‘. . . it is nine months this evening since I last saw the light in my own house, when I had to tear myself away from all that is dear to me. And today is also my little son’s birthday. Oh, how I long for home.’

So wrote Michael Muller in 1901 as he gazed at the lights of Cape Town from a ship bound for Bermuda, after months of internment in a British POW camp in Simon’s Town. The camps were full, so Boer prisoners were being sent to other parts of the empire. Michael’s brothers, Chris and Pieter, were exiled to Ceylon, while Lool was held in the Green Point camp in Cape Town.

Remarkably, three of the brothers kept diaries – the only known instance of this happening in the Boer War. They recorded their intimate thoughts and turbulent emotions, and the diaries gave them agency. The scrawled notes of Chris on the evening after the legendary Magersfontein battle, the rain-dashed pages written by Lool in Colesberg, and the angry words penned by Michael about his treatment at Surrender Hill, have the urgency of men determined to go on record.

When Beverley Roos-Muller first began to explore writing about the Boer experience of the war, she read the tiny war diary of Michael, grandfather of her husband, Ampie Muller. It led her to the discovery of the other diaries and many more documents. She also records the brothers’ difficult return home and examines the consequences for South Africa of the bitterness this strife invoked.

This is a beautifully told account of the fellowship of four brothers in war, their capture and their eventual recovery.

Leonidas Polk is one of the most fascinating figures of the Civil War. Consecrated as a bishop of the Episcopal Church and commissioned as a general into the Confederate army, Polk's life in both spheres blended into a unique historical composite. Polk was a man with deep religious convictions but equally committed to the Confederate cause. He baptized soldiers on the eve of bloody battles, administered last rites and even presided over officers' weddings, all while leading his soldiers into battle. Historian Cheryl White examines the life of this soldier-saint and the legacy of a man who unquestionably brought the first viable and lively Protestant presence to Louisiana and yet represents the politics of one of the darkest periods in American history.

Virginia's Shenandoah Valley was known as the "Breadbasket of the Confederacy" due to its ample harvests and transportation centers, its role as an avenue of invasion into the North and its capacity to serve as a diversionary theater of war. The region became a magnet for both Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War, and nearly half of the thirteen major battles fought in the valley occurred as part of General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's 1862 Valley Campaign. Civil War historian Jonathan A. Noyalas examines Jackson's Valley Campaign and how those victories brought hope to an infant Confederate nation, transformed the lives of the Shenandoah Valley's civilians and emerged as Stonewall Jackson's defining moment.

When American troops arrived in Paris to help maintain order at the end of the Second World War they were, at first, received by the local population with a sense of euphoria. However, the French soon began to resent the Americans for their display of wealth and brashness, while the US soldiers found the French and their habits irritating and incomprehensible. To bridge the cultural divide, the American generals came up with an innovative solution. They commissioned a surprisingly candid book which collated the GIs' 'gripes' and reproduced them with answers aimed at promoting understanding of the French and their country. The 'gripes' reveal much about American preconceptions: 'The French drink too much', 'French women are immoral', 'The French drive like lunatics ', 'The French don't bathe', 'The French aren't friendly' are just some of the many complaints. Putting the record straight, the answers cover topics as diverse as night-clubs, fashion, agriculture and sanitation. They also offer an unusual insight into the reality of daily life immediately after the war, evoking the shortage of food and supplies, the acute poverty and the scale of the casualties and destruction suffered by France during six years of conflict. Illustrated with delightfully evocative cartoons and written in a direct, colloquial style, this gem from 1945 is by turns amusing, shocking and thought-provoking in its valiant stand against prejudice and stereotype.

Too far north, the great state of Maine did not witness any Civil War battles. However, Mainers contributed to the war in many important ways. From the mainland to the islands, soldiers bravely fought to preserve the United States in all major battles. Men like General Joshua Chamberlain, a hero of Little Round Top, proudly returned home to serve as governor. Maine native Hannibal Hamlin served as Abraham Lincoln's first vice president. And Maine's strong women sacrificed and struggled to maintain their communities and support the men who had left to fight. Author Harry Gratwick diligently documents the stories of these Mainers, who preserved "The Way Life Should Be" for Maine and the entire United States.

In a gripping, moment-by-moment narrative based on a wealth of recently declassified documents and in-depth interviews, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin tell the remarkable drama that unfolded over the final, heroic hours of the Vietnam War. This closing chapter of the war would become the largest-scale evacuation ever carried out, as improvised by a small unit of Marines, a vast fleet of helicopter pilots flying nonstop missions beyond regulation, and a Marine general who vowed to arrest any officer who ordered his choppers grounded while his men were still on the ground.
Drury and Clavin focus on the story of the eleven young Marines who were the last men to leave, rescued from the U.S. Embassy roof just moments before capture, having voted to make an Alamo-like last stand. As politicians in Washington struggled to put the best face on disaster and the American ambassador refused to acknowledge that the end had come, these courageous men held their ground and helped save thousands of lives. Drury and Clavin deliver a taut and stirring account of a turning point in American history that unfolds with the heartstopping urgency of the best thrillers--a riveting true story finally told, in full, by those who lived it.

In the early hours of November 10, 1938, Nazi storm troopers and Hitler Youth rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods across Germany, leaving behind them a horrifying trail of terror and destruction. More than a thousand synagogues and many thousands of Jewish shops were destroyed, while thirty thousand Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht--the Night of Broken Glass--was a decisive stage in the systematic eradication of a people who traced their origins in Germany to Roman times and was a sinister forewarning of the Holocaust.

With rare insight and acumen, Martin Gilbert examines this night and day of terror, presenting readers with a meticulously researched, masterfully written, and eye-opening study of one of the darkest chapters in human history.

In 1982, eight young Guards officers in their twenties found themselves suddenly on the way to the Falklands 8000 miles away from Britain. Some four decades later, they realised that no one had written the history of this unique war in Britain's history from their side - including coming under Argentine fire on Sir Galahad on 8 June, the most dramatic day in Britain's military history since the second world war. Crispin Black tells their story and casts a startling new light on what happened to them, using the latest official documents. Even basic facts have remained hidden to this day.

On July 11, 1864, some residents cheered and others watched in horror as Confederate troops spread across the fields and orchards of Silver Spring, Maryland. Many fled to the capital while General Jubal Early's troops ransacked their property. The estate of Lincoln's postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, was burned, and his father's home was used by Early as headquarters from which to launch an attack on Washington's defenses. Yet the first Civil War casualty in Silver Spring came well before Early's raid, when Union soldiers killed a prominent local farmer in 1862. This was life in the shadow of the Federal City. Drawing on contemporary accounts and memoirs, Dr. Robert E. Oshel tells the story of Silver Spring over the tumultuous course of the Civil War.

At the end of the Spanish Civil War the Nationalist government instigated mass repression against anyone suspected of loyalty to the defeated Republican side. Around 200,000 people were imprisoned for political crimes in the weeks and months following 1st April 1939, including thousands of women who were charged with offences ranging from directing the home front to supporting their loved ones engaged in combat. Many women wrote and published texts about their experiences, seeking to make their voices heard and to counteract the dehumanising master narrative of the right-wing victors that had criminalised their existence. The memoirs of Communist women, such as Tomasa Cuevas and Juana Dona, have heavily influenced our understanding of life in prison for women under franquismo, while texts by non-Communist women have largely been ignored. This monograph offers a comparative study of the life writing of female political prisoners in Spain, focusing on six texts in particular: the two volumes of Carcel de mujeres by Tomasa Cuevas; Desde la noche y la niebla by Juana Dona; Requiem por la libertad by Angeles Garcia Madrid; Abajo las dictaduras by Josefa Garcia Segret; and Aquello sucedio asi by Angeles Malonda. All the texts share common themes, such as describing the hunger and repression that all political prisoners suffered. However, the ideologically-driven narratives of Communist women often foreground representations of resistance at the expense of exploring the emotional and intellectual struggle for survival that many women political prisoners faced in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. This study nuances our understanding of imprisoned women as individuals and as a collective, analysing how women political prisoners sought recognition and justice in the face of a vindictive dictatorship. It also explores the womens response to the spirit of convivencia during the transition to democracy, which once again threatened to silence them.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'A parable written for the age of technological disruption . . . brilliantly told' Sunday Times The international bestselling author returns with an exploration of one of the grandest obsessions of the twentieth century 'The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry. When some shiny new idea drops from the heavens, it does not land softly in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters.' In the years before the Second World War, in a sleepy air force base in central Alabama, a small group of renegade pilots put forth a radical idea. What if we made bombing so accurate that wars could be fought entirely from the air? What if we could make the brutal clashes between armies on the ground a thing of the past? This book tells the story of what happened when that dream was put to the test. The Bomber Mafia follows the stories of a reclusive Dutch genius and his homemade computer, Winston Churchill's forbidding best friend, a team of pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard, a brilliant pilot who sang vaudeville tunes to his crew, and the bomber commander, Curtis Emerson LeMay, who would order the bloodiest attack of the Second World War. In this tale of innovation and obsession, Gladwell asks: what happens when technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war? And what is the price of progress?

A military operation unlike any other on American soil, Morgan's Raid was characterized by incredible speed, superhuman endurance and innovative tactics. One of the nation's most colorful leaders, Confederate general John Hunt Morgan, took his cavalry through enemy-occupied territory in three states in one of the longest offensives of the Civil War. The effort produced the only battles fought north of the Ohio River and reached farther north than any other regular Confederate force. With twenty-five maps and more than forty illustrations, Morgan's Raid historian David L. Mowery takes a new look at this unprecedented event in American history, one historians rank among the world's greatest land-based raids since Elizabethan times.

Michael Stephenson's "Patriot Battles" is a comprehensive and richly detailed study of the military aspects of the War of Independence, and a fascinating look at the nuts and bolts of eighteenth-century combat. Covering everything from what motivated those who chose to fight to how they were enlisted, trained, clothed, and fed, it offers a close-up view of the war's greatest battles, with maps provided for each. Along the way many cherished myths are challenged, reputations are reassessed, and long-held assumptions are tested.

One of the most satisfying and illuminating contributions to the literature on the War of Independence in many years, "Patriot Battles" is a vastly entertaining work of superior scholarship and a refreshing wind blowing through some of American history's dustier corridors.

From Paris to Stalingrad, the Nazis systematically plundered all manner of art and antiquities. But the first and most valuable treasures they looted were the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire. In "Hitler's Holy Relics, "bestselling author Sidney Kirkpatrick tells the riveting and never-before-told true story of how an American college professor turned Army sleuth recovered these cherished symbols of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich before they could become a rallying point in the creation of a Fourth and equally unholy Reich.
Anticipating the Allied invasion of Nazi Germany, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler had ordered a top-secret bunker carved deep into the bedrock beneath Nurnberg castle. Inside the well-guarded chamber was a specially constructed vault that held the plundered treasures Hitler valued the most: the Spear of Destiny (reputed to have been used to pierce Christ's side while he was on the cross) and the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, ancient artifacts steeped in medieval mysticism and coveted by world rulers from Charlemagne to Napoleon. But as Allied bombers rained devastation upon Nurnberg and the U.S. Seventh Army prepared to invade the city Hitler called "the soul of the Nazi Party," five of the most precious relics, all central to the coronation ceremony of a would-be Holy Roman Emperor, vanished from the vault. Who took them? And why? The mystery remained unsolved for months after the war's end, until the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, ordered Lieutenant Walter Horn, a German-born art historian on leave from U.C. Berkeley, to hunt down the missing treasures.
To accomplish his mission, Horn must revisit the now-rubble-strewn landscape of his youth and delve into the ancient legends and arcane mysticism surrounding the antiquities that Hitler had looted in his quest for world domination. Horn searches for clues in the burnt remains of Himmler's private castle and follows the trail of neo-Nazi "Teutonic Knights" charged with protecting a vast hidden fortune in plundered gold and other treasure. Along the way, Horn has to confront his own demons: how members of his family and former academic colleagues subverted scholarly research to help legitimize Hitler's theories of Aryan supremacy and the Master Race. What Horn discovers on his investigative odyssey is so explosive that his final report will remain secret for decades.
Drawing on unpublished interrogation and intelligence reports, as well as on diaries, letters, journals, and interviews in the United States and Germany, Kirkpatrick tells this riveting and disturbing story with cinematic detail and reveals-- for the first time--how a failed Vienna art student, obsessed with the occult and dreams of his own grandeur, nearly succeeded in creating a Holy Reich rooted in a twisted reinvention of medieval and Church history.

Soldiers disguised as a herd of cows, cork bath mats for troops crossing streams and a tank with a piano attachment for camp concerts are just some of the absurd inventions to be found in this book of cartoons designed to keep spirits up during the Second World War. These intricate comic drawings poke gentle fun at both the instruments of war and the indignity of the air-raid shelter in Heath Robinson's inimitable style.

Covering more than four decades, this is the first full-scale, definitive account of Kerry's journey from war to peace. Brinkley has drawn on extensive interviews with virtually everyone who knew Kerry in Vietnam.Kerry also relegated to Brinkley his letters home from Vietnam, voluminous "war notes" journals and personal reminiscences written during and shortly after the war. This material was provided without restriction, to be used at Brinkley's discretion, and has never before been published.

Throughout, Brinkley deftly deals with issues such as U.S. atrocities in Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia. Using information from the newly released Nixon tapes, Brinkley reveals how White House aides Charles Colson and H. R. Haldeman tried to discredit Kerry. Refusing to be intimidated, Kerry ran for public office, eventually becoming a senator from Massachusetts. But he never forgot his fallen comrades returning to Vietnam numerous times to look for MIAs and POWs. When President Clinton officially recognized Vietnam in 1995, at long last Kerry's thirty-year-long tour of duty ended.

This is beautifully slipcased presented collector' s edition of the best selling title, The Lost World of Bletchley Park, a comprehensive illustrated history of this remarkable place, from its prewar heyday as a country estate, its wartime requisition and how it became the place where modern computing was invented and the German Enigma code was cracked, to its post-war dereliction and then rescue towards the end of the twentieth century as a museum. Removable memorabilia includes: 1938 recruiting memo with a big tick against Turing' s name Churchill' s ' Action this day' letter giving code breakers extra resources Handwritten Turing memos Top Secret Engima decryptions, about the sinking of the Bismark, German High Command' s assessment of D-Day threat and the message announcing Hitler' s suicide A wealth of everyday items such as call-up papers, security notices and propoganda posters Newly redesigned interiors with 25% new content, high end slipcase package featuring removable facsimile documents, this is an essential purchase for everyone interested and wanting to experience the place where code-breaking helped to win the war.

'My primary aim in writing this book is to demonstrate the importance of individual human beings in modern warfare. In the battle to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, Coalition forces used every form of high-technology weapon available; yet in the end success depended on the performance of individuals, whether they were pilots, divers, tank drivers, mechanics, engineers, cooks, radio operators, infantrymen, nurses or officers of all ranks. It was these ordinary people who, at the end of the day, were going to put their lives on the line and risk their neck when their Government decided to go to war.' Gen. Sir Peter de la Billiere

Dr. Juan Negrin Lopez (18921956) was a man of immense talent, energy, and socialist convictions who served the Spanish people in different capacities: as a physiologist of international reputation and as chairman of the medical faculty of the Complutense University in Madrid during the 1920s; as an active member of the Parliamentary wing of the Socialist Party, 19311936; during the Civil War as Minister of Finance in the Popular Front government led by Francisco Largo Caballero (September 1936May 1937); and as Prime Minister from late May until March 1939. In all these roles he was highly competent: improving the laboratories and experimental methods in physiology, obtaining scholarships for students, suggesting subjects for doctoral theses, encouraging his students to learn foreign languages and read scientific literature in the original, and also to think of public health as a national, public responsibility. As Minister of Finance he conceived of Spains relatively large gold reserve as the only means by which the Republic could buy the quality of modern arms that were being supplied to General Franco by Hitler and Mussolini. In European politics of the mid-1930s he understood much better than did the English, French, and United States political classes that Nazism and Fascism were a much greater threat to European democracy than was Soviet Communism. But the appeasement policy culminating in the Munich Pact of September 29, 1938 sealed the fate of the Spanish Republic as well as that of the Republic of Czechoslovakia. From 1940 onward Negrin was reviled in Franco Spain for having supposedly delivered the Republic into the hands of the Communists; many republican and socialist exiles also rejected him for continuing his Numantian policy of resistance when, after Munich, the military possibilities of the Republic were truly hopeless. Gabriel Jackson sets out to understand the moral and political thinking of Dr. Negrin of those who supported him to the end and of those who felt that the last months of the war merely prolonged the suffering of the population. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies

Based on previously unused French and German sources, this challenging and controversial new analysis of the war on the Western front from 1914 to 1918 reveals how and why the Germans won the major battles with one-half to one-third fewer casualties than the Allies, and how American troops in 1918 saved the Allies from defeat and a negotiated peace with the Germans.

In 1944 the British War Office distributed a handbook to British soldiers informing them what to expect and how to behave in a newly-liberated France. Containing candid descriptions of this war-ravaged society (widespread malnourishment, rampant tuberculosis) as well as useful phrases and a pronunciation guide (Bonjewer, commont-allay-voo), it was an indispensable guide to everyday life. This small, unassuming publication had a deeper purpose: to bring together two allies who did not enjoy ideal relations in 1944. The book attempts to reconcile differences by stressing a shared history and the common aim - defeating Hitler. It also tried to dispel misapprehensions: 'There is a fairly widespread belief among people in Britain that the French are a particularly gay, frivolous people with no morals and few convictions.' Often unintentionally hilarious in its expression of these false impressions, the book is also a guide for avoiding social embarrassment: 'If you should happen to imagine that the first pretty French girl who smiles at you intends to dance the can-can or take you to bed, you will risk stirring up a lot of trouble for yourself - and for our relations with the French.' Many of its observations still ring true today. For example, 'The French are more polite than most of us. Remember to call them "Monsieur, Madame, Mademoiselle," not just "Oy!"' Others remind us of how we recently we have adopted French customs: 'Don't drink yourself silly. If you get the chance to drink wine, learn to "'take it".' Anyone with an interest in Britain, France or World War II will find this an irresistible insight into British attitudes towards the French and an interesting, timeless commentary on Anglo-French relations.

Stephen B. Oates discerns the historical truth from the mythical legend that surrounds Lincoln in this original and fascinating portrait of America's 16th president.