Spies, Supplies and Moonlit Skies, Volume II: The French Connection, April-June 1944: Code Name Neptune During the critical period of World War II leading up to D-Day the United States Army Air Force activated the first Special Operations Group for clandestine activity against the Nazi enemy in Occupied Europe. While the daylight Air Force cleared the skies of Nazi planes in a brutal war of attrition before the invasion, the 801st Bombardment Group, on night operations from their secret base near Harrington in the United Kingdom dropped supplies and agents to the Resistance forces of Europe in preparation for D-Day on the beaches of Normandy on 6 June 1944. This is their story.

WE ALL MADE HISTORY is a collection of personal stories from people who were in the military. Many military have put their lives on the line for you to be free. The real Heroes never returned. When you see a veteran, shake their hand and thank them for their service.

An examination of the life of General Manton S. Eddy, this study details his experiences in World War II as leader of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division through North Africa, Sicily and France, and subsequently, as commander of XII Corps, into the heart of Germany. While much has been written about the top military leaders of this era, there is little information about corps commanders whose missions were limited to doing battle and whose organizations were tailored exclusively for this task. Eddy's career provides a model for the Army's most ambitious officers, particularly those who, like Eddy, faced the challenge without family connections or the traditional West Point education. He devoted his life to the U.S. Army, enhancing his innate talents through the incorporation of a daily program of self-education.

Eddy had an excellent grasp of the basic principles of military tactics and strategy. He attained this art through home study and assiduous application at the Army's professional education institutions, in particular at the Command and General Staff College, where he served as an instructor for four years. He focused on people, quickly learning and applying basic skills to draw out their best efforts. He came to know what to expect from them in the chaos and under the pressure of combat. This facilitated his development of strong, mission-oriented subordinates. His personal goal was always to maximize all available power at the correct point for crushing his nation's enemies, and to this end, he was extraordinarily successful.

It was Christmas 1942 when eleven young women boarded the troopship Strathaird and braved the attentions of U-Boats in the deep Atlantic. Borrowing a cricketing phrase, they called themselves the First Eleven. But they were not the first to arrive at the Special Operations Executive's secret North African base near Algiers. Code-named Massingham, it was formed by SOE to spearhead subversion and sabotage in what Winston Churchill called 'the soft underbelly' of Europe. Massingham was hidden away at the Club des Pins, a former luxury resort nestling among pines next to a Mediterranean beach. By the time SOE had got to work, there was little luxury left. Setting the Med Ablaze tells the true stories of the men and women of Churchill's secret base. Its life was short. Less than two years after its formation, its job was done. But Massingham played a key role in the Allied offensive in the Mediterranean islands, Italy and France. If you enjoy historical nonfiction, this book is for you.

The Holocaust did not introduce the phenomenon of the bystander, but it did illustrate the terrible consequences of indifference and passivity towards the persecution of others. Although the term was initially applied only to the good Germans--the apathetic citizens who made genocide possible through unquestioning obedience to evil leaders--recent Holocaust scholarship has shown that it applies to most of the world, including parts of the population in Nazi-occupied countries, some sectors within the international Christian and Jewish communities, and the Allied governments themselves. This work analyzes why this happened, drawing on the insights of historians, Holocaust survivors, and Christian and Jewish ethicists. The author argues that bystander behavior cannot be attributed to a single cause, such as anti-Semitism, but can only be understood within a complex framework of factors that shape human behavior individually, socially, and politically.

Eddie Slovik was the most famous American soldier to come out of World War Two. Or was infamous a better description? For 24 year old Slovik, Polish-American, petty thief and ex-con, was the only Allied soldier to be shot for desertion in the course of that long conflict. For nearly ten years the US Dept. of Defence tried to keep the Slovik case secret and even when it was revealed the American military hid the place of the condemned man's burial for a further thirty years. Thus when the details of the Slovik case were finally brought out into the open, there was much talk of an official cover-up. Now veteran military historian, Charles Whiting has attempted to dig up the final truth. He reveals in this fast paced intriguing book that Slovik was not the innocent victim that his advocate had maintained he was. In that year in which he was sentenced to death for desertion in the 'face of the enemy', he played a calculating game with the US Army -and lost. Whiting also reveals another secret: the man who would approve Slovik's death sentence and have him shot in a remote French mountain village, General (and future President) Dwight D. Eisenhower was also under a sentence of death that winter himself.

Despite heavy censorship and sometimes outright control by either Vichy or the Germans, the authorized press is a useful and necessary source for anyone studying the period of German occupation and the Vichy government in France. The daily and weekly political press, the press created by Vichy for its Chantiers de la Jeunesse youth movement, its Legion of War veterans and its Peasant Corporation for agriculture show the regime's ideology and priorities. A wide variety of other periodicals, including religious publications, advertising papers, trade papers, and sports papers, provides insights into the professional and local life of the period. This book provides a guide to the authorized press of the occupation period.

With a list of 2500 periodicals, the book covers the more important daily, weekly, bimonthly, monthly, and quarterly publications in Paris and the departments. The periodicals are listed by subject for Paris, alphabetically for the departments. For each periodical, the book gives city of publication, approximate beginning and ending dates, and library or archive where the periodical is held as well as other available information such as the periodical's prewar political position, what the periodical said about itself, its relationship with Vichy or the Germans, and successor publication. If a book or article has been written about the periodical, it is also included.

The name...oft heard and heralded during and after World War II PAPPY GUNN ordinarily speaks for itself..............however in this book, the unforgettable, untold to this day, human story of the legendary "Pappy Gunn," hero of the Pacific Air War and to his family who knew and loved him ....this story is told with the understanding of one who had the foreknowledge and burning determination to sort out the facts and myths about him, Nathaniel Gunn, the author, fellow lover of flying, and his youngest son, who was with him until his untimely crash in Civilian life doing what he loved to do - flying, flying, flying You'll find the story intriguing in its discoveries, packed with Pappy's own personal original files, long forgotten letters, documents and photographs spanning Pappy's youth into the U.S. Navy, marriage, retirement in Hawaii and move to the Philippine Islands. Then, the untimely entrance of the United States in the WWII bombing and capture of Manila. Most of all, this story draws a perceptive focus on ..the man..as the person and courageous patriot he truly was, joining the U. S.Air Force he was at this time.. Fighting 3 wars at once .His family imprisoned by the Japanese.. .The brass who needed him to accomplish the impossible .And, the enemy who had the upperhand, but not for long Thank God - his was a triumphant battle in all three

How did the French Resistance and Allied forces work together to liberate southern France from the Germans during World War II? Arthur Funk gives the first detailed account of the complex British, French, and American operations in 1944, an account that uses a wealth of original source material on both sides of the Atlantic to evaluate the role of the French Resistance and to assess the problems in coordinating Allied military activities. The study should be of great interest to historians, history buffs, and colleges and universities that wish to fill this gap in the historiography of World War II. The first half of the book deals with preparations for the Allied landings in August 1944, telling about agents first in contact with the French Resistance and about the work of Allied missions, French groups, and British officers and teams directed from London and Algiers. The second half of the book covers the collaboration of French Forces of the Interior with the U.S. Seventh Army in the liberation of Marseilles, Lyon, and other cities in southeastern France. Filled with interesting detail about major figures in the war and little-known agents and officers, the book is unique in weaving together recently declassified OSS sources in Washington with British and French archival information that is rarely noted. Maps and photographs are included in the book, and a useful bibliography is also provided.

Since unification, the Federal Republic of Germany has made vaunted efforts to make amends for the crimes of the Third Reich. Yet it remains the case that the demands for restitution by many countries that were occupied during the Second World War are unresolved, and recent demands from Greece and Poland have only reignited old debates. This book reconstructs the German occupation of Poland and Greece and gives a thorough accounting of these debates. Working from the perspective of international law, it deepens the scholarly discourse around the issue, clarifying the 'never-ending story' of German reparations policy and making a principled call for further action. A compilation of primary sources comprising 125 annotated key texts (512 pages) on the complexity of reparations discussions covering the period between 1941 and the end of 2017 is available for free on the Berghahn Books website, doi: 10.3167/9781800732575.dd.

One of the brightest Canadian scientists of his generation, Omond McKillop Solandt was a physiologist by training, an engineer by disposition, and a manager by necessity. A protege of insulin's co-discoverer, Charles Best, Solandt worked as a scientist for the British government during the Second World War, including as a pioneer of operational research and a manager of scientific establishments. Ending the war as a colonel, he served on the British Mission to Japan, where he studied the effects of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before returning to Canada to become chairman of the newly created Defence Research Board. There he spearheaded Canada's attempt to create a new and innovative government science infrastructure that served the needs of the Canadian military at the dawn of the nuclear age and worked alongside allies in Britain and the United States. In Maestro of Science, Jason S. Ridler draws on interviews with Solandt and his colleagues and declassified records from Canada and the United Kingdom to paint a vivid picture of the influence and achievements of a Canadian leader in Cold War military research.

Winner of both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. Frank Kermode, in The New York Times Book Review, hailed it as "an important contribution to our understanding of how we came to make World War I part of our minds," and Lionel Trilling called it simply "one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time." In its panaramic scope and poetic intensity, it illuminated a war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the world.

Now, in Wartime, Fussell turns to the Second World War, the conflict he himself fought in, to weave a narrative that is both more intensely personal and more wide-ranging. Whereas his former book focused primarily on literary figures, on the image of the Great War in literature, here Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on common soldiers and civilians. He describes the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II. He analyzes the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality (the early belief, for instance, that the war could be won by "precision bombing," that is, by long distance); he describes the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most important, he emphasizes the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity and wit. Of course, no Fussell book would be complete without some serious discussion of the literature of the time. He examines, for instance, how the great privations of wartime (when oranges would be raffled off as valued prizes) resulted in roccoco prose styles that dwelt longingly on lavish dinners, and how the "high-mindedness" of the era and the almost pathological need to "accentuate the positive" led to the downfall of the acerbic H.L. Mencken and the ascent of E.B. White. He also offers astute commentary on Edmund Wilson's argument with Archibald MacLeish, Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, the war poetry of Randall Jarrell and Louis Simpson, and many other aspects of the wartime literary world.

Fussell conveys the essence of that wartime as no other writer before him. For the past fifty years, the Allied War has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by "the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty." Americans, he says, have never understood what the Second World War was really like. In this stunning volume, he offers such an understanding.

Wide is the Gate, written in 1943, is the fourth of the epic eleven part classic Lanny Budd Series written by Upton Sinclair. Wide is the Gate followed the 1943 Pulitzer Prize Winning Dragon's Teeth. This book covers the period of 1934-1937 and introduces Lanny as a secret double agent fighting the Nazi's as a supporter of the resistance movement in Germany. Lanny is living primarily in England with his wife of almost five years, Irma Barnes, the 23 million dollar heiress. Irma does not share Lanny's "red" view of the world. Lanny's is conflicted continuously in his heart and soul for the workers and social justice. Lanny attempts to commit to Irma to "behave" himself and lead a normal aristocratic life. But foremost he is committed to ending Nazism, Fascism and the over throw of the democratically elected Spanish government. Irma believes she is entitled to live in the style of the aristocrats of Europe, she having inherited 23 million dollars from her late father, J. Paramount Barnes. She cares not at all for anything Lanny believes in. Lanny is awakened at the end of Dragon's Teeth to the oncoming dangers of the Nazi's. He sees the armament build-up and the militarism building in the Fatherland. Goring is not to be trusted. But both English and French leaders fail to recognize the menacing threat of the new Germany. Leading politician believe the threat of the Bolsheviks and the Red Menace poses a greater threat to European stability, aka, the ruling classes, than do the Nazi's in Germany, and the Fascist in Italy and Spain. Lanny involves himself in a double agent role by helping a new friend, one who will be us through the remaining books, Monck. Monck is a German socialist who is part of the underground and works with the resistance movement to alert the German people to the terrors of the Nazi's. Lanny helps a friend and colleague of the late Fredi Robin, Trudi, through which he meets Monck. Many adventures and dangers present themselves as Lanny travels back into Germany as an Art expert, eventually dealing directly and on a friendship basis with Hermann Goring. He uses the proceeds of the confiscated artwork masterpieces stolen by Goring from Johannes Robin to help finance and support the underground movement from inside the heart of Naziland. Lanny and Irma also have an eventful evening with Hitler, while hiding a hunted resistance worker in their car while visiting Hitler's Berghof estate. Robbie Budd, Lanny's father, has conceived the next great industrial advancement on a grand scale, the airplane. Having lost Budd Gunmakers to the Wall Street tycoons, Robbie sets out to develop the mass production of airplanes. He offers first to England, and then to France, the opportunity to build their air forces as protection in case of another armed conflict, but facing the intransigence of both countries politicians, he next offers his new high speed and potentially deadly product to Goring and they thus become close business associates. This alliance between Robbie and Goring offers Lanny cover for his duplicitous activities against the Nazi's. As alluded to at the end of Dragon's Teeth, Lan

The author, a historian and former Swiss Armoured Corp officer, uses primary documents to describe tank tactics during the first two years of World War II, a period in which armour was employed in the Polish, Western and Russian campaigns. The first year of 'Operation Barbarossa' is examined in great detail using the files of the second Panzer Army whose commander, Guderian, who has been called the father of the German armoured force.

The Japanese military was responsible for the sexual enslavement of thousands of women and girls in Asia and the Pacific during the China and Pacific wars under the guise of providing 'comfort' for battle-weary troops. Campaigns for justice and reparations for 'comfort women' since the early 1990s have highlighted the magnitude of the human rights crimes committed against Korean, Chinese and other Asian women by Japanese soldiers after they invaded the Chinese mainland in 1937. These campaigns, however, say little about the origins of the system or its initial victims. The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery during the China and Pacific Wars explores the origins of the Japanese military's system of sexual slavery and illustrates how Japanese women were its initial victims.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the Nanjing Massacre, together with an in-depth analysis of various aspects of the event and related issues. Drawing on original source materials collected from various national archives, national libraries, church historical society archives, and university libraries in China, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom and the United States, it represents the first English-language academic attempt to analyze the Nanjing Massacre in such detail and scope. The book examines massacres and other killings, in addition to other war crimes, such as rape, looting, and burning. These atrocities are then explored further via a historical analysis of Chinese survivors' testimony, Japanese soldiers' diaries, Westerners' eyewitness accounts, the news coverage from American and British correspondents, and American, British and German diplomatic dispatches. Further, the book explores issues such as the role and function of the International Committee for Nanking Safety Zone, burial records of massacre victims, post-war military tribunals, controversies over the Nanjing Massacre, and the 100-Man Killing Contest. This book is intended for all researchers, scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and members of the general public who are interested in Second World War issues, Sino-Japanese conflicts, Sino-Japan relations, war crimes, atrocity and holocaust studies, military tribunals for war crimes, Japanese atrocities in China, and the Nanjing Massacre.

Winning the Battle of the Atlantic was critical to Britain's survival in the Second World War. The British Merchant Navy suffered enormous losses of both ships and men, particularly in the early years of the war. Sailing through U-boat wolf-packs across the Atlantic, or on the perilous routes to Malta and Murmansk, took a special kind of courage. Ships often sank within minutes of being torpedoed. Survivors is the history of this epic struggle. It is a graphic account of how the ships were attacked and sunk, how crews reacted, how they attempted to launch their lifeboats and how they ended up swimming or clinging to debris, or making long voyages in lifeboats or on rafts. Death might come at any stage, yet the will to live and the resourcefulness and skill of the seamen enabled a surprising number to survive.
""There was a terrific smash and everything was pandemonium on deck. The wheel house collapsed on top of me and I was trapped by the concrete slabs which had fallen on me and pinned me to the deck. I think that the ship sank in about thirty seconds after breaking in two ... Although I was trapped, I could see everything over my head. The stern burst into flames and I saw flames forward. I could see the water coming up and coming over my head. The ship hit the bottom and turned over, the debris was thrown off me and I was released and I came to the surface.""--Sinking of SS Abukir, 28 May 1940

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.

Throughout WWII, thousands of Allied prisoners dreamed of outwitting their captors and returning to war against the Axis. Their ingenuity knew no bounds: they went over the barbed wire surrounding them and under it as well; they built tunnels of enormous length and complexity, often working with only their bare hands. They concealed themselves in their captors' vehicles and hitched rides to freedom. They became world-class forgers and tailors; they stole anything that might be useful to their escapes that wasn't actually red-hot or nailed down. Some of them made it to freedom; some did not. Many of those who failed simply tried again and again until they succeeded. Some of the escapers who were caught were murdered by the Japanese or the German Gestapo. That did not stop others from risking torture or death to gain their freedom. Many men whose break was initially successful would not have survived save for the dangerous, selfless help of civilians, especially in occupied Europe and the Philippine Islands. The stories in The Greatest Escapes of WWII highlight the courage, endurance, and ingenuity of Allied prisoners, chronicling their ceaseless efforts and the alarm that spread far and wide when one or more escaped. These escapes tied up thousands of Axis soldiers who might otherwise have prolonged the war for many more bloody months. The troops committed to guard the Allied prisoners and recapture escapers numbered in the hundreds of thousands.