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Books > History > World history > From 1900 > Second World War
This book is a study of the legal reckoning with the crimes of the
Latvian Auxiliary Security Police and its political dimensions in
the Soviet Union, West and East Germany, and the United States in
the context of the Cold War. Decades of work by prosecutors have
established the facts of Latvian collaboration with the Nazis
during the Holocaust. No group made a deeper mark in the annals of
atrocity than the men of the so-called 'Arajs Kommando' and their
leader, Viktors Arajs, who killed tens of thousands of Jews on
Latvian soil and participated in every aspect of the 'Holocaust by
Bullets.' This study also has significance for coming to terms with
Latvia's encounter with Nazism - a process that was stunted and
distorted by Latvia's domination by the USSR until 1991. Examining
the country's most notorious killers, their fates on both sides of
the Iron Curtain, and contemporary Latvians' responses in different
political contexts, this volume is a record of the earliest phases
of this process, which must now continue and to which this book
contributes.
Normandy 1944. Like most of his comrades Ken Tout was just 20 years
old. Not until many years later did he feel able to gather their
memoirs in three Hale books, "Tank!", "Tanks, Advance!" and "To
Hell with Tanks!". Now these adventures are condensed into this one
continuous narrative. Follow the ordinary young lads of the
Northamptonshire Yeomanry through the massive enemy defences on
Bourguebus Ridge, to the snows of the Ardennes, to the night
crossing of the River Rhine, and finally to Grote KerkI, where they
celebrated with liberated Dutch citizens. They were not
professional soldiers but young conscripts willing to 'do their
bit', knowing that their Shermans were outgunned by the enemy's
much heavier Tiger and Panther tanks. "By Tank: D Day to VE Days"
vividly recalls, in one complete volume, the whole experience of
battle with utter authenticity: the fear, confusion, boredom,
excitement and grief.
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Navy attacked the American
Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawai'i. The perception remains that
they succeeded in severely crippling the navy; however, nothing
could be further from the truth.
Thanks to meticulous research, Daughters of Infamy puts this
myth rest and shows that the vast majority of warships in the
harbor suffered no damage at all. Former US Navy photographer David
Kilmer provides documentation on each ship that survived the Pearl
Harbor massacre. He records what happened the day of the attack,
then traces the ships' movements after December 7 and, in some
cases, their destiny after the war. Contrary to popular belief,
many met the enemy and helped to win the war in the Pacific.
Undoubtedly the first work to compile factual and informative
data on nearly all the ships in Pearl Harbor in December of 1941,
Kilmer's in-depth record fills a scholarly void. His fascinating
narrative on each ship adds another layer of expertise and provides
a new perspective on a familiar event.
We commonly associate the term "Holocaust" with Nuremberg and
Kristallnacht, the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos, Auschwitz and
Treblinka. Appearing as they do in countless books and films, these
symbols of hatred penetrate our consciousness, memory, and history.
But, unfortunately, our memory is selective, and, in the case of
Romania, our knowledge is scant. In 1939 the Jewish population of
Romania exceeded 750,000: the third largest concentration of Jews
in Europe. By 1944, some 400,000 had disappeared. Another 150,000
Ukrainian Jews died at the hands of Romanian soldiers. In the quest
for a "final solution" Romania proved to be Hitler's most
enthusiastic ally. In The Silent Holocaust, Butnaru, himself a
survivor of the Romanian labor camps, provides a full account and
demonstrates that anti-Semitism was a central force in Romania's
history. He begins by examining the precarious status of Romanian
Jewry in the years prior to World War I. He then reviews the period
to the establishment in September, 1940, of the National Legionary
State, a period when anti-Semitism became the unifying force in
politics. The remainder of the book covers the Holocaust years, and
reveals that Romania's premeditated mass murder of Jews was well
underway before the Reich's gas chambers became operational. The
Silent Holocaust has been called a "work of epic and historical
worth" and it is invaluable for students of World War II, the
Holocaust, and Jewish and Eastern European studies.
Throughout his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt was determined to
pursue a peaceful accommodation with an increasingly powerful
Soviet Union, and inclination reinforced by the onset of world war.
Roosevelt knew that defeating the Axis powers would require major
contributions by the Soviets and their Red Army, and so, despite
his misgivings about Stalin's expansionist motives, he pushed for
friendlier relations. Yet almost from the moment he was
inaugurated, lower-level officials challenged FDR's ability to
carry out this policy. Mary Glantz analyzes tensions shaping the
policy stance of the United States toward the Soviet Union before,
during, and immediately after World War II. Focusing on the
conflicts between a president who sought close relations between a
president who sought close relations between the two nations and
the diplomatic and military officers who opposed them, she shows
how these career officers were able to resist and shape
presidential policy-"and how their critical views helped shape the
parameters of the subsequent Cold War. Venturing into the largely
uncharted waters of bureaucratic politics, Glantz examines
overlooked aspects of wartime relations between Washington and
Moscow to highlight the roles played by U.S. personnel in the
U.S.S.R in formulating and implementing policics governing the
American-Soviet relationship. She takes readers into the American
embassy in Moscow to show how individuals like Ambassadors Joseph
Davies, Lawrence Steinhadt, and Averell Harriman and U.S. military
attaches like Joseph Michela influenced policy, and reveals how
private resistance sometimes turned into public dispute. She also
presents new material on the controversial
militaryattache/lend-lease director Phillip Faymonville, a largely
neglected officer who understood the Soviet system and supported
Roosevelt's policy. Deftly combining military with diplomatic
history, Glantz traces these philosophical and policy battles to
show how difficult it was for even a highly popular president like
Roosevelt to overcome such entrenched and determined opposition.
Although he reorganized federal offices and appointed ambassadors
who shared his views, in the end he was unable to outlast his
bureaucratic opponents or change their minds. With his death,
anti-Soviet factions rushed into the policymaking vacuum to become
the primary architects of Truman's Cold War "containment" policy. A
case study in foreign relations, highlevel policymaking, and
civil-military relations, FDR "and the Soviet Union enlarges our
understanding of the ideologies and events that set the stage for
the Cold War. It adds a new dimension to our understanding of
Soviet-American relations as it sheds new light on the surprising
power of those in low places.
With the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War
looming, this new edition of the Wartime Scrapbook revives memories
of this evocative time in Britain's history. Life on the home front
revolved around rationing, blackouts, and air raid precautions,
bringing out that British spirit - humour coupled with making-do
and determination. Poster propaganda kept the population digging
for victory during the years of the Home Guard, Women's Land Army
and austerity with dried eggs. Drawn from Robert Opie's unrivalled
collection, this new edition of The Wartime Scrapbook profusely
illustrates a unique period in history - the song sheets, magazine
covers, comic postcards, fashion and food, games, propaganda
posters and a wealth of wartime ephemera whose very survival is
remarkable.
Part of a series about principal World War II and post war leaders,
this book is about Marshal Tito. This bibliography contains a
biographical essay and chronology, a survey of manuscript
resources, speeches and writings by the subject, a summary of
newspaper coverage and a bibliography of relevant newspapers and a
bibliography of historical and biographic works on Marshal Tito and
his place in history.
This book analyses the nationalist rebellion which emerged in
Romania following the Second World War. The first two decades after
the end of the war were times of rebellion in imperial peripheries.
Armed movements, sometimes communist but nearly always nationalist
in orientation, rose in opposition to retreating or advancing
imperial powers. One such armed revolt took place in Romania,
pitting nationalist partisans against a communist government. This
book is an analysis of how the authorities crushed this rebellion,
set in the context of parallel campaigns fought in Europe and the
Third World. It focuses on population control through censorship,
propaganda and deportations. It analyses military operations,
particularly patrols, checkpoints, ambushes and informed strikes.
Intelligence operations are also discussed, with an emphasis on
recruiting informants, on interrogation, torture and infiltration.
Bullets, brains and barbwire, not "hearts and minds" approaches,
crushed internal rebels in post-1945 campaigns.
Cat Wilson brings together two strands of historical scholarship:
Churchill's work as a historian and the history of WWII in the Far
East. Examining Churchill's portrayal of the British Empire's war
against Japan, as set down in his memoirs, it ascertains whether he
mythologised wartime Anglo-American relations to present a 'special
relationship'.
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.
The first study of the everydayness of political life under Stalin,
this book examines Soviet citizenship through common practices of
expressing Soviet identity in the public space. The Stalinist state
understood citizenship as practice, with participation in a set of
political rituals and public display of certain "civic emotions"
serving as the marker of a person's inclusion in the political
world. The state's relations with its citizens were structured by
rituals of celebration, thanking, and hatred-rites that required
both political awareness and a demonstrable emotional response.
Soviet functionaries transmitted this obligation to ordinary
citizens through the mechanisms of communal authority (workplace
committees, volunteer agitators, and other forms of peer pressure)
as much as through brutal state coercion. Yet, the population also
often imbued these ceremonies-elections, state holidays, parades,
mass rallies, subscriptions to state bonds-with different meanings:
as a popular fete, an occasion to get together after work, a chance
to purchase goods not available on other days, and even as an
opportunity to indulge in some drinking. The people also understood
these political rituals as moments of negotiation whereby citizens
fulfilling their "patriotic duty " expected the state to
reciprocate by providing essential services and basic social
welfare. Nearly-universal passive resistance to required attendance
casts doubt on recent theories about the mass internalization of
communist ideology and the development of "Soviet subjectivities.
"The book is set in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv during the last
years of World War II and immediate postwar years, the period best
demonstrating how formulaic rituals could create space for the
people to express their concerns, fears, and prejudices, as well as
their eagerness to be viewed as citizens in good standing. By the
end of Stalin's rule, a more ossified routine of political
participation developed, which persisted until the Soviet Union's
collapse.
This book analyses the film industries and cinema cultures of
Nazi-occupied countries (1939-1945) from the point of view of
individuals: local captains of industry, cinema managers, those
working for film studios and officials authorized to navigate film
policy. The book considers these people from a historical
perspective, taking into account their career before the occupation
and, where relevant, pays attention to their post-war lives. The
perspectives of these historical agents" contributes to an
understanding of how top-down orders and haphazard signals from the
occupying administration were moulded, adjusted and distorted in
the process of their translation and implementation. This edited
collection offers a more dynamic and less deterministic approach to
research on the international expansion of Third-Reich cinema in
World War Two; an approach that strives to balance the role of
individual agency with the structural determinants. The case
studies presented in this book cover the territories of Belgium,
Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and the
Soviet Union.
The story of an ordinary depression era kid playing a small part in
a big war. It took a lot of luck to make it through four years of
flying the various army fighter planes over a lot of the world.
Starting from Aviation Cadet training the trail goes to Oahu and
isolated atolls in the central Pacific, to the Solomons, then to
New Guinea, and finally to the Mighty Eighth over Europe.
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