Sole Survivor, based on three years of interviews with Poon and his family, reconstructs his remarkable ordeal and the survival techniques that earned him world celebrity and a listing in the Guiness Book of World Records. "A classic saga of ordeal and survival that reminds us of the courage, strength, and resourceful intelligence of which human beings are capable."-Tillie Olsen, author of Tell Me a Riddle

     First published in 1988, each experience of the ‘journey back from hell’ is unique, and readers are free to draw their own conclusions from what the survivors tell them. But the combined effect of the stories is so poignant and important to the core experience of the 20th century that nobody can afford to turn away — or to forget. ‘Brilliant, compelling...an inspiration’ – Mail on Sunday ‘Excellent’ – Dirk Bogarde, Daily Telegraph Anton Gill has been a freelance writer since 1984, specialising in European contemporary history but latterly branching out into historical fiction. He is the winner of the H H Wingate Award for non-fiction for ‘The Journey Back From Hell’. He is also the author of ‘Into Darkness’, ‘Dance Between the Flames’ and ‘An Honourable Defeat’. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

    Historian Victor Brooks argues that 1944 was, in effect, “the longest year” for Americans of that era, both in terms of casualties and in deciding the outcome of war itself.Brooks also argues that only the particular war events of 1944 could have produced the “reshuffling” of the cards of life that, in essence, changed the rules for most of the 140 million Americans in some fashion. Rather than focusing on military battles and strategy alone, the author chronicles the year as a microcosm of disparate military, political, and civilian events that came together to define a specific moment in time.As war was raging in Europe, Americans on the home front continued to cope (with some prospering). As US forces launched an offensive against the Japanese in the Mariana Islands and Palau, folks at home enjoyed morale-boosting movies and songs such as "To Have and Have Not" and “G.I. Jive.” And as American troops invaded the island of Leyte—launching the largest naval battle during the war—President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Thomas E. Dewey were in the home stretch leading up to the election of 1944.It has been said that the arc of history is long. Throughout American history, however, some years have been truly momentous. The Longest Year makes the case that 1944 was one such year.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.

    His many biographers have provided countless conflicting interpretations of his dark life, but virtually all agree on one thing: Hitler's formative experience was his service in World War I. Unfortunately, historians have found little to illuminate this critical period. Until now.In Hitler's First War, award-winning author Thomas Weber delivers a master work of history--a major revision of our understanding of Hitler's life. Weber paints a group portrait of the List Regiment, Hitler's unit during World War I, to rewrite the story of his military service. Drawing on deep and imaginative research, Weber refutes the story crafted by Hitler himself, and so challenges the historical argument that the war led naturally to Nazism. Contrary to myth, the regiment consisted largely of conscripts, not enthusiastic volunteers. Hitler served with scores of Jews, including noted artist Albert Weisberger, who proved more heroic, and popular, than the future F�hrer. Indeed, Weber finds that the men shunned Private Hitler as a "rear area pig," and that Hitler himself was still unsure of his political views when the war ended in 1918. Through the stories of such comrades as a soldier-turned-concentration camp commandant, veterans who fell victim to the Holocaust, an officer who became Hitler's personal adjutant in the 1930s but then cooperated with British intelligence, and the veterans who simply went back to their Bavarian farms and never joined the Nazi ranks, Weber demonstrates how and why Hitler aggressively policed the myth of his wartime experience.Underlying all Hitler studies is a seemingly unanswerable question: Was he simply a product of his times, or an anomaly beyond all calculation? Weber's groundbreaking work sheds light on this puzzle and offers a profound challenge to the idea that World War I served as the perfect crucible for Hitler's subsequent rise.

    Mr. Arad reports as a controlled and effective witness for the prosecution.... Mr. Arad's book, with its abundance of horrifying detail, reminds us of how far we have to go."--New York Times Book Review..". some of the most gripping chapters I have ever read.... the authentic, exhaustive, definitive account of the least known death camps of the Nazi era." --Raul HilbergArad, historian and principal prosecution witness at the Israeli trial of John Demjanjuk (accused of being Treblinka's infamous "Ivan the Terrible"), uses primary materials to reveal the complete story of these Nazi death camps.

    After the death of her mother, Frances, in 1989, Helen Epstein set out to research and reconstruct the life of her mother and that of her grandmother and great-grandmother. Like so many children of Holocaust survivors and other people displaced by the catastrophes of the 20th century, she had few family documents, only stories. She traveled to Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Israel, searching out people who had known her family and locating material in libraries and archives on three continents. Using three decades of journalistic training, and working like an archaeologist with shards of data, she pieced together an account of the lives of the women in her family and the social history of Central European Jews.

    Both Stalin and Hitler demanded victory at all costs, and the cost was extreme: 80,000 Soviet troops, 38,000 German and Hungarian soldiers, and 38,000 Hungarian civilians perished. The book provides the first full account of this shocking battle.“As a military history [The Siege of Budapest] is unrivaled. . . . Magisterial.”—John Lukacs, New York Review of Books“An exceedingly dramatic book, filled with fascinating stories, some of them even humorous, and with heart-rending accounts of suffering, limitless cruelty, and amazing decency.”—István Deák, New Republic"Ungváry has written a dramatic, gripping history of this siege, filling a gap in WWII history."—Choice

    This is the compelling story of the wartime adventures of Dr Aidan MacCarthy, who survived the evacuation at Dunkirk, burning planes, sinking ships, jungle warfare and appalling privation as a Japanese prisoner of war. It is a story of survival, forgiveness and humanity at its most admirable.

    Louis in Hamburg, Germany, on May 13, 1939. Lisa and her family are in first class; Sol and his parents are below in tourist class. The children have mixed feelings--they're excited to be beginning this voyage to a better life and sad to be leaving their old lives behind. They are Jewish, as are almost all of the 937 passengers on board, and although war has not been officially declared in Europe, the Nazis have been persecuting Jews for years. As they set sail for Cuba, the atmosphere on the ship is optimistic, led by the German captain Gustave Shroder, who is determined to see his passengers to safety. But as they learn that Hitler's propaganda has turned the country against them, the mood changes to despair. They are turned away--first from Cuba, then the United States, and then Canada. The story of Lisa and Sol is set against the tragic true history of the St. Louis. Denied entry from port after port, the captain was forced to return his Jewish passengers to Europe, where many died in the Holocaust. Through the eyes of Sol and Lisa, we see the injustice and heartbreak that were caused by the prejudice and hatred of so many.

    forces in the Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg, achieveing what had been considered impossible -- total surprise. In the most abysmal failure of battlefield intelligence in the history of the U.S. Army, 600,000 American soldiers found themselves facing Hitler's last desperate effort of the war.The brutal confrontation that ensued became known as the Battle of the Bulge, the greatest battle ever fought by the U.S. Army -- a triumph of American ingenuity and dedication over an egregious failure in strategic intelligence. A Time for Trumpets is the definitive account of this dramatic victory, told by one of America's most respected military historians, who was also an eyewitness: MacDonald commanded a rifle company in the Battle of the Bulge. His account of this unique battle is exhaustively researched, honestly recounted, and movingly authentic in its depiction of hand-to-hand combat.Mingling firsthand experience with the insights of a distinguished historian, MacDonald places this profound human drama unforgettably on the landscape of history.

    Pieced together by the couple’s granddaughters, who combed through historical research, family lore, and insights from a neighbour’s wartime diary, the story chronicles how the couple struggled to keep their children from starving, but could not keep them from harm, and reveals the strife and hardship endured not just by them, but by a nation. These experiences, kept from subsequent generations of the family, were almost lost until, long after their deaths, the path of the couple through the war and on to Canada was uncovered. A personal and intimate account within the larger context of a terrorized nation, this is also a story of the bonds and strains among family, told with the haunting, evocative prose for which Kristen den Hartog is known.

    Quickly falling in love with the rush of being a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne, he believed his service would honorably help the South Vietnamese protect their country from the ruthless communist North and their Southern allies. But once in the volatile jungles of Vietnam, the merciless hunting and killing of the enemy, constant threat of landmines and booby traps, ambushes that could easily backfire, and deaths of his comrades made Stillman question how any man—if he survived—could ever return to his life as he’d known it. Written with John’s daughter, Lori Stillman, Jumping from Helicopters is a vivid and moving memoir that unearths fifty years of repressed memories with stunning accuracy and raw details. Interwoven with the author’s own journal entries and including thirty-five photographs, it is a story that will open your eyes to what these brave young men witnessed and endured, and why they returned facing a lifetime of often unspoken unrest, persistent nightmares, and forced normalcy, haunting even the strongest of soldiers.

    This book recounts one of the largest rescues of Jews during the Holocaust.

    There were more than 300 escape attempts at Colditz in the four and a half years of its war history and Major Pat Reid vividly describes a unique interlude in Second World War history that contains the mythical qualities which cause a legend to live forever. Men from all over the world and from all walks of life were incarcerated in suffocating intimacy for five years in an alien and hostile land. Under these conditions they proved that men could live together, and that loyalty and generosity could thrive, transcending the natural prejudices of race, creed, language and intellectual diversity.

    Perhaps less familiar are Carin, Emmy, Magda, Margaret, Lina, Ilse and Gerda... These are the women behind the infamous men—complex individuals with distinctive personalities who were captivated by Hitler and whose everyday lives were governed by Nazi ideology. Throughout the rise and fall of Nazism these women loved and lost, raised families and quarreled with their husbands and each other, all the while jostling for position with the Fuhrer himself. Until now, they have been treated as minor characters, their significance ignored, as if they were unaware of their husbands' murderous acts, despite the evidence that was all around them: the stolen art on their walls, the slave labor in their homes, and the produce grown in concentration camps on their tables.James Wyllie's Nazi Wives explores these women in detail for the first time, skillfully interweaving their stories through years of struggle, power, decline and destruction into the post-war twilight of denial and delusion.