It is the third of September 1939. It is just after half past eleven in the morning. I am fifteen years and sixteen days old. The radiogram at my home, the Woodman Hotel in Clent, has just been switched off, the silence resonates around the room, and a deathly hush has fallen. The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, has declared that, despite the best efforts of the politicians of the day to secure 'peace in our time', the inevitable has befallen us; despite pledges to the contrary, Germany has invaded Poland, Hitler has ignored requests to back down and so, therefore, 'Britain is now at war with Germany'. Minutes after the broadcast ends, my Father, Sidney Wheeler, goes quietly up to his room where he methodically loads three bullets into his First World War revolver. This is the true story of a fifteen-year-old girl's experience of the Second World War, based around her parent's hotel in a sleepy Worcestershire village. As war is declared, her father prepares three bullets for the invasion. He will shoot the family and himself when the Germans come. In their village, local Germans are imprisoned (guilty or not). The blackout is immediate and has tragic consequences. There is a court case over an alleged poker game. An abortion nearly results in tragedy. Handsome young airmen fly low over the hotel. Pamela has a premonition of death. The business fails. An air raid very nearly kills them all. She is called up first to factory work and then to the Land Army. She marries by special licence. As the war comes to an end she is living at home with her parents and a small baby, at which point she is just twenty-one years of age. Amusing and entertaining, surprising and often moving, Pamela's account vividly captures one family's life on the home front in Worcestershire.

For three decades one of the most secretive units in the British military has been a mystery force known as X Platoon. Officially there was no X Platoon. The forty men in its elite number were specially selected from across the Armed Forces, at which point they simply ceased to exist. X Platoon had no budget, no weaponry, no vehicles and no kit - apart from what its men could beg, borrow or steal from other military units. For the first time a highly decorated veteran of this specialised force - otherwise known as the Pathfinders - reveals its unique story. Steve Heaney became one of the youngest ever to pass Selection, the gruelling trial of elite forces, and was at the cutting edge of X Platoon operations - serving on anti-narcotics operations in the Central American jungles, on missions hunting war criminals in the Balkans, and being sent to spy on and wage war against the Russians. The first non-officer in the unit's history to be award the Military Cross, Steve Heaney reveals the extraordinary work undertaken by this secret band of brothers.

Moscow in the late 1970s: one by one, CIA assets are disappearing. The perils of American arrogance, mixed with bureaucratic infighting, had left the country unspeakably vulnerable to ultra-sophisticated Russian electronic surveillance.. The Spy in Moscow Station tells of a time when―much like today―Russian spycraft was proving itself far ahead of the best technology the U.S. had to offer.

This is the true story of unorthodox, underdog intelligence officers who fought an uphill battle against their government to prove that the KGB had pulled off the most devastating and breathtakingly thorough penetration of U.S. national security in history.

Incorporating declassified internal CIA memos and diplomatic cables, this suspenseful narrative reads like a thriller―but real lives were at stake, and every twist is true as the US and USSR attempt to wrongfoot each other in eavesdropping technology and tradecraft. The book also carries a chilling warning for the present: like the State and CIA officers who were certain their "sweeps" could detect any threat in Moscow, we don't know what we don't know.

"Trident K9 Warriors" gave readers an inside look at the SEAL teams' elite K9 warriors--who they are, how they are trained, and the extreme missions they undertake to save lives. From detecting explosives to eliminating the bad guys, these powerful dogs are also some of the smartest and highest skilled working animals on the planet. Mike Ritland's job is to train them.

This special edition re-telling presents the dramatic tale of how Ritland discovered his passion and grew up to become the trainer of the nation's most elite military working dogs. Ritland was a smaller-than-average kid who was often picked-on at school--which led him to spend more time with dogs at a young age. After graduating BUD/S training--the toughest military training in the world--to become a SEAL, he was on combat deployment in Iraq when he saw a military working dog in action and instantly knew he'd found his true calling.

Ritland started his own company to train and supply working and protection dogs for the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, and other clients. He also started the Warrior Dog Foundation to help retired Special Operations dogs live long and happy lives after their service.

This is the true story of how Mike Ritland grew from a skinny, bullied child, to a member of our nation's most elite SEAL Teams, to the trainer of the world's most highly skilled K9 warriors.

Sheila Mills's story is a unique perspective of the Second World War. She is a clever, middle-class Norfolk girl with a yen for adventure and joins the WRNS in 1940 to escape the shackles of secretarial work in London, her unhappy childhood and her social-climbing mother. From a first posting in Scotland in 1940, she progresses through the ranks, first to Egypt and later to a vanquished Germany. Extraordinary and fascinating encounters and personalities are seen through the eyes of a young Wren officer: Admiral Ramsay, the Invasion of Sicily and Operation Mincemeat that triggered it, The Flap, the sinking of the Medway, the surrender of the Italian fleet and the Belsen Trials. These observations are peppered with humorous insights into the humdrum preoccupations of a typical Wren - boys, appearance and having fun, while worrying about home and family. This treasure trove of hundreds of letters, along with scrapbooks and memorabilia, some of which are reproduced here, was discovered in bin liners shortly after Sheila died. Her daughter, Vicky, has pieced together a fascinating and unusual record of the Second World War from a woman's perspective.

Paul Bruce was a tough, idealistic young trooper in the SAS when he was dispatched to Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles. His top secret mission was to execute IRA suspects in cold blood. Bruce and his SAS comrades shot down one terrified victim after another, leaving their bodies to be buried in deep, unmarked woodland graves. In this historic book, the author reveals where his victims lie secretly buried as well as chronicling the mental breakdown of crack SAS troops ordered to carry out the dirtiest job in a secret war.

'Captures the confusion, black humour, raw courage and sheer exhilaration of combat brilliantly' THE TIMES 'Read this account of his stint with the 26-man strong X Platoon in the sweltering jungle, living on grubs, outnumbered 80 to one, battling heavily armed rebels with bamboo sticks and home-made grenades, and you'll be asking the question... Why wasn't he given TWO MCs?' SUNDAY SPORT 2,000 blood-crazed rebels. 26 elite British soldiers. One man's explosive true story. Airlifted into the heart of the Sierra Leone jungle in the midst of the bloody civil war in 2000, 26 elite operators from the secret British elite unit X Platoon were sent into combat against thousands of Sierra Leonean rebels. Notorious for their brutality, the rebels were manned with captured UN armour, machine-guns and grenade-launchers, while the men of X Platoon were kitted with pitiful supplies of ammunition, malfunctioning rifles, and no body armour, grenades or heavy weapons. Intended to last only 48 hours, the mission mutated into a 16-day siege against the rebels, as X Platoon were denied the back-up and air support they had been promised, and were forced to make their stand alone. The half-starved soldiers, surviving on bush tucker, fought with grenades made from old food-tins and defended themselves with barricades made of sharpened bamboo-sticks, tipped in poison given to them by local villagers. Sergeant Steve Heaney won the Military Cross for his initiative in taking command after the platoon lost their commanding officer. OPERATION MAYHEM recounts his amazing untold true story, full of the rough-and-ready humour and steely fortitude with which these elite soldiers carried out operations far into hostile terrain.

In the terrifying summer of 1942 in Belgium, when the Nazis began the brutal roundup of Jewish families, parents searched desperately for safe haven for their children. As Suzanne Vromen reveals in Hidden Children of the Holocaust, these children found sanctuary with other families and schools--but especially in Roman Catholic convents and orphanages.
Vromen has interviewed not only those who were hidden as children, but also the Christian women who rescued them, and the nuns who gave the children shelter, all of whose voices are heard in this powerfully moving book. Indeed, here are numerous first-hand memoirs of life in a wartime convent--the secrecy, the humor, the admiration, the anger, the deprivation, the cruelty, and the kindness--all with the backdrop of the terror of the Nazi occupation. We read the stories of the women of the Resistance who risked their lives in placing Jewish children in the care of the Church, and of the Mothers Superior and nuns who sheltered these children and hid their identity from the authorities. Perhaps most riveting are the stories told by the children themselves--abruptly separated from distraught parents and given new names, the children were brought to the convents with a sense of urgency, sometimes under the cover of darkness. They were plunged into a new life, different from anything they had ever known, and expected to adapt seamlessly. Vromen shows that some adapted so well that they converted to Catholicism, at times to fit in amid the daily prayers and rituals, but often because the Church appealed to them. Vromen also examines their lives after the war, how they faced the devastating loss of parents to the Holocaust, struggled to regain their identities and sought to memorialize those who saved them.
This remarkable book offers an inspiring chronicle of the brave individuals who risked everything to protect innocent young strangers, as well as a riveting account of the "hidden children" who lived to tell their stories.

Unlike other historical depictions of the fall of the Third Reich, German Accounts from the Dying Days of the Third Reich presents the authentic voices of those German soldiers who fought on the front line. Throughout we are witness to the kind of bravery, ingenuity and, ultimately, fear that we are so familiar with from the many Allied accounts of this time. Their sense of confusion and terror is palpable as Nazi Germany finally collapses in May 1945, with soldiers fleeing to the American victors instead of the Russians in the hope of obtaining better treatments as a prisoner of war. This collection of first-hand accounts include the stories of German soldiers fighting the Red Army on the Eastern Front; of Horst Messer, who served on the last East Prussian panzer tank but was captured and spent four years in Russian captivity at Riga; of Hans Obermeier, who recounts his capture on the Czech front and escape from Siberia; and a moving account of an anonymous Wehrmacht soldier in Slovakia given orders to execute Russian prisoners.

Commended for the 2009 Best Books for Kids & Teens Canadian World War II pilot Charley Fox, now in his late eighties, has had a thrilling life, especially on the day in July 1944 in France when he spotted a black staff car, the kind usually employed to drive high-ranking Third Reich dignitaries. Already noted for his skill in dive-bombing and strafing the enemy, Fox went in to attack the automobile. As it turned out, the car contained famed German General Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, and Charley succeeded in wounding him. Rommel, who at the time was the Germans' supreme military commander in France orchestrating the Nazis' resistance to the D-day invasion, was never the same after that. Author Steve Pitt focuses on this seminal event in Charley Fox's life and in the war, but he also provides fascinating aspects of the period, including profiles of noted ace pilots Buzz Beurling and Billy Bishop, Jr., and Great Escape architect Walter Floody, as well as sidebars about Hurricanes, Spitfires, and Messerschmitts.

"No one bore witness better than Don Whitehead . . . this volume, deftly combining his diary and a previously unpublished memoir, brings Whitehead and his reporting back to life, and 21st-century readers are the richer for it."-from the Foreword, by Rick Atkinson Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Don Whitehead is one of the legendary reporters of World War II. For the Associated Press he covered almost every important Allied invasion and campaign in Europe-from North Africa to landings in Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, and Normandy, and to the drive into Germany. His dispatches, published in the recent Beachhead Don, are treasures of wartime journalism. From the fall of September 1942, as a freshly minted A.P. journalist in New York, to the spring of 1943 as Allied tanks closed in on the Germans in Tunisia, Whitehead kept a diary of his experiences as a rookie combat reporter. The diary stops in 1943, and it has remained unpublished until now. Back home later, Whitehead started, but never finished, a memoir of his extraordinary life in combat. John Romeiser has woven both the North African diary and Whitehead's memoir of the subsequent landings in Sicily into a vivid, unvarnished, and completely riveting story of eight months during some of the most brutal combat of the war. Here, Whitehead captures the fierce fighting in the African desert and Sicilian mountains, as well as rare insights into the daily grind of reporting from a war zone, where tedium alternated with terror. In the tradition of cartoonist Bill Mauldin's memoir Up Front, Don Whitehead's powerful self-portrait is destined to become an American classic.

When the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment (known as "2/3") arrived in Iraq five years to the day after 9/11, they were sent to a little-known swath of sparsely-populated desert called the Haditha Triad in Anbar province. It was the center of the most intense terrorist activity in Iraq-and it was being carried out by the well-organised and fearsome Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Into this cauldron 2/3 was thrown and given a nearly impossible double-sided mission: eradicate the enemy and build trust with the local population. After six months of gruelling and exhausting battle-and the loss of twenty-four brave, dedicated fighters-the warriors of 2/3 had utterly crushed the enemy and brought stability and hope to the region. In vivid, you-are-there style, The Warriors of Anbar takes readers onto the front lines of one of the most incredible stories to come out of America's war in Iraq- the story of how one Marine battalion decisively wielded the final, enduring death strike to Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Despite its historical importance, the full story of 2/3 in Iraq has remained untold-until now.

The explosive book from ex-MI5 surveillance officer Tom Marcus takes the reader on a non-stop, adrenalin-fuelled ride as he hunts down those who would do our country harm.

Tom spent years working covertly to stop those who want to do us harm. In his bestselling memoir Soldier Spy, he told how he was recruited and described some of his top-secret operations. In I Spy, he takes us deeper undercover as he puts his life on the line once more.

I Spy plunges the reader straight into the action as Tom and his team race to prevent terrorists from causing carnage on our streets and outsmart Russian agents, blocking a daring plot that threatens the security of the nation. Relying on their quick wits, training and courage, the extraordinary men and women of MI5 are under intense pressure every day. Not everyone is suited for the work, and Tom shows how the incredibly tough challenges he faced growing up gave him the mental strength and skills to survive in a dangerous world.

Gritty and eye-opening, this is a unique insight into a hidden war and the sacrifices made by those who fight it. You will never take your safety for granted again.

This compilation of 76 World War II veterans' stirring recollections presents a remarkable array of stories from all of the major theatres of the war, including the Pacific, Europe, and a saga of Japanese internment in the United States. Gleaned from a series of memoir-writing classes, veterans of the greater Fresno, California, region recorded their memories, thoughts, fears, and feelings on having played a role in World War II. Ranging from riveting to poignant, the stories capture the dramatic moments of epochal combat - including the landings at Okinawa and the Battle of the Bulge - while acutely expressing the difficulties and privations of life during wartime.

In August 1914, thirteen-year-old Amy was trapped on the Belgian seacoast as war was declared with Germany, alone with her younger brothers. British, resilient and feisty, she got back to occupied Brussels and began her war diaries. Amy knew Nurse Cavell and Ada Bodart, members of the secret network to get Allied soldiers across the frontier. She writes of zeppelins, food shortages, constant gunfire and spies. She confronts a 'sneering' German who demands to know where her brother is: 'I could have shot him, ' she comments. Then it all changes: in 1917 her mother attacks her and Amy is moved to a Catholic boarding school nearby. Constantly in trouble for being disruptive, answering back, whistling, laughing in church and climbing onto roofs 'for fun', she longs for the love and approval of her teacher - and her estranged mother.

A Few Bad Men is the incredible true story of an elite team of U.S. Marines set up to take the fall for Afghanistan war crimes they did not commit-and their leader who fought for the redemption of his men. Ambushed in Afghanistan and betrayed by their own leaders-these elite Marines fought for their lives again, back home. A cross between A Few Good Men and American Sniper, this is the true story of an elite Marine special operations unit bombed by an IED and shot at during an Afghanistan ambush. The Marine Commandos were falsely accused of gunning down innocent Afghan civilians following the ambush. The unit's leader, Maj. Fred Galvin, was summarily relieved of duty and his unit was booted from the combat zone. They were condemned by everyone, from the Afghan president to American generals. When Fox Company returned to America, Galvin and his captain were the targets of the first Court of Inquiry in the Marines in fifty years. "Fred Galvin is the real deal. His dramatic retelling of his experience as commander of Fox Company reads like a thriller, full of twists and turns, filled with unassuming heroes and deceitful villains." - Rob Lorenz, Producer/Director, American Sniper, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Mystic River, The Marksman "Fred Galvin has written a real 'page turner' that demonstrates how politics permeates The Pentagon and posts abroad...I highly recommend this book." - J.D. Hayworth, U.S. House of Representatives (Arizona), TV/Radio Host "This book is a must-read for every American who wants to know why, after twenty long years in Afghanistan, we did not win." - Jessie Jane Duff, USMC, Analyst, CNN and FOX "A Few Bad Men is a must-read story of valor, betrayal, and keeping the Marines' honor clean." - Jed Babbin, USAF Judge Advocate, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Journalist, National Review, Washington Post "An incredible account and history of the fighting spirit of the 'Marine Raiders' under fire and the relentless fourteen-year campaign by their leader to clear their names." - Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, U.S. Army (Ret.), Deputy Commander, U.S. Pacific Command

`There followed a blue flash accompanied by a ver y bright magnesium-type flare ... Then came a frighteningly loud but rather flat explosion, which was followed by a blast of hot air ... All this was followed by eerie silence.' This was Cork doctor Aidan MacCarthy's description of the atomic bomb explosion above Nagasaki in August 1945, just over a mile from where he was trembling in a makeshift bomb shelter in the Mitsubishi POW camp. At the end of the war, a Japanese officer did the unthinkable: he surrendered his samurai sword to MacCarthy, his enemy and former prisoner. This is the astonishing story of the wartime adventures of Dr Aidan MacCarthy, who survived the evacuation at Dunkirk, burning planes, sinking ships, jungle warfare and appalling privation as a Japanese prisoner of war. It is a story of survival, forgiveness and humanity at its most admirable.

Vietnam. November 1965. 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, are dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley and immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion is chopped to pieces in a similarly brutal manner. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constitute one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War and set the tone of the conflict to come.

Now a major motion picture starring Mel Gibson

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Omaha Beach legend Ray Lambert's unforgettable firsthand account of D-Day--read the astonishing true story celebrated by Tom Brokaw, CBS This Morning, NPR, and the President. Winner of the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award Seventy-five years ago, he hit Omaha Beach with the first wave. Now Ray Lambert, ninety-eight years old, delivers one of the most remarkable memoirs of our time, a tour-de-force of remembrance evoking his role as a decorated World War II medic who risked his life to save the heroes of D-Day. At five a.m. on June 6, 1944, U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Ray Lambert worked his way through a throng of nervous soldiers to a wind-swept deck on a troopship off the coast of Normandy, France. A familiar voice cut through the wind and rumble of the ship's engines. "Ray!" called his brother, Bill. Ray, head of a medical team for the First Division's famed 16th Infantry Regiment, had already won a silver star in 1943 for running through German lines to rescue trapped men, one of countless rescues he'd made in North Africa and Sicily. "This is going to be the worst yet," Ray told his brother, who served alongside him throughout the war. "If I don't make it," said Bill, "take care of my family." "I will," said Ray. He thought about his wife and son-a boy he had yet to see. "Same for me." The words were barely out of Ray's mouth when a shout came from below. To the landing craft! The brothers parted. Their destinies lay ten miles away, on the bloodiest shore of Normandy, a plot of Omaha Beach ironically code named "Easy Red." Less than five hours later, after saving dozens of lives and being wounded at least three separate times, Ray would lose consciousness in the shallow water of the beach under heavy fire. He would wake on the deck of a landing ship to find his battered brother clinging to life next to him. Every Man a Hero is the unforgettable story not only of what happened in the incredible and desperate hours on Omaha Beach, but of the bravery and courage that preceded them, throughout the Second World War--from the sands of Africa, through the treacherous mountain passes of Sicily, and beyond to the greatest military victory the world has ever known.

In 1941-44, Nazi Germany's Gebirgsjager - elite mountain troops - clashed repeatedly with land-based units of the Soviet Navy during the mighty struggle on World War II's Eastern Front. Formed into naval infantry and naval rifle brigades, some 350,000 of Stalin's sailors would serve the Motherland on land, playing a key role in the defence of Moscow, Leningrad, and Sevastopol. The Gebirgsjager, many among them veterans of victories in Norway and then Crete, would find their specialist skills to be at a premium in the harsh terrain and bitter weather encountered at the northern end of the front line. Operating many hundreds of miles north of Moscow, the two sides endured savage conditions as they fought one another inside the Arctic Circle. Featuring archive photographs, specially commissioned artwork and expert analysis, this is the absorbing story of the men who fought and died in the struggle for the Soviet Union's northern flank at the height of World War II.

Deng Adut was six years old when war came to his village in South Sudan. Taken from his mother, he was conscripted into the Sudan People's Liberation Army. He was taught to use an AK-47 then sent into battle. Shot in the back, dealing with illness and the relentless brutality of war, Deng's future was bleak. A child soldier must kill or be killed. But, after five years, he was rescued by his brother John and smuggled into a Kenyan refugee camp. With the support of the UN and help from an Australian couple, Deng and John became the third Sudanese family resettled in Australia. Despite physical injuries and ongoing mental trauma, Deng seized the chance he'd been given. Deng taught himself to read and, in 2005, he enrolled in a Bachelor of Laws at Western Sydney University. Songs of a War Boy is the inspirational story of a young man who has overcome unthinkable adversity to become a lawyer, refugee advocate and NSW Australian of the Year. Deng's memoir is an important reminder of the power of compassion and the benefit to us all when we open our doors and our hearts to those fleeing war, persecution and pain.

This book examines representations of war throughout American literary history, providing a firm grounding in established criticism and opening up new lines of inquiry. Readers will find accessible yet sophisticated essays that lay out key questions and scholarship in the field. War and American Literature provides a comprehensive synthesis of the literature and scholarship of US war writing, illuminates how themes, texts, and authors resonate across time and wars, and provides multiple contexts in which texts and a war's literature can be framed. By focusing on American war writing, from the wars with the Native Americans and the Revolutionary War to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this volume illuminates the unique role representations of war have in the US imagination.

Vietnam veteran Don Yost explores the pain and rage of his experience as a correspondent near Mai Laid in 1968, transforming it through writing to a elegaic and powerful memoir, imbued with a significant message for our time.

'Combines elements of In Cold Blood and Black Hawk Down with Apocalypse Now as it builds towards its terrible climax...Extraordinary' New York Times Iraq's 'Triangle of Death', 2005. A platoon of young soldiers from a U.S. regiment known as 'the Black Heart Brigade' is deployed to a lawless and hyperviolent area just south of Baghdad. Almost immediately, the attacks begin: every day another roadside bomb, another colleague blown to pieces. As the daily violence chips away, and chips away at their sanity, the thirty-five young men of 1st Platoon, Bravo Company descend into a tailspin of poor discipline, substance abuse, and brutality -- with tragic results. Black Hearts is a timeless true story of how modern warfare can make or break a man's character. Told with severe compassion, balanced judgement and the magnetic pace of a thriller, it looks set to become one of the defining books about the Iraq War. 'Black Hearts is the obverse of Band of Brothers, a story not of combat unity but of disharmony and disarray' Chicago Sun-Times 'A riveting picture of life outside the wire in Iraq, where "you tell a guy to go across a bridge, and within five minutes he's dead."' Kirkus Reviews (starred)