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Books > History > World history > From 1900 > Second World War
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'.
World War II was the defining event of the twentieth century. For
everyone it was a time of confusion, fear, destruction, and death
on a scale never before seen. Much has been written of the
generals, campaigns, and battles of the war, but it was young,
ordinary American kids who held our freedom in their hands as they
fought for liberty across the globe. Forgotten Heroes of World War
II offers a personal understanding of what was demanded of these
young heroes through the stories of rank-and-file individuals who
served in the navy, marines, army, air corps, and merchant marine
in all theaters of the war. Their tales are told without pretense
or apology. At the time, each thought himself no different from
those around him, for they were all young, scared, and miserable.
They were the ordinary, the extraordinary-the forgotten.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the slogan "The Arsenal of
Democracy" to describe American might during the grim years of
World War II. The man who financed that arsenal was his Secretary
of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr. This is the first book to
focus on the wartime achievements of this unlikely hero--a dyslexic
college dropout who turned himself into a forceful and efficient
administrator and then exceeded even Roosevelt in his determination
to defeat the Nazis.
Based on extensive research at the FDR Library in Hyde Park, NY,
author Peter Moreira describes Morgenthau's truly breathtaking
accomplishments: He led the greatest financial program the world
has ever seen, raising $310 billion (over $4.8 trillion in today's
dollars) to finance the war effort. This was largely done without
the help of Wall Street by appealing to the patriotism of the
average citizen through the sale of war bonds. In addition, he
championed aid to Britain before America entered the war; initiated
and oversaw the War Refugee Board, spearheading the rescue of
200,000 Jews from the Nazis; and became the architect of the 1944
Bretton Woods Conference, which produced the modern economic
paradigm.
The book also chronicles Morgenthau's many challenges, ranging from
anti-Semitism to the postwar "Morgenthau Plan" that was his
undoing.
This is a captivating story about an understated and often
overlooked member of the Roosevelt cabinet who played a pivotal
role in the American war effort to defeat the Nazis.
The Nazis put a remarkable amount of effort into anti-Semitic
propaganda, intending to bring ordinary Germans around to the
destructive ideology of the Nazi party. Julius Streicher
(1885-1946) spearheaded many of these efforts, publishing
anti-Semitic articles and cartoons in his weekly newspaper, Der
Sturmer, the most widely read paper in the Third Reich. Streicher
won the close personal friendship of Hitler and Himmler, and drew
deserved attacks from the world press. Bytwerk's biography examines
Streicher's use of propaganda techniques, and the hate literature
towards Jews that continued to appear after his death, bearing his
influence.
This gripping and heartbreaking narrative is the first full account
of an American woman who gave her life in the struggle against the
Nazi regime. As members of a key resistance group, Mildred and her
husband, Arvid Harnack, assisted in the escape of German Jews and
political dissidents, and for years provided vital economic and
military intelligence to both Washington and Moscow. But in 1942,
following a Soviet blunder, the Gestapo arrested, tortured and
tried some four score members of the Harnack's group, which the
Nazis dubbed the Red Orchestra.
Mildred Fish-Harnack was guillotined in Berlin on February 16,
1943, on the personal instruction of Adolf Hitler--the only
American woman executed as an underground conspirator. Yet as World
War II ended and the Cold War began, her courage, idealism and
self-sacrifice went largely unacknowledged in America and the
democratic West, and were distorted and sanitized in the Communist
East. Only now, with the opening of long-sealed archives, can the
full story be told.
Resisting Hitler is based on extensive interviews with Fish-Harnack
family, friends and associates; it draws on personal correspondence
and formerly classified German and Soviet KGB files and recently
released CIA and FBI dossiers. It describes the life of a Wisconsin
girl whose intelligence and beauty captivated a visiting scholar,
Arvid Harnack, a member of a distinguished German academic family.
It explores for the first time the complex familial connections of
the Harnacks, Delbrucks and Bonhoeffers, twelve of whom were
executed for resistance acts. And it details Mildred's friendship
with Martha Dodd, daughter of FDR's ambassador to the Third Reich,
whose affair with a Soviet diplomat led to his death.
Moments before her death, Mildred said, "I have loved Germany so
much." In this superbly told life of an unjustly forgotten woman,
Shareen Blair Brysac depicts the human side of a controversial
resistance group that for too long has been portrayed as merely a
Soviet espionage network. The extraordinary story of Mildred
Fish-Harnack's ten dramatic years of resisting the Nazi regime also
reminds today's readers of the hard moral choices that beset
opponents of a ruthless totalitarian dictatorship."
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 is the first full-length work to be published about the
spectacular failure of the German intelligence services in Persia
(Iran) during WWII. Based on archival research it analyzes a
compelling history of Nazi planning, operations, personalities, and
intrigues, and follows the protagonists from Hitler's rise to power
into the postwar era.
What did Hitler really want to achieve: world domination. In the
early twenties, Hitler was working on this plan and from 1933 on,
was working to make it a reality. During 1940 and 1941, he believed
he was close to winning the war. This book not only examines Nazi
imperial architecture, armament, and plans to regain colonies but
also reveals what Hitler said in moments of truth. The author
presents many new sources and information, including Hitler's
little known intention to attack New York City with long-range
bombers in the days of Pearl Harbor.
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.
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.
For nearly three years, August 1941 to March 1944, 47,000 Spanish
soldiers served under German command on the Russian front, two of
those years con tinuously in the line in the siege of Leningrad.
There were 22,000 casu alties, of which 4,500 were killed in ac
tion or died of wounds, disease, or frost bite. Fewer than 300
prisoners of war finally were repatriated in 1954. The story of
these Spanish volunteers told here, largely from original Spanish
and German archival sources, in the graphic detail of a military
history cover ing the major battles of the Russo-German war, gives
an entirely different perspective to the siege of Leningrad which
is neither Communist nor Nazi but Mediterranean. Thinking of
themselves as warriors, as opposed to soldiers, the Spaniards
fought with great courage and dash. Masters of improvisation, they
lived off the countryside, regarded the Russians as human beings,
and often formed strong bonds with the peasants--so strong that the
Russian population often protected the Spaniards from both the Red
Army and the partisans.
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
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.
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