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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900 > Second World War
Drawing together a wide variety of primary source documents from
across the United States, Europe, and Asia, this book illuminates
the events and experiences of World War II-the most devastating war
in human history. World War II was the most destructive and
disruptive war ever, a global conflict that in one way or another
affected the lives of people across the planet. Voices of World War
II: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life coalesces a wide variety of
primary source documents drawn from across the United States,
Europe, and Asia. Supplemented by interpretive material that
enables readers to analyze them, assess their impact and
significance, and place them in context to comparable situations
today, the documents provide rare insights into World War II.
Expert commentaries and additional information on these texts
enable a greater understanding of the background to these
documents, providing valuable training in learning to interpret,
assess, and evaluate historical sources. Intended primarily for
upper-level high school and undergraduate-level history students,
general readers will also appreciate the variegated array of
primary material from World War II, which depicts numerous aspects
of the conflict, often in extremely personal terms. A chronology
lists all major events of World War II A bibliography provides an
up-do-date selection of basic books, Internet sources, and movies
and television series on World War II A glossary defines key World
War II terms and phrases Extensive commentary, contextual
information, and guiding questions accompany each document
Paldiel highlights the role of non-Jews in extending aid and
assistance to Jews inside Nazi-dominated Europe. From the
testimonies and files housed at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust martyrs
and heroes memorial in Jerusalem, Paldiel presents dozens of
stories of the circumstances and odds facing Jews and those who
would help them. Includes an eight-page photo insert.
The incredible wartime saga of the only American submariners to
survive the sinking of their ship and evade enemy capture in WWII
On the night of August 13, 1944, the U.S. submarine Flier struck a
mine in the Sulu Sea in the southern Philippines as it steamed
along the surface. All but fifteen of the more than eighty-strong
crew went down with the vessel. Of those left floating in the dark,
eight survived by swimming for seventeen hours before washing
ashore on an uninhabited island. The story of the Flier and its
eight survivors is wholly unique in the annals of U.S. military
history. Eight Survived tells the gripping story of the doomed
submarine and its crew from its first patrol, during which it sank
several enemy ships, to the explosion in the Sulu Sea. Drawing on
interviews with the survivors and on a visit to the jungle where
they washed ashore-where a cast of fascinating characters helped
the U.S. sailors evade the Japanese-Douglas Campbell fully captures
the combination of extraordinary courage and luck that marked one
of the most heroic episodes of World War II.
Jay A. Stout breaks new ground in World War II history with this
gripping account of one of the war's most highly decorated American
fighter groups. Stout combines the storytelling gifts and careful
research for a seasoned historian with the combat experience of a
former fighter pilot to tell the remarkable story of the 352nd
Fighter Group. This isn't just the story of a single fighter group;
it's the story of how the United States won the air war over
Europe.
In Nine Wartime Lives, James Hinton uses diaries kept by nine
'ordinary' people in wartime Britain to re-evaluate the social
history of the Second World War, and to reflect on the
twentieth-century making of the modern self.
These diaries were written by some of the unusually self-reflective
and public-spirited people who agreed to write intimate journals
about their daily activity for the social research organization,
Mass Observation. One of the nine diarists discussed is Nella Last,
whose published diaries have been a source of delight and
fascination for many thousands of readers. Alongside her there are
chapters on eight other Mass Observers, each in their own way as
vivid, interesting, and surprising as Nella herself.
A central insight underpins the book: in seeking to make the best
of our own lives, each of us makes selective use of the resources
of our shared culture in a unique way; and, in so doing, we
contribute, however modestly, to molecular processes of historical
change. Placing individuals at the center of his analysis, James
Hinton probes the impact of war on attitudes to citizenship, the
changing relationships between men and women, and the search for
meanings in life that could transcend the wartime context of
limitless violence.
Consistently sensitive, thoughtful and often moving, this
beautifully written book resists nostalgic contrasts between the
presumed dutiful citizenship of wartime Britain and contemporary
anti-social individualism, pointing instead to longer run processes
of change rooted as much in struggles for personal autonomy in the
private sphere as in the politics of active citizenship in public
life.
Few historical events have resonated as much in modern British
culture as the Second World War. It has left a rich legacy in a
range of media that continue to attract a wide audience: film, TV
and radio, photography and the visual arts, journalism and
propaganda, architecture, museums, music and literature. The
enduring presence of the war in the public world is echoed in its
ongoing centrality in many personal and family memories, with
stories of the Second World War being recounted through the
generations. This collection brings together recent historical work
on the cultural memory of the war, examining its presence in family
stories, in popular and material culture and in acts of
commemoration in Britain between 1945 and the present.
The two decades between the first and second world wars saw the
emergence of nuclear physics as the dominant field of experimental
and theoretical physics, owing to the work of an international cast
of gifted physicists. Prominent among them were Ernest Rutherford,
George Gamow, the husband and wife team of Frederic and Irene
Joliot-Curie, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, Gregory Breit and
Eugene Wigner, Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch, the brash
Ernest Lawrence, the prodigious Enrico Fermi, and the incomparable
Niels Bohr. Their experimental and theoretical work arose from a
quest to understand nuclear phenomena; it was not motivated by a
desire to find a practical application for nuclear energy. In this
sense, these physicists lived in an 'Age of Innocence'. They did
not, however, live in isolation. Their research reflected their
idiosyncratic personalities; it was shaped by the physical and
intellectual environments of the countries and institutions in
which they worked. It was also buffeted by the political upheavals
after the Great War: the punitive postwar treaties, the runaway
inflation in Germany and Austria, the Great Depression, and the
intellectual migration from Germany and later from Austria and
Italy. Their pioneering experimental and theoretical achievements
in the interwar period therefore are set within their personal,
institutional, and political contexts. Both domains and their
mutual influences are conveyed by quotations from autobiographies,
biographies, recollections, interviews, correspondence, and other
writings of physicists and historians.
In early 1942, following a string of successes, the Japanese seized
nearly 10,000 American soldiers, among them Pvt. Oscar Smith, on
Manila Bay and marched them to a near-certain death through Bataan.
A few days later they put Smith to work burying the stacked bodies
of his own men. Robert Salmon had already served his time in the
military during World War I, fighting for his native England. He
was teaching biochemistry to Chinese students in Shanghai when the
Japanese arrested him in 1943 and condemned him, with thousands of
confused Western missionaries, to spend the remainder of World War
II in an abandoned tobacco factory. German soldiers, marching
toward what would be known as the Battle of the Bulge, captured Ed
Uzemack, a Chicago journalist turned soldier, at an abandoned
Luxembourg inn. By cattle car they sent him to a crowded,
wind-swept POW camp, once the final internment spot for Jewish
concentration camp victims. In 1945 Hermann Pfengle, just fifteen
years old, had been released from German mil
What form does the dialogue about the family during the Nazi period
take in the families of those persecuted by the Nazi regime and of
Nazi perpertrators and accomplices? What impact does the past of
the first generation, and their own way of dealing with it, have on
the lives of their descendants? What are the structural differences
between the dialogue about the Holocaust in families of
perpetrators and those of the victims? This text examines these
questions on the basis of selected case studies. It presents five
families of survivors from Germany and Israel whose experiences of
persecution and family histories after the liberation differ
greatly. Two case studies of non-Jewish German families whose
grandparents' generation are suspected of having perpretrated Nazi
crimes illustrate the mechanisms operating in these families -
those of passing the guilt on to the victims and creating the myth
of being victims themselves - and give a sense of the psychological
consequences these mechanisms have for the generations of their
children and grandchildren.
In October 1946, Colonel Presley Rixey arrived by destroyer at
Chichi Jima to repatriate 22,000 Japanese who had been bypassed
during the war in the Pacific. While waiting for a Marine battalion
to arrive, the colonel met daily with a Japanese commission
assigned to assist him. When asked what had happened to American
prisoners on the island, the Japanese hatched a story to hide the
atrocities that they had committed. In truth, the downed flyers had
been captured, executed, and eaten by certain senior Japanese
officers. This is the story of the investigation, the cover-up, and
the last hours of those Americans who disappeared into war's
wilderness and whose remains were distributed to the cooking
galleys of Chichi Jima. Rixey's suspicion of a cover-up was later
substantiated by a group of Americans returning from Japan who had
lived on Chichi Jima for generations. It would take five months of
gathering testimony to uncover all the details. Thirty war
criminals were eventually tried at Guam in 1947, five of whom met
their fate on the gallows.
An omnibus edition of two collections of deeply eccentric
autobiographical essays by Lord Fisher, the father of the
Dreadnought and of the battle cruiser.
From the preface to the first volume, Memories:
Readers of this book will quickly observe that Admiral of the
Fleet Lord Fisher has small faith in the printed word; and those
who have enjoyed the privilege of having " his fist shaken in their
faces" will readily admit that the printed word, though faithfully
taken down from his dictation, must lack a large measure of the
power-the " aroma," as he calls it-which his personality lends to
his spoken word.
Had Lord Fisher been allowed his own way, there would have been
no Book. Not for the first time in his career, the need of serving
his country and his country's Navy has over-ridden his personal
feeling. These "Memories," therefore, must be regarded as a
compromise ("the beastliest word in the English language"-see "The
Times" of September gth, 1919) between the No-Book of Lord Fisher's
inclination and the orderly, complete Autobiography which the
public wishes to possess.
The book consists in the main of the author's ipsissima verba,
dictated during the month of September, 1919. One or two chapters
have been put together from fugitive writings which Lord Fisher had
collected and printed (in noble and eloquently various type) as a
gift to his friends after his death. The discreeter passages of the
letters which he wrote to Lord Esher between 1903 and 1912
illustrate some portions of the life's work which-caring little for
the past and much for the future, much for the idea and little for
the fact-Lord Fisher has successfully declined to describe in his
own words.
Swastika over the Acropolis is a new, multi-national account which
provides a new and compelling interpretation of the Greek campaign
of 1941, and its place in the history of World War II. It overturns
many previously accepted English-language assumptions about the
fighting in Greece in April 1941 - including, for example, the
impact usually ascribed to the Luftwaffe, German armour and the
conduct of the Greek Army Further, Swastika over the Acropolis
demonstrates that this last complete strategic victory by Nazi
Germany in World War II is set against a British-Dominion campaign
mounted as a withdrawal, not an attempt to 'save' Greece from
invasion and occupation. At the same time, on the German side, the
campaign revealed serious and systemic weaknesses in the planning
and the conduct of large-scale operations that would play a
significant role in the regime's later defeats.
Shaping the minds of the future generation was pivotal to the Nazi
regime in order to ensure the continuing success of the Third
Reich. Through the curriculum, the elite schools and youth groups,
the Third Reich waged a war for the minds of the young. Hitler
understood the importance of education in creating self-identity,
inculcating national pride, promoting 'racial purity' and building
loyalty. Education in Nazi Germany examines how Nazism took shape
in the classroom via school textbook policy, physical education and
lessons on Nationalist Socialist heroes and anti-Semitism. Offering
a compelling new analysis of Nazi educational policy, this book
brings to the forefront an often-overlooked aspect of the Third
Reich.
In this volume, the first English-language account of the
underground Jewish resistance in Romania, I. C. Butnaru examines
the efforts that resulted in some 300,000 Romanian Jews surviving
the Holocaust. After detailing the rise of the fascist Iron Guards
and the consequences of German domination, Butnaru describes the
organization of the Jewish resistance movement, its various
contacts within the government, and its activities. While
emphasizing the role played by Zionist youth organizations which
smuggled Jews from Europe and arranged illegal emigration, Butnaru
also describes the role of Jewish parachutists from Palestine, the
links between the resistance and the key international Jewish
organizations, and even the links with the Gestapo. Waiting for
Jerusalem is the most comprehensive study of the efforts to save
the Jewish population of Romania, and, as such, will be of
considerable use to scholars and students of the Holocaust and
Eastern European Studies.
Private Dan Jones was captured by Nazi sergeants in a smoke-filled
forest in Holland. He and a small group of American prisoners,
mostly paratroopers from the 101st and 82nd Airborne, were taken to
the squalid barn loft that was to be their home for the rest of the
war. In the Work Commando 311/I, Nazis forced them to work as slave
laborers, repairing and maintaining German railroads that had been
damaged by Allied bombs. The ill, weary prisoners, once proud
members of elite U.S. fighting units, suffered unaccustomed
disgrace. Bickering over the meager food supply added to their
anxious depression and hopelessness. Tired of the men's morose
outlook and individualistic ways, Herbert Marlowe, their unofficial
leader, held a meeting one evening in the barn loft. Marlow
explained that their infighting and irritability were not only
keeping their spirits low by also amusing the Germans. He
encouraged the prisoners to retaliate against their captors in
careful, nonthreatening ways. Jones suggested that they work s
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