James Bond meets Michael Schumacher The idea of racing drivers working as secret agents is at best far-fetched but The Grand Prix Saboteurs tells the amazing TRUE story of how three top Grand Prix drivers from the 1920s and 1930s worked for a clandestine British secret service in occupied France, during World War II. The product of 18 years of research, The Grand Prix Saboteurs tells a story that remained top secret until the British Government finally agreed to release them in 2003. The book dazzles with swashbuckling escapes, shocking betrayals and a story you will never forget.

A brilliantly vivid Second World War memoir by one of 'the Few' Spitfire fighter pilots. Following the D-Day landings, Battle of Britain hero Tom Neil was assigned as an RAF liaison to an American fighter squadron. As the Allies pushed east, Neil commandeered an abandoned Spitfire as his own personal aeroplane. Erasing any evidence of its provenance and stripping it down to bare metal, it became the RAF's only silver Spitfire. Alongside his US comrades, he took the silver Spitfire into battle until, with the war's end, he was forced to make a difficult decision. Faced with too many questions about the mysterious rogue fighter, he contemplated increasingly desperate measures to offload it, including bailing out mid-Channel. He eventually left the Spitfire at Worthy Down, never to be seen again. THE SILVER SPITFIRE is the first-hand, gripping story of Neil's heroic experience as an RAF fighter pilot and his reminiscences with his very own personal Spitfire.

Franz (Frank) Oberle was nine years old when his family was relocated from Forchheim, Germany to Poland. There, he was taken from his parents to an isolated school where adolescents were being prepared for indoctrination into Hitler's Youth Movement. As the tide of war changed, he became a refugee fleeing the Russian advance only to arrive in Dresden as the city became the target of the most horrific Allied bombing raid of the war. Surviving on grass and stolen eggs, Franz and a friend walked 800 kilometres to his ancestral village on the edge of the Black Forest -- only to find that his parents had not returned and to be rejected by his remaining family. The indomitable Franz not only survived amid a disillusioned populace of the Fatherland, but, with Joan, his youthful sweetheart at his side, he also dreamed of a new life in a new land. With her blessings, he set off for Canada, promising to send for her when he was able to provide for her. Their subsequent life together in BC has encompassed tragedy and pure joy, hard work and hard times, failure and triumph as Frank Oberle rose from self-educated immigrant to acclaimed federal politician. 'Finding Home', the first volume of Oberle's memoirs, is set against backdrops of World War II and the raw British Columbia frontier. It covers Oberle's fascinating life story up until the time he, as a successful business person, returned to Germany after little more than a decade in the promised land, knowing that in Canada, he, Joan and their children had found their true home. Rich in detail, drama, and humour, this is a love story, an inspirational saga, and a book that sings the song of the Canadian immigrant.

SOLDIER FIVE is an elite soldier's explosive memoir of his time within the Special Air Service (SAS) and, in particular, his experiences during the 1991 Gulf War. As a member of the Special Forces patrol now famously known by its call sign Bravo Two Zero, he and seven others were inserted hundreds of kilometres behind enemy lines. Their mission to reconnoitre targets, undertake surveillance of Scud missil sites and sabotage Iraqi communications links was to end in desperate failure.From the outset, the patrol was dogged by problems that contributed both directly and indirectly to the demise of the mission. The patrol's compromise, and subsequent attempts to evade Iraqi troops, resulted in four members of Bravo Two Zero being captured and a further three killed. One escaped. But the story goes further that the Gulf War itself. Despite numerous books, films and articles on the same subject, the British Government has done its utmost to thwart the release of SOLDIER FIVE, at one stage claiming the book in its entirety was confidential. A campaign of harassment that took some four and a half years of litigation to resolve has now resulted in this controversial publication. SOLDIER FIVE is a gripping and suspenseful account of one man's experiences as a Special Forces soldier. Revealing his conflicts and loyalties, and the relationships he forged both on and off the battlefield, this book is the resolution of a soldier's determined fight to see his story told.

In 1939, several hundred people - students, professors, international chess players, junior military officers, actresses and debutantes - reported to a Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire: Bletchley Park. This was to be 'Station X', the Allies' top-secret centre for deciphering enemy codes. Their task was to break the ingenious Enigma code used for German high-level communications. The settings for the Enigma machine changed continually and each day the German operators had 159 million million million different possibilities. Yet against all the odds this gifted group achieved the impossible, coping with even greater difficulties to break Shark, the U-Boat Enigma, and Fish, the cypher system used by Hitler to talk to his guards.

THE ULTIMATE WARRIORS
Highly trained and equipped to kill, special-ops forces take on the world's most dangerous and courageous missions. Warrior Elite zeroes in on the most lethal special- ops encounters of all time.
- RAID AT SON TAY
Helicopter gunships drop 100 Green Berets into North Vietnamese jungle on a virtual suicide mission to rescue POWs
- MAERSK ALABAMA
Perfect planning and precise execution come together as Navy SEALs fire the greatest simultaneous sniper shots ever
- BATTLE OF TORA BORA
In the pitch-black labyrinthine caves of Afghanistan, Special Forces dispatch Taliban insurgents in a video game-like scenario of infrared warfare
- KILLING OF BIN LADEN
With the plan up in smoke as a Black Hawk goes down, SEAL Team 6 deftly adjusts on the fly--getting in and eliminating the target in just 7 minutes

Commemorating the 70th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush, Stephen Bourne's War to Windrush explores the lives of Britain's immigrant community through the experiences of Black British women during the period spanning from the beginning of World War II to the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948. In those short years, Black British women performed integral roles in keeping the country functioning and set the stage for the arrival of other black Britons on the MV Empire Windrush. The book shows first-hand what life was like in Britain for black women through photography and evocative prose. War to Windrush retraces the history of those women who helped to build the great, multicultural Britain we know today. It is a celebration of multiculturalism and immigration, much needed in today's political climate.

How did the soldiers in the trenches of the Great War understand and explain battlefield experience, and themselves through that experience? Situated at the intersection of military history and cultural history, The Embattled Self draws on the testimony of French combatants to explore how combatants came to terms with the war. In order to do so, they used a variety of narrative tools at hand rites of passage, mastery, a character of the soldier as a consenting citizen of the Republic. None of the resulting versions of the story provided a completely consistent narrative, and all raised more questions about the "truth" of experience than they answered. Eventually, a story revolving around tragedy and the soldier as victim came to dominate even to silence other types of accounts. In thematic chapters, Leonard V. Smith explains why the novel structured by a specific notion of trauma prevailed by the 1930s.

Smith canvasses the vast literature of nonfictional and fictional testimony from French soldiers to understand how and why the "embattled self" changed over time. In the process, he undermines the conventional understanding of the war as tragedy and its soldiers as victims, a view that has dominated both scholarly and popular opinion since the interwar period. The book is important reading not only for traditional historians of warfare but also for scholars in a variety of fields who think critically about trauma and the use of personal testimony in literary and historical studies."

Submarine duty in World War Two took the lives of more than twenty per cent of American submariners. As a young ensign, William J. Ruhe kept a journal on eight action-filled patrols in the South Pacific. His colourful memoir has earned a place alongside the best naval fiction, with such classics as Run Silent, Run Deep and The Hunt For Red October.

An explosive expose of how British military intelligence really works-from the inside. This book presents the stories of two undercover agents: Brian Nelson, who worked for the Force Research Unit (FRU), aiding loyalist terrorists and murderers in their bloody work; and the man known as Stakeknife, deputy head of the IRA's infamous "Nutting Squad," the internal security force that tortured and killed suspected informers.
This book is copublished with O'Brien Press, Dublin and is for sale only in the United States, it's territories and dependencies, Canada, and the Philippines.

Spoken from the Front is the story of the Afghan Campaign, told for the first time in the words of the servicemen and women who have been fighting there. With unprecedented access to soldiers of all ranks, as well as pilots, reservists, engineers, medics, Royal Military police, mechanics, cooks and other military personnel, Andy McNab has assembled a portrait of modern conflict like never before. This is the full experience of our troops on the ground and in the air. The horrors, cruelties, drudgery, excitement and banter of these soldiers' lives combine to form a chronological narrative of all the major events in Helmand during the British Army's time there. From their action-packed, dramatic, moving and often humorous testimonies in interviews, diaries, letters and emails written to family, friends and loved ones, emerges a 360-degree picture of guerrilla warfare up close and extremely personal. It is as close to the real thing as you can get.

When the Great War engulfed Europe in 1914, the United States and the Confederate States of America, bitter enemies for five decades, entered the fray on opposite sides: the United States aligned with the newly strong Germany, while the Confederacy joined forces with their longtime allies, Britain and France. But it soon became clear to both sides that this fight would be different--that war itself would never be the same again. For this was to be a protracted, global conflict waged with new and chillingly efficient innovations--the machine gun, the airplane, poison gas, and trench warfare.

Across the Americas, the fighting raged like wildfire on multiple and far-flung fronts. As President Theodore Roosevelt rallied the diverse ethnic groups of the northern states--Irish and Italians, Mormons and Jews--Confederate President Woodrow Wilson struggled to hold together a Confederacy still beset by ignorance, prejudice, and class divisions. And as the war thundered on, southern blacks, oppressed for generations, found themselves fatefully drawn into a climactic confrontation . . .

The epic story of how the Second World War was won.On 4 January 1945, General 'Blood and Guts' Patton confided gloomily to his diary, 'We can still lose the war.' The Nazis were attacking in Eastern France, Luxembourg and Belgium. General Eisenhower's allied armies had lost over 300,000 men in battle (with a similar number of non-battle casualties) and they were still in the same positions they had first captured three months before. Would the German will to resist never be broken? Veteran military historian Charles Whiting assembled individual stories from the frontline as the war entered its last bloody, but ultimately victorious phase. From material such as diaries, interviews and battalion journals he vividly builds up a picture of the soldiers and combatants. As the greatest conflict of them all came to its epic crescendo, those on the ground knew that paths that lead to glory could also lead to death... Perfect for fans of Anthony Beevor, Richard Overy and Damien Lewis.

One Soldier's War is a visceral and unflinching memoir of a young Russian soldier's experience in the Chechen wars that brilliantly captures the fear, drudgery, chaos, and brutality of modern combat. An excerpt of the book was hailed by Tibor Fisher in the Guardian as "right up there with Catch-22 and Michael Herr's Dispatches" and the book won Russia's inaugural Debut Prize, which recognizes authors who write "despite, not because of, their life circumstances." In 1995, Arkady Babchenko was an eighteen-year-old law student in Moscow when he was drafted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya. It was the beginning of a torturous journey from naive conscript to hardened soldier that took Babchenko from the front lines of the first Chechen War in 1995 to the second in 1999. He fought in major cities and tiny hamlets, from the bombed-out streets of Grozny to anonymous mountain villages. Babchenko takes the raw and mundane realities of war--the constant cold, hunger, exhaustion, filth, and terror--and twists it into compelling, haunting, and eerily elegant prose. Acclaimed by reviewers around the world, this is a devastating first-person account of war by an extraordinary storyteller.

Approximately 2.5 million men and women have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in the service of the U.S. War on Terror. Marian Eide and Michael Gibler have collected and compiled personal combat accounts from some of these war veterans. In modern warfare no deployment meets the expectations laid down by stories of Appomattox, Ypres, Iwo Jima, or Tet. Stuck behind a desk or the wheel of a truck, many of today's veterans feel they haven't even been to war though they may have listened to mortars in the night or dodged improvised explosive devices during the day. When a drone is needed to verify a target's death or bullets are sprayed like grass seed, military offensives can lack the immediacy that comes with direct contact. After Combat bridges the gap between sensationalized media and reality by telling war's unvarnished stories. Participating soldiers, sailors, marines, and air force personnel (retired, on leave, or at the beginning of military careers) describe combat in the ways they believe it should be understood. In this collection of interviews, veterans speak anonymously with pride about their own strengths and accomplishments, with gratitude for friendships and adventures, and also with shame, regret, and grief, while braving controversy, misunderstanding, and sanction. In the accounts of these veterans, Eide and Gibler seek to present what Vietnam veteran and writer Tim O'Brien calls a "true war story" - one without obvious purpose or moral imputation and independent of civilian logic, propaganda goals, and even peacetime convention.

Thomas Riha vanished on March 15, 1969, sparking a mystery that lives on 50 years later.A native of Prague, Czechoslovakia, Riha was a popular teacher at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a handsome man, with thick, graying hair and a wry smile. After his disappearance, the FBI and the CIA told local law enforcement and university officials that Riha was alive and well and had left Boulder to get away from his wife. But, as Eileen Welsome convincingly argues, Riha was not alive and well at all. A woman named Galya Tannenbaum, she concludes, had murdered him. Galya-a mother of four, a talented artist, and an FBI informant-allegedly went on to murder two more people in Denver as the trail to find Riha ran cold. Her weapon of choice? Cyanide. Galya was a chameleon, able to deceive businessmen and experienced investigators alike. But she had an Achilles' heel: she couldn't spell. She consistently misspelled words, such as "concider" and "extreemly." For the first time, Galya's signature misspellings are linked to documents once thought to be written by Riha and two other murder victims, as Welsome reexamines the facts and evidence of the case. She argues that these misspellings prove that Galya forged the documents and committed other murders. Her conclusion is buttressed by a wealth of additional information from police reports, depositions, and court testimony. During the Cold War era, the Riha case had an extraordinary ripple effect that reached even the highest levels of government. When the local district attorney in Colorado threatened to subpoena intelligence officials to find out who was behind the "alive and well" rumors, the CIA's representative in Denver claimed the information originated with the FBI. Director J. Edgar Hoover was infuriated by this assertion and actually cut off relations with the CIA. Presenting a compelling cast of characters in an era of intrigue and with astounding attention to detail, Eileen Welsome demonstrates why Galya Tannenbaum's alleged crimes continue to fascinate-even as her motivations remain mysterious.

On 29 August 2012 Private Robert Poate, Lance Corporal Rick Milosevic and Sapper James Martin were killed during an insider, or green on blue, attack in Afghanistan. Their killer was supposed to be their ally but was a Taliban sleeper in the ranks of the Afghan National Army. Information provided to the families by rank-and-file soldiers after the event shocked them. When the heavily redacted internal investigation report was received the grieving families knew that it excluded a plethora of incriminating facts. This powerful book is the result of a father's quest to find out all the facts associated with the death of his son. It was a search that revealed a labyrinth of excuses, denials, half-truths, cover-ups, contrived secrecy, incompetence, negligence, orders not followed, and lessons not learnt from the previous twelve years of war in Afghanistan. The determination of Hugh Poate and the other two families to uncover the truth would lead to a civilian Coronial Inquest into combat deaths, the first in the 120-year history of the Australian Army. The Coroner found five systemic deficiencies which contributed to the soldier's deaths. Hugh Poate felt a duty to publish the full story for the benefit of the Australian public which relies on its Defence Force for national security in the hope that Defence, particularly the army, will learn lessons from its failures and improve its standard of leadership. Apart from burying his son, Hugh found writing this book was the most depressing thing he has ever done. Compelling and enraging, this story of the true facts surrounding the devastating loss of three soldiers continues to reverberate beyond their families to the highest levels of defence and government.

To the Allies she was a fearless freedom fighter, special operations super spy, a woman ahead of her time. To the Gestapo she was a ghost, a shadow, the most wanted person in the world with a five-million Franc bounty on her head. Her name was Nancy Wake. Now, for the first time, the roots of her legend are told in a thriller about one woman's incredible quest to save the man she loves, turn the tide of the war, and take brutal revenge on those who have wronged her.

As World War II in Europe reached its end, armour development and doctrine had experienced several years of massively accelerated change, especially within the crucible of the Eastern Front. The German Jagdpanther and Soviet SU-100, both turretless tank-destroyer designs based on a 'traditional' turret-tank chassis, were the culminating examples of how the progression of experience, resources and time constraints produced vehicles that were well suited for roles of defence and offence, respectively. The Jagdpanther represented a well-balanced solution and an excellent use of limited resources, while the SU-100 was a natural progression of the SU-85, where numbers produced compensated for rudimentary construction, poor crew comfort and limited optics.

Approximately 2.5 million men and women have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in the service of the U.S. War on Terror. Marian Eide and Michael Gibler have collected and compiled personal combat accounts from some of these war veterans. In modern warfare no deployment meets the expectations laid down by stories of Appomattox, Ypres, Iwo Jima, or Tet. Stuck behind a desk or the wheel of a truck, many of today's veterans feel they haven't even been to war though they may have listened to mortars in the night or dodged improvised explosive devices during the day. When a drone is needed to verify a target's death or bullets are sprayed like grass seed, military offensives can lack the immediacy that comes with direct contact. After Combat bridges the gap between sensationalized media and reality by telling war's unvarnished stories. Participating soldiers, sailors, marines, and air force personnel (retired, on leave, or at the beginning of military careers) describe combat in the ways they believe it should be understood. In this collection of interviews, veterans speak anonymously with pride about their own strengths and accomplishments, with gratitude for friendships and adventures, and also with shame, regret, and grief, while braving controversy, misunderstanding, and sanction. In the accounts of these veterans, Eide and Gibler seek to present what Vietnam veteran and writer Tim O'Brien calls a "true war story" - one without obvious purpose or moral imputation and independent of civilian logic, propaganda goals, and even peacetime convention.

Dragan was a Yugoslav peasant who flirted with the ideals of Communism and aspired to become a teacher. Instead, he became a slave in a German labour camp. Galina was an only child growing up in the harsh reality of Stalinist Russia. She survived the siege of Leningrad only to be exiled and enslaved in her turn. Chance is the true story of two ordinary people who lived in extraordinary times. Displaced by war and the vagaries of politics, Dragan and Galina met and married in the chaos that followed the conflict. For them, survival was not a question of heroes and victims but simply a matter of chance.

Why do Australians know the names of Charles Bean, Alan Moorehead and Chester Wilmot, but not Agnes Macready, Anne Matheson and Lorraine Stumm? This is the hidden story of Australian and New Zealand women war reporters who fought for equality with their male colleagues and filed stories from the main conflict zones of the twentieth century.

Two months after being posted to France in 1917, Edward Thomas wrote: 'I already know enough to confirm my old opinion that the papers tell no truth at all about what war is and what soldiers are - '. This anthology provides an impression of what it meant to be a soldier on the Western front in the First World War and, above all, what it meant to be a Welsh soldier. Although this collection of writings, prose and poetry, includes such famous names as Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, David Jones and Saunders Lewis, the pieces have been chosen not purely by literary criteria, but to reflect as wide a range as possible of experience within Welsh military units. These personal reminiscences record not just horrific and dramatic events, soldiers under artillery bombardment or coping with mud, or the confusion of attacks or retreats, but also routine activities - the everyday working parties to repair trenches, the tunnelling, the waiting, the food, the blisters and the cold - and the comradeship in the Welsh regiments. Some additional background military information is provided in the appendices.