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.

A TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'His best book yet' The Times 'Macintyre's page-turner is a dazzling portrait of a flawed yet driven individual who risked everything (including her children) for the cause' Sunday Times DISCOVER THE INCREDIBLE TRUE STORY OF THE SPY WHO ALMOST KILLED HITLER - FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE SPY AND THE TRAITOR Ursula Kuczynski Burton was a spymaster, saboteur, bomb-maker and secret agent. Codenamed 'Agent Sonya', her story has never been told - until now. Born to a German Jewish family, as Ursula grew, so did the Nazis' power. As a fanatical opponent of the fascism that ravaged her homeland, Ursula was drawn to communism as a young woman, motivated by the promise of a fair and peaceful society. From planning an assassination attempt on Hitler in Switzerland, to spying on the Japanese in Manchuria, to preventing nuclear war (or so she believed) by stealing the science of atomic weaponry from Britain to give to Moscow, Ursula conducted some of the most dangerous espionage operations of the twentieth century. In Agent Sonya, Britain's most acclaimed historian Ben Macintyre delivers an exhilarating tale that's as fast-paced as any fiction. It is the incredible story of one spy's life, a life that would alter the course of history . . . 'Macintyre does true-life espionage better than anyone else' John Preston 'Macintyre has found a real-life heroine worthy of his gifts as John le Carre's nonfiction counterpart' New York Times 'This book is classic Ben Macintyre . . . quirky human details enliven every page' Spectator

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.

In April 1982 Harry Benson was a 21-year-old Royal Navy commando helicopter pilot, fresh out of training and one of the youngest helicopter pilots to serve in the Falklands War. These pilots, nicknamed 'junglies', flew most of the land-based missions in the Falklands in their Sea King and Wessex helicopters. Much of what happened in the war -- the politics, task force ships, Sea Harriers, landings, Paras and Marines -- is well-known and documented. But almost nothing is known of the young commando helicopter pilots and aircrewmen who made it all happen on land and sea. This is their 'Boys Own' story, told for the very first time.
Harry Benson has interviewed forty of his former colleagues for the book creating a tale of skill, initiative, resourcefulness, humour, luck, and adventure. This is a fast-paced, meticulously researched and compelling account written by someone who was there, in the cockpit of a Wessex helicopter.
Few of these pilots have spoken publicly about:
- The two helicopter crashes and eventual rescue following a failed SAS mission high up on an inhospitable glacier in South Georgia
- The harrowing story of the Exocet strike that sunk the transport ship Atlantic Conveyor
- The daring missile raid on the Argentine high command in Port Stanley
- The constant mortar fire faced while supporting troops and evacuating casualties
- The hair-raising head-on attacks by Argentine jets on British helicopters
- The extraordinarty courage shown during the evacuation of the bombed landing ship "Sir Galahad"
- The secret nighttime low-level missions to insert and resupply SAS and SBS using night vision goggles
If you liked "Apache, Vulcan 607 "and "Chickenhawk," you'll love "Scram "
The word "Scram" was used to warn other junglies to go to ground or risk being shot down by their own side as Argentinean jets blasted through 'bomb alley'.

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.

"We tried to live with 120 percent intensity, rather than waiting for death. We read and read, trying to understand why we had to die in our early twenties. We felt the clock ticking away towards our death, every sound of the clock shortening our lives." So wrote Irokawa Daikichi, one of the many kamikaze pilots, or "tokkotai," who faced almost certain death in the futile military operations conducted by Japan at the end of World War II.
This moving history presents diaries and correspondence left by members of the "tokkotai "and other Japanese student soldiers who perished during the war. Outside of Japan, these kamikaze pilots were considered unbridled fanatics who willingly sacrificed their lives for the emperor. But the writings explored here by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney clearly and eloquently speak otherwise. A significant number of the kamikaze were university students who were drafted and forced to volunteer, and in their diaries and correspondence they often wrote heartbreaking soliloquies in which they poured out their anguish and fear and expressed profound ambivalence toward the war as well as opposition to their nation's imperialism.
A salutary correction to the many caricatures of the kamikaze, this poignant work will be essential to anyone interested in the history of Japan and World War II. "Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney's book is designed to challenge Western perceptions of the kamikaze generation. By assembling brief biographies of some of the young Japanese who perished on suicide missions, and by quoting extensively from their wartime diaries and poetry, she portrays a group of literate, thoughtful people, most of whom hated the war and were reluctant to die."--" SundayTelegraph "(UK)

John Holmes was a schoolboy when World War II broke out in 1939, but even then he knew his destiny lay in the skies. 'Boys from these parts don't join the RAF', he was told on more than one occasion. But they were wrong. After many months undergoing selection and training he eventually made it into the air crew of 196 Squadron. It was there he embarked on a love affair with the Stirling Bomber, and it was there that he met up with his crew - his brothers in arms. With in-depth research, Steve Holmes' inspirational, harrowing and at times humorous book charts the wartime exploits of his father, John 'Sherlock' Holmes, and his flight crew. Through many hours of research and contact with living relatives of 'Sherlock's Squadron' Steve has pulled together a unique and personal insight into the most brutal and devastating armed conflict in history. Verified and independently confirmed by the MOD, War Office Bomber Command and preserved navigator's records and pilots' log books of the time, this is a comprehensive and compelling account of World War II from the eyes of a group of young RAF men from distant corners of the globe.

"The most important political book of the year."-Gregg Easterbrook, author of The Progress Paradox Everyone knows: wars are getting worse, more civilians are dying, and peacemaking achieves nothing, right? Wrong. Despite all the bad-news headlines, peacekeeping is working. Fewer wars are starting, more are ending, and those that remain are smaller and more localized. But peace doesn't just happen; it needs to be put into effect. Moreover, understanding the global decline in armed conflict is crucial as America shifts to an era of lower military budgets and operations. Preeminent scholar of international relations, Joshua Goldstein, definitively illustrates how decades of effort by humanitarian aid agencies, popular movements-and especially the United Nations-have made a measureable difference in reducing violence in our times. Goldstein shows how we can continue building on these inspiring achievements to keep winning the war on war. This updated and revised edition includes more information on a post-9-11 world, and is a perfect compendium for those wishing to learn more about the United States' armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What is it like to drive a Challenger tank over desert terrain for six days in a row? Or hover an Apache AH1 attack helicopter a hundred metres above enemy ground? How quickly can a Sapper clear a field of unexploded devices, or build a bridge - or blow one up? What is it like to fix bayonets, and engage in hand to hand combat, or train a 5.56 mm SA80 sniper sight on an enemy soldier, and pull the trigger? How do you find out what a soldier must learn on his way to war...? Ask him. In this extraordinary book, Danny Danziger interviews the people who fight our wars for us, providing a unique insight into the reality of what we ask of our armed forces. Groundbreaking and utterly compelling, WE ARE SOLDIERS takes the reader to the heart of the 21st century soldier's experience.

Ross Kemp risks all to tell the story of the British soldier in Ross Kemp on Afghanistan. He has played an East End hardman, an SAS soldier and investigated vicious world gangs. Now Ross Kemp is taking on perhaps his hardest assignment of all - the Taliban. In order to prepare for this life-threatening ordeal, Ross Kemp trains with the First Battalion Royal Anglians in England's subzero temperatures, practicing firing SA 80 rifles and .50 calibre machine guns, getting to know the soldiers and learning the tactics they use to stay alive. Sent with them to Camp Bastion in Afghanistan's Helmand province, he immerses himself fully: he endures the stifling heat, the constant threat of snipers, RPG attacks, suicide bombers and land mines. In short, he discovers first hand what it's like to fight on the frontline. It's the closest he's ever come to dying - bullets fizzing inches from his head as they hit the ground on either side of him. After two harrowing and arduous months Ross returns to England, but there is little relief to be had as he meets the mothers of soldiers killed in the conflict. Then in September 2008 he goes back to the war zone, to see how the men he grew so close to are faring, to check how many of them are still alive. Ross Kemp on Afganistan is a fascinating, horrifying and often moving insight into the brutal reality ordinary soldiers have to face in one of the world's most dangerous and volatile regions. Ross Kemp was born in Essex in 1964, to a father who was a senior detective with the Metropolitan Police and had served in the army for four years. He is a BAFTA award-winning actor, journalist and author, who is best known for his role of Grant Mitchell in Eastenders. His award-winning documentary series Ross Kemp on Gangs led to his international recognition as an investigative journalist.

On the eve of World War II, Krystyna Wituska, a carefree teenager attending finishing school in Switzerland, returned to Poland. During the occupation, when she was twenty years old, she drifted into the Polish Underground. By her own admission, she was attracted first by the adventure, but her youthful bravado soon turned into a mental and spiritual mastery over fear. Because Krystyna spoke fluent German, she was assigned to collect information on German troop movements at Warsaw's airport. In 1942, at age twenty-one, she was arrested by the Gestapo and transferred to prison in Berlin, where she was executed two years later. Eighty of the letters that Krystyna wrote in the last eighteen months of her life are translated and collected in this volume. The letters, together with an introduction providing historical background to Krystyna's arrest, constitute a little-known and authentic record of the treatment of ethnic Poles under German occupation, the experience of Polish prisoners in German custody, and a glimpse into the prisons of Berlin. Krystyna's letters also reflect her own courage, idealism, faith, and sense of humor. As a classroom text, this book relates nicely to contemporary discussions of racism, nationalism, patriotism, human rights, and stereotypes. This is a new edition of the book originally titled ""I Am First a Human Being: The Letters of Krystyna Wituska"" (Vehicule Press, 1997).

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."

Medicine and Duty is the World War I memoir of Harold McGill, a medical officer in the 31st Alberta Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, that was originally compiled and written by McGill in the 1930s. Anticipating that his memoir would be published by Macmillan of Canada in 1935, McGill instead was met with disappointment when the publishing house, forced by financial constraints, was unable to see the project to its final conclusion. Decades later, editor Marjorie Barron Norris came upon a draft of the manuscript in the Glenbow Museum archives, and utterly compelled by what she found, took it upon herself to resurrect McGill's story. Performing an exhaustive edit of the original manuscript, Norris has also included a wealth of information adding detailed explanatory notes and topographical maps, as well as excerpts of letters Captain McGill sent home to friends and family. These letters are literally written "from the trenches" and lend an unsettling atmosphere and stark realism to the original memoir. Wartime accounts written by medical officers are quite rare, and often more than other regular officers, the M.O.'s position in the battalion provides a unique perspective on the day-to-day lives of soldiers under his command. Norris's painstaking archival research and careful editing skills have brought back to light a gripping first-hand account of the 31st Battalion and, on a larger scale, of Canada's participation in World War I, making this book of great interest not only to military historians, but also to any Canadian compelled by the incredible sacrifice of soldiers during wartime.

Lurps is the memoir of a juvenile delinquent who drops out of ninth grade to pursue a dream of military service. While a paratrooper in Europe, he volunteers for Vietnam where he joins the elite U.S. Army LRRP / Rangers-small, heavily armed long-range reconnaissance teams that patrolled deep in enemy-held territory. Set in 1968, during some of the war's major campaigns and battles including Tet, Khe Sanh, and A Shau Valley, Lurps considers war through the eyes of a green young warrior. The compelling narrative and realistic dialogue engrosses the reader in both the horror and the humor of life in Vietnam and reflects upon the broader philosophical issue of war. This poignant, auto-biographical, coming-of-age story explores the social background that shaped the protagonist's thinking; his quest for redemption through increased responsibility; the brotherhood of comrades in arms; women and his sexual awakening; and the mysterious, baffling randomness of who lives and who dies.

In A Soldier Without Arms, author David A. Kronick describes his experiences as a World War II Medical Supply Officer at station hospitals in the United States, England, France, and Germany. The author's personal accounts provide a unique and fascinating firsthand view of the dominant historical event of the 20th century.

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.

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.