The best of the best, these elite units have frequently been immortalised on the big screen, and in computer games, for their daring deeds. Whether it be fighting on the battlefield, storming forts and castles, rescuing hostages, high stakes reconnaissance missions or the dramatic assassination of enemy leaders, these are the men who are relied upon to undertake dangerous missions of the highest stakes. While celebrating the heroics of groups such as the SAS and Navy Seals, Sir Ranulph also reveals the true stories of infamous organisations such as The Assassins and Templar Knights. Uncovering their origins, and examining their weapons and tactics, Sir Ranulph showcases these units most famous missions, and reveals the men behind them. Showing incredible courage, often in the face of impossible odds, these units have also changed the course of history along the way. Sir Ranulph discusses the reasons behind their success and failures, with many notorious conflicts often being decided by these elite units facing off against each other, with the victor not only evolving warfare, but also consigning their opponent to history. While these units traditionally prefer to operate in the shadows, Sir Ranulph brings their remarkable histories to the fore, told with his trademark ability to weave a story which has seen him become one of Britain’s most beloved bestselling authors.

    Schultz was a noted author, explorer, Glacier National Park guide, fur trader and historian of the Blackfoot Indians. While operating a fur trading post at Carroll, Montana and living amongst the Pikuni tribe during the period 1880-82, he was given the name "Apikuni" by the Pikuni chief, Running Crane. Schultz is most noted for his prolific stories about Blackfoot life and his contributions to the naming of prominent features in Glacier National Park. Story of a maiden warrior of the Blackfoot tribe. The story of an Indian girl who became the acknowledged leader of her tribe. As a little girl Otaki asked for bows and arrows rather than for dolls. Her father, who loved her dearly, indulged her in her wishes. and taught her to hunt like a boy. When both father and mother were taken by death, she again turned back to the hunting, providing the game for her brothers and sisters and following the war path to avenge her father's death. Disapproval of her course finally gives way and she is highly honored by her tribe, and like the young men who prove themselves worthy, she is given a warrior's name. Running Eagle. This book originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1919 has been reformatted for the Kindle and may contain an occasional defect from the original publication or from the reformatting.

    Col. Robert K. Brown, Editor and Publisher, Soldier of Fortune“Morris captures the historical accuracy of Special Operations in the language learned from firsthand experience.”–Lt. Col. Chuck Allen, Commander, Project Delta“War Story is the lore of Special Forces in Vietnam told in the tradition of Woody Guthrie.”–Al Santoli, author of Everything We Had“Jim Morris is a highly decorated Green Beret combat veteran, with a unique talent for making his readers feel a part of his gripping, action-packed personal experiences. Morris commands your attention as a reader with the same authority and ability with which he commanded troops in combat.”–J.C. Pollock, author of Mission M.I.A.Jim Morris was an educated young man who had always wanted to be a soldier. In 1963, he found the perfect war..."The war was like a great puzzle, great to think about, great to plan, great to do. It was so incredibly peaceful out there in the jungle."As an advisor to a Montagnard strike force, Morris and his guerrillas outfought and outmaneuvered the Viet Cong in his sector. To a Green Beret like Jim Morris, the “Yards” were brothers—so fiercely insular, they would serve no outsider and made the Berets who fought with them honorary members of the tribe…so valiant, they would follow the right man into a firestorm…But while he loved the ambushes, the firefights and the Montagnards, he could see a tragedy unfolding in Vietnam."As I jumped I heard a crack and felt a thud in my right shoulder. I squeezed the trigger on my M-16. The bolt went ka-schlugg and that was that, baby. Jammed again."In the most widely admired Special Forces memoir to come out of the Vietnam War, Jim Morris tells his story: of the early days and the Tet Offensive in '68, of the slaughters and the beauty, of the violence, the courage, the loyalty and the loss..."The war was my life and I identified with it totally. To end it was to end me, and that I would not do..."About the AuthorJim Morris served three tours with Special Forces (The Green Berets) in Vietnam. The second and third were cut short by serious wounds. He retired from his wounds as a major. He has maintained his interest in the mountain peoples of Vietnam with whom he fought, and has been, for many years, a civil rights activist on their behalf. His Vietnam memoir War Story won the first Bernal Diaz Award for military nonfiction. Morris is author of the story from which the film Operation Dumbo Drop was made, and has produced numerous documentary television episodes about the Vietnam War. He is author of three books of nonfiction and four novels.

    In conversation with legendary rock critics and authors he respected, Reed’s interviews are as pithy and brilliant as the man himself.

    Sir Ernest Shackleton had carefully picked crew and a stout, well-outfitted ship, the Endurance. But he had no radio, the world was at war, and at the edge of the Antarctic continent, the ship froze in the sea ice. After months of immobility, it was crushed. Then began an impossible journey. With three tiny boats, the crew worked their way across frozen the Antarctic Sea. This vivid book recounts the story of Shackleton's heroic voyage from South Georgia Island to Antarctica then back to South Georgia. It is a tribute to Shackleton and his crew's ability to fight for survival and one of the most harrowing adventures in history.

    Brown tries to fake to his flight instructor that he has flown before. On his twenty-first birthday, Brown is on his way home after logging eighty-five missions in a P-47 fighter over Italy, France, and Germany. Brown’s stories surrounding his training and combat experiences in World War II reveal brushes with death, continuous peril and, ultimately, a coming of age for a young man whose freshman year in college becomes instead a heroic engagement with one of the fiercest enemies his country has ever encountered. Ever dutiful to the mother who tells him to “write it down, Jamie,” Brown notes his experiences in the journal she provides and adds detail later to deliver a firsthand account of life as a pilot in the final months of combat within the European Theater. Serving as Tail-End Charley – the last man out – in most of the missions he flew, Brown’s job was to record results for the interrogation officers afterward. But Brown offers much more insight in this memoir. Follow his triumphs and travails with colleagues who become lifelong compatriots during an indelible period in American history.

    As his party grew, Pol Pot formed a resistance army in the jungles of Cambodia, known as the Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians). In 1970, U.S. military forces entered Cambodia in an attempt to expel North Vietnamese rebels who had fled into Cambodia. Over the next five years the North Vietnamese were successfully driven out of major Cambodian cities, along with several hundred-thousand Cambodian peasants, most of whom fled to the city of Phnom Penh for refuge. Many of these North Vietnamese escaped to the surrounding jungles and allied themselves with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. As the Khmer Rouge strengthened, their plan to overtake Phnom Penh intensified. Having witnessed their friends and families die during the Vietnam War, struggling Cambodian peasants, desperate for hope, began to believe in the social utopia promised by Pol Pot; promises he said would bring them peace and a better life. Pol Pot’s army, which was now well-supplied by communist China, grew exponentially and soon gained the allegiance of many of these displaced Cambodians. By 1975, U.S. troops had withdrawn from Cambodia, leaving the people defenseless against Pol Pot’s army, the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge soon controlled Phnom Penh and much of southern Cambodia. With no military force to oppose them, the Khmer Rouge initiated one of the most atrocious genocide campaigns the world has ever known. At this time many of the well-educated, wealthy Cambodians were residing in modern cities near the Thailand border. It was in these cities and surrounding fields and jungles, that the Khmer Rouge, fueled by fierce contempt for the wealthy and educated, unleashed their greatest brutality. These were the worst of the Killing Fields. It was here that fourteen-year-old Bun (pronounced “boon”) Yom was taken from his parents and forced to work as a slave in conditions so inhumane it seemed only death could free him.The Khmer Rouge’s brutality would soon rival Nazi Germany’s attempt to eradicate the Jews from Europe as the single most horrifying act of violence ever committed against a nation’s people. Over the next four years, two million people (one-fifth of the Cambodian population) were enslaved and either murdered, starved or worked to death. After three years in the Killing Fields, seventeen-year-old Bun Yom escaped from the Khmer Rouge and became a “Freedom Fighter.” Using his wisdom, selfless courage and unprecedented compassion, Bun rescued thousands of Cambodian people and soon become the Cambodian Freedom Army’s greatest soldier.

    We and the 1st Battalion."A Yale graduate who volunteered to serve his country, Larry Gwin was only twenty-three years old when he arrived in Vietnam in 1965. After a brief stint in the Delta, Gwin was reassigned to the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) in An Khe. There, in the hotly contested Central Highlands, he served almost nine months as executive officer for Alpha Company, 2/7, fighting against crack NVA troops in some of the war's most horrific battles.The bloodiest conflict of all began November 12, 1965, after 2nd Battalion was flown into the Ia Drang Valley west of Pleiku. Acting as point, Alpha Company spearheaded the battalion's march to landing zone Albany for pickup, not knowing they were walking into the killing zone of an NVA ambush that would cost them 10 percent casualties.Gwin spares no one, including himself, in his gut-wrenching account of the agony of war. Through the stench of death and the acrid smell of napalm, he chronicles the Vietnam War in all its nightmarish horror.

    His hopes of inheriting his family's manor are dashed when Prince John takes power in his brother's absence. With a handful of men Sir Thomas is forced to travel to Sweden where he joins The Jarl Birger Brosa fighting the Estonians, Karelians and Slavs. Fighting in a the harsh environment of a Baltic winter makes Sir Thomas and his men stronger. There he learns of further treachery and dishonour among Bishops, Kings and Princes who value thrones more than men.

    

    We were halfway in when the Japanese machine guns got their range. Bullets slapped the water and whined as they ricocheted off the barge. Some of us ducked; some of us fell to the floor; and all of us prayed.” Here, in heart-stopping human detail, are twenty-one personal accounts told by the men themselves. They are the stories of men who lived in hell and lived to tell of it. There is the story of Sgt. Albert Schmid who was awarded the Navy Cross for his single-handed destruction of a flanking attack while on Guadalcanal. The account of Private Nicolli who was literally blown into the air like a matchstick and then, with a piece of shrapnel in his chest, managed to help a wounded comrade to the rear. “The luckiest man in the Solomons,” Sgt. Koziar, tells of how he had his tonsils removed with the assistance of a Japanese sniper’s bullet. These are just three of the twenty-one fascinating stories that were told to Gerold Frank and James Horan just months after these marines had returned from active duty to recover from the conflict in the Pacific. The valor of these marines is astounding, as twenty-one-year-old Corporal Conroy states in the book, “I don’t suppose I shall ever be able to sum up all the bravery, the guts, the genuine, honest courage displayed by the boys out in Guadalcanal. They were afraid, and yet they took it. They had what it takes . . .” The battles of Gavutu-Tanambogo, Tulagi, Tenaru, Matanikau and Guadalcanal are all covered through these accounts which take the reader right to the epicenter of the Pacific conflict. “telling of living conditions on the beaches and in the jungles where they fought, offering an insider’s view of foxholes, food, snipers, mosquitos, boondocks, shrapnel, their injuries, and their pain.” Great Stories of World War II Gerold Frank and James Horan were professional authors who wrote down the stories of these marines shortly after they had returned from active duty. The War in the South Pacific was first published in 1943 as Out in the Boondocks. Frank went on to become a prominent ghostwriter and passed away in 1998. Horan, author of more than forty books, died in 1981.

    His single mother checked into the hospital as a vibrant young woman and checked out as a full-blown opioid addict. From that day forward, Sean's life became a silent nightmare of abuse, neglect, chronic hunger, and slow, helpless withdrawal from everything and everyone he loved.In Rising Above, Green Beret Sean Rogers chronicles the toughest battle of his life: the long, painful fight to confront his darkest fears and reclaim his life. After struggling as a young man to accept the raw trauma of his past, he eventually learned to understand and embrace it, ultimately using it to become an elite Special Forces operator.Through this profoundly honest and inspiring memoir, Rogers explores what it means to make the pain of your past work for you, showing you how to harness the truth of your own reality and take control of your destiny.

    You may have heard of a plot to rob Abraham Lincoln’s body from its grave site, but did you know that there was also attempts to steal Benjamin Harrison's and Andrew Jackson’s remains? The book also includes “Critical Death Information,” which prefaces each chapter, and a complete visitor’s guide to each grave site and death-related historical landmark. An “Almost Presidents” section includes chapters on John Hanson (first president under the Articles of Confederation), Sam Houston (former president of the Republic of Texas), David Rice Atchison (president for a day), and Jefferson Davis. Exhaustively researched, The President Is Dead! is richly layered with colorful facts and entertaining stories about how the presidents have passed. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

    But he was also one of its greatest gentlemen - a class act with heart, fire, wanderlust and a wild streak. Exploding out of Canvey Island in the early 1970s - an age of glam rock, post-hippy folk and pop androgyny - the Feelgoods, with Lee Brilleaux and Wilko Johnson at the helm, charged into London, grabbed the pub rock scene by the throat and sparked a revolutionary new era, proving that you didn't have to be middle class, wearing the 'right clothes' or living in the 'right place' to succeed. Lee Brilleaux: Rock'n'Roll Gentleman, while a totally different work, is a companion of sorts to the hugely popular Wilko Johnson book: Looking Back At Me (also co-authored by Howe). It is the first comprehensive appreciation of Lee Brilleaux and, with its numerous exclusive interviews and previously unseen images, is a book no Dr Feelgood fan would wish to be without.

    Its portrayal of the Duke of Windsor as a Nazi sympathizer--who would stop at nothing to hide it--is sure to make headlines. Black-and-white photographs.