Special Forces are a key component of every modern army, capable of carrying out clandestine operations, reconnaissance, and incisive attacks behind enemy lines. Units such as the British SAS, US Navy SEALs, the US Army’s Delta Force, Polish GROM and the France’s National Gendarmerie Intervention Group are famous for their bravery and formidable record. Aircraft are a key element of their functionality, without which Special Forces would not be able to move quickly to the combat zone. Arranged into chapters divided by transports, gunships, helicopters, and unmanned aerial vehicles, the book includes the AC-130H gunship, which can be armed with weapons such as the M61 Vulcan rotary cannon and can destroy ground targets from a range of 2,000 metres; the CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, which can land large numbers of men and material in tight spaces because of its STOL capabilities; the Eurocopter AS365 Dauphin II, used by the British Joint Special Forces Aviation Wing (JSFAW) for the insertion of small units behind enemy lines; and the Mil Mi- 171Sh Storm rotorcraft, used by the Russian Spetsnaz commandos for operations in difficult terrain. Illustrated with 140 photographs and artworks, Aircraft of the Special Forces is a dynamic guide to the specialist aircraft and UAVs deployed by Special Forces throughout the world today.

"An author's quest to discover what really happened to his uncle in World War II"

To all appearances, Anthony "Tony" Korkuc was just another casualty of World War II. A gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress, Korkuc was lost on a bombing mission over Germany, and his family believed that his body had never been recovered. But when they learned in 1995 that Tony was actually buried at Arlington National Cemetery, his nephew Bob Korkuc set out on a seven-year quest to learn the true fate of an uncle he never knew.

"Finding a Fallen Hero" is a compelling story that blends a wartime drama with a primer on specialized research. Author Bob Korkuc initially set out to learn how his Uncle Tony came to rest at Arlington. In the process, he also unraveled the mystery of what occurred over the skies of Germany half a century ago.

Korkuc dug up military documents and private letters and interviewed people in both the United States and Germany. He tracked down surviving crewmembers and even found the brother of the Luftwaffe pilot who downed the B-17. Dozens of photographs help readers envision both Tony Korkuc's fateful flight and his nephew's dogged search for the truth.

A gripping chronicle of exhaustive research, "Finding a Fallen Hero" will strike a chord with any reader who has lost a family member to war. And it will inspire others to satisfy their own unanswered questions.

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.

At a time when Napoleon needed all his forces to reassert French dominance in Central Europe, why did he fixate on the Prussian capital of Berlin? Instead of concentrating his forces for a decisive showdown with the enemy, he repeatedly detached large numbers of troops, under ineffective commanders, toward the capture of Berlin. In "Napoleon and Berlin, " Michael V. Leggiere explores Napoleon's almost obsessive desire to capture Berlin and how this strategy ultimately lost him all of Germany.

Napoleon's motives have remained a subject of controversy from his own day until ours. He may have hoped to deliver a tremendous blow to Prussia's war-making capacity and morale. Ironically, the heavy losses and strategic reverses sustained by the French left Napoleon's Grande Armee vulnerable to an Allied coalition that eventually drove Napoleon from Central Europe forever.

Civil War historians have long noted that support for the Confederacy in the antebellum South tended to align with geography: those who lived in towns, along railroads, and on land suited for large-scale farming tended to side with the Confederacy, while those who lived a more isolated existence and made their livings by subsistence farming and bartering usually remained Unionist. Bartow County in northwest Georgia, with its distinctive terrain of valley, piedmont, and Appalachian hill country, is an ideal microcosm to examine these issues. Keith S. Hebert examines the rise and precipitous fall of Confederate nationalism in Bartow County, a shared experience among many counties in the upland South. Hebert's story tells us much about the war's origins, Confederate defeat, and the enduring legacy of white supremacy in these rural areas. Although no major battles were fought in Bartow County, Sherman's Atlanta Campaign saw Federal troops occupying the area, testing the loyalties of Bartow County soldiers serving in the Army of Tennessee and elsewhere. As the home front collapsed, they had to decide if they should remain in the army and fight or return home to protect their families and property. Locals hardly knew whom to trust as Unionists and Confederates-from both home and afar-engaged in guerilla warfare, stole resources from citizens, and made the war a confusing trap rather than a struggle for an emergent nation. Drawing on the primary source record of newspapers, letters, diaries, and official documents from the county, Hebert compellingly works personalized vignettes into a scholarly study of developments from the advent of war through Reconstruction and the decades following. The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains solidifies recent scholarship about the war in southern Appalachia and opens a window into a community deeply divided by civil war.

With The Weaker Sex in War, Kristen Brill shows how white women's wartime experiences shaped Confederate political culture-and the ways in which Confederate political culture shaped their wartime experiences. These white women had become passionate supporters of independence to advance the cause of Southern nationalism and were used by Confederate leadership to advance the cause. These women, drawn from the middle and planter class, played an active, deliberate role in the effort. They became knowing and keen participants in shaping and circulating a gendered nationalist narrative, as both actors for and symbols of the Confederate cause. Through their performance of patriotic devotion, these women helped make gender central to the formation of Confederate national identity, to an extent previously unreckoned with by scholars of the Civil War era.In this important and original work, Brill weaves together individual women's voices in the private sphere, collective organizations in civic society, and political ideology and policy in the political arena. A signal contribution to an increasingly rich vein of historiography, The Weaker Sex in War provides a definitive take on white women and political culture in the Confederacy.