A year later, he was unknowingly assigned to the Kamikaze Special Attack Corps—a group of airmen whose mission was to sacrifice their lives by crashing planes into enemy ships. Their callsign was "ten dead, zero alive."By picking up Memoirs of a Kamikaze, readers will experience the hardships of fighter pilot training—dipping and diving and watching as other trainees crash into nearby mountainsides. They'll witness the psychological trauma of coming to terms with death before each mission, and breathe a sigh of relief with Odachi when his last mission is cut short by Japan's eventual surrender. They'll feel the anger at a government and society that swept so much of the sacrifice under the rug in its desperation to rebuild.Odachi's innate "samurai spirit" carried him through childhood, WWII and his eventual life as a kendo instructor, police officer and detective. His attention to detail, unwavering self-discipline and impenetrably strong mind were often the difference between life and death. Odachi, who is now well into his nineties, kept his Kamikaze past a secret for most of his life. Seven decades later, he agreed to sit for nearly seventy hours of interviews with the authors of this book—who know Odachi personally. He felt it was his responsibility to finally reveal the truth about the Kamikaze pilots: that they were unsuspecting teenagers and young men asked to do the bidding of superior officers who were never held to account.This book offers a new perspective on these infamous suicide pilots. It is not a chronicle of war, nor is it a collection of research papers compiled by scholars. It is a transcript of Odachi's words.

    Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that “hidden” Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to ensure their own survival.

    In November 1942 a Japanese torpedo destroyed the U.S.S. Juneau, killing 700 men. From extensive interviews, Kurzman reveals the agonizing truth behind one of America's greatest military tragedies.

    It was August 3, 1943, just one day after Sam escaped the Camp during a prisoner uprising. With 870,000 murdered at Treblinka, Sam was one of approximately 65 to survive and live until the end of the war. Esther had been hiding in that patch of forest for a year and was out that morning, looking for mushrooms to eat. They met and after hearing of the prisoner revolt, she took him to the Righteous Gentiles who, at great danger to themselves, hid them in their barn for three days while the Nazis, Ukrainians and Poles scoured the area looking for escapees. Deciding to stay and hide with Esther, they dug a forest pit where they “lived” when it was not freezing. They subsisted in the pit and the barns – hungry, cold, and scared – for another year until they were liberated by the Red Army in July of 1944. This is only one piece of their harrowing story of survival. This book tells the story of Sam and Esther, Holocaust survivors, who lost their entire families because of Hitler’s Final Solution. After four years in Displaced Person’s Camps, they arrived in New York Harbor to build a new life. The author, Karen Treiger, is Sam and Esther’s daughter-in-law, and with in-depth research and a bit of luck was able to find the three surviving children of the Styś families – those Righteous Gentiles who helped Sam and Esther during that dark time. She and her family traveled to Poland to walk in Sam and Esther’s footsteps and to meet the Styś children. It was intensely emotional, and the family heard some of what Sam and Esther lived through from those who helped them survive. Also, with the help of a Polish Priest, she was able to locate and meet a Goldberg cousin they never knew they had. My Soul is Filled with Joy: A Holocaust Story brings to life the horror of the Nazis’ actions and the toll that it exacted on so many Jewish families. This is also a story of hope, love and determination; of a family rediscovering the path taken by their parents to find life and freedom in a new world. Sam and Esther’s story is one of love and the will to live no matter what they had to endure. It reminds us that we are still learning the lessons of the Holocaust. TRIBUTES “Karen has written a powerful and personal account of Sam and Esther Goldberg. This book is a must read for those interested in the greatest crime in the history of mankind.” Chris Webb, Author/Historian, Founder of the Holocaust Historical Society,br> “It is vital that this book—as well as other accounts of the Holocaust— be preserved and disseminated widely to future generations to help prevent anything similar from ever happening again.”Marion Blumenthal Lazan, Holocaust Survivor and Co-Author, Four Perfect Pebbles“One can only bow one’s head, out of an unutterable gratitude, to the author for her contribution to the sacred narrative of our people. I call this book sacred, for (as with all forms of scripture) it tells not only what happened - but how to live in light of the story.”Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, President Emeritus, CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership; chairman, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 2000-2002. “We are haunted by the question of inexplicable evil. If you want to be inspired in spite of the horrors one human being can do to another human being, read this book.

    Here, the soldiers were worked to death, starved and brutalized; more than twenty percent died from this horrific treatment.This is one of the last untold stories of World War II, and Roger Cohen re-creates it in all its blistering detail. Ground down by the crumbling Nazi war machine, the men prayed for salvation from the Allied troops, yet even after their liberation, their story was nearly forgotten. There was no aggressive prosecution of the commandants of the camp and the POWs received no particular recognition for their sacrifices. Cohen tells their story at last, in a stirring tale of bravery and depredation that is essential for any reader of World War II history.

    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.

    Jonas Noreika, remembered as “General Storm,” had resisted his country’s German and Soviet occupiers in World War II, surviving two years in a Nazi concentration camp only to be executed in 1947 by the KGB. His granddaughter, growing up in Chicago, was treated like royalty in her tightly knit Lithuanian community. But in 2000, when Silvia traveled to Lithuania for a ceremony honoring her grandfather, she heard a very different story—a “rumor” that her grandfather had been a “Jew-killer.” The Nazi’s Granddaughter is Silvia’s account of her wrenching twenty-year quest for the truth, from a beautiful house confiscated from its Jewish owners, to familial confessions and the Holocaust tour guide who believed that her grandfather had murdered members of his family. A heartbreaking and dramatic story based on exhaustive documentary research and soul-baring interviews, The Nazi’s Granddaughter is an unforgettable journey into World War II history, intensely personal but filled with universal lessons about courage, faith, memory, and justice.

    In France in 1940, then for two years in North Africa, then finally back in France again, at Normandy in 1944, he proved himself a master of armored warfare, running rings around a succession of Allied generals who never got his measure and could only resort to overwhelming numbers to bring about his defeat.And yet for all his military genius, Rommel was also naive, a man who could admire Adolf Hitler at the same time that he despised the Nazis, dazzled by a Führer whose successes blinded him to the true nature of the Third Reich. Above all, he was the quintessential German patriot, who ultimately would refuse to abandon his moral compass, so that on one pivotal day in June 1944 he came to understand that he had mistakenly served an evil man and evil cause. He would still fight for Germany even as he abandoned his oath of allegiance to the Führer, when he came to realize that Hitler had morphed into nothing more than an agent of death and destruction. In the end Erwin Rommel was forced to die by his own hand, not because, as some would claim, he had dabbled in a tyrannicidal conspiracy, but because he had committed a far greater crime – he dared to tell Adolf Hitler the truth.In Field Marshal historian Daniel Allen Butler not only describes the swirling, innovative campaigns in which Rommel won his military reputation, but assesses the temper of the man who finally fought only for his country, and no dark depths beyond.

    

    Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, charismatic head of the Manhattan Project, recruited scientists to live as virtual prisoners of the U.S. government at Los Alamos, a barren mesa thirty-five miles outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thousands of men, women, and children spent the war years sequestered in this top-secret military facility. They lied to friends and family about where they were going and what they were doing, and then disappeared into the desert. Through the eyes of a young Santa Fe widow who was one of Oppenheimer's first recruits, we see how, for all his flaws, he developed into an inspiring leader and motivated all those involved in the Los Alamos project to make a supreme effort and achieve the unthinkable.

    T.D. is the only book to be published that recounts the events that led up to the British Army’s uncovering of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp and its 60,000 prisoners, how the Army dealt with the unprecedented horror that existed in the camp, how the surviving prisoners were rescued, how the inmates were evacuated, how the Royal Army Medical Corps established the world’s largest hospital to care for the many thousands of sick and emaciated ex-inmates, how the survivors were rehabilitated and cared for, how they were repatriated to their own countries, why many thousand refused to return ‘home’ and the eventual establishment of the Belsen Displaced Persons camp, the largest DP camp in Germany. The author of this book was a senior British Army officer who participated in the liberation of the Camp, who was in charge of evacuating the ex-prisoners to the vast Rehabilitation Camp that the Army set up, and who was then appointed as the Commandant of that Camp until its management was handed over to the United Nations, and who gave evidence against the SS guards at the Belsen War Crimes Trial. Forewords by Nanette Blitz Konig, Belsen survivor and former classmate of Anne Frank, and Major-General Nicholas Eeles CBE, with the introduction by the Oscar®-nominated film director, Joshua Oppenheimer.

    government has knowingly suppressed evidence of American soldiers still held captive in Southeast Asia. Over the course of a five-year investigation, the authors became convinced that the safety and interests of these prisoners and their families were being sacrificed to American foreign policy. 16 pages of photographs.

    Their goal: to smash the main factories and production centers of the Luftwaffe while also drawing German planes into an aerial battle of attrition to neutralize the Luftwaffe as a fighting force prior to the cross-channel invasion, planned for a few months later. Officially called Operation ARGUMENT, this aerial offensive quickly became known as "Big Week," and it was one of the turning-point engagements of World War II. In Big Week, acclaimed World War II historian James Holland chronicles the massive air battle through the experiences of those who lived and died during it. Prior to Big Week, the air forces on both sides were in crisis. Allied raids into Germany were being decimated, but German resources--fuel and pilots--were strained to the breaking point. Ultimately new Allied aircraft--especially the American long-range P-51 Mustang--and superior tactics won out during Big Week. Through interviews, oral histories, diaries, and official records, Holland follows the fortunes of pilots, crew, and civilians on both sides, taking readers from command headquarters to fighter cockpits to anti-aircraft positions and civilian chaos on the ground, vividly recreating the campaign as it was conceived and unfolded. In the end, the six days of intense air battles largely cleared the skies of enemy aircraft when the invasion took place on June 6, 1944--D-Day.Big Week is both an original contribution to WWII literature and a brilliant piece of narrative history, recapturing a largely forgotten campaign that was one of the most critically important periods of the entire war.

    On that train were carriage after carriage of loot – gold, diamonds, furs, wedding rings – plundered in one of the most shameful crimes of the century. Commanded by Árpád Toldi, a key organizer of the Hungarian Holocaust, and harbouring a desperate group of fascist ideologues, soldiers and thieves, the gold train was destined for a Nazi stronghold in the Alps. It would never arrive. Along its crazed journey the train’s contents were pilfered, fought over, hidden and scattered, until they became the stuff of legend, with legal claims unresolved even today. What is the truth of this mythical cargo? In ‘The Gold Train’ Ronald Zweig reveals the full story of one of the most terrible mysteries of the Second World War.

    Every day Karl Niemann commutes to work, a business manager in charge of various factories. In the evenings he returns home to life as a normal family man.For many years this was all Derek Niemann had known about his grandfather – until he made the chilling discovery that Karl had actually been an officer in the SS; and that his “business” used thousands of slave labourers in concentration camps. Suddenly, a lifetime of unsettling hints and clues fell into place.With the help of surviving relatives and hundreds of previously unknown photographs, Derek reconstructs the lives of his German forebears and uncovers the true story of what Karl did. A Nazi in the Family is an illuminating portrayal of how ordinary people can fall into the service of a monstrous regime."All families have secrets, but few are as shocking as Derek Niemann's." Culture Trip"Extraordinary." Glasgow Evening Times"Vividly captures the complex life of an ordinary man." Andrew Bomford, BBC Radio 4