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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Military history
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A riveting account of
a forgotten holocaust: the slaughter of over one hundred thousand
Ukrainian Jews in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. In the
Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining
moment of the twentieth century. 'Exhaustive, clearly written,
deeply researched' - The Times 'A meticulous, original and deeply
affecting historical account' - Philippe Sands, author of East West
Street Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were
murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed
the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of
separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors
with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah
scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely
forgotten today, these pogroms - ethnic riots - dominated headlines
and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that
six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty
years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon
long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly
discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders,
acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how
this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the
Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers,
and governmental officials, he explains how so many different
groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was
an acceptable response to their various problems.
This book chronicles the lives and deaths of courageous Canadians.
It also tells the inspiring story of how the citizens of Nelson of
all ages, with help from surrounding communities, marshalled all
their resources and devoted their civic life for six long years to
help make victory possible. Their efforts prompted some to call
Nelson "The Most Patriotic Town in B.C." And, Nelsons story
highlights an important chapter of Canadian history -- the
invaluable contribution to the Allied war effort made by countless
small Canadian communities across the country.
In die vierde deel van die reeks Imperiale somer word aan Marabastad, die separatistiese kerke, die opkoms van die Afrikaners in die naoorlogsjare, die emigrasie van blankes na Oos-Afrika ná die oorlog, en die veldtog ten behoewe van die Indiërbevolking onder leiding van Gandhi aandag gegee. Anekdotes en kameebeskrywings kleur die vertelling in.
Dié deel lewer 'n belangrike bydrae tot 'n voorheen minder bekende tydperk in die Suid-Afrikaanse geskiedenis en sal 'n wye leespubliek en nie net vakkundiges nie boei.
An in-depth look at the unique actions of the newly formed state of
West Virginia during the Civil War While the taking of hostages by
both the Union and the Confederacy was common during the Civil War,
it was unique for an individual state government to engage in this
practice. The Governor's Pawns examines the history that led to the
taking of political prisoners in western Virginia, the
implementation of a hostage law by Virginia's pro-Union government
in 1863, and the adoption of that law by the newly recognized state
of West Virginia. The roots of state hostage-taking took hold prior
to the Civil War. Sectional politics between eastern and western
Virginia and their local communities, as well as long-standing
family rivalries, resulted in the extreme actions of secession and
war. Randall Gooden uses genealogical sources to tell the
fascinating stories of individuals swept up in the turmoil,
including hostages and their captors, freedmen, and government and
military officials. Gooden emphasizes the personal nature of
civilian arrests and hostage-taking and describes the impact on
communities and the families left scarred by this practice. The
Governor's Pawns takes readers into the city streets, state and
national capitol buildings, army camps, jails and military prisons,
hospitals, and graveyards that accompanied the tit-for-tat style of
pointedly personal warfare.
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The Survivor
(Hardcover)
Josef Lewkowicz, Michael Calvin
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R646
R533
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One of the last great untold stories of the Holocaust, The Survivor
is an astonishing account of one man's unbreakable spirit,
unshakeable faith, and extraordinary courage in the face of evil.
At only 16 years old, Josef Lewkowicz became a number, prisoner
85314. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, he and his father
were separated from their family and herded to the Krakow-Plaszow
concentration camp. Forced to carry out hard labour in brutal
conditions, and to live under the constant threat of extreme
violence and sudden death, before the war was over Josef would
witness the unique horrors of six of the most notorious Nazi
concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Ebensee.
From salt mines to forced marches, summary executions to Amstetten,
where prisoners were used as human shields in Allied bombing, Josef
lived under the spectre of death for many years. When he was
liberated from Ebensee at the end of the war, conditions were
amongst the worst witnessed by allied forces. With his freedom,
Josef returned home to find that he was the only one left alive in
an extended family of 150. Compelled by the need to do something to
avenge that loss, he joined the Jewish police while still in a
displaced persons' camp, and was recruited as an intelligence
officer for the US Army who gave him a team to search for Nazis in
hiding. Whilst rounding up SS leaders, he played a critical role in
identifying and bringing to justice his greatest tormentor, the
Butcher of Plaszow, Amon Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes in
Schindler's List. He then committed his life to helping the
orphaned children of the Holocaust rebuild their lives. The
Survivor is Josef's extraordinary testimony.
Forest Diplomacy draws students into the colonial frontier, where
Pennsylvania settlers and the Delaware Indians (or Lenape) are
engaged in a vicious and destructive war. Using sources-including
previous treaties, firsthand accounts of the war, controversies
over Quaker pacifism, and various Iroquois and Lenape cultural
texts-students engage in a Treaty Council to bring peace back to
the frontier.
In the early days of the Civil War, Richmond was declared the
capital of the Confederacy, and until now, countless stories from
its tenure as the Southern headquarters have remained buried. Mary
E. Walker, a Union doctor and feminist, was once held captive in
the city for refusing to wear proper women's clothing. A coffee
substitute factory exploded under intriguing circumstances. Many
Confederate soldiers, when in the trenches of battle, thumbed
through the pages of Hugo's "Les Miserables." Author Brian Burns
reveals these and many more curious tales of Civil War Richmond.
It has been 100 years since the first airfield was established in
the country town of Yeovil. Since 1915, aircraft have been
designed, manufactured and tested at Westland, including the
Lysander, used to transport British agents to Europe during the
Second World War. In 1948 the company focused solely on helicopters
and its aircraft have been sent all over the world since then, used
in lifesaving with Air Ambulance and Search and Rescue and deployed
in warfare such as Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. To celebrate the
centenary of the UK's only major helicopter manufacturer, David
Gibbings has collated an anthology of writings that retell
Westland's history and its special relationship with Yeovil, which
has rarely been quiet since the first aircraft took off from the
airfield that now lies at its heart.
The evacuation of Kabul in August 2021 will go down in military
history as one of the most unexpected events in modern times. In an
eerie replay of the disastrous British retreat from Kabul in 1842,
coalition troops withdrew from Afghanistan after 20 years of
military campaigning. The subsequent collapse of the Afghan
government and its army shocked the world, as a resurgent Taliban
gathered its forces and swept across the country. Thousands of
Afghans who had worked with the allies were left to the meagre
mercy of the Taliban. As the Taliban went door to door to execute
'collaborators', a small international task force set out on a
daring mission to evacuate as many Afghans and their families as
possible. Drawing on a wide range of first-hand accounts - the
politicians and officers who planned the trans-continental rescue,
the young soldiers who were faced with the unenviable task of
keeping a crowd of thousands of desperate people at bay, former
interpreters and soldiers of the Afghan Special Forces who made it
out - Escape from Kabul is the harrowing true story of Operation
Pitting and the Kabul airlift.
With the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War
looming, this new edition of the Wartime Scrapbook revives memories
of this evocative time in Britain's history. Life on the home front
revolved around rationing, blackouts, and air raid precautions,
bringing out that British spirit - humour coupled with making-do
and determination. Poster propaganda kept the population digging
for victory during the years of the Home Guard, Women's Land Army
and austerity with dried eggs. Drawn from Robert Opie's unrivalled
collection, this new edition of The Wartime Scrapbook profusely
illustrates a unique period in history - the song sheets, magazine
covers, comic postcards, fashion and food, games, propaganda
posters and a wealth of wartime ephemera whose very survival is
remarkable.
The USSR was the only nation to employ women in battle.It has been
written that, in what the Soviet historians called the Great
Patriotic War, between 800,000 and a million women from all over
the USSR took up arms, out of a total 10 million soldiers, sailors
and aviators involved. What's more, 200,000 of them were decorated.
The employment of such a quantity of women combatants by the Soviet
Union was due, also in this case, to several factors: the equality
between men and women sanctioned by communism; the multitude of
paramilitary activities offered free to students and workers
between the two world wars and in practice up until the fall of the
Berlin Wall; an ardent patriotism diffused by omnipresent and
incessant propaganda; the frightening losses incurred by the Soviet
Armed Forces with the German invasion. The women combatants paid a
high price in blood for the victory: many were wounded, remained
invalid, were killed, taken prisoner and tortured by the Germans or
disappeared and never returned home. However always very little is
said about them. Still less has been written on the subject of this
book, the women-snipers, an aspect that was totally exclusive to
the Red Army in the last war. There amounted to be a little less
than two thousand highly skilled markswomen that sowed panic among
the German ranks and that killed (according to some estimates)
20,000 enemy soldiers. In the West very little has been published
on these Red Army sniper women.
**Selected as a Book of the Year by the Spectator and the Daily
Telegraph** 'Fascinating ... carefully researched and beautifully
written' DAVID DIMBLEBY 'Utterly riveting' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
'Robert-Sackville West writes tenderly about death and remembrance'
GERARD DEGROOT, THE TIMES ______________________ By the end of the
First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million
British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed dead, lost
forever under the battlefields of northern France and Flanders. In
The Searchers, Robert Sackville-West brings together the
extraordinary, moving accounts of those who dedicated their lives
to the search for the missing. These stories reveal the remarkable
lengths to which people will go to give meaning to their loss:
Rudyard Kipling's quest for his son's grave; E.M. Forster's
conversations with traumatised soldiers in hospital in Alexandria;
desperate attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead; the
campaign to establish the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior; and the
exhumation and reburial in military cemeteries of hundreds of
thousands of bodies. It was a search that would span a century:
from the department set up to investigate the fate of missing
comrades in the war's aftermath, to the present day, when DNA
profiling continues to aid efforts to recover, identify and honour
these men. As the rest of the country found ways to repair and move
on, countless families were consumed by this mission, undertaking
arduous, often hopeless, journeys to discover what happened to
their husbands, brothers and sons. Giving prominence to the deep,
personal battles of those left behind, The Searchers brings the
legacy of war vividly to life in a testament to the bravery,
compassion and resilience of the human spirit. 'Remarkable' JOHN
CAREY, SUNDAY TIMES 'This is an outstanding book' LITERARY REVIEW
'Deeply moving' DAILY MAIL
Most people are familiar with the use of horses and their
often-heroic actions in the First World War, but what about camels,
monkeys and the mighty elephant? In this wonderfully illustrated
title, learn about how animals were trained and used, the role pets
had to play in the war, and the plight of animals on the farm, down
the mine and in the street. Although animals were used heavily on
the front line and in major battles such as the Somme, they also
had a role to play at home and, indeed, in almost every aspect of
wartime life. From their first use to how animals were treated when
the war ended, and including the involvement of the RSPCA and
Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, this volume contains stories that
will shock, delight and move you.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, AND USA TODAY
BESTSELLER "As exciting as any spy novel" (Daily News, New York),
The Princess Spy follows the hidden history of an ordinary American
girl who became one of the OSS's most daring World War II spies
before marrying into European nobility. Perfect for fans of A Woman
of No Importance and Code Girls. When Aline Griffith was born in a
quiet suburban New York hamlet, no one had any idea that she would
go on to live "a life of glamour and danger that Ingrid Bergman
only played at in Notorious" (Time). As the United States enters
the Second World War, the young college graduate is desperate to
aid in the war effort, but no one is interested in a bright-eyed
young woman whose only career experience is modeling clothes.
Aline's life changes when, at a dinner party, she meets a man named
Frank Ryan and reveals how desperately she wants to do her part for
her country. Within a few weeks, he helps her join the Office of
Strategic Services--forerunner of the CIA. With a code name and
expert training under her belt, she is sent to Spain to be a coder,
but is soon given the additional assignment of infiltrating the
upper echelons of society, mingling with high-ranking officials,
diplomats, and titled Europeans. Against this glamorous backdrop of
galas and dinner parties, she recruits sub-agents and engages in
deep-cover espionage. Even after marrying the Count of Romanones,
one of the wealthiest men in Spain, Aline secretly continues her
covert activities, being given special assignments when abroad that
would benefit from her impeccable pedigree and social connections.
"[A] meticulously researched, beautifully crafted work of
nonfiction that reads like a James Bond thriller" (Bookreporter),
The Princess Spy brings to vivid life the dazzling adventures of a
spirited American woman who risked everything to serve her country.
This narrative history tells the story of the German occupation of
Normandy (1940-44), and the Allied liberation. Following the fall
of France in 1940, Normandy formed part of the Reich's western
border and its history for the next four years. On the coast, vast
defenses were built up, and large numbers of German troops were
stationed throughout the region, all in the midst of the local
population. Much of the story is told in the words of French,
German, and Allied participants, including last letters of executed
hostages and resisters, accounts of everyday life and eyewitness
reports of aerial, naval, and ground combat operations during the
Liberation. When the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944, all
were witness to the greatest amphibious landing in history. This,
then, is the story of the 51-month-nightmare that was Normandy's
war, told while it is still possible to record the personal stories
of survivors, which very soon will not be the case.
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