The international bestselling author returns with an exploration of one of the grandest obsessions of the twentieth century.

In the years before the Second World War, in a sleepy air force base in central Alabama, a small group of renegade pilots put forth a radical idea. What if we made bombing so accurate that wars could be fought entirely from the air? What if we could make the brutal clashes between armies on the ground a thing of the past? This book tells the story of what happened when that dream was put to the test.

The Bomber Mafia follows the stories of a reclusive Dutch genius and his homemade computer, Winston Churchill's forbidding best friend, a team of pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard, a brilliant pilot who sang vaudeville tunes to his crew, and the bomber commander, Curtis Emerson LeMay, who would order the bloodiest attack of the Second World War.

In this tale of innovation and obsession, Gladwell asks: what happens when technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war? And what is the price of progress?

From the secret SAS archives, and acclaimed author Ben Macintyre: the first ever authorized history of the SAS.

In the summer of 1941, at the height of the war in the Western Desert, a bored and eccentric young officer, David Stirling, came up with a plan that was radical and entirely against the rules: a small undercover unit that would inflict chaos and mayhem behind enemy lines. Despite intense opposition, Winston Churchill personally gave Stirling permission to recruit the toughest, brightest and most ruthless soldiers he could find. So began the most celebrated and mysterious military organisation in the world: the SAS. Now, 75 years later, the SAS has finally decided to tell its astonishing story. It has opened its secret archives for the first time, granting historian Ben Macintyre full access to a treasure trove of unseen reports, memos, diaries, letters, maps and photographs, as well as free rein to interview surviving Originals and those who knew them.

The result is an exhilarating tale of fearlessness and heroism, recklessness and tragedy; of extraordinary men who were willing to take monumental risks. It is a story about the meaning of courage.

The remarkable story of a woman's journey out of Auschwitz to find her family, told to her son for the very first time.

As a reporter, Jacques Peretti has spent his life investigating important stories. But there was one story, heard in scattered fragments throughout his childhood, that he never thought to investigate. The story of how his mother survived Auschwitz.

In the few last months of the War, thirteen-year-old Alina Peretti, along with her mother and sister, was one of thirteen thousand non-Jewish Poles sent to Auschwitz, in the wake of the Warsaw Uprising. Her experiences there, which she rarely discussed, cast a shadow over the rest of her life.

Now ninety, Alina has been diagnosed with dementia. Together, mother and son begin a race against time to record her memories and preserve her family's story. For the first time, Alina recalls her experiences as a child during the Second World War, the horrors that she witnessed in Auschwitz and the miraculous story of how she survived a firing squad.

Along the way, Jacques learns long-hidden secrets about his mother's family; his mysterious grandfather who lived a double-life, his grandmother who read tarot cards in a Soviet labour camp, and his aunt and uncles, whose fate he never knew. He also gains an understanding of his mother through retracing her past, learning more about the woman who would never let him call her 'Mum'.

If a mere seven more MPs had voted with Prime Minister JBM Hertzog in favour of neutrality, South Africa’s history would have been quite different.

Parliament’s narrow decision to go to war in 1939 led to a seismic upheaval throughout the 1940s: black people streamed in their thousands from rural areas to the cities in search of jobs; volunteers of all races answered the call to go ‘up north’ to fight; and opponents of the Smuts government actively hindered the war effort by attacking soldiers and committing acts of sabotage. World War Two upended South Africa’s politics, ruining attempts to forge white unity and galvanising opposition to segregation among African, Indian and coloured communities. It also sparked debates among nationalists, socialists, liberals and communists such as the country had never previously experienced.

As Richard Steyn recounts so compellingly in 7 Votes, the war’s unforeseen consequence was the boost it gave to nationalism, both Afrikaner and African, that went on to transform the country in the second half of the 20th century. The book brings to life an extraordinary cast of characters, including wartime leader Jan Smuts, DF Malan and his National Party colleagues, African nationalists from Anton Lembede and AB Xuma to Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela, the influential Indian activists Yusuf Dadoo and Monty Naicker, and many others.

Historian Karen Horn painstakingly tracked down a number of former POWs in which their interviews reveal rich narratives of hardship, endurance, humour, longing and self-discovery. Instead of fighting, these men adapted to another war, one which was fought on the inside of many prison camps.

In their interviews, all the POWs expressed surprise at being asked to share their experiences of almost 70 years earlier.They returned home in 1945 to a country which soon afterwards tried its utmost to promote national amnesia with regard to the country’s participation in the war.

With great insight and empathy, Karen Horn shines a light on a neglected corner of South African history. Karen Horn is a lecturer at Stellenbosch University.

A startling, gripping portrait of what it was like to be alive in Britain during the blitz, and what it was like to be around Churchill.

On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, the Nazis would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons and destroying two million homes.

In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson gives a new and brilliantly cinematic account of how Britain’s most iconic leader set about unifying the nation at its most vulnerable moment, and teaching ‘the art of being fearless.’

Drawing on once-secret intelligence reports and diaries, #1 bestselling author Larson takes readers from the shelled streets of London to Churchill’s own chambers, giving a vivid vision of true leadership, when – in the face of unrelenting horror – a leader of eloquence, strategic brilliance and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together.

Tense Future falls into two parts. The first develops a critical account of total war discourse and addresses the resistant potential of acts, including acts of writing, before a future that looks barred or predetermined by war. Part two shifts the focus to long interwar narratives that pit both their scale and their formal turbulence against total war's portrait of the social totality, producing both ripostes and alternatives to that portrait in the practice of literary encyclopedism. The book's introduction grounds both parts in the claim that industrialized warfare, particularly the aerial bombing of cities, intensifies an under-examined form of collective traumatization: a pretraumatic syndrome in which the anticipation of future-conditional violence induces psychic wounds. Situating this claim in relation to other scholarship on "critical futurities," Saint-Amour discusses its ramifications for trauma studies, historical narratives generally, and the historiography of the interwar period in particular. The introduction ends with an account of the weak theory of modernism now structuring the field of modernist studies, and of weak theory's special suitability for opposing total war, that strongest of strong theories.

During World War Two, death and violence permeated all aspects of the everyday lives of ordinary people in Eastern Europe. Throughout the region, the realities of mass murder and incarceration meant that people learnt to live with daily public hangings of civilian hostages and stumbled on corpses of their neighbors. Entire populations were drawn into fierce and uncompromising political and ideological conflicts, and many ended up being more than mere victims or observers: they themselves became perpetrators or facilitators of violence, often to protect their own lives, but also to gain various benefits. Yugoslavia in particular saw a gradual culmination of a complex and brutal civil war, which ultimately killed more civilians than those killed by the foreign occupying armies. Therapeutic Fascism tells a story of the tremendous impact of such pervasive and multi-layered political violence, and looks at ordinary citizens' attempts to negotiate these extraordinary wartime political pressures. It examines Yugoslav psychiatric documents as unique windows into this harrowing history, and provides an original perspective on the effects of wartime violence and occupation through the history of psychiatry, mental illness, and personal experience. Using previously unexplored resources, such as patients' case files, state and institutional archives, and the professional medical literature of the time, this volume explores the socio-cultural history of wartime through the eyes of (mainly lower-class) psychiatric patients. Ana Antic examines how the experiences of observing, suffering, and committing political violence affected the understanding of human psychology, pathology, and normality in wartime and post-war Balkans and Europe.

Mere decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the promise of European democracy seems to be out of joint. What has become of the once-shared memory of victory over fascism? Historical revisionism and nationalist propaganda in the post-Yugoslav context have tried to eradicate the legacy of partisan and socialist struggles, while Yugonostalgia commodifies the partisan/socialist past. It is against these dominant 'archives' that this book launches the partisan counter-archive, highlighting the symbolic power of artistic works that echo and envision partisan legacy and rupture. It comprises a body of works that emerged either during the people's liberation struggle or in later socialist periods, tracing a counter-archival surplus and revolutionary remainder that invents alternative protocols of remembrance and commemoration. The book covers rich (counter-)archival material - from partisan poems, graphic works and photography, to monuments and films - and ends by describing the recent revisionist un-doing of the partisan past. It contributes to the Yugoslav politico-aesthetical "history of the oppressed" as an alternative journey to the partisan past that retrieves revolutionary resources from the past for the present.

Eva Tichauer was born in Berlin at the end of the First World War into a socialist Jewish family. After a happy childhood in a well-off intellectual milieu, the destiny of her family was turned upside-down by the rise of Hitler in 1933. They emigrated to Paris in July of that year, and life started to become difficult. Eva was in her second year of medical studies in 1939 when war was declared, with fatal consequences for her and her family: they sere forced to the Spanish frontier, then returned to Paris to a flat which had been searched by the Gestapo. Eva was then compelled to break off her studies due to a quota system being imposed on Jewish students.

The Second World War affected the lives and shaped the experience of millions of individuals in Germany--soldiers at the front, women, children and the elderly sheltering in cellars, slave laborers toiling in factories, and concentration-camp prisoners and POWs clearing rubble in the Reich's devastated cities.
Taking a "history from below" approach, the volume examines how the minds and behaviour of individuals were moulded by the Party as the Reich took the road to Total War. The ever-increasing numbers of German workers conscripted into the Wehrmacht were replaced with forced foreign workers and slave labourers and concentration camp prisoners. The interaction in everyday life between German civilian society and these coerced groups is explored, as is that society's relationship to the Holocaust.
From early 1943, the war on the home front was increasingly dominated by attack from the air. The role of the Party, administration, police, and courts in providing for the vast numbers of those rendered homeless, in bolstering civilian morale with "miracle revenge weapons" propaganda, and in maintaining order in a society in disintegration is reviewed in detail.
For society in uniform, the war in the east was one of ideology and annihilation, with intensified indoctrination of the troops after Stalingrad. The social profile of this army is analysed through study of a typical infantry division. The volume concludes with an account of the various forms of resistance to Hitler's regime, in society and the military, culminating in the failed attempt on his life in July 1944.

Although millions of Russians lived as serfs until the middle of the nineteenth century, little is known about their lives. Identifying and documenting the conditions of Russian serfs has proven difficult because the Russian state discouraged literacy among the serfs and censored public expressions of dissent. To date scholars have identified only twenty known Russian serf narratives. Four Russian Serf Narratives contains four of these accounts and is the first translated collection of autobiographies by serfs. Scholar and translator John MacKay brings to light for an English-language audience a diverse sampling of Russian serf narratives, ranging from an autobiographical poem to stories of adventure and escape. Autobiography (1785) recounts a highly educated serf s attempt to escape to Europe, where he hoped to study architecture. The long testimonial poem News About Russia (ca. 1849) laments the conditions under which the author and his fellow serfs lived. In The Story of My Life and Wanderings (1881) a serf tradesman tells of his attempt to simultaneously escape serfdom and captivity from Chechen mountaineers. The fragmentary Notes of a Serf Woman (1911) testifies to the harshness of peasant life with extraordinary acuity and descriptive power. These accounts offer readers a glimpse, from the point of view of the serfs themselves, into the realities of one of the largest systems of unfree labor in history. The volume also allows comparison with slave narratives produced in the United States and elsewhere, adding an important dimension to knowledge of the institution of slavery and the experience of enslavement in modern times."

Constructing the Holocaust examines the development of Holocaust historiography in the light of recent critical philosophy of history. It argues that the Holocaust provides both the occasion for, and the ultimate test of, new ways of giving meaning to the past. It also shows that examining our representations of the past is as important as archival research for understanding history.

"The book is the product of a protracted, laborious and scrupulous research and draws on a most extensive and varied assembly of documents. But the archival evidence, factual accounts and even personal narratives would have remained remote, dry and cold if not for the author's remarkable gift of empathy. Barbara Engelking gives the witnesses of the Holocaust a voice which readers of this book will understand....Under her pen memories come alive again."--from the Foreword by Zygmunt BaumanOriginally published in Polish to great acclaim and based on interviews with survivors of the Holocaust in Poland, Holocaust and Memory provides a moving description of their life during the war and the sense they made of it. The book begins by looking at the differences between the wartime experiences of Jews and Poles in occupied Poland, both in terms of Nazi legislation and individual experiences. On the Aryan side of the ghetto wall, Jews could either be helped or blackmailed by Poles. The largest section of the book reconstructs everyday life in the ghetto. The psychological consequences of wartime experiences are explored, including interviews with survivors who stayed on in Poland after the war and were victims of anti-Semitism again in 1968. These discussions bring into question some of the accepted survivor stereotypes found in Holocaust literature. A final chapter looks at the legacy of the Holocaust, the problems of transmitting experience and of the place of the Holocaust in Polish history and culture.

For fans of Radium Girls and history and WWII buffs, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line takes you inside the lives and experiences of 15 unknown women heroes from the Greatest Generation, the women who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen during WWII-in and out of uniform, for theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come. The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line are the heroes of the Greatest Generation that you hardly ever hear about. These women who did extraordinary things didn't expect thanks and shied away from medals and recognition. Despite their amazing accomplishments, they've gone mostly unheralded and unrewarded. No longer. These are the women of World War II who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen-in and out of uniform. Young Hilda Eisen was captured twice by the Nazis and twice escaped, going on to fight with the Resistance in Poland. Determined to survive, she and her husband later emigrated to the U.S. where they became entrepreneurs and successful business leaders. Ola Mildred Rexroat was the only Native American woman pilot to serve with the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) in World War II. She persisted against all odds-to earn her silver wings and fly, helping train other pilots and gunners. Ida and Louise Cook were British sisters and opera buffs who smuggled Jews out of Germany, often wearing their jewelry and furs, to help with their finances. They served as sponsors for refugees, and established temporary housing for immigrant families in London. Alice Marble was a grand-slam winning tennis star who found her own path to serve during the war-she was an editor with Wonder Woman comics, played tennis exhibitions for the troops, and undertook a dangerous undercover mission to expose Nazi theft. After the war she was instrumental in desegregating women's professional tennis. Others also stepped out of line-as cartographers, spies, combat nurses, and troop commanders. Retired U.S. Army Major General Mari K. Eder wrote this book because she knew their stories needed to be told-and the sooner the better. For theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

Stafford Cripps cut an incongruous figure in British politics in the 1930s. His fortuitous appointment as Ambassador to Moscow in 1940 secured him a prominent position in the War Cabinet. His meticulously kept diary describes the change in his political fortune and bears witness to key German-Soviet events during World War 2.

Coral and Concrete, Greg Dvorak's cross-cultural history of Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, explores intersections of environment, identity, empire, and memory in the largest inhabited coral atoll on earth. Approaching the multiple "atollscapes" of Kwajalein's past and present as Marshallese ancestral land, Japanese colonial outpost, Pacific War battlefield, American weapons-testing base, and an enduring home for many, Dvorak delves into personal narratives and collective mythologies from contradictory vantage points. He navigates the tensions between "little stories" of ordinary human actors and "big stories" of global politics-drawing upon the "little" metaphor of the coral organisms that colonize and build atolls, and the "big" metaphor of the all-encompassing concrete that buries and co-opts the past. Building upon the growing body of literature about militarism and decolonization in Oceania, this book advocates a layered, nuanced approach that emphasizes the multiplicity and contradictions of Pacific Islands histories as an antidote to American hegemony and globalization within and beyond the region. It also brings Japanese, Korean, Okinawan, and American perspectives into conversation with Micronesians' recollections of colonialism and war. This transnational history-built upon a combination of reflective personal narrative, ethnography, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies-thus resituates Kwajalein Atoll as a pivotal site where Islanders have not only thrived for thousands of years, but also mediated between East and West, shaping crucial world events. Based on multi-sited ethnographic and archival research, as well as Dvorak's own experiences growing up between Kwajalein, the United States, and Japan, Coral and Concrete integrates narrative and imagery with semiotic analysis of photographs, maps, films, and music, traversing colonial tropical fantasies, tales of victory and defeat, missile testing, fisheries, war-bereavement rituals, and landowner resistance movements, from the twentieth century through the present day. Representing history as a perennial struggle between coral and concrete, the book offers an Oceanian paradigm for decolonization, resistance, solidarity, and optimism that should appeal to all readers far beyond the Marshall Islands.

In Hiding tells the story of a Jewish family of four when a Dutch couple offered to hide them from Nazi atrocities during the Second World War. The couple agreed that they would hide this family for a large sum of money, thinking that the war would soon end. When it appeared that the war would last much longer than first anticipated, the hostess threatened and physically and mentally abused the foursome. In Hiding relates the cruelty that this family had to endure not from the Nazis directly, but from their own neighbours during more than two years of persecution.

The Bavarian mountain village of Oberammergau is famous for its decennial passion play. The play began as an articulation of the villagers' strong Catholic piety, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries developed into a considerable commercial enterprise. The growth of the passion play from a curiosity of village piety into a major tourist attraction encouraged all manner of entrepreneurial behavior and brought the inhabitants of this isolated rural area into close contract with a larger world. Hundreds of thousands of tourists came to see the play, and thousands of temporary workers descended on the village during the play season, some settling permanently in Oberammergau. Adolf Hitler would attend a performance of the play in 1934, later saying that the drama "revealed the muck and mire of Jewry." But, Helena Waddy argues, it is a mistake to brand Oberammergau as a Nazi stronghold, as has commonly been done. In this book she uses Oberammergau's unique history to explain why and how genuinely some villagers chose to become Nazis, while others rejected Party membership and defended their Catholic lifestyle. She explores the reasons why both local Nazis and their opponents fought to protect the village's cherished identity against the Third Reich's many intrusive demands. On the other hand, she also shows that the play mirrored the Gospel-based anti-Semitism endemic to Western culture. As a local study of the rise of Nazism and the Nazi era, Waddy's work is an important contribution to a growing genre. As a collective biography, it is a fascinating and moving portrait of life at a time when, as Thomas Mann wrote, "every day hurled the wildest demands at the heart and brain."

In the terrifying summer of 1942 in Belgium, when the Nazis began the brutal roundup of Jewish families, parents searched desperately for safe haven for their children. As Suzanne Vromen reveals in Hidden Children of the Holocaust, these children found sanctuary with other families and schools--but especially in Roman Catholic convents and orphanages.
Vromen has interviewed not only those who were hidden as children, but also the Christian women who rescued them, and the nuns who gave the children shelter, all of whose voices are heard in this powerfully moving book. Indeed, here are numerous first-hand memoirs of life in a wartime convent--the secrecy, the humor, the admiration, the anger, the deprivation, the cruelty, and the kindness--all with the backdrop of the terror of the Nazi occupation. We read the stories of the women of the Resistance who risked their lives in placing Jewish children in the care of the Church, and of the Mothers Superior and nuns who sheltered these children and hid their identity from the authorities. Perhaps most riveting are the stories told by the children themselves--abruptly separated from distraught parents and given new names, the children were brought to the convents with a sense of urgency, sometimes under the cover of darkness. They were plunged into a new life, different from anything they had ever known, and expected to adapt seamlessly. Vromen shows that some adapted so well that they converted to Catholicism, at times to fit in amid the daily prayers and rituals, but often because the Church appealed to them. Vromen also examines their lives after the war, how they faced the devastating loss of parents to the Holocaust, struggled to regaintheir identities and sought to memorialize those who saved them.
This remarkable book offers an inspiring chronicle of the brave individuals who risked everything to protect innocent young strangers, as well as a riveting account of the "hidden children" who lived to tell their stories.

Shortly after Ponce de Leon discovered La Florida in 1513, early Spanish settlers found a large and sheltered bay on the Gulf of Mexico. The bay became known as Pensacola after the Penzacola Indians who lived along the shore. In 1698, the first permanent colony was established by pioneers who recognized the strategic importance of a fine harbor with protective barrier islands and a high bluff, or barranca, on the mainland across from a defensible mouth. For centuries the bay was fortified and refortified. Battles raged in four wars, and five nations raised their flags along the harbor. Pensacola Bay: A Military History traces the rich military history of the bay from Spanish times to the present-day Naval Air Station Pensacola, home of the Navy's Blue Angels. The book presents over 200 black-and-white images that highlight the acquisition of Florida by the United States in 1821, the construction of fortifications and naval installations, the Civil War, both World Wars, the Old Navy Yard, the Naval Air Station, and present-day military activity.