What he found in the ruins of Tikrit, one of the last barriers between ISIS and Baghdad, was a covert alliance of women, embedded against ISIS and fronted by an Iraqi named Wahida, acting as unofficial spies for the US and coalition forces. With her entire family wiped out by ISIS, Wahida has been waging a war of her own—she recruits from the divorce courts of Iraq to find women willing to pose as wives under ISIS rule. The result: air strikes that have liquidated top ISIS figures—and civilians.The Widow’s Network reveals a world where battle lines don’t exist, where risks are incalculable, and where everyday women are playing a major role in defeating one of the most depraved and destructive forces of our time.

    A drama that captured the attention of the American public, the group and its flight crew dodged bullets and battled blinding winter storms as they climbed mountains and fought to survive, aided by courageous villagers who risked death at Nazi hands to help them.

    In the space of a few nightmarish weeks that all changed as the French and their British allies were crushed and eight million people fled their homes. Richard Vinen's new book describes the consequences of that defeat. It does so not by looking at political leaders in Vichy or Paris or London but rather at those who were caught up in daily horrors of war. It describes the fate of a French prisoner of war who was punished because he wrote a love letter to a German woman, and the fate of a French woman who gave birth to a German-fathered child as the Americans landed in Normandy. It describes the 'false policemen' who proliferated in occupied Paris as desperate men on the run seeking to feed themselves by blackmailing those who were even more vulnerable than themselves. It asks why some gentile French people chose to risk imprisonment by wearing yellow stars. It recounts the fate of a couple of estranged middle-aged Jews, separated by the mobilisation of 1939, who found themselves (in July 1942) on the same train to Auschwitz. Extremely moving and brilliantly readable, The Unfree French is a remarkable addition to the literature of the Second World War.

    They had news. News that gutted us to the core -- the death of our loved ones, a brother and two husbands -- in combat zones. The thing about those moments is that it's almost inconceivable that they can happen to you. That is, until they do.This book is for anyone who has ever received a knock at the door. And if you live long enough and have the courage to love others, you will. Maybe it's a cancer diagnosis. Maybe it's the death of your best friend. The betrayal of a spouse. The loss of a child. The implosion of a professional career. Or any tragedy that takes the person we love the most away from us too soon. Life is not without its challenges. The key is how you respond.This is our story. The story of three women, bonded by grief and purpose. Grief because we lost our best friends in war. Purpose because we resolved -- together -- to do something about it. To turn loss into inspiration for others and to channel the love that we had for the men in our lives into love for others through service. It was the only way we could escape the trap of despair and inaction, and we believe it offers a roadmap for anyone else who has ever had to answer a knock at the door.

    It proposes answers to such questions as “Why were the Allies unprepared?”, “Why did France collapse so quickly?”, “Why didn’t the British government accept Hitler’s peace proposals?” and “Why did the Germans allow Hitler to obtain life and death control over them?”But the book’s main purpose is to provide an account of Winston Churchill’s actions and their intended consequences – as well as some of the unintended ones – for readers who are unlikely to read a military history book of 800 pages. The author has pared down the details of this at once fascinating and frightening story to an accessible length of how the world nearly ended in the 1940s. How Churchill Saved Civilization was written in honor of all those who sacrificed their lives in the War, and to caution readers that it could very easily happen again, as key factors like complacency, ignorance, and weakness continue to play a role in international diplomacy.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.

    It wasn't a cry, or even a sob. It came from deep in my soul... It was the sound of a mother helpless to save her child from danger. I asked the same unanswered questions over and again. Where was he? Where was my Damien?On 2 November 1996, sixteen-year-old Damien Nettles went out for the evening in his home town of Cowes on the Isle of Wight. CCTV recorded him in a chip shop at 23:40 and on the High Street just after midnight. He has never been seen since.His mother, Valerie, has spent over two decades desperately trying to find out what happened to her son. Arrests have been made, and suspects released without charge. Despite years of research by journalists and a private investigator, Damien's vanishing remains a mystery.In this hugely moving and compelling account, Valerie Nettles tells the full, perplexing story of her son's disappearance. Someone must know what happened to Damien. Will the truth ever emerge from the shadows?

    A bohemian Berliner, a Flieger-Hitlerjugend member, a prodigy pilot, and a butcher’s son, with nothing in common but their love for the Luftwaffe and the freedom the sky has to offer. The bond they develop is put to the test by what might be a stronger adversary - war itself. Over the English Channel, in the dusty skies of Africa, on the brutal Eastern front, they will discover where their loyalty lies, and what true bravery means. “It’s Großdeutsches Reich, soldier. When one has a family at home, it doesn’t leave him many chances for the revolt.” As the war progresses, Willi and Johann grow more and more disillusioned with the regime they’re protecting with their lives. An SS unit appearing on their base to claim one of their own; bits of conversation revealing the truth about the extermination program accidentally overheard during the official reception - the pieces of the puzzle are slowly coming together, but it’s too late to do anything but fight to the bitter end, whatever it may bring.   Set during one of the bloodiest wars in history, “Of Knights and Dogfights” is the story of the shattered illusions of youth, tyranny and freedom, friendship and love guiding one out of the darkest hell of Soviet captivity.

    It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion—including the readiness to risk one’s life—to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author’s interviews with several of the story’s participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, “The Jerusalem of Lithuania.” The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi “expert” on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city’s great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed “the Paper Brigade,” and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group’s worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto’s secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet “liberation” of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved—only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR. Thoroughly researched by the foremost scholar of the Vilna Ghetto—a writer of exceptional daring, style, and reach—The Book Smugglers is an epic story of human heroism, a little-known tale from the blackest days of the war.

    He first came to international prominence in 1979, when he was recruited from the cult metal band Quiet Riot to play with Ozzy Osbourne, who had been fired from Black Sabbath for his drink and drug addictions and was in urgent need of a co-writer to kickstart a solo career. How and why Ozzy and Randy went on to find enormous success is one of the key themes of Crazy Train, named after the first and most famous Osbourne/Rhoads co-composition. It was Randy's pioneering combination of neo-classical soloing, catchy riffage and unforgettable songwriting which propelled Ozzy. The two albums that Randy recorded with Quiet Riot and the two with Ozzy showcase the young guitarist's immense ability, although the full extent of his talent may never have been revealed. In 1982 he died in an air crash. The parallels between Crazy Train and the author's best-selling To Live Is To Die: The Life And Death Of Metallica's Cliff Burton (Jawbone 2009) are intentional and obvious. Both books deal with a musical prodigy who died tragically in his mid-20s; both men have a vast following and a profile which has risen in the years since their deaths; and both men have a large coterie of friends, family and associates prepared to tell their stories for the very first time.

    Having Polish friends meant it was becoming increasingly unsafe for her to stay there and she finds a new life in the Harz Mountains. This taking her still further away from her home and her beloved younger sister, Erika.In Goslar, Hilde meets her husband, Karl, a young officer in the German Army.When he joins the 7th Panzer Brigade led by General Erwin Rommel at the beginning of WW II, Hilde is left to bring up their children in war-torn Germany.After Rommel's promotion to Field Marshal, Karl follows him to Africa, later Italy and ultimately Karl is posted to the Russian front. Hilde's story is based on facts and is told by her youngest daughter, Elisabeth

    In Prague he was known as the Hangman. Hitler, who called him 'The Man with the Iron Heart', considered Heydrich to be his heir, and entrusted him with the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish question: the systematic murder of eleven million people.In 1942 two men were trained by the British SOE to parachute back into their native Czech territory to kill the man ruling their homeland. Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik risked everything for their country. Their attempt on Reinhard Heydrich’s life was one of the single most dramatic events of the Second World War, with horrific consequences for thousands of innocent people.

    Who was this enigmatic officer Pearl Good had spoken of so often?After five years of research--interviewing survivors, assembling a team that could work to open German files untouched for fifty years, following every lead he could, Good was able to uncover the amazing tale of one man's remarkable courage. And in April 2005 Karl Plagge joined Oskar Schindler and 380 other Germans as a "Righteous among Nations," honored by the State of Israel for protecting and saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust.This expanded edition features new photographs and a new epilogue on the impact of the discovery of Karl Plagge--especially the story of 83-year-old Alfons von Deschwanden, who, after fifty years of silence, came forward as a veteran of Plagge's unit. His testimony is now part of this growing witness to truth.

    The smallest of the extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany during World War II, Sobibor was where now-retired auto worker John Demjanjuk has been accused of working as a prison guard. Sobibor also was the scene of the war's biggest prisoner escape.   Richard Rashke's interviews with eighteen of  those who survived provide the foundation for this volume. He also draws on books, articles, and diaries to make vivid the camp, the uprising, and the escape. In the afterword, Rashke relates how the Polish government in October 1993, observed the fiftieth anniversary of the escape and how it has beautified the site since a film based on his book appeared on Polish television.

    Twenty years after the end of the war, this was the first time that the German people were confronted with the horrific details of the Holocaust executed by 'ordinary men' still living in their midst.The trial sent Krüger back to his childhood in the 1930s, in an attempt to understand 'how it really was, that incomprehensible time'. He had grown up in a Berlin suburb, among a community of decent, lower-middle-class homeowners. This was not the world of torch-lit processions and endless ranks of marching SA men. Here, people lived ordinary, non-political lives, believed in God and obeyed the law, but were gradually seduced and intoxicated by the promises of Nazism. He had been, Krüger realised, 'the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work'.This world of respectability, order and duty began to crumble when tragedy struck. Krüger's older sister decided to take her own life, leaving the parents struggling to come to terms with the inexplicable. The author's teenage rebellion, his desire to escape the stifling conformity of family life, made him join an anti-Nazi resistance group. He narrowly escaped imprisonment only to be sent to war as Hitler embarked on the conquest of Europe. Step by step, a family that had fallen under the spell of Nazism was being destroyed by it.Written in accomplished prose of lingering beauty, The Broken House is a moving coming-of-age story that provides an unforgettable portrait of life under the Nazis. Yet the book's themes also chime with our own times - how the promise of an 'era of greatness' by a populist leader intoxicates an entire nation, how thin is the veneer of civilisation, and what makes one person a collaborator and another a resister.

    They were not -- as we have all come to believe--two halves of the same apple. Each had a distinctive role in creating the first "flying machine."How could two misanthropic brothers who never left home, were high-school dropouts, and made a living as bicycle mechanics have figured out the secret of manned flight? This new history of the Wright Brothers' monumental accomplishment focuses on their early years of trial and error at Kitty Hawk (1900-1903) and Orville Wright's epic fight with the Smithsonian Institute and Glenn Curtis. William Hazelgrove makes a convincing case that it was Wilbur Wright who designed the first successful airplane, not Orville. He shows that, while Orville's role was important, he generally followed his brother's lead and assisted with the mechanical details to make Wilbur's vision a reality. Combing through original archives and family letters, Hazelgrove reveals the differences in the brothers' personalities and abilities. He examines how the Wright Brothers' myth was born when Wilbur Wright died early and left his brother to write their history with personal friend John Kelly. The author notes the peculiar inwardness of their family life, business and family problems, bouts of depression, serious illnesses, and yet, rising above it all, was Wilbur's obsessive zeal to test out his flying ideas. When he found Kitty Hawk, this desolate location on North Carolina's Outer Banks became his laboratory. By carefully studying bird flight and the Rubik's Cube of control, Wilbur cracked the secret of aerodynamics and achieved liftoff on December 17, 1903. Hazelgrove's richly researched and well-told tale of the Wright Brothers' landmark achievement captures the excitement of the times at the start of the "American century."