Britain now stood alone to face Hitler's inevitable invasion attempt.For the German Army to be landed across the Channel, Hitler needed mastery of the skies - the RAF would have to be broken - so every day, throughout the summer, German bombers pounded the RAF air bases in the southern counties. Greatly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe, the pilots of RAF Fighter Command scrambled as many as five times a day, and civilians watched skies criss-crossed with the contrails from the constant dogfights between Spitfires and Me-109s. Britain's very freedom depended on the outcome of that summer's battle.Britain's air defences were badly battered and nearly broken, but against all odds, 'The Few', as they came to be known, bought Britain's freedom - many with their lives.These are the personal accounts of the pilots who fought and survived that battle. We will not see their like again.

    All of its pilots were men. But by 1940, after Fighter Command lost hundreds of pilots during the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill realised the recruitment pool needed to be widened. In stepped ATA Senior Commander Pauline Gower, who had been a famous flier before the war. When Gower and ATA founder Gerard ‘Pop’ d’Erlanger discussed the idea of women flying in the ATA she answered the question ‘why women?’ with ‘why not?’ These women pilots were to become the ‘Bomber Girls’. By the end of the War, 166 extraordinarily brave young women learned to laugh off morale-crushing socio-political taboos in a bid to help Britain in its hour of need. Among them was the world famous aviatrix and socialite Amy Johnson who, in 1930 had made a pioneering solo flight, from Britain to Australia. But most were ordinary girls, who nonetheless counted themselves the equal of any man, and were willing to face death to defeat the enemy. Unlike the male pilots they had none of the firepower to defend themselves against enemy attack; neither had they been taught any specific manoeuvres that might save their lives if they were shot at. Their orders from the commanders at the ATA ferry pools were simple and straightforward: stay on course, try not to fly above 800 feet in bad weather, and don’t try anything fancy. But their fight was not just against the Nazis. It was also against the male establishment of the Armed Forces. Thanks to the political guile of Miss Gower they were the first collective of women to earn the same salary as their male colleagues doing the same job. Even so, it was only in 2008 that women of the ATA were rewarded with medals for their outstanding work and heroism during the war years. ‘Bomber Girls’ is the inspiring account of the achievements of those 166 women during the Second World War, not only in defending their country, but in breaking new ground for women’s rights. Based on exclusive interviews with the veterans of those harrowing years, it is a brilliantly told story of the War’s heroines. M J Foreman is a journalist, writer and editor with a varied experience in newspapers, broadcasting, and communications. Her books include ‘So You Think You Know Canterbury?’ and ‘Kent Revisited’. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.

    With the onset of World War II, her life is carried by a swirl of atrocities, decisions, farewells and remorse that will scar her forever. A stirring historical drama about the life of a Jewish family during WW II. This is the story of one unforgettable woman, supporting her husband and children under impossible conditions. It is also the story of a Jewish family who feels safe from war because of its status and wealth, and wakes up to a disastrous reality. More than anything, it is the story of the entire Italian Jewish community in face of the Holocaust – a story of disaster, overcoming and eventual immigration to Israel as a part of the Zionist movement. Behind every successful man stands an insightful woman. Daily life soaked in historical consequences, family ties and general atmosphere, aromas, sounds and tastes, based on thorough research, interviews and original historical manuscripts. A drama of loss and despair, survival and human triumph with unforgettable characters that stay with you long after the last page. Scroll up to grab your copy of Vittoria now!

    All over the country, people are on the move- concentration camp survivors, Allied PoWs, escaping Nazis- and the civilian population is running out of food. The man who orchestrated this nightmare is in his bunker beneath the capital, saying his farewells. This is the gripping story of Hitler's final hours, as seen through the eyes of those who were with him in the bunker; those fighting in the streets of Germany; and those pacing the corridors of power in Washington, London and Moscow.30th April 1945 was a day that millions had dreamed of, and millions had died for.

    The perimeter of the massive Saigon Airbase, Tan Son Nhut, was breached, and fighting raged all morning. Both gritty and intimate, From Chicago to Vietnam tells the powerful story of the ensuing epic battle, the Tet Offensive, from the perspective of one brave American soldier, Michael Duffy, whose life, like so many others, would forever be changed.Duffy's war experience begins when he exits a C-130 cargo plane onto the Tan Son Nhut tarmac--a chaotic scene of blasts, explosions, and small arms fire. Sprinting to a waiting helicopter, he is lifted up and over the city, where he gets a bird's-eye view of Saigon under attack. The helicopter lands on a road outside Bien Hoa Base Camp, and Duffy crawls in under enemy fire, tumbling into a fox-hole under cover of two GIs. Later, he meets up with his younger brother, Danny Duffy, in an ammunition convoy driving up Highway 1 to the village of Xuan Loc.After his brutal one-year tour in Vietnam, Duffy returns to Chicago, where he enjoys a Christmas dinner with his family before enrolling as a freshman at Colorado College. Like many vets, his return from the war would be met with curiosity, indifference, and, at times, scorn. This harrowing memoir was thirty years in the making.

    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.

    But when the Germans and Ukrainians obliterated David-Horodok in 1941, killing off all Jewish men in the town, everything changed.Left to fend for themselves, Basia and her mother fled 100 kilometers south, driven into the infamous Sarny ghetto. Tragedy struck again as the Germans liquidated the ghetto in 1942, and Basia went into the first of many hiding places. After years of running from soldiers, changing her identity, and hiding her faith, Basia emerged as a survivor – shepherding the rebirth of her faith and her family in America.

    Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally--and willing to fight to the end.In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows how Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless." It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it's also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill's prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London. Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports--some released only recently--Larson provides a new lens on London's darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents' wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela's illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the advisers in Churchill's "Secret Circle," to whom he turns in the hardest moments.

    There have been other books on Dr Morell's cocktail of treatments for Hitler and Goering's reliance on drugs, but Ohler's book is the first to show how the entire Nazi regime was permeated with drugs - cocaine, heroin, morphine and methamphetamines, the last of these crucial to troops' resilience and partly explaining German victory in 1940. Ohler is explicit that drugs cannot explain Third Reich ideology, but their promiscuous use impaired and confused decision-making, with drastic effects on Hitler and his entourage, who, as the war turned against Germany, took refuge in ever more poorly understood cocktails of stimulants. This chemical euphoria changes how we should think about the Nazi high command and its ability to understand the situation it found itself in by 1944-45. As such Blitzed will force a wider reinterpretation of several key events during the Second World War.

    The Germans called it Auschwitz. Auschwitz; a name now synonymous with man's darkest hour. Contrary to widespread belief, Auschwitz was not just a camp for those that the Third Reich deemed 'undesirables' - Jews, homosexuals and communists - hundreds of British Tommies were also incarcerated there and beheld the atrocities meted out by Hitler's brutal SS. This is the true story of one of those witnesses. Forced to do hard labour in an industrial factory, beaten by SS guards, part of a partisan group aiding in the plans for a mass breakout of Jewish prisoners. An escapee, a survivor; Arthur Dodd - a Spectator in Hell.

    In the first week of October, 1918, six hundred men charged into the forbidding Argonne Forest. Against all odds, they surged through enemy lines--alone. They were soon surrounded and besieged. As they ran out of ammunition, water, and food, the battalion withstood constant mortar attack and relentless enemy assaults. Seven days later, only 194 soldiers from the original unit walked out of the forest. The stand of the "Lost Battalion" was--and remains--an unprecedented display of heroism under fire.The narrative of Never in Finer Company focuses on the stories of four men: the battalion's commander, Major Charles Whittlesey, a lawyer eager to prove his mettle; his New York stockbroker executive officer, Captain George McMurtry; Sergeant Alvin York, whose famous exploits help rescue the battalion; and Damon Runyon, the soon-to-be famous newspaper man who struggled to understand the events he witnessed. From the patriotic frenzy that sent young men "over there" to the hurried stateside training, shipping overseas, and encounters with life at the front, each man trod a unique path to the October days that engulfed them. And their stories did not end on the battlefield--each man was haunted by the experience as America tried to come to grips with the carnage of the war.Character-rich, abundantly textured, sometimes tragic, sometimes uplifting, but always compelling, Never in Finer Company is a deeply moving and dramatic story on an epic scale.

    But in the autumn of 1939, decades of anti-Semitic propaganda turned into full-fledged violence. Bornstein’s family was subsequently sent to Auschwitz where his parents and siblings were gassed to death.The Long Night is Bornstein’s firsthand account of what he witnessed in seven concentration camps. Written with remarkable insight and raw emotion, The Long Night paints a portrait of human psychology in the darkest of times. Bornstein tells the stories of those who did all they could do to withstand physical and psychological torture, starvation, and sickness, and openly describes those who were forced to inflict suffering on others. The narrative is simple, yet profound; unbridled, honest, and dignified.The Long Night was written shortly after the war when the author’s memories were fresh and emotions ran strong. Originally published in German in 1967 as Die Lange Nacht, this is the first English translation of this work.

    In The Mousetrap -- winner of the 2003 San Diego Book Award for an Unpublished Memoir -- she tells the harrowing true story of her experiences as a young Bohemian woman in the years after the Second World War ended. She tells of the understandable brutality with which she and her family and friends were treated after the Germans lost the war. She also tells the story of a mother-daughter relationship that, because of the terrible times in which they lived, threatened to kill them both.At the time of her death, Ruth had nearly completed the next portion of her autobiography, which is currently being prepared for publication.Learn more about Ruth Eigner at TheMousetrapBook.com or find her on page on Facebook -- https://www.facebook.com/TheMousetrap...From the Introduction to The Mousetrap --Now that I have finally brought myself to write of these events, which took place nearly sixty-five years ago in a middle European land which no longer exists, I am faced with the fact that Americans now coming of age, like my own grandchildren, will need some historical background. The country was Czechoslovakia, created in 1918, made up of a hodge-podge of nationalities – Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Hungarian, Poles and others -- previously ruled by the Austrians, losers of the First World War. My own people, ethnic Germans, had lived in this same territory for almost a thousand years, and since we spoke the same language as the Austrian rulers, I suppose we thought of ourselves as better than our neighbors. Many of us were also excessively proud of our German culture, believing that it was superior to that of the Slavic people who now vastly outnumbered us in the new country. There was great fear among chauvinists and prejudiced Germans that we might lose our national identity and be forced even to give up our language. These people argued and sometimes demonstrated violently for the creation of a new German country. And the uprisings they fomented were sometimes put down with corresponding violence. It was easy, therefore for Adolf Hitler to argue in 1938 that the German citizens of Czechoslovakia needed his protection. To “save” us, as he said, from the persecution of the Czechs, he annexed the part of the country in which we lived. I was only twelve when this happened, but I was old enough to remember that there was much cheering in the streets when the German troops marched in. I remember also that during the next seven years which passed before the defeat of the Nazis, Germans of my group, even boys I grew up with, enlisted or were drafted to fight in Hitler’s army. No doubt many of them joined in the persecution of those who had been our fellow Czechoslovakians for the past twenty years, the descendants of people who had been our neighbors for centuries. Who could blame the Czechs for wanting to get revenge once Hitler was gone, and they were back in power? They felt, that unless we were driven from the country, we would betray them again at the first opportunity. All this was understandable, but it did not lessen the fear of the German Czechoslovakians, both the innocent and the guilty among us, who faced this reciprocal terror. -- Ruth Hanka Eigner

    He was also responsible for implementing Nazi policies towards the Jews in his area - inhumane processes that were the precursors of genocide. Yet he later claimed, like so many other Germans after the war, that he had 'known nothing about it'; and that he had personally tried to save a Jew before he himself managed to leave for military service. A Small Town Near Auschwitz re-creates Udo Klausa's story. Using a wealth of personal letters, memoirs, testimonies, interviews and other sources, Mary Fulbrook pieces together his role in the unfolding stigmatization and degradation of the Jews under his authoritiy, as well as the heroic attempts at resistance on the part of some of his victims. She also gives us a fascinating insight into the inner conflicts of a Nazi functionary who, throughout, considered himself a 'decent' man. And she explores the conflicting memories and evasions of his life after the war.But the book is much more than a portrayal of an individual man. Udo Klausa's case is so important because it is in many ways so typical. Behind Klausa's story is the larger story of how countless local functionaries across the Third Reich facilitated the murderous plans of a relatively small number among the Nazi elite - and of how those plans could never have been realized, on the same scale, without the diligent cooperation of these generally very ordinary administrators. As Fulbrook shows, men like Klausa 'knew' and yet mostly suppressed this knowledge, performing their day jobs without apparent recognition of their own role in the system, or any sense of personal wrongdoing or remorse - either before or after 1945.This account is no ordinary historical reconstruction. For Fulbrook did not discover Udo Klausa amongst the archives. She has known the Klausa family all her life. She had no inkling of her subject's true role in the Third Reich until a few years ago, a discovery that led directly to this inescapably personal professional history.

    At first an exciting adventure, young Guy Sajer’s war becomes, as the German invasion falters in the icy vastness of the Ukraine, a simple, desperate struggle for survival against cold, hunger, and above all the terrifying Soviet artillery. As a member of the elite Gross Deutschland Division, he fought in all the great battles from Kursk to Kharkov. Sajer's German footsoldier’s perspective makes The Forgotten Soldier a unique war memoir, the book that the Christian Science Monitor said "may well be the book about World War II which has been so long awaited." Now it has been handsomely republished containing fifty rare German combat photos of life and death at the eastern front. The photos of troops battling through snow, mud, burned villages, and rubble-strewn cities depict the hardships and destructiveness of war. Many are originally from the private collections of German soldiers and have never been published before. This volume is a deluxe edition of a true classic.