From the unrelenting fear of death and gnawing pain of hunger, to the budding relationships of an adolescent girl growing into womanhood during the worst of all times, the author withholds nothing. Fanya Gottesfeld Heller's subtle depiction of her parents knowledge that it was a non-Jew's love for their daughter that had moved him to hide them, and their embarrassment and ultimate acceptance of the situation, lead us to wonder how we would have acted under the same circumstances as father, mother, or daughter. Love in a World of Sorrow features Fanya's gripping tale of survival and an updated foreword and epilogue by the author, reflecting more than a decade of experience bearing witness to the Holocaust before hundreds of audiences around the world. On the reading list at Princeton University, the University of Connecticut, and Ben Gurion Univesity of the Negev, among others. Fanya Gottesfeld Heller's book is an indispensable educational tool for teaching future generations about the human potential for both good and evil.

    It is must reading for every aficionado of modern military history.” –San Francisco ChronicleErwin Rommel’s instinct for battle and leadership places him among the great commanders of history. In this definitive biography, David Fraser, an acclaimed biographer and distinguished soldier, looks at Rommel’s career and shows how wild and superficially undisciplined Rommel’s bold style of leadership could be, and how it inspired the men under his command to attack with ferocity and pursue with tenacity—qualities that served him well in his great battles in the North African desert and throughout his entire military career. Fraser also thoroughly explores the question of Rommel’s possible involvement in the plot against Hitler and the reason for his forced suicide, even though there was no criminal evidence against him.Revealing his failings as well as his genius, Knight’s Cross is a fascinating biography of a soldier whose distinguished career has become a part of history.

    The insights are brilliant and intriguing as Deighton warns that the lessons of the War remain unheeded.

    Picking up the story after Midway, the author presents a scrupulously accurate account of what happened, describing in rich detail the actual planes and pilots pitted in the ferocious battles that helped turn the tide of war. Based on correspondence with 150 American and Japanese veterans, or their families, he reveals the thoughts, pressures, and fears of the airmen and their crews as he reconstructs the battles. These are the story of the Wildcat and Zero fighters, and the Dauntless, Avenger, Betty, Kate, and Val bombers. Lavishly illustrated with drawings, maps, and photographs, this fresh look at the campaign set a standard for aviation histories when first published in 1994.

    Without the convoys no supplies; without supplies certainly no Second Front. Captain Frederic Walker RN devised and employed tactics which were the only sure means of combating and ultimately defeating the U-boat Wolf packs, but it was only when the Lords of the Admiralty came to employ these tactics that the U-boats were finally defeated.No one did more to regain control of the North Atlantic than Captain Walker. His relentless battle with the U-boat Wolf packs, amounting almost to a personal duel with Admiral Donitz, is an epic saga which has long deserved a larger page in the story of our nation's history, though he did achieve the rare distinction of winning the DSO and three bars. Alan Burn, who served under Walker, brilliantly recaptures the feeling of those dramatic days - the sheer bloody hell of the Atlantic weather, the ever-present menace of the lurking U-boats, but above all the quite remarkable and indomitable spirit which Walker managed to inspire in all who served in the ships under his command. Not only the citizens of Liverpool, where Walker is still revered as a local hero, but all who hold freedom dear will appreciate this well-merited tribute to a largely unsung hero who did as much as any man to preserve that freedom.

    The first full account of the experience of occupation, it offers a vividly human picture of resistance fighters and black marketeers, teenage German conscripts and Gestapo officers, Jews and starving villagers. "Fascinating. . . . [Mazower] succeeds in getting under the skin of the occupation. . . . [This book] conjures up, in vivid detail, life under an occupation that had shattered old certainties and replaced them with painful choices, cynical compromises, and hopes undercut by the daily death toll."—Mark Almond, New York Times "A vivid picture of the German occupier’s mind and actions. . . . Mazower’s arguments are always fair."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review "A superb book on the horrors afflicting wartime Greece. . . . [Mazower] has done vast archival research and emerged with a gripping, readable and human account, setting every moment of a tragic period in appropriate context."—Fritz Stern, Foreign Affairs "[A] sensitive, illuminating and richly textured account of painful, complex experience."—Richard Overy, Observer Mark Mazower is professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Dark Continent.

    Decades later, their fates are entangled with that of Jake Tallon, an American soldier stationed in Berlin who falls in love with Mader's daughter. Tallon, too, is a decorated war hero, though from Vietnam, not WWII. Together, the three iron men join together in Berlin just before the fall of the Wall to confront the legacy of the past . . . and defeat it.

    They flew their "Flying Fortresses" almost daily against strategic targets in Europe in the name of freedom. Their astonishing courage and appalling losses earned them the name that resounds in the annals of aerial warfare and made the "Bloody Hundredth" a legend.Harry Crosby arrived with the very first crews. After dealing with his fear and acquiring skill and confidence, he was promoted to Group Navigator, surviving hairbreadth escapes and eluding death while leading thirty-seven missions, some of them involving two thousand aircrafts, he left with the very last. Now in a breathtaking and often humorous account, he takes his readers into the hearts and minds of the intrepid airmen to experience the heart-stopping emotions, the triumph and the white-knuckle terror of the war in the skies in a riveting, unforgettable book destined to become a classic.

    Col. Dean Ladd, USMC (Ret.), a combat veteran of the 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division. Written with award-winning author Steven Weingartner, Col. Ladd s book chronicles his experiences as a junior officer in some of the fiercest fighting of the war, during the amphibious invasions of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, and Tinian. Ladd's recollections and descriptions of life--and death--on the far-flung battlefronts of the Pacific War are vividly rendered, and augmented by the personal recollections of many of the men who served with and under him in his wartime journey across the Pacific.Dean Ladd grew up in the Marine Corps; and the Marine Corps grew up in World War II. Faithful Warriors tells the story of how both came of age in history s greatest conflict. The book presents Ladd's journey through eventful times and extraordinary circumstances: prewar training outside San Diego; awaiting attack on Samoa after the attack on Pearl Harbor; surviving Guadalcanal; rest and recuperation in New Zealand; savage fighting and terrible suffering on Tarawa; recovery in Hawaii; more fighting on Saipan and Tinian This vividly written memoir will stir the memories of those who lived during these trying times and will help future generations of readers to understand the realities of the Pacific War.

    Moving between his childhood in Silesia, adolescence in Nazi concentration camps, postwar career as a journalist in Communist Poland and later in Israel (to which he emigrated in 1957), Frister's nonchronological narrative is carefully structured to slowly reveal the Holocaust's devastating impact on an individual life. Young Roman watches a German officer kill his mother with a single blow, then is forced to lie on her cooling corpse; at 15, he sits by his dying father's bed, thinking only of the half-loaf of bread underneath it: "I was afraid it might crumble before he stopped breathing." Frister does nothing to soften such horrific experiences, nor does he share his emotions. Yet readers will sense the author is not unfeeling, but rather in a state of profound moral shock that endures to scar his adult existence. The "thick layer of callousness" he wrapped around himself in the camps may seem to enfold him still, but it's peeled away by his ferocious passion for truth, however unsavory. As a colleague tells Frister after reading his account of saving his own life by stealing the cap of a fellow prisoner (who was shot), "You've demonstrated what honesty means." --Wendy Smith

    Leaving school at fourteen, she is faced with no alternative but to help her mother run Pleasant View boarding house in Blackpool. To the holidaymakers it is a welcoming retreat, but to Jenny and her younger sister Violet, who struggle to keep up with their mother’s intolerable demands, it feels more like the workhouse. Then Jenny meets Tom Bradshaw, an idealistic young Yorkshire lad who not only stands up to Annie’s caustic remarks, but whisks Jenny straight off her feet and down the aisle.Happy though their marriage is and much as she loves their young daughter, Jenny feels she has slipped uncontrollably from dominated daughter into doting wife and mother, and there are times when she yearns for the independence she has been denied. Then Germany invades Poland, and Tom, eager for a slice of the action, joins up to fight in the Second World War.The ensuing war years provide Jenny and her sister with their first taste of freedom: Violet finds work in an aircraft factory, while Jenny takes in a little evacuee. And before long, both girls have begun to fall in love…

    Three airborne divisions, plus the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade, were dropped behind German lines to hold the bridges of Holland for an armored assault that would simultaneously crash across the Dutch border. Instead of cracking the German defenses, however, the Allies were horribly bloodied in their attempt to take the “bridge too far” and Hitler achieved his last victory in the West. The story of the 1st British Airborne Division’s near annihilation at the hands of two SS Panzer divisions has passed into military legend. Less celebrated is the role of the Polish Parachute Brigade, which flew into the battle on the third day, onto German-held drop zones, to fight heroically in this most dramatic of Allied failures. A subject of controversy ever since the battle, the Poles were accused by the British high command of incompetence and obstructiveness at the time. Poles Apart, through years of thorough research and interviews with participants, describes in vivid, “on the spot” detail how the Poles in fact performed with great skill and dogged courage under the most difficult-of circumstances. Seldom have soldiers fought under conditions as poignant as did the Poles in MARKET GARDEN. Originally formed to support an uprising in its homeland against the Nazis, the 1st Polish Parachute Brigade was thrown into the inferno of Arnhem just as the Polish Home Army was rising against the Germans in Warsaw As the Poles fought and died in support of their Western Allies in Holland, the citizens of burning Warsaw looked skyward for their paratroopers to save them from the Germans, as the Russian Army sat across the Vistula awaiting their own turn at occupation. Unlike the gallant soldiers of other Allied armies, many Polish paratroopers would never see their homeland again, even after ultimate victory. Poles Apart describes the inception of the Polish airborne force, including the career of its dynamic leader, Sosabowski, through the debacles of 1939 in Poland and 1940 in France, to the incredible gamble that was MARKET GARDEN. Along with telling the story of airborne combat on a massive scale in one of this century’s most daring failures, Poles Apart corrects the historical record by establishing the Polish airborne force once and for all as a fighting force worthy of the respect of all nations.

    This is the story of those men and their beloved ship, recorded by a junior officer who served on the famous destroyer from her commissioning in 1939 to April 1943, when he was wounded at the Battle of Tulagi. Peppered with the kind of vivid, authentic details that could only be provided by a participant, the book is the saga of a gallant fighting ship that earned a Presidential Unit Citation for her part in the Third Battle of Savo Island, where she took on a battleship, cruiser, and destroyer and was the last to leave the fray. Calhoun's gripping and colorful account tells what it was like to be there during those furiously fought, close-range engagements. When published in hardcover in 1993, the book was widely praised as a good read loaded with rich and interesting details.

    Though equipped with Aryan false-identity papers, she found life marked by daily threats and the danger of discovery - by the Gestapo, Polish police, extortionists, collaborators, hoodlums, and even former colleagues and acquaintances. Rosenberg's wartime trek took her to Polish cities, German military hospitals, and finally to Heidelberg, Germany, where she worked as a maid in a Nazi household from 1944 until her liberation by American forces. Her story is also a testimony to the power of friendship. Brought together in the ghetto, she and her friend Maria continued to support each other in their ensuing struggle for survival.

    On the tactical level, The Second World War can still be read with profit." Fuller himself characterized the book, however, as "in part a least a psychological study of the folly of man." Expertly combining detailed military history and analysis with Clausewitzian insights based on his own theories of warfare, Fuller produced a modern military masterpiece in The Second World War.

    Specifically, the heroes are a handful of National Guardsmen of the Carolinas' 30th Infantry Division who, for five days in August, 1944, withstood the full fury of a massive Nazi counterattack that threatened to cut-off and defeat the Allies' breakout from the Normandy beaches.

    Army created parachute regimental combat teams. Drawing on daring volunteers willing to hurl themselves from airplanes and hit the ground fighting, the 517th PRCT became one of the most highly trained airborne units in the world. Blooded in northern Italy in 1944, the Battling Buzzards dropped at night in southern France for the second D-day to spearhead a savage advance through the Champagne region and then into the Alps.Gerald Astor, acclaimed author of A Blood-Dimmed Tide, draws on the words of the men of the 517th to create this gripping, action-packed account of a unit that existed for only two years but fought heroically to defeat the vaunted German forces. From its campaign in Italy to its assault in the French Alps, the Battling Buzzards helped push the Germans out of southern Europe one fierce, close-quarter battle at a time. Then, after six months of nonstop action, the exhausted, battle-hardened 517th was called into the ultimate battle — at a place called The Bulge....

    Holocaust survivor George Brown recounts his experience and the loss of his family in WWII.

    Army during World War II hoped that they might make permanent gains as a result of their military service and their willingness to defend their country. They were soon disabused of such illusions. Taps for a Jim Crow Army is a powerful collection of letters written by black soldiers in the 1940s to various government and nongovernment officials. The soldiers expressed their disillusionment, rage, and anguish over the discrimination and segregation they experienced in the Army. Most black troops were denied entry into army specialist schools; black officers were not allowed to command white officers; black soldiers were served poorer food and were forced to ride Jim Crow military buses into town and to sit in Jim Crow base movie theaters. In the South, German POWs could use the same latrines as white American soldiers, but blacks could not. The original foreword by Benjamin Quarles, professor emeritus of history at Morgan State University, and a new foreword by Bernard C. Nalty, the chief historian in the Office of Air Force History, offer rich insights into the world of these soldiers.

    A veteran of World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the Polish-Russian War of 1920-21, he also was respected as a historian. From 1939 to 1944 he kept a detailed secret journal, making entries daily at first and then, near the end of the occupation, even more frequently. His observations range from matter-of-fact anticipation of war in 1939 to information about his own and other Poles' underground activities. As a whole, the entries reveal his growing recognition that the Nazis intended to destroy Polish culture and all those who had been its bearers. When originally published in Polish, the diary won a major award and soon went into a second edition. Now translated by his son and edited by his grandchildren, Klukowski's diary provides a rare picture of how noncombatants coped with life in German-occupied eastern Poland. Klukowski chronicled births, deaths, deportations, liquidations, partisan actions, and much more. His devotion to detail resulted in an amazingly long list of victims who fell to the German Occupation forces.