Guerrillas on skis, heroic single-handed attacks on tanks, unfathomable endurance, and the charismatic leadership of one of this century's true military geniuses - these are the elements of both the Finnish victory and a gripping tale of war.

    Condition Red. Many planes.” What was it like to be trapped upon a ship and constantly under threat of attack from Japanese forces? Frederick J. Bell, commander of the USS Grayson during World War Two, dramatically exposes the mental and physical strain that his crew and ship underwent through the course of the first few years of conflict. No stone is left unturned in Bell’s account, as he explains how he and his crew survived strafing by Japanese planes, navigated the treacherous waters of the South Pacific, assisted fellow ships in peril and overcame the tedious moments of boredom. Admiral Bell takes the reader to the heart of the action which he witnessed first-hand and explains the vital role that destroyers played in the Pacific War. They fulfilled a variety of roles, from escorting convoys and guarding Task Forces, to bombing enemy shorelines and providing much needed supplies to the army and marines fighting on the islands. There are few accounts that better document naval warfare during the Second World War. “Tales of himself and the men, of the function of destroyers, alone and in group action, of early difficulties of poor charting, of successive South Pacific engagements, of periods without sleep, of shore landings, of ‘coconut shoots’ and many a ding dong with the enemy.” Kirkus Reviews The valor that Bell demonstrated during the battle of Ontong Java in August 1942 earned him the Medal of Honor, and later during USS Grayson’s operations at Guadalcanal in February 1943 he received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. His citation reads: "When his ship was subjected to repeated bombing and strafing attacks by enemy dive bombers at very close range, Commander Bell ... directed the fire of his battery with outstanding efficiency, destroying at least two Japanese dive bombers and damaging others. Immediately following the engagement and during the night, he conducted a search for lost planes, taking his ship into enemy waters and away from the protection of friendly forces. ... He established the identity of lost aircraft and, by flashing messages, directed our planes safely to the carriers." After the war Bell became a business executive and later at the age of 68 he became an Episcopal priest. His books Room to Swing a Cat, a history of the early American navy, and Condition Red were published in 1938 and 1943 respectively. He died at the age of 91 in Miami in 1994.

    One of the formations they encountered was a similarly elite group of paratroopers, who instead of dropping from the skies fought on the defensive, giving their Allied counterparts a tremendous challenge in achieving their objectives.This is the complete wartime history of one of the largest German paratrooper regiments, 6th Fallschirmjäger, from its initial formation in the spring of 1943 to its last day at the end of the war. With numerous firsthand accounts from key members, reporting on their experiences, they describe the events of 1943-45 vividly and without compromise.These accounts reveal previously unknown details about important operations in Italy, Russia, on the Normandy Front, Belgium, Holland, the last German Parachute drop in the Ardennes, and the final battle to the end in Germany.With over 220 original photographs, many from private collections and never before published, this book fully illustrates the men, their uniforms, equipment and weapons. Also included is an appendix with maps, battle calendar, staffing plans, a list of field and post-MOB-numbers, and the Knight's Cross recipients of the regiment. Having earned the respect of the Allied forces who fought against it during World War II, this work will inform current readers of the full record of Fallschirmjäger Regiment 6, and why the Allied advance into German-held Europe was so painstaking to achieve.

    After hard fighting, American, British, and Canadian troops won a toehold in Nazi-held Europe. But Germany's elite Panzer divisions hadn't been present at the beaches. Due to poor intelligence and a divided command, the tanks with black crosses only came to the invasion area after the first landings. But when the German Panther and Tiger tanks finally arrived, they were seeking a battle of annihilation, presenting the Allied attack inland with a ring of fire and steel.For nearly two months, the Allies hammered the enemy, even as the Germans attempted to throw them back into the sea. Some of the most intense armored battles ever fought in war were fought in Normandy, bringing glory and infamy to hardened and colorful soldiers such as Kurt "Panzer" Meyer, Jochen Peiper, and Max Wunsche, and enhancing their reputations for ferocious, desperate combat. In the end, their actions would decide the outcome of the war.Told in an engaging style and packed full of fascinating details of the 1st SS Panzer Corps, Steel Inferno offers a unique perspective on one of the greatest military engagements in history.

    For five long years, thousands of men and women fought ferociously in the coldest corner of hell on earth. Some fought for survival, some struggled to help others survive, and some sought to crush their enemies. If man-made death didn't get you, the Arctic's weapons of ice and cold would. These natural weapons killed regardless of whose side you were on or how just was your cause. No one escaped unscathed. Author Mike Walling captures the Arctic convoys’ bitter essence in Forgotten Sacrifice. The story launches in October 1939, when Germany and the Soviet Union began diplomatic maneuvering. The action accelerates with Winston Churchill's decision in 1941 to provide supplies to Soviet forces battling the German invasion. From this point until the closing days of WWII in spring 1945, an unremitting sea battle raged within the confines of the always-lethal, ever-shifting Arctic ice pack and the savage Scandinavian coastline. Nearly 4.5 million tons of supplies were moved in 77 convoys over the course of 5 years in order to help the Soviet war effort. The Allies fought to keep the sea lanes open to Murmansk while the Germans were determined to slaughter every ship which dared to make the attempt. By the end of the convoys, 98 ships had been lost. Forgotten Sacrifice reveals a timeless tale of determination, heroism, sacrifice, and the strength of the human spirit.

    Months later, under orders from the president, the general is whisked away in the dark of night, leaving his troops to their fate. It is a bitter pill for a fiercely proud warrior who has always protected his men. He famously declares "I shall return," but the humiliation of Corregidor haunts him, even earning him the derisive nickname "Dugout Doug."In early 1945, MacArthur returns to the Philippines, his eyes firmly fixed on Corregidor. To take back the island, he calls on the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, a highly trained veteran airborne unit. Their mission is to jump onto the island—hemmed in by sheer cliffs, pockmarked by bomb craters, bristling with deadly spiky broken tree trunks—and wrest it from some 6,700 Japanese defenders who await, fully armed and ready to fight to the death.Drawn from firsthand accounts and personal interviews with the battle's surviving veterans, acclaimed war correspondent and bestselling author Kevin Maurer delves into this extraordinary tale, uncovering astonishing accounts of bravery and heroism during an epic, yet largely forgotten, clash of the Pacific War. Here is an intimate story of uncommon soldiers showing uncommon courage and winning, through blood and sacrifice, the redemption of General MacArthur.

    But the brutal reality of the war as endured by combat infantrymen has remained little documented. In Foot Soldier, Roscoe C. Blunt provides an all-too-rare glimpse into the experience of fighting at the Allied front. Nineteen-year-old "Rockie" arrived on the continent in November 1944, when burnt-out U.S. vehicles still littered the beaches. His 84th Infantry Division fought at the Roer, through the Battle of the Bulge, and at the crossing of the Rhine all the way to the Elbe; he was briefly taken prisoner by an SS Panzer unit. Drawing upon his numerous letters home and the journals he scrawled in foxholes and tents, he has given us one of the most detailed, immediate accounts of the Second World War ever written, a memoir sure to take its place among the classics of war literature.

    In September 1939, when the Nazis began their reign of terror in Europe and invaded Poland, Aliza was eleven years old. In her diaries—furtively written on scraps of precious paper that she kept throughout the war—she described the history of her family, struggling to survive in the occupied Warsaw Ghetto. Those diaries and later writings formed the basis for this memoir. Becoming a member of Hashomer Hatzair, the noted youth movement in the Warsaw Ghetto, gave Aliza hope and encouraged her to fight for survival. As a result of an extraordinary series of “miracles,” Aliza managed to survive after being sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She was among those liberated by American troops, and she has continued to tell the story throughout her life. Aliza is among the last of the Warsaw Ghetto survivors. She has been passionately lecturing around the world about the revolt, and she has escorted numerous youth groups on their visits to Poland. This book has been previously translated and published in Hungarian, Polish, and Hebrew.

     May 1940: Royal Air Force pilot Harry Fitzgerald is one of millions of heroic Allied troops fighting against Nazi Germany. In the pitched heat of battle over the skies of Northern France, Fitzgerald is shot down by an enemy plane and captured. Miraculously, he escapes certain death but must make his way back to the Allied evacuation at Dunkirk to get back home. However, Fitzgerald is in the middle of a warzone. At a chateau turned hospital, he encounters two of his wounded comrades. Too sick to reach Dunkirk by themselves, they helplessly lie in wait as the German army advances. Fitzgerald knows he must save them, and with the assistance of the French nurse Solange, the refugees attempt to reach Dunkirk-before the Nazis can reach them. It’s a life-or-death mission through dangerous territory where nothing is guaranteed. In Dash for Dunkirk, authors Denis Caron and Fran Connor explore a world where loyalty and bravery face off against an unforgiving enemy. Bound together by duty and honor, war heroes push themselves to the limit through refugee-crowded streets, mechanical setbacks and enemy attacks. Will they reach safe harbor, or will the ultimate evil finally prevail? Praise for Dash for Dunkirk > "A wildly entertaining, action packed story not only about the reality of war, but also of loyalty, friendship, and romance. A must read! - Jordan Ebare, Avid Reader & Historical Fiction Enthusiast

    This book portrays the gradual awakening in the mind of a young Hitler Youth æeducatedÆ soldier of a Panzer Division, bogged down in the bitterest fighting on the Eastern Front, to the truth of the criminal character of what he is involved in.Having in mind that about 9 out of 10 German soldiers who died in WWII were killed in Russia, the book throws light on the largely unreported heroic sacrifices of Soviet soldiers and civilians often against seemingly hopeless odds, without which Europe might well have fallen to fascism. It deals less with grand strategies, tactics and military technicalities than with the human involvement of ordinary people, from both sides, who were caught up in that enormity of a tragedy, that epic struggle in Russia.It throws light on the chasm which existed between officers and men in the sharply class-divided Wehrmacht with most of the top rank officers having been drawn from the old imperial aristocracy.

    The German High Command was under the impression that the Red Army could be destroyed west of the Dnepr River and that there would be no need for conducting operations in cold, snow, and mud. They were wrong.In reality, the extreme conditions of the German war in Russia were so brutal that past experiences simply paled before them. Everything in Russia--the land, the weather, the distances, and above all the people--was harder, harsher, more unforgiving, and more deadly than anything the German soldier had ever faced before.Based on the recollections of four veteran German commanders of those battles, FIGHTING IN HELL describes in detail what happened when the world's best-publicized "supermen" met the world's most brutal fighting. It is not a tale for the squeamish.

    In 1985 Hans von Ohain, the scientist who pioneered Nazi Germany's efforts to build a jet plane, posed the question: 'Would World War II have occured if the Luftwaffe knew it faced operational British jets instead of Spitfires?' He immediately answered, 'I, for one, think not.'Frank Whittle, working-class outsider and self-taught enthusiast, had worked out the blueprint of a completely new type of engine in 1929, only for his ideas to be blocked by bureaucratic opposition until the outbreak of war in 1939. The importance of his work was recognized too late by the government for his revolutionary engine to play a major part in World War II. After the war Whittle's dream of civilian jet-powered aircraft became a reality and Britain enjoyed a golden age of 1950's jet-powered flight.Drawing on Whittle's extensive private papers, Campbell-Smith tells the story of a stoic and overlooked British hero, a tantalizing tale of 'what might have been'.

    Over a thousand of these soldiers were Australian. By the end of the war, just one-third of them had survived and Ambon became a place of nightmares, one of the most notorious of all POW camps the war had seen.Many of the men captured were massacred, and of those who initially survived, many later succumbed to the sadistic brutality of the Japanese guards. Starvation also took a fearful toll, and then there were the medical 'experiments'. It was a place almost without hope for those who held on, made worse by the fact that the savagery inflicted on them wasn't limited to their captors but also came from their own. One soldier described their hopelessness towards the end with the bleak words: 'The men knew they were dying.'Yet astoundingly there were survivors and in Ambon they speak of not just the horrors, but the bravery, endurance and mateship that got them through an ordeal almost impossible to imagine.The story of Ambon is one of both the depravity and the triumph of the human spirit; it is also one that's not been widely told. Until now.

    How and why, then, did the Germans prolong the barbaric conflict for three and a half more years?In The German War, acclaimed historian Nicholas Stargardt draws on an extraordinary range of primary source materials—personal diaries, court records, and military correspondence—to answer this question. He offers an unprecedented portrait of wartime Germany, bringing the hopes and expectations of the German people—from infantrymen and tank commanders on the Eastern front to civilians on the home front—to vivid life. While most historians identify the German defeat at Stalingrad as the moment when the average German citizen turned against the war effort, Stargardt demonstrates that the Wehrmacht in fact retained the staunch support of the patriotic German populace until the bitter end.Astonishing in its breadth and humanity, The German War is a groundbreaking new interpretation of what drove the Germans to fight—and keep fighting—for a lost cause.

    But nothing offered more fatal choices than being inside a B-17 bomber above Nazi-occupied Europe. From the hellish storms of enemy flak and relentless strafing of Luftwaffe fighters, to mid-air collisions, mechanical failure, and simple bad luck, it?s a wonder any man would volunteer for such dangerous duty. But many did. Some paid the ultimate price. And some made it home. But in the end, all would achieve victory. Here, author Travis L. Ayres has gathered a collection of previously untold personal accounts of combat and camaraderie aboard the B-17 Bombers that flew countless sorties against the enemy, as related by the men who lived and fought in the air?and survived.