Organised chronologically by type, Russian Tanks of World War II offers a highly-illustrated guide to the main armoured fighting vehicles used by the Red Army during World War II. The book offers a comprehensive survey of Soviet AFVs, from the pre-war T-18 light tank and BT fast tank series to the heavy Joseph Stalin tanks and self- propelled guns of the final months of the war. All the major and many minor tanks are featured, including every significant variation of the T-26 light tank, KV series and T-34 to see action on the Eastern Front. There are also chapters on the many types of self-propelled guns developed by Soviet industry, as well as Allied Lend-Lease AFVs, such as the British Churchill and Valentine tanks and American Sherman and Stuart tanks. Each featured profile includes authentic markings and colour schemes, while every separate model is accompanied by exhaustive specifications. Packed with 120 newly-commissioned, full-colour artworks with exhaustive specifications, Russian Tanks of World War II is a key reference guide for military modellers and World War II enthusiasts.

On 13 January 1942 hundreds of army and air force servicemen due to sail from Durban on the British troopship City of Canterbury refused to board the vessel in defiance of their commanders and of the British Military and Naval authorities in South Africa. Gerry Rubin sees this unusual and dramatic incident in the round. Besides examining the legal case itself, its precedents and its outcome, he looks at both the human factors involved and at the wider background. In so doing he deals with a little-mentioned aspect of the war but one familiar to hundreds of thousands of servicemen: the journey by troopship via the Cape to the Middle and Far East.

This index provides subject entries for numerous articles about World War II that were published in major military periodicals between 1939 and 1949. The majority of the articles are essential sources and were written by participants in the events they describe. Most of the periodicals in this volume have either not been previously indexed before or have not been indexed in this user-friendly fashion. Organized topically, this work employs "Use" and "See also" references in order to give the user a familiar subject structure to conduct their search. Numerous cross-references are included to assist in locating relevant materials quickly. Its deep indexing strengthens this book, which gives most articles at least two subject headings.

Joe Pappalardo's Inferno tells the true story of the men who flew the deadliest missions of World War II, and an unlikely hero who received the Medal of Honor in the midst of the bloodiest military campaign in aviation history. There's no higher accolade in the U.S. military than the Medal of Honor, and 472 people received it for their action during World War II. But only one was demoted right after: Maynard Harrison Smith. Smith is one of the most unlikely heroes of the war, where he served in B-17s during the early days of the bombing of France and Germany from England. From his juvenile delinquent past in Michigan, through the war and during the decades after, Smith's life seemed to be a series of very public missteps. The other airmen took to calling the 5-foot, 5-inch airman "Snuffy" after an unappealing movie character. This is also the man who, on a tragically mishandled mission over France on May 1, 1943, single-handedly saved the crewmen in his stricken B-17. With every other gunner injured or bailed out, Smith stood alone in the fuselage of a shattered, nameless bomber and fought fires, treated wounded crew and fought off fighters. His ordeal is part of a forgotten mission that aircrews came to call the May Day Massacre. The skies over Europe in 1943 were a charnel house for U.S. pilots, who were being led by tacticians surprised by the brutal effectiveness of German defenses. By May 1943 the combat losses among bomb crews were a staggering 40 to 50 percent. The backdrop of Smith's story intersects with some of the luminaries of aviation history, including Curtis Lemay, Ira Eaker and "Hap" Arnold, during critical times of their storied careers. Inferno also examines Smith's life in a new, comprehensive light, through the use of exclusive interviews of those who knew him (including fellow MOH recipients and family) as well as public and archival records. This is both a thrilling and horrifying story of the air war over Europe during WWII and a fascinating look at one of America's forgotten heroes.

A former prisoner of the Gestapo, Kulka leads us through the horror of the Nazi death camps, describing such unbearable conditions as the over-crowded ghettos where Jewish minorities were left to starve, separation of families in cases where parents were brought to one concentration camp and children to another, and fear of an unknown fate such as the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Few people escaped from Auschwitz, and fewer survived such escape attempts. From personal experience as well as accounts from other survivors, Kulka details the only successful escape, led by Siegfried Lederer, where all those involved survived.This is a test

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and other Western positions in the Asia-Pacific World in December 1941, it was unprepared to go to war with the United States and the Western Democracies generally and even realized it could not win. Its navy and air force were impressive, and its army could battle impressively against China, but Japanese small arms were terrible. Japan's tanks could not compete with their opposite numbers. The Empire's logistical base was undeveloped for modern warfare. While the Allies could produce large numbers of trained many pilots, Japan produced very few. When its elite airmen were lost at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, Japan could not replace them. At sea, Japan built battleships when it needed more aircraft carriers. The Japanese military never even attempted to win World War II by a simple and direct plan. Its planners consistently assumed that the enemy would do precisely what they assumed and countenanced no alternative analyses of facts.

This is perhaps the most revealing case history of the politics of modern warfare ever set down. It is a story of a time when image making and public relations took precedence over strategy at the cost of thousands of lives. It is the story of the distortion of history and the promulgation of questionable glory. By August 1942, disaster had struck Great Britain in every theater of war, Singapore had fallen; Crete was gone; the Egyptians were hammering at Egypt. The British Navy and Air Force were being repulsed, and Churchill wrote: "I should have then vanished from the scene and the harvest would have been ascribed to my belated disappearance." The shadow of becoming a second class power was already falling on Britain, and Churchill and his generals were about to be eclipsed by Roosevelt and the strength of America. Churchill was desperate for victory and a glamorous hero. General Auchinleck, commander of Britain's Eighth Army, had already fought a successful battle at El Alamein. But Churchill needed something more theatrically effective than what Auchinleck could provide. SO he set the propaganda machinery working to obliterate that victory. Auchinleck was sacked and replaced by Montgomery. Although Rommel was by this time a very sick man with a weakened army, the myth of the Desert Fox was revived as well. And the second Battle of El Alamein, the one recorded in the history books, was launched. Every man played his part well, including the public relations staff, General Montgomery's personal photographers, the moving picture teams, and those who fell in battle. This is a fascinating book, not just for buffs of military history, but for anyone concerned with how a war is really run in an age of propaganda.

World War II was a watershed event for the people of the former Japanese colonies of Micronesia. The Japanese military build-up, the conflict itself, and the American occupation and control of the conquered islands brought rapid and dramatic changes to Micronesian life. Whether they spent the war in caves and bomb shelters, in sweet potato fields under armed Japanese guard, or in their own homes, Micronesians who survived those years recognize that their peoples underwent a major historical transformation. Like a typhoon, the war swept away a former life. The Typhoon of War combines archival research and oral history culled from more than three hundred Micronesian survivors to offer a comparative history of the war in Micronesia. It is the first book to develop Islander perspectives on a topic still dominated by military histories that all but ignore the effects of wartime operations on indigenous populations. The authors explore the significant cultural meanings of the war for Island peoples, for the events of the war are the foundation on which Micronesians have constructed their modern view of themselves, their societies, and the wider world. Their recollections of those tumultuous years contain a wealth of detail about wartime activities, local conditions, and social change, making this an invaluable reference for anyone interested in twentieth-century Micronesia. Photographs, maps, and a detailed chronology will help readers situate Micronesian experiences within the broader context of the Pacific War.

"This useful compilation of essays serves as an introduction and guide to the complexities arising from the theft of Jewish property during WWII...This anthology belongs in every library."
-- "Choice"

The campaign for the restitution of Jewish property stolen during the Holocaust has touched a raw nerve within European society, bringing many nations to confront their wartime past. Together with the end of the Cold War and generational change, the campaign has created a need to reevaluate conventional historical truths.

Following an unprecedented media campaign, pressure from Jewish organizations, and public opinion, more than 40 European commissions were established to investigate their fellow countrymen's behavior during the war and to ascertain how stolen property was dealt with in its aftermath.

The Plunder of Jewish Property During the Holocaust brings together a range of distinguished international experts to examine the major cases concerning restitution in several countries, covering specific issues such as Nazi gold, wartime theft of works of art, and the ownership of dormant accounts in Swiss banks. The contributors incorporate insights from diverse disciplines such as international law, economics, history, and political science which, taken as a whole, make clear that some chapters of European history will have to be rewritten.

With a preface by Edgar Bronfman and Israel Singer

Covering the development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, the origins and early course of the Cold War, and the advent of the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War explores a still neglected aspect of Winston Churchill's career - his relationship with and thinking on nuclear weapons. Kevin Ruane shows how Churchill went from regarding the bomb as a weapon of war in the struggle with Nazi Germany to viewing it as a weapon of communist containment (and even punishment) in the early Cold War before, in the 1950s, advocating and arguably pioneering "mutually assured destruction" as the key to preventing the Cold War flaring into a calamitous nuclear war. While other studies of Churchill have touched on his evolving views on nuclear weapons, few historians have given this hugely important issue the kind of dedicated and sustained treatment it deserves. In Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War, however, Kevin Ruane has undertaken extensive primary research in Britain, the United States and Europe, and accessed a wide array of secondary literature, in producing an immensely readable yet detailed, insightful and provocative account of Churchill's nuclear hopes and fears.

Second edition. First published 2005. US Army Center of Military History publication CMH Pub 12-2.A major collection of photographs with explanatory text that graphically portrays various aspects of the war in North Africa and the Middle East; Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia; and Italy and southern France.

Nazi art looting has been the subject of enormous international attention in recent years, and the subject of two history bestsellers, Hector Feliciano's The Lost Museum and Lynn Nicholas's The Rape of Europa. But such books leave us wondering: What made thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women decide to put their talents in the service of a brutal and inhuman regime? This question is the starting point for The Faustian Bargain, Jonathan Petropoulos's study of five key figure in the art world of Nazi Germany.

Petropoulos follows the careers of these prominent individuals that like Faust, that German archetypechose to pursue artistic ends through collaboration with diabolical forces. Readers meet Ernst Buchner, the distinguished museum director and expert on Old Master paintings who "repatriated" Van Eyck's Ghent altarpiece to Germany, and Karl Haberstock, an art dealer who filled German museums with works bought virtually at gunpoint from Jewish collectors. Robert Scholz, an art critic in the Third Reich, became an officer in the chief art looting unit in France and Kajetan Muhlmanna leading art historianheaded looting agencies in Poland and the Netherlands. Finally, there is Arno Breker, a gifted artist who exchanged his modernist style for monumental realism and became Hitler's favorite sculptor. If it is striking that these educated men became part of the Nazi machine, it is equally is striking that most of them lived comfortably after the war.

Based on previously unreleased information and recently declassified documents, The Faustian Bargain is a gripping read about the art world during this period, and a fascinating examination of the intense relationship between culture and politics in the Third Reich.

Now available in English for the first time, a controversial work that indicts the Vatican for its actions before and during World War II.
In the decade preceding the outbreak of World War II, the Vatican made a devil's bargain with fascist leaders. Anticipating that their regimes would eliminate a common enemy--namely Marxist-Leninist communism--two popes essentially collaborated with Hitler, Mussolini, and the fascist dictators in Spain (Franco) and Croatia (Pavelić).
This is the damning indictment of this well-researched polemic, which for almost five decades in Germany has sparked controversy, outrage, and furious debate. Now it is available in English for the first time.
Many will dismiss Deschner--who himself was raised and educated in a pious Catholic tradition--as someone who is obsessed with exposing the failings of the church of his upbringing. But he has marshaled so many facts and presented them with such painstaking care that his accusations cannot easily be ignored.
The sheer weight of the evidence that he has brought together in this book raises a host of questions about a powerful institution that continues to exercise political influence to this day.

When General Douglas MacArthur led Allied troops into the jungles of New Guinea in World War II, he was already looking ahead. By successfully leapfrogging Japanese forces on that island, he placed his armies in a position to fulfill his personal promise to liberate the Philippines.

The New Guinea campaign has gone down in history as one of MacArthur's shining successes. Now Stephen Taaffe has written the definitive history of that assault, showing why it succeeded and what it contributed to the overall strategy against Japan. His book tells not only how victory was gained through a combination of technology, tactics, and Army-Navy cooperation, but also how the New Guinea campaign exemplified the strategic differences that plagued the Pacific War, since many high-ranking officers considered it a diversionary tactic rather than a key offensive.

"MacArthur's Jungle War" examines the campaign's strategic background and individual operations, describing the enormous challenges posed by jungle and amphibious warfare. Perhaps more important, it offers a balanced assessment of MacArthur's leadership and limitations, revealing his reliance on familiar battle plans and showing the vital role that subordinates played in his victory. Taaffe tells how MacArthur played the difficulties of the New Guinea campaign by maintaining his undivided attention on reaching the Philippines. He also discloses how MacArthur frequently deceived both his superiors and the public in order to promote his own agenda, and examines errors the general would later repeat on a larger scale up through the Korean War.

"MacArthur's Jungle War" offers historians a more analytical treatment of the New Guinea campaign than is found in previous works, and is written with a dramatic flair that will appeal to military buffs. By revealing the interaction among American military planning, interservice politics, MacArthur's generalship, and the American way of war, Taaffe's account provides a clearer understanding of America's Pacific war strategy and shows that the New Guinea offensive was not a mere backwater affair, but a critical part of the war against Japan.

At the end of World War II, the Soviet secret police installed ten special camps in the Soviet occupation zone, later to become the German Democratic Republik. Between 1945 and 1950, roughly 154,000 Germans were held incommunicado in these camps. Whether those accused of being Nazis, spies, or terrorists were indeed guilty as charged, they were indiscriminately imprisoned as security threats and denied due process of the law. One third of the captives did not survive. To this day, most Germans have no knowledge of this postwar Stalinist persecution, even though it exemplifies in a unique way the entangled history of Germans as perpetrators and victims. How can one write the history of victims in a "society of perpetrators?" This is only one of the questions Displaced Terror: History and Perception of Soviet Special Camps in Germany raises in exploring issues in memory culture in contemporary Germany. The study begins with a detailed description of the camp system against the backdrop of Stalinist security policies in a territory undergoing a transition from war zone to occupation zone to Cold War hot spot. The interpretation of the camps as an instrument of pacification rather than of denacification does not ignore the fact that, while actual perpetrators were a minority, the majority of the special camp inmates had at least been supporters of Nazi rule and were now imprisoned under life-threatening conditions together with victims and opponents of the defeated regime. Based on their detention memoirs, the second part of the book offers a closer look at life and death in the camps, focusing on the prisoners' self-organization and the frictions within these coerced communities. The memoirs also play an important role in the third and last part of the study. Read as attempts to establish public acknowledgment of violence suffered by Germans, they mirror German memory culture since the end of World War II.