The last place a German soldier wanted to be in 1944 was the Eastern Front. That summer, Stalin hurled millions of men and thousands of tanks and planes against German forces across a broad front. In a series of massive, devastating battles, the Red Army decimated Hitler's Army Group Center in Belorussia, annihilated Army Group South in the Ukraine, and inflicted crushing casualties while taking Rumania and Hungary. By the time Budapest fell to the Soviets in February 1945, the German Army had been slaughtered--and the Third Reich was in its death throes.

In Music in the Holocaust Shirli Gilbert provides the first large-scale, critical account in English of the role of music amongst communities imprisoned under Nazism. She documents a wide scope of musical activities, ranging from orchestras and chamber groups to choirs, theatres, communal sing-songs, and cabarets, in some of the most important internment centres in Nazi-occupied Europe, including Auschwitz and the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos. Gilbert is also concerned with exploring the ways in which music--particularly the many songs that were preserved--contribute to our broader understanding of the Holocaust and the experiences of its victims. Music in the Holocaust is, at its core, a social history, taking as its focus the lives of individuals and communities imprisoned under Nazism. Music opens a unique window on to the internal world of those communities, offering insight into how they understood, interpreted, and responded to their experiences at the time.

China Ghost is the story of Crew 7, a flight crew attached to VPB-219 VPB-219 was a U.S. Navy bombing squadron in the South Pacific during World Was II. The Navy used long range patrol bombers such as the PB4Y-1, Liberator and the PB4Y-2 Privateer, a Liberator modified for the navy's special missions. These squadrons were based in such places as Guadalcanal, Munda, New Guinea, The Admiralties and The Philippines. The missions were long range patrols into Japanese waters in search of enemy shipping. More important, China Ghost is about the very young boys that were forced into maturity by the dangers and horrors of war before they served life's apprenticeship. It's about their loves, their fears, honor, patriotism and commune with God. The story is compassionate and emotional, a fiction based on actual events that the author and members of his crew and squadron experienced. Beau Rachal, a veteran of a previous tour in the South Pacific, returned to San Diego and reunited with his girlfriend, Frances Maginley. Beau was assigned to a new squadron, VPB-219, were the strength of Crew 7. VPB-219 was based at Clark Field on the island of Luzon in The Philippine Islands. Their missions were into French Indo-China and China. The Japanese targets were plentiful and Crew 7 became known as The China Ghost. It has been said that "wars are started by old men and fought by young men." China Ghost is a tribute to those brave, young warriors that faced the prospect of death each time they climbed into one of those machines.

Bomb disposal was the most technically demanding and dangerous job outside of combat during World War II. Fewer than five thousand men did it in the American armed forces. During the war their activities were shrouded in secrecy, so that the Axis would not know what techniques the Allies were using. When they came home the citizen soldiers and officers who had done the work preferred anonymity to publicity. Furthermore, the units they had served in, often squads of six enlisted men and one officer, had been too small and independent to attract much notice by American chroniclers, official or unofficial, of the biggest armed conflict in history. Captains of Bomb Disposal, 1942-1946 attempts to bring some long-overdue public attention to this small group of neglected heroes. It chronicles two of their two most significant achievements during the World War II era: the contributions of the thirty-three bomb disposal squads of the Ninth Air Force, and the top-secret intelligence mission code named Operation 'Hidden Documents."In 1944 the Ninth Air Force was the most powerful tactical air force the world had ever seen. In the European Theater of Operations (ETO) it controlled more bomb disposal personnel than any other high command. Part I of Captains of Bomb Disposal, 1942-1946 mainly describes training at the Bomb Disposal School at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, and the support thirty-three bomb disposal squads gave the Ninth Air Force. Interwoven in the narrative covering events after D-Day is the wider context in which those squads, and all of the Ninth Air Force, operated, namely, air and ground forces pioneering a large-scale, close partnership which defeated the Germans in northwest Europe. Also discussed is how Ninth Air Force bomb disposal squads helped handle the problem after V-E Day of up to two million tons of surplus explosive ordnance in the theater.Most of the sources for Part I on bomb disposal operations are unpublished unit histories, Ninth and Eighth Air Force ordnance reports, theater-level reports, and related documents at either the National Archives at College Park, Maryland (NACP), or the Air Force Historical Research Agency (AFHRA), at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Part I is organized around, but definitely not limited to, the World War II experiences of Capt. Thomas R. Reece. Now deceased and the author's father, he was one of the four highest-ranking bomb disposal officers in the Ninth Air Force. Some of his official and personal papers are utilized. Background material on the course of the war in the ETO is taken mainly from published official histories, and for the Ninth Air Force, also from unpublished documents at AFHRA.One of the passages in Part I describes how two men in the 80th Bomb Disposal Squad, Sgt. Russell F. McCarthy and T/5 Walter V. Smith, in 1945 won the Soldier's Medal, America's highest military award for bravery in action not against the enemy. They were not the only bomb disposal personnel to win that award during the World War II era. Part II revolves around Capt. Stephen A. Richards, who was commanding officer of the 123rd Bomb Disposal Squad, attached during the war to General Patton's Third Army. Captain Richards and two combat engineers won the award for disarming a cache of booby-trapped documents outside Stechovice, Czechoslovakia in February 1946, as part of Operation 'Hidden Documents." The trio was apprehended by Czechoslovak authorities while the other mission members took the documents to Germany, and was only released after the documents were returned. Meanwhile, a diplomatic crisis was ignited as Czechoslovakia officially protested the American infringement of its sovereignty. Moreover, the Czechoslovak Communist Party used the controversy for propaganda purposes shortly before the national elections of May 1946.Shortly before the trio was released, the operation received fairly extensive publicity, including an article on page two of Th

Drawing from engrossing survivors' accounts, many never before published, "The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943" recounts a heroic yet little-known chapter in Holocaust history. In vivid and moving detail, Barbara Epstein chronicles the history of a Communist-led resistance movement inside the Minsk ghetto, which, through its links to its Belarussian counterpart outside the ghetto and with help from others, enabled thousands of ghetto Jews to flee to the surrounding forests where they joined partisan units fighting the Germans.Telling a story that stands in stark contrast to what transpired across much of Eastern Europe, where Jews found few reliable allies in the face of the Nazi threat, this book captures the texture of life inside and outside the Minsk ghetto, evoking the harsh conditions, the life-threatening situations, and the friendships that helped many escape almost certain death. Epstein also explores how and why this resistance movement, unlike better known movements at places like Warsaw, Vilna, and Kovno, was able to rely on collaboration with those outside ghetto walls. She finds that an internationalist ethos fostered by two decades of Soviet rule, in addition to other factors, made this extraordinary story possible.

"Our Mothers' War" is an eye-opening and moving portrait of women during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women participate in American society. Never before has the vast range of women's experiences during this pivotal era been brought together in one book. Now, "Our Mothers' War" re-creates what American women from all walks of life were doing and thinking, on the home front and abroad. These heartwarming and sometimes heartbreaking accounts of the women we have known as mothers, aunts, and grandmothers reveal facets of their lives that have usually remained unmentioned and unappreciated.

"Our Mothers' War" gives center stage to one of WWII's most essential fighting forces: the women of America, whose extraordinary bravery, strength, and humanity shine through on every page.

Against the frightening backdrop of World War II, a young Scottish woman took ten children by ship through the waters of the Atlantic from Scotland to South Africa, where she set up a home for them called Bairnshaven. An unusual portrayal of motherhood, nuclear family and love, Marjorie's story comes to life through diary pages, letters, telegrams and photographs. This true story is a fresh take on the role that women played during the war, highlighting the strength and courage shown, and focusing on hope and unconditional kindness.

The Maginot Line was the last great gun-bearing line of subterranean forts built before World War II. Although it acquired an unjustified reputation as a white elephant, the Maginot Line fulfilled the role for which it was built, allowing the French High Command the opportunity to mass its forces and counter the German invasion. Unfortunately, the French leadership failed to make the most of its assets, with the resulting disastrous outcome. During the 1920s, the French High Command formulated a number of offensive plans to strike at Germany, but by the end of the decade, it switched to defensive plans because of a lack of manpower. Work thus began on the Maginot Line and on other fortifications such as the French Mareth Line in North Africa and the heavy naval coastal defense batteries in Bizerte (Tunisia) and Toulon (France). The authors conclude that the Maginot Line offered the French High Command many opportunities from September 1939 until May 1940. They blame a failed French military doctrine for taking the initiative away from subordinates, laying the groundwork for the disastrous events of 1940 that left the French High Command paralyzed while German forces broke through the weakly held Ardennes.

This story of survival against all odds tells what befell Kurt Pick, an Austrian Jew, after he left his Vienna home and fled the Nazi persecution of his race. He was captured whilst attempting to walk across the German border into Belgium, but escaped and succeeded in being smuggled into Brussels, where he existed in constant fear, freezing cold and near starvation. In the summer of 1939 he was appointed Administrator of a camp for Jewish refugee families at Marneffe, near Brussels, becoming their official link with the outside world. When Germany invaded Belgium, the 600 residents were evacuated and joined the immense tide of refugees clogging the roads. Pick survived the air attacks and reached Avesnes, where he was mistaken for a spy, almost shot, and then nearly lynched by civilians. With the Germans now in occupation, he walked 100 miles back to Brussels. In 1942 he left to become a baker at a boarding school which he found was sheltering many Jews and was being used as a centre for the Resistance. When the Germans raided the school, he bluffed his way out and escaped to Liege. From that point Pick was permanently on the run until the Americans liberated Liege in September 1944. He survived, but was to discover that most of his family had perished.

Read the little known story of the World War II Army Anti-Aircraft units in the Pacific, and how they helped win the war.

"Caught by Politics" recalls the exile of German and European visual artists and film practitioners in the United States. The book traces the paths and aesthetic strategies of Hitler exiles in the United States as ones of productive encounters and ironic cultural masquerades. While stressing creative transformations and performative self-reinventions, the accounts don't ignore the hardship of forced displacement. "Caught by Politics" encourages the reader to revise dominant and one-sided understandings of modernist culture and instead to engage with the various cross-cultural dialogues between European and American artists. Whether discovering the work of visual artists such as Max Beckmann and George Grosz, of designers such as Jakob Detlef Peters, or of directors and popular film practitioners such as Hans Richter, Edgar Ulmer and Peter Lorre, all authors understand their object of study not in isolation from other media of expression, but as part of the effervescent circulation of images typical for modern industrial society.

John Hodgkins was eight years old when his father was drafted into the army and left for Europe for fight in WWII. After his return, his father never spoke much of the war. After his father's death, John opened his father's diary and two boxes of memorabilia.

Most Americans are unaware that Soviet forces detained and imprisoned Japanese soldiers and civilians on a massive scale following World War II. In addition to interning large numbers of Japanese nationals in Soviet-occupied territories, the Red Army deported more than half a million Japanese to labor camps in Siberia and other parts of the USSR. Despite efforts to gain their release, repatriation was not complete until 1956. William Nimmo's book is the first work in English to provide a detailed account of this little-known aspect of the war's aftermath.

During the critical summer months of 1943, Noor Inayat Khan was the only wireless operator transmitting secret messages from Nazi-occupied France to the Special Operations Executive in Britain. As the daughter of an Indian mystic, brought up in a household devoted to peaceful reflection on the outskirts of Paris, Khan did not seem destined for wartime heroism. Yet, faced with the evils of Nazism, she volunteered to help the British; was trained in espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance; and returned to France with a new identity. Khan transmitted details crucial to the Allies' success on D-Day, until she was captured and imprisoned by the Gestapo. She attempted two escapes before being sent to Germany. Three months after the Allied invasion of France, she was executed at Dachau. Her last word was "liberte".

In May 1940, the Netherlands were overrun by German armed forces. The five-day campaign might seem to be a prime example of "Blitzkrieg," which led shortly afterwards to the rapid and unexpected overthrow of France. This book, based on the newest scholarly research, argues that this is too simple a view. Even though the German assault on the Netherlands made use of tanks, aircraft and airborne troops, it was still a classic campaign against a weak opponent in a theater on the margins of "Fall Gelb." In many instances, artillery and infantry were the decisive factors and it is debatable whether the bombing of Rotterdam can be seen as a precursor to the aerial terror campaigns against civilian populations that marked the later stages the Second World War. Contributors are H. Amersfoort, H.W. van den Doel, P.H. Kamphuis, P.M.J. de Koster, C.M. Schulten and J.W.M. Schulten.

Seventy-five years after the Battle of Britain, the Few's role in preventing invasion continues to enjoy a revered place in popular memory. The Air Ministry were central to the Battle's valorisation. This book explores both this, and also the now forgotten 1940 Battle of the Barges mounted by RAF bombers.