Marine 1st Force Reconnaissance Company during the bloodiest years of the Vietnam War. Dropped deep into enemy territory, Recon relied on stealth and surprise to complete their mission--providing intelligence on enemy positions and conducting raids, prisoner snatches, and ambushes. Fleming's absorbing memoir recounts his transformation from idealistic recruit to cynical veteran as the war claimed the lives of his friends and the missions became ever more dangerous.

    Is the emperor alive? Or is his death being kept a closely-guarded secret? It’s impossible to know for certain, since the spies and agents of the kingdom trade in misinformation and half-truths, and only heighten the tension between the brothers.In this atmosphere of palace intrigue and chicanery—as Murad acquires a reputation for overindulgence, Dara for sensitivity, and Shuja for impulsiveness—the stage seems set for a power-hungry Aurangzeb to make his ascent as emperor. However, will Aurangzeb’s quest for domination become his ultimate undoing? The Mughal High Noon, with master brushstrokes, explores questions of power, faith and contentment.

    The old sailors, who could remember her past, said that she was jinxed and ought never sail again. But in the last days of 1940, as the phoney war drew to an end, Britain needed every ship she could lay her hands on, to challenge the might of Hitler’s Kriegsmarine. So it was that Lieutenant-Commander John Lamb found himself commanding the old destroyer Rose, with a crew of misfits and troublemakers, and set sail across the dark and icy seas in a desperate race to prevent the German invasion of Norway.... Duncan Harding is a pseudonym for Charles Whiting (1926-2007), who also wrote as Leo Kessler and John Kerrigan. Charles Whiting volunteered for the Army aged 16 in 1943, where he saw active service in Belgium, Holland and Germany with the 52nd Reconnaissance Regiment. He has over 350 books to his credit, encompassing military history, espionage, biography and action fiction and holds the Sir George Dowty Prize for Literature.

    

    Author GM Matheny was a US Navy saturation diver on the nuclear submarine USS Halibut. Involved in Operation Ivy Bells. America's most important (and most dangerous of the Cold War) clandestine operations. If you like good old fashioned American bravado, espionage and American history, you will enjoy this book. GOD & SPIES is a firsthand account of America's greatest intelligence coup! Operation Ivy Bells was not a onetime intercept of foreign intelligence but an ongoing operation of multiple Soviet military channels! Another reason for the high interest in our operation was the audacious nature in which it was done—with not one person risking his neck but the crews of two US Navy nuclear submarines which rendezvoused in Soviet territorial waters. “How did I end up as a navy diver, four hundred feet down in a frigid Russian sea? After making my dad totally disgusted with me, I set out to make him happy. ‘Honor thy father’ - I struggled with a decision to serve God. ‘Lord, I will give my life to you and serve you if you let me make this dive.’ But I had the impression He only wanted to know one thing: ‘What if I do not let you? Will you serve me anyway?’”

    The two sisters have their own secrets, hiding difficult childhoods yet still maintaining an air of superiority and righteousness with those around them. Living with them is their brother, Saville, an adult but with the mind of a seven year old. The little girl’s arrival soon turns their world upside down. Great plans are laid for their good-looking, headstrong niece. Harris is going to marry well. Everything changes when World War Two breaks out. Harris falls in love with a man who only has his own interests at heart. She scandalises and disgraces her family with her obsessive behaviour, making herself a laughing stock in the close-knit town. But Harris is not to be put down. She begins to build a successful business with the support of her aunts and her close friend, Bonny. She eventually meets and agrees to marry the respectable local solicitor to the happiness of her aunts, but at the altar, she hears her lost love enter the church…. And once again, she shows her true colours. When tragedy strikes, Harris fights to regain respectability in the eyes of those who care for her but has Harris learned any lessons from her obsessive past…?

    Lee and Jefferson Davis, and much more.

    The stunning Northern victory thrust Union commander Ulysses S. Grant into the national spotlight, claimed the life of Confederate commander Albert S. Johnston, and forever buried the notion that the Civil War would be a short conflict. The conflagration at Shiloh had its roots in the strong Union advance during the winter of 1861-1862 that resulted in the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee. The offensive collapsed General Albert S. Johnston advanced line in Kentucky and forced him to withdraw all the way to northern Mississippi. Anxious to attack the enemy, Johnston began concentrating Southern forces at Corinth, a major railroad center just below the Tennessee border. His bold plan called for his Army of the Mississippi to march north and destroy General Grant's Army of the Tennessee before it could link up with another Union army on the way to join him. On the morning of April 6, Johnston boasted to his subordinates, "Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee!" They nearly did so. Johnston's sweeping attack hit the unsuspecting Federal camps at Pittsburg Landing and routed the enemy from position after position as they fell back toward the Tennessee River. Johnston's sudden death in the Peach Orchard, however, coupled with stubborn Federal resistance, widespread confusion, and Grant's dogged determination to hold the field, saved the Union army from destruction. The arrival of General Don C. Buell's reinforcements that night turned the tide of battle. The next day, Grant seized the initiative and attacked the Confederates, driving themfrom the field. Shiloh was one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war, with nearly 24,000 men killed, wounded, and missing.Edward Cunningham, a young Ph.D. candidate studying under the legendary T. Harry Williams at Louisiana State University, researched and wrote Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 in 1966. Although it remained unpublished, many Shiloh experts and park rangers consider it to be the best overall examination of the battle ever written. Indeed, Shiloh historiography is just now catching up with Cunningham, who was decades ahead of modern scholarship. Western Civil War historians Gary D. Joiner and Timothy B. Smith have resurrected Cunningham's beautifully written and deeply researched manuscript from its undeserved obscurity. Fully edited and richly annotated with updated citations and observations, original maps, and a complete order of battle and table of losses, Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 will be welcomed by everyone who enjoys battle history at its finest.

    But as Elizabeth Varon reveals in this vividly narrated history, this rosy image conceals a seething debate over precisely what the surrender meant and what kind of nation would emerge from war. The combatants in that debate included the iconic Lee and Grant, but they also included a cast of characters previously overlooked, who brought their own understanding of the war's causes, consequences, and meaning. In Appomattox, Varon deftly captures the events swirling around that well remembered-but not well understood-moment when the Civil War ended. She expertly depicts the final battles in Virginia, when Grant's troops surrounded Lee's half-starved army, the meeting of the generals at the McLean House, and the shocked reaction as news of the surrender spread like an electric charge throughout the nation. But as Varon shows, the ink had hardly dried before both sides launched a bitter debate over the meaning of the war. For Grant, and for most in the North, the Union victory was one of right over wrong, a vindication of free society; for many African Americans, the surrender marked the dawn of freedom itself. Lee, in contrast, believed that the Union victory was one of might over right: the vast impersonal Northern war machine had worn down a valorous and unbowed South. Lee was committed to peace, but committed, too, to the restoration of the South's political power within the Union and the perpetuation of white supremacy. Lee's vision of the war resonated broadly among Confederates and conservative northerners, and inspired Southern resistance to reconstruction. Did America's best days lie in the past or in the future? For Lee, it was the past, the era of the founding generation. For Grant, it was the future, represented by Northern moral and material progress. They held, in the end, two opposite views of the direction of the country-and of the meaning of the war that had changed that country forever.

    Ironically, while the great military exploits of General Stonewall Jackson are studied in military schools the world over and his iron will and stern self-discipline have become legendary, little is said about his remarkable marriage. The real Thomas J. Jackson was a humble Christian and loving husband and father. The tender and instructive letters he wrote to his wife Anna are a model of godly leadership and covenantal faithfulness. From their courtship to their final days together, trace the true story of this remarkable couple through the letters of General Jackson to his bride."

    Apart from this, many a times each state of each nation has role models from the past but not forgotten history. Maharashtra has its own idols. The greatest and most loved of them all is shivaji maharaj.

    Lee had a heretofore undiscovered strategy at Gettysburg that, if successful, could have crushed the Union forces and changed the outcome of the war. The Battle of Gettysburg is the pivotal moment when the Union forces repelled perhaps America's greatest commander-the brilliant Robert E. Lee, who had already thrashed a long line of Federal opponents-just as he was poised at the back door of Washington, D.C. It is the moment in which the fortunes of Lee, Lincoln, the Confederacy, and the Union hung precariously in the balance. Conventional wisdom has held to date, almost without exception, that on the third day of the battle, Lee made one profoundly wrong decision. But how do we reconcile Lee the high-risk warrior with Lee the general who launched "Pickett's Charge," employing only a fifth of his total forces, across an open field, up a hill, against the heart of the Union defenses? Most history books have reported that Lee just had one very bad day. But there is much more to the story, which Tom Carhart addresses for the first time. With meticulous detail and startling clarity, Carhart revisits the historic battles Lee taught at West Point and believed were the essential lessons in the art of war-the victories of Napoleon at Austerlitz, Frederick the Great at Leuthen, and Hannibal at Cannae-and reveals what they can tell us about Lee's real strategy. What Carhart finds will thrill all students of history: Lee's plan for an electrifying rear assault by Jeb Stuart that, combined with the frontal assault, could have broken the Union forces in half. Only in the final hours of the battle was the attack reversed through the daring of an unproven young general-George Armstrong Custer. "Lost Triumph" will be one of the most captivating and controversial history books of the season.

    He demonstrates this system's success, beginning in the 1820s and 1830s, in confining sectional disputes safely within the political arena. With the breakdown of vital two-party competition in the 1850s, sectional issues increasingly took on ideological dimension, causing, Americans North and South to see in them dangerous threats to cherished republican institutions. No longer manageable within the arena of politics, sectional differences had to be resolved with in the arena of battle.The Political Crisis of the 1850s offers a clearly written account of politics (state and federal), sectionalism, race, and slavery from the 1820s through to the Civil War, brilliantly combining the behavioral and ideological approaches to political history.

    In augmenting this incomplete history, Margaret Creighton presents a new look at the decisive battle through the eyes of Gettysburg's women, immigrant soldiers, and African Americans.An academic with a superb flair for storytelling, Creighton draws on memoirs, letters, diaries, and newspapers to get to the hearts of her subjects. Mag Palm, a free black woman living with her family outside of town on Cemetery Ridge, was understandably threatened by the arrival of Lee's Confederate Army; slavers had tried to capture her three years before. Carl Schurz, a political exile who had fled Germany after the failed 1848 revolution, brought a deeply held fervor for abolitionism to the Union Army. Sadie Bushman, a nine-year-old cabinetmaker's daughter, was commandeered by a Union doctor to assist at a field hospital. In telling the stories of these and a dozen other participants, Margaret Creighton has written a stunningly fluid work of original history--a narrative that is sure to redefine the Civil War's most essential battle.

    Richard Coles, led a pilgrimage to all the major historic sites of the Holy Land: from Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee in the North, via Jericho and the Jordan River, to Bethlehem and, finally, Jerusalem. All of the pilgrims in his care were practising Christians, except one: the writer Kevin Jackson, a diffident and sympathetic atheist intrigued by the chance to take part in this modern-day version of an ancient act of piety, and to learn some more about his old friend, the media clergyman.Coles to Jerusalem is Kevin Jackson’s light-hearted diary of that pilgrimage, and a close-up portrait of Richard Coles both as priest and as man. As the journey proceeds, Coles reminisces at length about his past life as a rock star and radical gay agitator, his new life as a spiritual leader and a popular broadcaster on BBC radio and television, and the strange, unpredictable path that led him from self-destructive debauchery to faith and vocation.With a lively supporting cast of fellow pilgrims, Coles to Jerusalem ranges among the magnificence of ancient monuments and the banalities of the guided tour, the grim political background of contemporary Israel and the comedy of a group of idiosyncratic English folk abroad, the intensity of worship and the lightness of banter. It will be irresistible to all admirers of Richard Coles, who has contributed a foreword; and a revelation to those who have never encountered his wisdom and warmth.