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This narrative history tells the story of the German occupation of
Normandy (1940-44), and the Allied liberation. Following the fall
of France in 1940, Normandy formed part of the Reich's western
border and its history for the next four years. On the coast, vast
defenses were built up, and large numbers of German troops were
stationed throughout the region, all in the midst of the local
population. Much of the story is told in the words of French,
German, and Allied participants, including last letters of executed
hostages and resisters, accounts of everyday life and eyewitness
reports of aerial, naval, and ground combat operations during the
Liberation. When the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944, all
were witness to the greatest amphibious landing in history. This,
then, is the story of the 51-month-nightmare that was Normandy's
war, told while it is still possible to record the personal stories
of survivors, which very soon will not be the case.
Forget the adventure stories of James Bond, Kim Philby, Klaus Fuchs
and co. – espionage is not just a boys’ game. As long as there
has been conflict, there have been female agents behind the scenes.
In Belgium and northern France in 1914–18 there were several
thousand women actively working against the Kaiser’s forces
occupying their homelands. In the Second World War, women of many
nations opposed the Nazis, risking the firing squad or decapitation
by axe or guillotine. Yet, many of those women did not have the
right to vote for a government or even open a bank account. So why
did they do it? Female Secret Agents explores the lives and the
motivations of the women of many races and social classes who have
risked their lives as secret agents, and celebrates their
intelligence, strength and courage.
Of the 2.3 million National Servicemen conscripted during the Cold
War, 4,200 attended the secret Joint Services School for Linguists,
tasked with supplying much-needed Russian speakers to the three
services. The majority were in RAF uniform, as the Warsaw Pact saw
air forces become the greatest danger to the West. After training,
they were sent to the front lines in Germany and elsewhere to snoop
on Russian aircraft in real time. Posted to RAF Gatow in Berlin,
ideally placed for signals interception, Douglas Boyd came to know
Hitler's devastated former capital, divided as it was into Soviet,
French, US and British sectors. Pulling no punches, he describes
the SIGINT work, his subsequent arrest by armed Soviet soldiers one
night on the border, and how he was locked up without trial in
solitary confinement in a Stasi prison. The Solitary Spy is a
unique account of the terrifying experience of incarceration and
interrogation in an East German political prison, from which Boyd
eventually escaped one step ahead of the KGB.
Of the 2.3 million National Servicemen conscripted during the Cold
War, 4,200 attended the secret Joint Services School for Linguists,
tasked with supplying much-needed Russian speakers to the three
services. After training, they were sent to the front lines in
Germany and elsewhere to snoop on Soviet aircraft in real time.
Posted to RAF Gatow in Berlin, ideally placed for signals
interception, author Douglas Boyd came to know Hitler's devastated
former capital. Pulling no punches, he describes SIGINT work, his
subsequent arrest by armed Soviet soldiers, and how he was locked
up without trial in solitary confinement in a Stasi prison. The
Solitary Spy is a unique first-hand account of the terrifying
experience of incarceration and interrogation in an East German
political prison, from which Boyd eventually escaped, one step
ahead of the KGB.
After the guns fell silent in May 1945, the USSR resumed its
clandestine warfare against the western democracies. Stalin
installed secret police services in the satellite countries of
Central and Eastern Europe. Trained by his NKVD officers of the
Polish UB, the Czech StB, the Hungarian AVO, Romania's Securitate,
Bulgaria's KDS, Albania's Sigurimi and the Stasi of the German
Democratic Republic spied on and ruthlessly repressed their fellow
citizens on the Soviet model. When the resultant hatred exploded in
uprisings they were put down by brutality, bloodshed and Soviet
tanks. Not so obvious was that these state terror organisations
were also designed for military and commercial espionage in the
West, to conceal the real case officers in Moscow. Specially
trained operatives undertook 'wet jobs', including the
assassinations. Perhaps the most menacing were the sleepers who who
married and raised families in the west while waiting to strike
against their host countries; many are still among us. In Moscow
Rules Douglas Boyd explores the relationship between the KGB and
its ghastly brood - a family from hell.
Lore Schindler was ten years old when her dentist father Harry was
arrested by the Gestapo in Berlin and sent to Sachsenhausen
concentration camp. His wife Grete bought his release by giving all
their possessions to the Nazi state. Leaving Germany with just 10
Marks each, parents and daughter suffered humiliating strip
searches at the border. This was the start of Lore’s ordeal. In
her first French concentration camp, her mother died. Her father
also died in another camp. Orphaned and ill in the huge camp at
Gurs, she was saved by prisoner-nurse Schwester Käte, but would
later have starved to death, had not two sisters – Elsie and
Marthe Liefmann – ‘adopted’ her, found food and made her eat
it. Elsbeth Kasser was a Swiss-German social worker in the camp who
gave her treats of milk and Swiss cheese to build up ‘the
thinnest girl in the camp’. Another social worker, Elisabeth
Hirsch used a forged identity card to get Lore out of the camp and
took her to La Maison de Moissac, a children’s home in SW France
run by her sister Shatta Simon. There, several hundred refugee
children were hidden from the Nazi occupiers and French fascists
who wanted to send the children to the death camps in Poland. When
it became unsafe to stay in Moissac, Lore was adopted by pianist
Hélène Gribenski, living in a remote village. When that too
became unsafe, she moved her little family into a primitive hovel
in the forest to await the Allied victory. That Lore survived was
due to these courageous women, who risked their own lives to save
hers. After the war, she found love in an Israeli kibbutz and moved
with her American husband to New York, becoming a librarian with
Brooklyn Public Library. No borrowers ever guessed what her
adolescence and burgeoning womanhood had been like in a terrifying
land whose language she could not even speak.
When Count Henry of Anjou and his formidable wife Eleanor of
Aquitaine became king and queen of England, they amassed an empire
stretching 1,000 miles from the Pyrenees to the Scottish border,
including half of France. Henry's grandmother Empress (of Germany)
Mathilda had taught him that ruling is like venery: show the hawk
the reward, but take it away at the last moment, to keep the bird
eager to please. To sons and vassals alike, Henry promised
everything but gave nothing, keeping the three adult princes hating
him and the other siblings all their lives. Plantagenet Princes
traces the lives and infamous webs of mistrust and intrigue among
them. What sons they were! Henry (b. 1155), 'the Young king' was
entitled to succeed his father, yet was a rich playboy who died
crippled by debt before his thirtieth birthday, after living the
life of a robber baron. Richard (b. 1157), 'the Lionheart' was lord
of his mother's duchy of Aquitaine and became, thanks to her,
England's most popular king despite bankrupting the Empire twice in
his disastrous 10-year reign. Geoffrey (b. 1158), count of
Brittany, was the cleverest, but was trampled to death by horses
aged 32 in a pointless melee at Paris, leaving his wife Constance
to act as regent for their son Arthur in a long power struggle
between Philip Augustus, king of France, and the Plantagenets. The
runt of the litter, John (b. 1166) was nicknamed Lackland, since no
inheritance was initially promised him. He proved the longest-lived
by far, dying at the age of fifty after signing Magna Carta, losing
the key duchy of Normandy and most of the other continental
possessions - also murdering his nephew Arthur, imprisoning
Arthur's sister for life and waging war against his barons,
continued by Henry III. The Plantagenet line continued with Richard
of Cornwall, Edward I conquering Wales, gay Edward II, Edward III,
Edward the Black Prince and Richard II, who died in prison while
his usurper sat on the throne.
The October Revolution happened in November 1917. Later Soviet
propaganda pretended for several decades that it was 'the will of
the people', but in reality the brutal rebellion, which killed
millions and raised the numerically tiny Bolshevik Party to power,
was made possible by massive injections of German money laundered
through a Swedish bank. The so-called 'workers' and peasants'
revolution' had a cast of millions, of which the three stars were
neither workers nor peasants. Nor were they Russian. Josef V.
Djugashvili - Stalin - was a Georgian who never did speak perfect
Russian; Leiba Bronstein - Trotsky - was a Jewish Ukrainian;
Vladimir I. Ulyanov - Lenin - was a mixture of Tatar and other
Asiatic bloodlines. Karl Marx had thought that the Communist
revolution would happen in an industrialised country like Germany.
Instead, German cash enabled Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Co. to
destroy ineffective tsarist rule and declare war on the whole
world. This is how they did it, told largely in the words of people
who were there.
Winston Churchill called it 'the unknown war'. Unlike the long
stalemate of the Western Front, the conflict 1914-18 between the
Russian Empire and the Central Powers was a war of movement
spanning a continent - from the Arctic to the Adriatic, Black and
Caspian seas and from the Baltic in the west to the Pacific Ocean.
The appalling scale of casualties provoked strikes in Russia's war
industries and widespread mutinies at the front. As the whole
fabric of society collapsed, German money brought the Bolsheviks to
power in the greatest deniable dirty trick of the twentieth
century, after which Russia stopped fighting, eight months before
the Western Front armistice. The cost to Russia was 4 million men
dead and as many held as POWs by the Central Powers. Wounded? No
one has any idea how many. All the belligerent powers of the
Russian fronts were destroyed: the German, Austro-Hungarian and
Russian empires gone forever and the Ottoman Empire so crippled
that it finally collapsed in 1922. During four years of brutal
civil war that followed, Trotsky's Red Army fought the White
armies, murdering and massacring millions of civilians, as British,
American and other western soldiers of the interventionist forces
fought and died from the frozen Arctic to the arid deserts of Iran.
This is the story of that other First World War.
When people think of Richard the Lionheart they recall the scene at
the end of every Robin Hood epic when he returns from the Crusades
to punish his treacherous brother John and the wicked Sheriff of
Nottingham. In reality Richard detested England and the English,
was deeply troubled by his own sexuality and was noted for greed,
not generosity, and for murder rather than mercy. In youth Richard
showed a taste for cruelty and a rapacity for gold that would
literally be the death of him. To save his own skin, he repeatedly
abandoned his supporters, and his indifference to women saw the
part of queen at his coronation played by his formidable mother,
Queen Eleanor. His brief reign bankrupted England twice,
destabilised his parents' powerful empire and set the scene for his
brother's ruinous rule. So how has Richard come to be known as the
brave and patriotic Christian warrior? Lionheart reveals the
scandalous truth about England's hero king - a truth that is far
different from the legend that has endured for eight centuries.
What did it mean when Vladimir Putin stepped down from president to
prime minister of Russia in 2008 and bounced to the top again in
2013? The Putin-Medvedev clique of mega-rich ex-KGB men and lawyers
call their state machine kontora - the firm - and run it as though
they own all the shares. They command the largest armed forces in
Europe, equipped with half the world's nuclear warheads. Their air
force regularly flies nuclear capable Tupolev Tu-95 strategic
bombers into British airspace to analyse our radar defences and
time in-the-air reaction. In a frightening foretaste of future
warfare, the Kremlin launched a cyberattack on neighbouring Estonia
in 2007 that crashed every computer and silenced every mobile
phone, bringing the country to a complete halt. Was this just Tsar
Vladimir bullying a small independent neighbour state that could
not hit back - or a rehearsal for something far bigger? People call
Putin's power strategy 'the new Cold War'. Author Douglas Boyd
argues that it is the same one as before, fought with potent new
weapons: the energy resources on which half of Europe now depends,
and which can be turned off at Moscow's whim. Recounted often in
the words of participants, The Kremlin Conspiracy is the chilling
story of 1,000 years of bloodshed that made the Russians the way
they are. Today, Ukraine. Tomorrow? The past points the way, for
the men running the Kremlin 'firm' are driven by the same
motivation as Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great.
The names of few medieval monarchs and their queens are better
known than Eleanor of Aquitaine, uniquely queen of France and queen
of England, and her second husband Henry II. Although academically
labelled medieval', their era was the violent transition from the
Dark Ages, when countries' borders were defined with fire and
sword. Henry grabbed the English throne thanks largely to Eleanor's
dowry because she owned one third of France. Their daughters also
lived extraordinary lives. If princes fought for their succession
to crowns, the princesses were traded - usually by their mothers -
to strangers for political power without the bloodshed. Years
before what would today be marriageable age, royal girls were
despatched to countries whose speech was unknown to them and there
became the property of unknown men; their duty the bearing of sons
to continue a dynasty and daughters who would be traded in their
turn. Some became literal prisoners of their spouses; others
outwitted would-be rapists and the Church to seize the reins of
power when their husbands died. Eleanor's daughters Marie and Alix
were abandoned in Paris when she divorced Louis VII of France. By
Henry II, she bore Matilda, Alienor and Joanna. Between them, these
extraordinary women and their daughters knew the extremes of power
and pain. Joanna was imprisoned by William II of Sicily and worse
treated by her brutal second husband in Toulouse. If Eleanor was
libelled as a whore, Alienor's descendants include two saints,
Louis of France and Fernando of Spain. And then there were the
illegitimate daughters, whose lives read like novels
When people think of Richard the Lionheart they recall the scene at
the end of every Robin Hood epic when he returns from the Crusades
to punish his treacherous brother John and the wicked Sheriff of
Nottingham. In reality Richard detested England and the English,
was deeply troubled by his own sexuality and was noted for greed,
not generosity, and for murder rather than mercy. In youth Richard
showed no interest in girls; instead, a taste for cruelty and a
rapacity for gold that would literally be the death of him. To save
his own skin, he repeatedly abandoned his supporters to an evil
fate, and his indifference to women saw the part of queen at his
coronation played by his formidable mother, Queen Eleanor. His
brief reign bankrupted England twice, destabilised the powerful
empire his parents had put together and set the scene for his
brother's ruinous rule. So how has Richard come to be known as the
noble Christian warrior associated with such bravery and
patriotism? Lionheart reveals the scandalous truth about England's
hero king - a truth that is far different from the legend that has
endured for eight centuries.
In this new biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine - one of the most
exciting women in European medieval history - author Douglas Boyd
takes us to the heart of this extraordinary woman. He reveals her
as a peculiarly 'modern' character - she rejects as a liberated
woman the subordinate role decreed by the Church and Salic law; she
refused to be a consenting victim of ethnic cleansing; and she
promotes her vision of a continent wide dynasty - and uniquely sets
her into the context of southern French civilisation, with its love
of comforts and pleasures of life. Boyd's new biography will not
only recreate the turbulent life of this extraordinary woman, but
take us into the world she knew - her friendships, the food she
ate, the clothes she wore, the sounds, sights and smells around her
- and thus bring her to life as never before.
What was life really like in German-occupied France during the
Second World War? Douglas Boyd paints the clearest picture yet,
using previously unpublished first-person accounts of ordinary men
and women who lived through this extraordinary and dangerous time,
when a few made fortunes, but most went cold and hungry. Less than
1 percent of the French were pro-German. Is it pure coincidence
that the same percentage actively resisted the Germans despite
knowing that, if caught, their husbands, wives and children were
considered equally culpable under the brutal Teutonic principle of
Sippenhaft - guilt by association? Using new, meticulously
researched material, Douglas Boyd tells an enthralling and
sometimes chilling narrative history of the Occupation, as lived by
the French people. It is a record of great heroism and ultimate
cruelty. Read it and ask yourself, "How would I have reacted,
living in Occupied France?" The answer may surprise you.
After watching a D-Day film, do youwonder why no French units took
part in the invasion of their own German-occupied country? General
Charles De Gaulle commanded 400,000 Free French soldiers, but US
President Roosevelt insisted they not be told the date of the
invasion because he intended to occupy France and open the country
up to American Big Business, while keeping in office traitors who
had run the country for Hitler. This would have sparked a civil
war, but De Gaulle outwitted Washington to head the first
government of liberated France. Disgusted with the professional
politicians, he resigned in 1946. but twelve years later, to save
France from civil war a second time, he was elected President of
the Republic. After Roosevelt's death, he defied presidents Truman,
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Drawing on hitherto
unpublished and revealing material from the archives in Paris and
Washington, this thought-provoking account of a great European's
rejection of foreign domination has significant resonance for
modern Britain, whose governments are subservient both to
Washington and Brussels.
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