Best of
War

1971

The Winds of War


Herman Wouk - 1971
    Like no other masterpiece of historical fiction, Herman Wouk's sweeping epic of World War II is the great novel of America's Greatest Generation.Wouk's spellbinding narrative captures the tide of global events, as well as all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of World War II, as it immerses us in the lives of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom.The Winds of War and its sequel War and Remembrance stand as the crowning achievement of one of America's most celebrated storytellers.

Five Years To Freedom


James N. Rowe - 1971
    Rowe was captured in 1963 in Vietnam, his life became more than a matter of staying alive.In a Vietcong POW camp, Rowe endured beri-beri, dysentery, and tropical fungus diseases. He suffered grueling psychological and physical torment. He experienced the loneliness and frustration of watching his friends die. And he struggled every day to maintain faith in himself as a soldier and in his country as it appeared to be turning against him.His survival is testimony to the disciplined human spirit.His story is gripping.

The First Day on the Somme


Martin Middlebrook - 1971
    On 1 July 1916 the British Army went over the top and attacked the German trenches. It was the first day of the battle of the Somme, and on that day the British suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, two for every yard of their front. With more than fifty times the daily losses at El Alamein and fifteen times the British casualties on D-day, 1 July 1916 was the blackest day in the history of the British Army. But, more than that, it was a watershed in the history of the First World War. The Army that attacked on that day was the volunteer Army that had answered Kitchener's call. It had gone into action confident of a decisive victory. But by sunset on the first day on the Somme, no one could any longer think of a war that might be won. After that it was a struggle that had simply to be endured. Martin Middlebrook's research has covered not just official and regimental histories and tours of the battlefields, but interviews with hundreds of survivors, both British and German. As to the action itself, he conveys the overall strategic view and the terrifying reality of an new kind of war for front-line soldiers.

Love and War in the Apennines


Eric Newby - 1971
    This story recounts his experiences and the invaluable aid given by the local people, especially the woman who became his life-long love.

365 Days


Ronald J. Glasser - 1971
    "The stories I have tried to tell here are true, " says Glasser in his foreword. "Those that happened in Japan I was part of; the rest are from the boys I met. I would have liked to disbelieve some of them, and at first I did, but I was there long enough to hear the same stories again and again, and then to see part of it myself." Assigned to Zama, an Army hospital in Japan in September 1968, Glasser arrived as a pediatrician in the U.S. Army Medical Corps to care for the children of officers and high-ranking government officials. The hospital's main mission, however, was to support the war and care for the wounded. At Zama, an average of six to eight thousand patients were attended to per month, and the death and suffering were staggering. The soldiers counted their days by the length of their tour--one year, or 365 days--and they knew, down to the day, how much time they had left. Glasser tells their stories--of lives shockingly interrupted by the tragedies of war--with moving, humane eloquence.

Shadows in Paradise


Erich Maria Remarque - 1971
    Now living in New York City among old friends, far from Europe's chilling atrocities, Ross soon meets Natasha, a beautiful model and fellow migre, a warm heart to help him forget his cold memories.Yet even as the war draws to its violent close, Ross cannot find peace. Demons still pursue him. Whether they are ghosts from the past or the guilt of surviving, he does not know. For he is only beginning to understand that freedom is far from easy--and that paradise, however perfect, has a price. . . .

Devil's Guard


George Robert Elford - 1971
    In that struggle, its frontline troops were the misfits, criminals and mercenaries of the French Foreign Legion. And among that international army of the desperate and the damned, none were so bloodstained as the fugitive veterans of the German S.S.WHAT THEY DID IN VIETNAM WAS ITS UGLIEST SECRET -- UNTIL NOW.Loathed by the French, feared and hated by the Vietnamese, the Germans fought not for patriotism or glory but because fighting for France was better than hanging from its gallows. Here now is the untold story of the killer elite whose discipline, ferocity and suicidal courage made them the weapon of last resort.

Fork-Tailed Devil; The P-38 Lightning


Martin Caidin - 1971
    The National War College, the Air Force’s Air University and several other institutions use his books as doctrine and strategy guides, historical references and textbooks. He twice won the Aviation/Space Writers Association award as the outstanding author in the field of aviation. Caidin died in March 1997.

Chronicle in Stone


Ismail Kadare - 1971
    Surrounded by the magic of beautiful women and literature, a boy must endure the deprivations of war as he suffers the hardships of growing up. His sleepy country has just thrown off centuries of tyranny, but new waves of domination inundate his city. Through the boy's eyes, we see the terrors of World War II as he witnesses fascist invasions, allied bombings, partisan infighting, and the many faces of human cruelty as well as the simple pleasures of life. Evacuating to the countryside, he expects to find an ideal world full of extraordinary things but discovers instead an archaic backwater where a severed arm becomes a talisman and deflowered girls mysteriously vanish. Woven between the chapters of the boy's story are tantalizing fragments of the city's history. As the devastation mounts, the fragments lose coherence, and we perceive firsthand how the violence of war destroys more than just buildings and bridges.

How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War


Norman Longmate - 1971
    In contrast with the thousands of books on military operations, barely any have concerned themselves with the individual's experience. The problems of the ordinary family are barely ever mentioned - food rationing, clothes rationing, the black-out and air raids get little space, and everyday shortages almost none at all. This book is an attempt to redress the balance; to tell the civilian's story largely through their own recollections and in their own words.

Convoy Escort Commander: A Memoir of the Battle of the Atlantic (Submarine Warfare in World War Two)


Peter Gretton - 1971
    

Goshawk Squadron


Derek Robinson - 1971
    But for Stanley Woolley, commanding officer of Goshawk Squadron, the romance of chivalry in the clouds is just a myth. There are two types of men up there: victims and murderers, and the code he drums into his men bans any notion of sport or fair play. This produces better killers but, even so, Wolley believes the whole squadron will be dead within three months. Derek Robinson quietly builds the day-to-day details of these mens lives and deaths into a powerful indictment of war. But this classic of war literature is also very funny, often painfully so; Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this is Derek Robinson's masterly novel of the war in the air over the Western Front in 1918.

The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac, 1861-1865


E.B. Long - 1971
    It has been needed for a long time, both by the student and by the man who simply likes to read about the Civil War, but until now no one had the dedication or the encyclopedic knowledge to produce it. Here it is, at last—an almanac, or day-by-day recital down to the close conflict, written by Professor E. B. Long of the University of Wyoming. If there was a battlefield in the Civil War that this man has not visited personally, I do not know where it is; if there is an important collection of papers shedding light on the war that he has not examined, it would be hard to name it. It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that this man knows more facts about the Civil War than any other man who ever lived. To know a subject thoroughly, of course, is one thing; to put the results of that knowledge into lucid prose of manageable compass is something else again. One does not need to examine many pages of this almanac to realize that Professor Long has succeeded admirably in the second task. Crammed into the margins of each page with facts, this book is never soporific. It is for the casual reader as well as for the specialist; it can even, as a matter of fact, be read straight through as a narrative, in which the dramatic and heart-stirring events of America’s greatest time of trial pass before the eye on a day-to-day basis. A book like this has been needed for a long time, but up to now no one was able to write it. It should have a long life, and no one will ever need to do it again. It belongs on the somewhat restricted shelf of Civil War books that will be of permanent value.”Bruce Catton, from his foreword

The Arnheiter Affair


Neil Sheehan - 1971
    Vance. He hadbeen her captain for ninety-nine days. The dispute over what happened aboard the Vance during those three months grew into one of the major controversies in the United States Navy in over a decade -- "The Arnheiter Affair." This is the engrossing story.

London War Notes, 1939-1945


Mollie Panter-Downes - 1971
    She wrote her first one on September 3rd 1939; on May 12th 1945 she wrote her hundred and fifty-third. Her New Yorker obituary observed: ‘Other correspondents were writing about the war, of course, often with great power and conviction, but they dealt with large incidents and events, while Mollie wrote of the quotidian stream of English life, of what it was like to actually live in a war, of what the government was doing, of the nervous sound of the air-raid sirens, of the disappearance of the egg, of children being evacuated – of all the things that made life in England bearable and unbearable. In a steady flow of copy, directed to editors she had never met at a magazine she had never visited, she undoubtedly did more to explain wartime England to American readers than anyone else in the field.And as the TLS said when London War Notes was published in 1971: ‘For sheer range of mood and matter Mollie Panter-Downes leaves most of her rivals standing. Nothing more vivid has been written about those early days of soft sunshine when it was hard to disentangle the dream from the reality, a long summer afternoon in which fantasy flourished, and the barrage balloons glittered “like swollen fairy elephants lolling against the blue”.

Bomb Run


Spencer Dunmore - 1971
    For them, World War II is virtually over. They will take off tonight, make a last passage through the barrage of flak and flame, take a last gamble against the Messerschmitts, and return to England and relative peace. The pilot of the Lancaster bomber, Wally Mann, Paul Taylor the navigator, Douglas, Harry, Phil, Charlie, Len — the other members of the crew — dream of life and love and each fights his fear as the bomber lifts off in the night for the run over Berlin. But across the Channel, a young German fighter pilot, grieving for his dead parents and thinking of the combat to come, is destined to alter forever the lives of the British bomber crew. One of the most exciting first novels to appear in years, Bomb Run has been described as "a military The High and the Mighty." Certainly one of the finest novels ever written about flying, it is one of the most exciting reading experiences in any genre. About the author: Spencer Dunmore was a schoolboy in Yorkshire, England during World War II and watched bombers limping home to the RAF airfields there. His imagination was fired by this experience to the extent that he became an expert on the war in the air, 1939-1945, and his accounts of the bombers and fighters involved are renowned for their accuracy. Dunmore left Britain for Canada in the mid-50s where he was an advertising executive for many years. Dunmore is now a full-time writer and a private pilot on weekends and resides in Ontario.

Thomas Merton on Peace


Thomas Merton - 1971
    

The War of the Running Dogs: How Malaya Defeated the Communist Guerrillas 1948-1960


Noel Barber - 1971
    The Chinese-backed guerrillas called it the War of the Running Dogs—their contemptuous term for those in Malaya who remained loyal to the British. The British Government referred to this bloody and costly struggle as the "Malayan Emergency." Yet it was a war that lasted 12 years and cost thousands of lives. By the time it was over Malaya had obtained its independence—but on British, not on Chinese or Communist, terms. Here is the war as it was. Here are the planters and their wives on their remote rubber estates, the policemen, the generals and the soldiers, the Malays, Chinese and Indians of a polyglot country, all fighting an astute, ruthless, and well organized enemy.

German Army Uniforms and Insignia, 1933-1945


Brian Leigh Davis - 1971
    Library of Congress catalog card number 79-169172

The Brass Ring


Bill Mauldin - 1971
    A semi-memoir covering a decade of the acclaimed cartoonists formative years (1935-1945), and including many reproductions of famous drawings and photos from the authors personal collection.

Annals of Tennessee: To the End of the Eighteenth Century (the First American Frontier)


James Gettys McGready Ramsey - 1971
    Originally published in 1853 and reprinted in 1967 by the East Tennessee Historical Society, this definitive history of the state of Tennessee includes a biographical introduction of the author, annotations, and an exhaustive 49-page index.

The Rape of Bangladesh


Anthony Mascarenhas - 1971
    

The Moral Equivalent of War & Other Essays/Some Problems of Philosophy


William James - 1971
    Selections

The Frigates


James Henderson - 1971
    This text presents a narrative of the frigates of 1793-1815 and the swashbuckling spirit of their sea adventures.

Code: Polonaise


Eva-Lis Wuorio - 1971
    A group of Polish children risk their lives and narrowly escape detection by the Nazis while publishing an underground newspaper in occupied Poland.

History Of The Uniforms Of The British Army: V. 2


Cecil C.P. Lawson - 1971
    

The Theme of the Mutilation of the Corpse in the Iliad


Charles Segal - 1971
    

Siege And Survival: The Odyssey Of A Leningrader


Elena Skrjabina - 1971
    It awarded to the survivors (and to some who did not) the Medal for Defense of Leningrad.So far as I know it played no favorites in this. Those who had chanced to come through alive got the medal (many of them to their great surprise). In all more than 300,000 medals were passed out-- and it may sound like a very large total. But when you consider the fact that something like 3,300,000 persons were trapped within the siege lines when the long blockade began on September 8, 1941, the number is not so large. Of course, between 1,100,000 and 1,500,000 persons died during the siege--of hunger, of cold, of disease, of German bullets, bombs, and shells.All of this Elena Skrjabina has experienced. She has no Medal of Leningrad. But she possesses a distinction which is as rare as any human being possesses. She "is a "Leningrader. She endured the siege. She came out over Lake Ladoga-- not alone. She brought her mother, two children and an old nurse with her. She did not emerge without loss; her mother died. Her mother survived the bitter days of the siege. She even lived through December 1941, and January 1942, into February 1942. She survived the trip across the ice. But once on the other side, her strength was gone. She endured a few days in the hospital. Not more. Then she slipped away from life as hundreds of thousands of her fellow Leningraders had before her.