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Books > History > World history > From 1900 > Second World War
Who was the enigmatic Jean Moulin, a man as skilled in deception as
he was in acts of heroism? The memory of this French Resistance
hero, who was betrayed to the Gestapo and tortured by Klaus Barbie,
the infamous 'Butcher of Lyon', is revered alongside that of other
national icons. But Moulin's story is full of unanswered questions
and the truth of his life is far more complicated than the legend.
Patrick Marnham, winner of the Marsh Prize for biography,
thrillingly tells the epic story of France's greatest war hero,
bringing to light the shadowy and often deceitful world of the
French Resistance, and offers a shocking conclusion to one of the
great unsolved mysteries of World War II.
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.
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.
'Long Live Freedom!' - Hans Scholl's last words before his
execution The White Rose (die Weisse Rose) resistance circle was a
group of students and a professor at the University of Munich who
in the early 1940s secretly wrote and distributed anti-Nazi
pamphlets. At its heart were Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, Christoph
Probst, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf and Professor Kurt Huber,
all of whom were executed in 1943 by the Nazi regime. The youngest
among them was just twenty-one years old. This book outlines the
story of the group and sets their resistance texts in political and
historical context, including archival photographs. A series of
brief biographical sketches, along with excerpts from letters and
diaries, trace each member's journey towards action against the
National Socialist state. The White Rose resistance pamphlets are
included in full, translated by students at the University of
Oxford. These translations are the result of work by undergraduates
around the same age as the original student authors, working
together on texts, ideas and issues. This project reflects a
crucial aspect of the White Rose: its collaborative nature. The
resistance pamphlets were written collaboratively, and they could
not have had the reach they did without being distributed by
multiple individuals, defying Hitler through words and ideas.
Today, the bravery of the White Rose lives on in film and
literature and is commemorated not just in Munich but throughout
Germany and beyond.
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.
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'.
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.
Based on 70 hours of interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka (the largest of the extermination camps), this book bares the soul of a man who continually found ways to rationalize his role in Hitler's final soulution.
Italy's declaration of war on Britain in June 1940 had devastating
consequences for Italian immigrant families living in Scotland
signalling their traumatic construction as the 'enemy other'.
Through an analysis of personal testimonies and previously
unpublished archival material, this book takes a case study of a
long-established immigrant group and explores how notions of
belonging and citizenship are undermined at a time of war. Overall,
this book considers how wartime events affected the construction or
Italian identity in Britain. It makes a groundbreaking and original
contribution to the social and cultural history of Britain during
World War Two as well as the wider literature on war, memory and
ethnicity. It will appeal to scholars and students of British and
Scottish cultural and social history and the history of World War
II. -- .
Millions of Soviet soldiers died in the "war of annihilation"
against Nazi Germany but millions more returned to Stalin's state
after victory. Mark Edele traces the veterans' story from the early
post-war years through to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. He
describes in detail the problems they encountered during
demobilization, the dysfunctional bureaucracy they had to deal with
once back, and the way their reintegration into civilian life
worked in practice in one of the most devastated countries of
Europe. He pays particular attention to groups with specific
problems such as the disabled, former prisoners of war, women
soldiers, and youth.
The study analyses the old soldiers' long struggle for recognition
and the eventual emergence of an organized movement in the years
after Stalin's death. The Soviet state at first refused to
recognize veterans as a group worthy of special privileges or as an
organization. They were not a group conceived of in
Marxist-Leninist theory, there was suspicion about their political
loyalty, and the leadership worried about the costs of affording a
special status to such a large population group. These
preconceptions were overcome only after a long, hard struggle by a
popular movement that slowly emerged within the strict confines of
the authoritarian Soviet regime.
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.
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.
This book offers a clear, accessible account of the American
litigation over the restitution of works of art taken from Jewish
families during the Holocaust. For the past two decades, the courts
of the United States have been an arena of conflict over this issue
that has recently captured widespread public attention. In a series
of cases, survivors and heirs have come forward to claim artworks
in public and private collections around the world, asserting that
they were seized by the Nazis or were sold under duress by owners
desperate to escape occupied countries. Spanning two continents and
three-quarters of a century, the cases confront the courts with
complex problems of domestic and international law, clashes among
the laws of different jurisdictions, factual uncertainties about
the movements of art during and after the war, and the persistent
question whether restitution claims have been extinguished by the
passage of time.Through individual case studies, the book examines
the legal questions these conflicts have raised and the answers the
courts have given. From the internationally celebrated "Woman in
Gold" lawsuit against Austria to lesser-known claims against
Germany, Hungary, Spain, and museums and private collections in the
United States, the book synthesizes the legal and evidentiary
materials and judicial rulings in each case, creating a coherent
narrative of proceedings that are often labyrinthine in complexity.
Written by a leading authority on litigation and procedure, the
book will be of interest to readers in various fields of the
humanities and social sciences as well as law, and to anyone
interested in the fate of artworks that have been called the "last
prisoners" of the Second World War.
This book consists of ten essays that examine the ways in which
language has been used to evoke what Lawrence L. Langer calls the
'deathscape' and the 'hopescape' of the Holocaust. The chapters in
this collection probe the diverse impacts that site visits,
memoirs, survivor testimonies, psychological studies, literature
and art have on our response to the atrocities committed by the
Germans during World War II. Langer also considers the
misunderstandings caused by erroneous, embellished and sentimental
accounts of the catastrophe, and explores some reasons why they
continue to enter public and printed discourse with such ease.
View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.
Written with passion and intelligence, the letters of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade in World War II express the raw idealism of
anti-fascist soldiers who experienced the war in boot camps,
cockpits, and foxholes, but never lost sight of the great global
issues at stake.
When the United States entered World War II on December 7, 1941,
only one group of American soldiers had already confronted the
fascist enemy on the battlefield: the U.S. veterans of the Lincoln
Brigade, a volunteer army of about 2,800 men and women who had
enlisted to defend the Spanish Republic from military rebels during
the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). They fought on the losing
side.
After Pearl Harbor, Lincoln Brigade veterans enthusiastically
joined the U.S. Army, welcoming this second chance to fight against
fascism. However, the Lincoln recruits soon encountered suspicious
military leaders who questioned their patriotism and denied them
promotions and overseas assignments, foreshadowing the political
persecution of the postwar Red Scare. African American veterans who
fought in fully integrated units in Spain, faced second-class
treatment in America's Jim Crow army. Nevertheless, the Lincolns
served with distinction in every theater of the war and won a
disproportionate number of medals for courage, dedication, and
sacrifice.
The 154 letters in this volume, selected from thousands held in
the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives at NYU's Tamiment Library,
provide a new and unique perspective on aspects of World War
II.
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