactly happened in the desperate drive to Hammelburg.