During 9/44 Germany is burning at both ends. The Reich is crumbling. Word has reached Berlin that the Americans are testing a secret weapon of unbelievable destruction, a weapon that will win the war. The Fuhrer himself calls upon Agent 146 in a last ditch effort to sabotage America's atomic program. Two months later, a German U-boat surfaces off Maine's coast. Agent 146 & an American turncoat named William Collepaugh sneak ashore. Down the coast they go, ending up in New York. Once there, a fascinating game of cat & mouse begins as the FBI attempts to close in on the elusive Nazi spy. Previously unpublished in the USA, Agent 146 is a tale of espionage under the Reich. Within are accounts of the Nazis' plans to sabotage the Allies--from sending in commandos to capture Gibraltar to blowing up the Panama Canal. Agent 146 is a must read memoir for WWII history buffs.ForewordMy Career as a Spy Begins Fighting a War in Dinner JacketsTraining as a Spy in Germany Spain-& My First Missions A Plan to Blow up the Panama CanalThe Start of a Grim AdventureTo America by SubmarineThe Landing in America Tricked by Billy in New YorkI Work Out my Own Salvation Billy Betrays me to the F.B.I. Love--& Then Arrest Grilled by the F.B.I. In the Shadow of the ScaffoldSentenced to Death Sized up by the Hangman Germany's Capitulation Saves my LifeMy Years in Alcatraz Promoted from Convict to Mister

    Caught there by the outbreak of the Second World War, he was unable to return to his parents for seven years. In due course, he was called to serve in an anti-aircraft battery and in the National Labour Service. Just after his eighteenth birthday, he was sent to the Russian Front with the elite Paratrooper and Tank Division, Hermann Göring. He lived through an amazing series of events, escaping death many times and was one of the few survivors of his division when the war ended. In this narrative of his early life, John Stieber describes how he went from a carefree childhood through increasing hardships, until every day of his life became a challenge for survival.

    It's only five in the afternoon, but a sandtorm has plunged everything into a hellish twilight of murky, red dust. On rooftops, in alleyways lurk militiamen with machine guns, AK rifles and the odd rocket-propelled grenade. Artillery bombardment has shattered the town's sewers and rubble is piled up in lagoons of human excrement. It stinks. Welcome to Iraq... Within hours of 9/11, America's war on terrorism fell to those like the 23 Marines of the First Recon Battalion, the first generation dispatched into open-ed combat since Vietnam. They were a new breed of American warrior unrecognizable to their forebears-soldiers raised on hip hop, Internet porn, Marilyn Manson, video games and The Real World, a band of born-again Christians, dopers, Buddhists, and New Agers who gleaned their precepts from kung fu movies and Oprah Winfrey. Cocky, brave, headstrong, wary, and mostly unprepared for the physical, emotional, and moral horrors ahead, the "First Suicide Battalion" would spearhead the blitzkrieg on Iraq, and fight against the hardest resistance Saddam had to offer. Generation Kill is the funny, frightening, and profane firsthand account of these remarkable men, of the personal toll of victory, and of the randomness, brutality, and camaraderie of a new American war.

    Sledge's memoir of his experience fighting in the South Pacific during World War II so devastatingly powerful is its sheer honest simplicity and compassion.Now including a new introduction by Paul Fussell, With the Old Breed presents a stirring, personal account of the vitality and bravery of the Marines in the battles at Peleliu and Okinawa. Born in Mobile, Alabama in 1923 and raised on riding, hunting, fishing, and a respect for history and legendary heroes such as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene Bondurant Sledge (later called "Sledgehammer" by his Marine Corps buddies) joined the Marines the year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and from 1943 to 1946 endured the events recorded in this book. In those years, he passed, often painfully, from innocence to experience.Sledge enlisted out of patriotism, idealism, and youthful courage, but once he landed on the beach at Peleliu, it was purely a struggle for survival. Based on the notes he kept on slips of paper tucked secretly away in his New Testament, he simply and directly recalls those long months, mincing no words and sparing no pain. The reality of battle meant unbearable heat, deafening gunfire, unimaginable brutality and cruelty, the stench of death, and, above all, constant fear. Sledge still has nightmares about "the bloody, muddy month of May on Okinawa." But, as he also tellingly reveals, the bonds of friendship formed then will never be severed.Sledge's honesty and compassion for the other marines, even complete strangers, sets him apart as a memoirist of war. Read as sobering history or as high adventure, With the Old Breed is a moving chronicle of action and courage.

    

    On December 7th, when the attack on Pearl Harbor woke so many others to the reality of war, Stewart was already in uniform: as a private on guard duty south of San Francisco at the Army Air Corps Moffet Field. Seeing war on the horizon, Jimmy Stewart, at the height of his fame after Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and his Oscar-winning turn in The Phadelphia Story in 1940, had enlisted several months earlier. Jimmy Stewart, Bomber Pilot chronicles his long journey to become a bomber pilot in combat. Author Starr Smith, the intelligence officer assigned to the movie star, recounts how Stewart's first battles were with the Air Corps high command, who insisted on keeping the naturally talented pilot out of harm's way as an instructor pilot for B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators. By 1944, however, Stewart managed to get assigned to a Liberator squadron that was deploying to England to join the mighty Eighth Air Force. Once in the thick of it, he rose to command his own squadron and flew twenty combat missions, including one to Berlin. “My father would feel honored by this book.” —Kelly Stewart Harcourt, daughter of Jimmy Stewart"We would have made Jimmy a group commander [equivalent to an army regiment] if the war had lasted another month." - General Jimmy Doolittle. "An excellent biography of a distinguished airman and fine human being." - Roger Freeman, author of The Mighty Eighth: A History of the U.S. 8th Air Force. "How wonderful it is that Starr Smith has finally directed a literary light on the personal history of Jimmy Stewart. . . . I welcomed Starr's book. It is needed and wanted. Bravo!" - Gay Talese. "This is a very well researched and written book. . . . It fills a place in history about no mere actor but a courageous and selfless man, Brigadier General Jimmy Stewart, USAF." - General Michael E. Ryan, former Chief of Staff of the Air Force. “I have met a few movie stars, but of them all, I think that Jimmy Stewart was most like those modest heroes he portrayed. Now journalist Starr Smith has raised the curtain on Stewart’s gallant service as a bomber pilot and air combat commander in World War II.” —Walter Cronkite, from the Foreword.

    As an agent for Britain’s MI-6 and then America’s OSS during World War II, these qualities proved crucial to her success. This is the remarkable story of this “Mata Hari from Minnesota” (Time) and the passions that ruled her tempestuous life—a life filled with dangerous liaisons and death-defying missions vital to the Allied victory.For decades, much of Betty’s career working for MI-6 and the OSS remained classified. Through access to recently unclassified files, Howard Blum discovers the truth about the attractive blond, codenamed “Cynthia,” who seduced diplomats and military attachés across the globe in exchange for ciphers and secrets; cracked embassy safes to steal codes; and obtained the Polish notebooks that proved key to Alan Turing’s success with Operation Ultra.Beneath Betty’s cool, professional determination, Blum reveals a troubled woman conflicted by the very traits that made her successful: her lack of deep emotional connections and her readiness to risk everything. The Last Goodnight is a mesmerizing, provocative, and moving portrait of an exceptional heroine whose undaunted courage helped to save the world.

    This is his story, from the first day of the war to the last, of how he became one of history’s leading fighter aces. Starting out flying Spitfires for 416 (Canadian) Squadron and then for an RAF Eagle Squadron, Goodson transferred over to the Thunderbolts and Mustangs of the Fourth Fighter Group when the U.S. joined the war. Mixing it up with the Luftwaffe’s very best pilots accompanying bombing runs into the heart of Germany, Goodson scored thirty kills. But the “King of the Strafers” finally got shot down trying to attack a Me 163 rocket plane. Captured by the Gestapo and only hours away from execution, he managed to buy himself more time by showing the commandant how to blow smoke rings!—and was moved to Berlin, just as Allied bombers besieged the city… With breathtaking descriptions of aerial dogfights and vivid portraits of the men who fought, Tumult in the Clouds is a dramatic, gripping story of courage and sacrifice—and a stunningly personal account of war.

    According to mission reports from the Army Air Forces, the plane crashed in shallow water—but when investigators went to find it, the wreckage wasn't there. Witnesses saw the crew parachute to safety, yet the airmen were never seen again. Some of their relatives whispered that they had returned to the United States in secret and lived in hiding. But they never explained why.For sixty years, the U.S. government, the children of the missing airmen, and a maverick team of scientists and scuba divers searched the islands for clues. They trolled the water with side-scan sonar, conducted grid searches on the seafloor, crawled through thickets of mangrove and poison trees, and flew over the islands in small planes to shoot infrared photography. With every clue they found, the mystery only deepened.Now, in a spellbinding narrative, Wil S. Hylton weaves together the true story of the missing men, their final mission, the families they left behind, and the real reason their disappearance remained shrouded in secrecy for so long. This is a story of love, loss, sacrifice, and faith—of the undying hope among the families of the missing, and the relentless determination of scientists, explorers, archaeologists, and deep-sea divers to solve one of the enduring mysteries of World War II.

    It is a study of the contribution made, not only by George VI and his redoubtable Queen, but also by the entire royal family during those turbulent years. And of how that contribution strengthened and popularized the monarchy. This is a family saga; an account of the lives, as much private as public, of all the diverse members of what George VI called 'The Firm'. Together with the tireless efforts of the King and Queen, it deals with such aspects as the Duke of Windsor's flirtation with Fascism, the ground-clearing obsessions of Queen Mary, the mysterious death of the Duke of Kent, the activities of the Athlones in Canada and the Gloucesters in Australia, and the imprisonment of the Princess Royal's eldest son, Viscount Lascelles. Occasionally tragic, often amusing, always interesting, it is a richly detailed panorama of the monarchy in one of its finest hours. Theo Aronson has been granted an unprecedented series of audiences with the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, Princess Alice. Duchess of Gloucester, and the late Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, as well as interviews with many other members of the royal family and of the royal households. He has been permitted the use of previously unpublished letters, diaries and papers. The result is a colourful study by an author who has been consistently praised for his insight, scholarship and, above all, readability.

    Army to play a key role in the Allied victory.In 1942, the U.S. Army unleashed one of its greatest secret weapons in the battle to defeat Adolf Hitler: training nearly 2,000 German-born Jews in special interrogation techniques and making use of their mastery of the German language, history, and customs. Known as the Ritchie Boys, they were sent in small, elite teams to join every major combat unit in Europe, where they interrogated German POWs and gathered crucial intelligence that saved American lives and helped win the war.Though they knew what the Nazis would do to them if they were captured, the Ritchie Boys eagerly joined the fight to defeat Hitler. As they did, many of them did not know the fates of their own families left behind in occupied Europe. Taking part in every major campaign in Europe, they collected key tactical intelligence on enemy strength, troop and armored movements, and defensive positions. A postwar Army report found that more than sixty percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from the Ritchie Boys.Bruce Henderson draws on personal interviews with many surviving veterans and extensive archival research to bring this never-before-told chapter of the Second World War to light. Sons and Soldiers traces their stories from childhood and their escapes from Nazi Germany, through their feats and sacrifices during the war, to their desperate attempts to find their missing loved ones in war-torn Europe. Sons and Soldiers is an epic story of heroism, courage, and patriotism that will not soon be forgotten.

    Going Downtown: The War Against Hanoi and Washington

    Several biographies have chronicled her stardom, but none has covered her intense experiences through five years of Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. According to her son, Luca Dotti, “The war made my mother who she was.” Audrey Hepburn’s war included participation in the Dutch Resistance, working as a doctor’s assistant during the “Bridge Too Far” battle of Arnhem, the brutal execution of her uncle, and the ordeal of the Hunger Winter of 1944. She also had to contend with the fact that her father was a Nazi agent and her mother was pro-Nazi for the first two years of the occupation. But the war years also brought triumphs as Audrey became Arnhem’s most famous young ballerina. Audrey’s own reminiscences, new interviews with people who knew her in the war, wartime diaries, and research in classified Dutch archives shed light on the riveting, untold story of Audrey Hepburn under fire in World War II.

    On June 6, 1944, on Omaha Beach, however, these proud Virginians who carried the legacy of the famed Stonewall Brigade showed the regular army and the world what true valor really was. In this moving World War II memoir, the author captures the day-to-day comings and goings of GI Joe from pre--World War II National Guard days through induction, training, deployment overseas, and more training.All leads up to D-Day and Normandy on June 6, 1944, when Sergeant Bob Slaughter came across Omaha Beach with Company D of the 116th Infantry. This was the beginning of his long march to final victory in Europe, a march that would take him and his fellow soldiers of Company D, at least those who survived, to Holland, the Bulge, and on into Germany itself.

    Sgt. John Basilone was lauded by General Douglas MacArthur as "…a one man Army", awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions on Guadalcanal and celebrated by the nation. It was the turning point of the war and Basilone’s foxhole was the site of the turning point in that battle. That was just the beginning of his legend. Distinctive among military biographies, the story is narrated by Sgt. Basilone himself allowing readers to experience the development of Johnny Basilone, the aimless youth, into Gunnery Sergeant "Manila John" Basilone, the clear-eyed warrior, undefeated light-heavyweight boxer and nationally revered war hero. This publication is the only family-authorized biography and features many never before published family photographs. Basilone, along with his first commanding officer in actual combat, Chesty Puller, are arguably the two greatest icons in Marine Corps history. The story of "Manila John" is part of every Marine’s boot camp education. The story is woven with surprising personal details. He clearly foresaw his future three separate times. Each time his visions came to pass - including the last - foretelling his death. But his place was with "…my boys", so he ignored the vision and returned to battle at Iwo Jima. Manila John was killed on the beach defending his boys and earned the Navy Cross for his bravery - an emotional true story.