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Blood on the Painted Mountain: Zulu Victory and Defeat, Hlobane and Kambula, 1879 by Ron Lock
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Liberating Belsen Concentration Camp
Leonard Berney - 2015
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.
Desert War
Stephen W. Sears - 2014
The desert proved a real test of generalship, pitting Germany's Erwin Rommel against Britain's Bernard Montgomery and America's George Patton. Here, from award-winning military historian Stephen W. Sears, is the dramatic story of the generals, politicians, and soldiers who changed the course of the war.
3000 Facts about TV Shows
James Egan - 2016
The producers refused. In Doctor Who, the Twelfth Doctor's costume was inspired by David Bowie. In Game of Thrones, Hodor's real name is Wyllis. Matthew Perry plays Chandler in Friends. He says he can't remember a single thing from the show throughout three seasons. In The Simpsons, Hans Moleman has died at least 15 times. Many mobsters contacted James Gandolfini to tell him his performance was excellent in The Sopranos but warned him not to wear shorts in the show. Millie Bobby Brown was 11 when she was cast as Eleven in Stranger Things. The Tourette Syndrome Association praised the show, South Park, for its accurate portrayal of the Tourette's condition. In Family Guy, Meg's full name is Megatron Griffin.
Nightmare in Jonestown: Cult of Death (Singles Classic)
Time Inc. - 2016
December 4, 1978.In an appalling demonstration of the way in which a charismatic leader can bend the minds of his followers with a devilish blend of professed altruism and psychological tyranny, some 900 members of the California-based Peoples Temple died in a self-imposed ritual of mass suicide and murder.The followers of the Rev. Jim Jones, 47, a once respected Indianaborn humanitarian who degenerated into egomania and paranoia, had first ambushed a party of visiting Americans, killing California Congressman Leo Ryan, 53, three newsmen and one defector from their heavily guarded colony at Jones-town. Then, exhorted by their leader, intimidated by armed guards and lulled with sedatives and painkillers, parents and nurses used syringes to squirt a concoction of potassium cyanide and potassium chloride onto the tongues of babies. The adults and older children picked up paper cups and sipped the same deadly poison sweetened by purple Kool-Aid.This story is part of the TIME Classic Coverage Collection from Time Inc. This is a reproduction of a story that appeared in the December 4, 1978 issue of TIME magazine. Time Inc. is one of the world’s most influential media companies – home to 90 iconic brands like People, Sports Illustrated, Time, InStyle, Real Simple, Food & Wine, and Fortune. The Spotlight Stories in this collection aim to provide you with a quick read on a single subject, highlighting our readers’ most popular stories and featuring great reporting from our Time Inc. journalists.
Highway to Hell: Dispatches from a Mercenary in Iraq
John Geddes - 2006
There are Gurkhas from the Himalayan foothills and Fijians from the South Sea Islands. There are men who learned their skills with the Japanese antiterrorist paramilitaries and many from southern Africa. There was even one guy who'd served in the Chinese People's Army and Chilean commandos and Sri Lankan antiterrorist experts who joined the mercenary gold rush to Iraq. They don't share a common ideology or common loyalty, but what they do share is a thirst for adventure and a hunger for big bucks; Iraq is the one place they are certain to find both..."For the first time a private military contractor delivers a frontline report on life as a hired gun in Iraq. ""Anyone entering Iraq must travel the road from Amman to Baghdad along the Fallujah bypass and around the Ramadi Ring Road. It's the most dangerous trunk route in the world, used as a personal fairground shooting gallery by insurgents and Islamists with rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikovs. For newcomers to the country it's terrifying - but hell only really begins when that first journey ends...""" "Amidst the ongoing controversy over the widespread employment of private military contractors in Iraq, "Highway to Hell" is a mercenary's graphic, first-person expose of life in "the second biggest army in Iraq." Not since the days when the East India Company used soldiers of fortune to depose fabulously wealthy maharajas and conquer India for Great Britain, and mercenaries fought George Washington's Continental Army for King George, has such a large and lethal independent fighting force been assembled. Hired to do everything from securing American bases and supply routes to guarding the thousands of government officials, executives, aid workers, journalists, and other civilians now populating the Middle East's most notorious target range, today's clandestine soldiers of fortune earn up to $1,000 a day, while remaining almost entirely immune from government oversight, military authority, or Iraqi law John Geddes, a former warrant officer in Britain's elite SAS and veteran of several wars, became a private military contractor in Iraq immediately following President George W. Bush's declaration of the end of hostilities in early May 2003. In "Highway to Hell "Geddes gives an unsparing account of his harrowing, often bloody, and occasionally absurd adventures in the wild west of Iraq. After a chaotic chase on the Ramadi Ring Road, he takes out insurgents with a sniper rifle (while nursing the mother of all hangovers). He provides security to a cameraman during to a shootout on the rooftop of a Baghdad hotel alongside Kalashnikov-wielding Iraqi waiters (and accepts a marriage proposal that is almost drowned out by RPG fire). He witnesses American contractors shooting and pushing other vehicles off the road first and asking questions later (or, rather, not at all). From rushing a TV crew into the mayhem of a suicide bombing's aftermath to accompanying an oil executive to a meeting in the heart of darkness of Sadr City, Geddes presents a stunning, chilling inside look at the face of contemporary warfare.
Goodbye Poland
Stefan B. Maczka - 2014
Good addition to other books on this subject. I enjoyed it very much.' UK Reviewer.Stefan Maczka’s father, (also Stefan), was a cavalry officer who fought victoriously in possibly the last and greatest cavalry battle of the preceding one hundred years, the ‘Miracle of the Vistula’. It was the final victory in the Russian/Polish War of 1920. He was one of nine thousand former soldiers rewarded with a plot of land in the reclaimed borderlands. Stalin never forgot that humiliating defeat.Stefan B. was born in 1922 just over two years later.Life was hard in those early years; the military settlers had to defend their borders against invasion by armed bands from Russia, crossing into Poland from the east.By 1937, the rewards of hard work were paying off, and life was beginning to get easier... Then came the war, and Stalin’s revenge on the military settlers he so bitterly despised for their victory over Soviet forces twenty years earlier. Rounded up, they were uprooted from their homes, put on cattle trucks, and forcibly deported to the frozen and inhospitable wastes of Siberia.Goodbye Poland is one man’s account of his journey into adversity at the age of just seventeen. Written exactly as he spoke, his accent comes through loud and clear, in this inspirational true story of stoicism, and survival against the odds.
Korea
Michael Pembroke - 2018
It provides the history and the context that explains US involvement; why there has been no peace treaty, no unification, and why we now live with the threat of nuclear war in Northeast Asia. Few people understand the real failures of the Korean War or that the United States was the first to abrogate the armistice. As President Trump threatens to totally destroy North Korea, this book tells the tale that fires Pyongyang's indignation from the disastrous decision to invade North Korea; to the longest retreat in American military history; to the napalm, the nuclear threats, the biological warfare and the ghastly treatment of POWs in camps run by the US Army. Korea examines Washington's role from 1945 to the present in the creation and worsening of relations how hubris, overreach and militarism have dominated policy, and how, in pursuit of regional hegemony in Northeast Asia, the United States has made a bad situation worse.Perceptive and compelling often heart-rending, sometimes downright terrifying... The lessons are all too pertinent in today's toxic political climate, with Korea once again a centrepiece and victim. - Noam ChomskyThis is a very important book, an eye-opening one, and a wise one. ... beautifully written...the phrase 'as gripping as a thriller,' really applies... No-one with an interest in recent history and current affairs should fail to read it. - AC GraylingAs Alistair Horne once observed so wisely, ‘How different world history would have been if MacArthur had had the good sense to stop on the 38th parallel’.
Fighter Pilot
Mc Scotch - 2018
The Home of 99p/99c History Books. After two years spent in the infantry at home and no sight of being posted overseas, William MacLanachan, later known simply as McScotch, followed the advice of a friend and applied to transfer into the Royal Flying Corps. Determined to become a single-seater, or “scout”, pilot, his ambition was fulfilled when he made it to the front, joining 40 (Scout) Squadron at Bruay in 1917. At this time, a fighter pilot’s “‘expectation of life’ was journalistically computed at three weeks. Amongst the men of 40 Squadron was Mick Mannock, who became a celebrated flying ace and an early theorist of aviation tactics: the two became close friends as war took its toll. It was Mannock who later dubbed him McScotch, in order to be able to distinguish between the two Macs under his command, and the name has endured. First published in 1936, ‘Fighter Pilot’ is a detailed and exciting account of squadron life in the latter years of the First World War, showing the true bravery and camaraderie of these early aviators and the effect that combat had on them. William MacLanachan, known as McScotch, was a flying ace of the First World War, credited with seven victories. He joined the Royal Flying Corps from the Army, being posted to No. 40 Squadron in the spring of 1917. His lucky mascot, a teddy bear called Scotch Jock, is displayed at the RAF Museum Cosford.
Last Chapter
Ernie Pyle - 1946
After covering the war from the British home front to North Africa, Italy, and France, he left the European Theater to go to the Pacific to cover what would be the last few months of conflict with the Japanese forces. Instead of recounting the discussions and activities of generals or the movements of armies, Pyle captured the daily lives of the common soldier and showed the public how their brothers, fathers and sons were experiencing the war. Rather than covering the war from safety, he threw himself into the heat of battle so that he could fully understand and record what the fighting men were going through. Last Chapter is a collection of his last articles that he wrote while witnessing the conflict in the Pacific. During his time in the Far East he spent time in the occupied Marianas, with pilots and aircrew of B-29’s as they flew in missions over the Japanese mainland, with sailors in the hundreds of boats that were swarming the Pacific Ocean, and with marines as they were preparing for the assault of Okinawa. "No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told", wrote Harry Truman. "He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen." “These pages will of course have a commemorative value, mark an end to one of the best known, best loved figures of the war.” Kirkus Reviews Ernie Pyle was the most celebrated war correspondent of World War Two. His work ran in one-hundred and forty-four papers and reached an audience of forty million Americans. His brilliant portrayal of the everyday fighting man in World War Two won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1944. Last Chapter was first published in 1946 after Pyle had been killed at Ie Shima on 18th April, 1945.
Carrier! (Annotated): Life Aboard a World War II Aircraft Carrier
Max Miller - 2015
Author Max Miller spent many weeks at sea gathering material for his book, and presents his observations in an easy-to read fashion. Carrier! is intended to provide civilians with a glimpse into what life aboard these massive ships was like during World War 2.*New 2019 edition includes footnotes and images.
Flashing Saber: Three Years in Vietnam
Matthew Brennan - 1985
The Blues, as they were called, were perpetually understrength and considered to be acceptable losses in hopeless situations—but their amazingly successful record proved otherwise.A firsthand account of mortal combat with the Ninth Cavalry, Flashing Saber is the remarkable story of the brave men who served in the First Air Cavalry Division's reconnaissance squadron. Included is an account of an air-ground raid that overran a regimental command post and killed more high-ranking enemy officers than any similar engagement of the war. The story begins when a teenager, an Eagle Scout and West Point Prep School student, goes to Vietnam in 1965. Motivated by patriotism and the desire to see combat firsthand, Brennan volunteers for front line duty and spends years as an artillery forward observer and infantryman. Promoted to sergeant and then to lieutenant, Brennan participates in hundreds of assault landings.An expansion and careful reworking of his previous work, Brennan's War, published in 1985, and in the vein of classic memoirs by Johnnie Clark and Frederick Downs, Flashing Saberis a harrowing firsthand account of life and death in war, one filled with breathtaking details about a renowned unit.
Bury Him: A Memoir of the Viet Nam War
Doug ChamberlainDoug Chamberlain - 2019
Doug Chamberlain endured many challenges. One challenge was a direct order to bury the remains of a Marine that had been left behind by another unit and be forced to participate in the following cover-up. The order was in direct contraction of United States Marine Corps Policy and the Warrior's Honor Code of never leaving any Marine behind. Following this order meant committing an act of incomprehensible betrayal and dishonor.In this captivating new book, Capt. Chamberlain explains in detail the events that transpired as he was forced into playing the role of a political pawn in a massive wartime cover-up. Capt. Chamberlain expertly paints a picture of deceit and military malfeasance, sharing with the reader the moral and mental struggles that ate away at him in the decades that followed this horrible act.
History's Greatest Generals: 10 Commanders Who Conquered Empires, Revolutionized Warfare, and Changed History Forever
Michael Rank - 2013
Whether it is Hannibal of Carthage marching elephants across the Alps and attacking the heart of Rome, Khalid ibn al-Walid boasting an undefeated military career and destroying the Persian Empire while subduing the Byzantines, or Russian General Alexander Suvurov and his elevation of the bayonet to a work of art that could cut down any European army, great military leaders have exerted tremendous influence on society. This book will look at the lives of the ten greatest military commanders in history. Some conquered the fullest expanse of the known world, as did Alexander the Great. Still others were master statesmen and capable of translating military victory into long-term political gains, such as Julius Caesar, whose vanquishing of the Gauls and his political opponents laid the groundwork for several centuries of unmatchable Roman imperial might. It will also look at the tactics they used to bring down stronger armies and befuddle them at every turn; whether it is Napoleon, who nearly conquered Europe through his deadly manoeuvre sur les derrieres and marching unexpectedly away from the enemy's main strength and concentrating on a weak but vital enemy point; or Hannibal's double entrapment maneuver, which has been the envy of military strategists for the last 2,000 years. Whatever their background, these rulers show that the right military commander at the right time in history can destroy an empire, change civilization, and alter the course of world history forever.
Legion of the Lost: The True Experience of an American in the French Foreign Legion
Jaime Salazar - 2005
Made up completely of volunteers, the Legion gives men a new lease on life - and a chance to test their limits both physically and mentally. In 1999, the Legion was just what American Jaime Salazar was looking for ..." "The son of underpaid Mexican immigrants, Jaime found himself on the corporate fast track after graduating with a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University. But at twenty-three, he was already disillusioned with what life had to offer him: a luxury car, a corporate expense account, a future sitting behind a desk." "Always fascinated with the Legion, he decided to join up while on a trip to Europe. Giving up his identity and five years of his life, he was a misfit American in a rag-tag group of recruits - men from homelands without proper armies, men on the run from their pasts, men without hope - in the Legion's notoriously brutal training regime." From the harrowing physical rigors of basic training to his posting in the 2e REG outside of the tiny village of Saint Christol, from his fierce competitiveness and pride to his ultimate disillusionment with the Legion and dramatic desertion, this is the story of one man's quest for honor and sacrifice. Legion of the Lost is a compelling firsthand account of the contemporary French Foreign Legion, sure to dispel myths while at the same time add to the legend of the finest trained army of mercenaries the world has ever seen.
Waterloo: The French Perspective
Andrew W. Field - 2012
Even after 200 years of intensive research and the publication of hundreds of books and articles on the battle, the French perspective and many of the primary French sources are underrepresented in the written record. So it is high time this weakness in the literature – and in our understanding of the battle – was addressed, and that is the purpose of Andrew Field’s thought-provoking new study. He has tracked down over ninety firsthand French accounts, most of which have never been previously published in English, and he has combined them with accounts from the other participants in order to create a graphic new narrative of one of the world’s decisive battles. Virtually all of the hitherto unpublished testimony provides fascinating new detail on the battle and many of the accounts are vivid, revealing and exciting.