Fighting Through to Kohima: A Memoir of War in India and Burma


Michael Lowry - 2003
    This was exciting enough but only a taste of what was to come. The Japanese advance into Burma threatened India and, along with many thousands of British and Colonial troops, Lowry found himself fighting in the Arakan region, where he earned a further Mention in Despatches. Conditions were appalling and the fighting was bitter by any standards. At one point his Battalion was cut off by the Japs for three weeks but surrender was never an option. Yet even worse was to come as the Battalion was thrown into the thick of the action at Kohima which is rated as the most desperate defensive action for the campaign. In one week 173 members of his Battalion were lost. All this is vividly described in this fascinating and inspiring memoir which will enthrall its readers.

Germany 1945: From War to Peace


Richard Bessel - 2009
    Called “a masterly account by a first rate historian,” by Ian Kershaw (Hitler), Germany 1945 is sure to become the definitive work on the subject.

Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial


Joseph E. Persico - 1994
    Using new sources--ground-breaking research in the papers of the Nuremberg prison psychiatrist and commandant, the letters and journals of the prisoners, and accounts of the judges and prosecutors as they struggled through each day making compromises and steeling their convictions--Joseph Persico retells the story of Nuremberg, combining sweeping history with psychological insight. Here are brilliant, chilling portraits of the Nazi warlords and riveting descriptions of the tensions between law and vengeance, between East and West, and of the friction already present in the early stages of the Cold War.

Humble Heroes, How The USS Nashville CL43 Fought WWII


Steven Bustin - 2010
    It started like a Hollywood thriller, secretly transporting from England $25 million in British gold bullion, delivered to the ship in unguarded bread trucks, a pre-war “Neutrality Patrol” that was really an unofficial hostile search for the far bigger and more powerful German battleship Prinz Eugen, and sneaking through the Panama Canal at night with the ship’s name and hull number covered for secrecy. Now, with the ship bulging with an unusual load of fuel and supplies, in the company of a large fleet quietly passing under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the crew was about to learn of their latest (but not last) and most improbable adventure yet as the captain made an announcement that would change the war and their lives forever, “We are going to Tokyo!”. Over three years, scores of battles and hundreds of thousands of ocean miles later, the Nashville and her crew had earned 10 Battle Stars, served from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, from the Aleutians to the Yangtze River, as McArthur’s flagship and suffered heavy casualties from a devastating kamikaze attack. Tokyo Rose reported her sunk, repeatedly. Earlier, with goodwill trips that included France, England, Scandinavia, Bermuda and Rio de Janeiro, the new, sleek Nashville built a pre-war reputation as a “glamour ship”. But with war came the secret missions, capturing the second and third Japanese POWs of the war, having a torpedo pass just under the stern, being strafed and bombed by Japanese planes, losing a third of the crew in a single devastating Kamikaze attack, swimming in shark infested waters protected by marines with machine guns, enjoying the beauty of Sydney and her people, planning a suicide mission to destroy the Japanese fishing fleet, and bombarding Japanese troops and airfields across the Pacific. The Nashville crew served their ship and country well. They came from Baltimore row-houses, New York walk-ups, San Francisco flats, Kansas wheat farms, Colorado cattle ranches, Louisiana bayous and Maine fishing towns. Many had never traveled more than 25 miles from home and had never seen the ocean until they joined the service. They were part Irish, part Italian, part Polish and All-American. Battered, burnt and bombed, they made the USS Nashville their home and lived and died as eternal shipmates. Historical narrative enriched with the personal stories of the crew, this is the story of a ship and crew of ordinary men who did extraordinary things.

The Noose


Mark H. Newhouse
     What Ann Frank's Diary did to put a face to the plight of Dutch Jews in WWII, The Devil's Bookkeepers does for the Jew in the Lodz ghetto. Rita Boehm, Award-Winning Author “We need this book now more than ever.” – Wanda Luthman, Award-Winning AuthorLove and courage in the face of unrelenting terror as four men in the Lodz Ghetto struggle to document the tightening of the noose under Nazi rule. Written by the son of Holocaust survivors, this stunning novel based on events described in the Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto (Yale University Press, 1984), asks what you would have sacrificed to be one of the few to survive.Desperate people do desperate things…“…an emotionally riveting account of life inside the ghetto… You cannot read this story and remain unaffected.” – Kimberlee J Benart, 5 Stars Readers’ Favorite “… a riveting, emotionally charged novel… an amazing accomplishment… This is a must-read...” Louis Emond, English Professor

Journeys Into Night: Remarkable first-hand accounts from the Bomber Command


Don Charlwood - 1991
     It forms a companion piece to Charlwood’s highly-regarded elegy on Bomber Command, No Moon Tonight, expanding on the author’s experiences as a WWII navigator. It is the story of twenty young Australians who sailed together to Canada to train as navigators under the Empire Air Training Scheme. Most of them went on to Bomber Command, fifteen of the twenty losing their lives. Charlwood based much of this book on wartime diaries and letters, his own and those of others among the twenty men and Charlwood’s crew members. This book is as much their story as it is Charlwood’s own. In 1991 Elizabeth Webby, Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney University, wrote: ‘Journeys into Night is notable for the clarity and power of its writing. Don Charlwood’s wartime experiences – travelling overseas, training, the tedium and terror of ops – are recreated in vivid and moving detail.’ Praise for Journeys Into Night "This poignantly conceived and strongly written look-back-in-old-age [book] must surely rank as one of the most perceptive and rewarding accounts by any Australian who found himself on the cutting edge of the tragic insanity of war." - Alan Roberts, The Advertiser "This is one of the most moving books to come out of World War II; no reader without a heart of ice could fail to become involved with the young characters... The reader becomes part of the family of the crew, sharing their fears and jokes, their superstitions, and their spells of leave..." - Geoffrey Dutton, Overland Donald Ernest Cameron (Don) Charlwood AM (6 September 1915 – 18 June 2012) was an Australian author. He worked as a farm hand, an air traffic controller, and most notably as an RAAF navigator in Bomber Command during the WWII. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1992 in recognition of service to literature.

Auschwitz & The Holocaust: Eyewitness Accounts from Auschwitz Prisoners & Survivors


Ryan Jenkins - 2014
    In this companion volume to The Holocaust: An Introduction, you will go through a detailed account of the camp, its methods of killing and cruelty, and more. Buy your copy today to become educated in both the far reaches of evil in those responsible and the heights of bravery in those that survived. Here's a Preview of What You Will Learn * Origins of Auschwitz * Witold Pilecki * Auschwitz I * Auschwitz-Birkenau * First-hand accounts from the camps DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY TODAY

Göring


David Irving - 1989
    In this major biography, based on hitherto undiscovered diaries and private and official documents, David Irving tells how Göring connived, intrigued, and conspired to bring Adolf Hitler to power, how he directed National Socialist Germany's industrial resurgence, commanded the mighty Luftwaffe, (Air Force), and served as Hitler's buttress through the years of struggle, triumph, and decline.

Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice


Gerald Steinacher - 2008
    But "Odessa" was nothing more than a myth. Now, in Nazis on the Run, historian Gerald Steinacher provides the true story of how the Nazis escaped their fate.Steinacher not only reveals how Nazi war criminals escaped from justice at the end of the Second World War, fleeing through the Tyrolean Alps to Italian seaports, but he also highlights the key roles played by the Red Cross, the Vatican, and the Secret Services of the major powers. The book takes a hard look at the International Committee of the Red Cross, proving that identification papers issued by the Red Cross made it possible for thousands of Nazis, war criminals, and collaborators - including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengale - to slip through the hands of justice and to find refuge in North and South America, Spain, and the Near East. Steinacher underscores the importance of the South Tyrol as a "ratline" from Germany to Italy and also reveals that many figures in the Catholic Church - sometimes knowingly, other times unwittingly - were involved in large-scale Nazi smuggling, often driven by the fear of an imminent communist takeover of Italy. Finally, the book documents how the Counter Intelligence Corps (the predecessor to the CIA) recruited former SS men to advise U.S. intelligence agencies and smuggled them out of Soviet-occupied areas of Austria and Eastern Europe into Italy and on to South America.Based on extensive research in newly opened archives, Nazis on the Run is the first book to provide a complete picture of this little-known story of justice denied.

The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic


Benjamin Carter Hett - 2018
    He would never have come to power if Germany’s leading politicians had not responded to a spate of populist insurgencies by trying to co-opt him, a strategy that backed them into a corner from which the only way out was to bring the Nazis in. Hett lays bare the misguided confidence of conservative politicians who believed that Hitler and his followers would willingly support them, not recognizing that their efforts to use the Nazis actually played into Hitler’s hands. They had willingly given him the tools to turn Germany into a vicious dictatorship.Benjamin Carter Hett is a leading scholar of twentieth-century Germany and a gifted storyteller whose portraits of these feckless politicians show how fragile democracy can be when those in power do not respect it. He offers a powerful lesson for today, when democracy once again finds itself embattled and the siren song of strongmen sounds ever louder.

The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler's Secret Police


Frank McDonough - 2015
    Popularly depicted as a central part of an all-powerful "'Big Brother" Nazi totalitarian police state, its primary aim was to hunt down "the enemies of the people." Drawing on a detailed examination of previously unpublished Gestapo case files, this book relates the fascinating, vivid, and disturbing stories of a cross-section of ordinary and extraordinary people who opposed the Nazi regime. It also tells the equally disturbing stories of their friends, neighbors, and sometimes relatives drawn into the Gestapo's web of intrigue, either as informers or as staff. The book reveals, too, the cold-blooded and efficient methods of the Gestapo officers. This book argues that while it lacked the manpower and resources to spy on everyone, ultimately relying on tip-offs from the general public, the Gestapo was still a strong instrument of Nazi terror. It ruthlessly and efficiently targeted its officers against clearly defined political and racial "enemies of the people."

Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction


Martin Gilbert - 2005
    Three days later the diplomat was dead, and Germany was in the grips of skillfully orchestrated anti-Jewish violence.In the early hours of November 10, Nazi storm troopers and Hitler Youth rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods across Germany, leaving behind them a horrifying trail of terror and destruction. More than a thousand synagogues and many thousands of Jewish shops were destroyed, while thirty thousand Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. This was the moment when deliberately inflamed hatreds ignited nationwide destruction.With rare insight and acumen, Martin Gilbert, one of the leading historians of our time, examines Kristallnacht -- the Night of Broken Glass -- and describes how the rest of the world reacted in its wake. His narration of that night and day of terror is chilling, vividly conveying its scale and intensity through more than fifty previously unpublished eyewitness testimonies and graphic newspaper accounts of the events as they unfolded. No other attack on Jews during the course of the Second World War was as widely reported by contemporary observers.Kristallnacht marked the beginning of the systematic eradication of a people who traced their origins in Germany to Roman times and was a sinister fore-warning of the Holocaust. By setting the tone for the terrible war to follow, it shaped the second half of the twentieth century and continues to haunt us, almost seventy years later. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, this is an eye-opening study of one of the darkest chapters in human history.

KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps


Nikolaus Wachsmann - 2015
    The Third Reich has been studied in more depth than virtually any other period in history, and yet until now there has been no history of the camp system that tells the full story of its broad development and the everyday experiences of its inhabitants, both perpetrators and victims, and all those living in what Primo Levi called "the gray zone." In KL, Wachsmann fills this glaring gap in our understanding. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system. Examining, close up, life and death inside the camps, and adopting a wider lens to show how the camp system was shaped by changing political, legal, social, economic, and military forces, Wachsmann produces a unified picture of the Nazi regime and its camps that we have never seen before. A boldly ambitious work of deep importance, KL is destined to be a classic in the history of the twentieth century.

Boldness Be My Friend


Richard Pape - 1953
    Stirling bomber goes on a special mission to destroy Goering's residence which is used as operational headquarters for the air defence of Berlin. His aircraft, after the operation has been successfully accomplished, is shot down. Wounded, he is hunted across Holland, joins the Dutch underground and is captured in Leyden waiting to be taken off by a British submarine.The description of the Berlin raid, the last moments of the aircraft and the pursuit across Holland are among the best dramatic passages to come out of the war. But this is only the beginning of the most fantastic tale, which, interspersed with intrigue and violence, with setbacks and recapture, takes Pape across the breadth of German-occupied Europe; to Poland and Czechoslovakia; to Austria and Hungary and almost to the Yugoslav partisans.

Sitting Ducks


Steve Anderson - 2011
    In December 1944, during the bloody Battle of the Bulge, teams of German commandos disguised as American soldiers slipped behind the US front lines. Riding in captured US jeeps, they committed sabotage, sowed confusion and caused paranoia among American troops. Word quickly spread that the undercover commandos were out to kill US General Eisenhower. Popular legend has made the false flag operation out to be a skilled and menacing ploy with cunning German spies speaking American English. Their commander, propaganda hero SS Lt. Col. Otto Skorzeny, seemed a mastermind. But the reality was much different, and all the more deadly. The planning and training were slapdash, the mission desperate, its chances slim to none. Sitting Ducks is a fast read equaling about 49 print pages.