The story of millions of young men and women who gave everything for freedom and in the final victory lost all. In a cruel twist of history the monumental struggles of an entire nation have been forgotten, and even intentionally obscured. This book redresses the balance, giving a comprehensive overview of Poland's participation in World War II. Following their valiant but doomed defense of Poland in 1939, members of the Polish armed forces fought with the Allies wherever and however they could. With previously unpublished first-hand accounts, information never before seen in English, and rare photographs, this title provides a detailed analysis of the devastation the war brought to Poland, and the final betrayal when, having fought for freedom for six long years, Poland was handed to the Soviet Union.

    This shameful memento came to symbolize not only his father’s tragically misguided allegiance but also a shattered marriage and ultimately the unconscionable separation of a mother and son.In this revelatory memoir, the author confronts his parents’ complex past as he reconstructs the fortunes and disillusions of an entire family upheaved during the changes of twentieth-century Europe. The Münninghoffs were driven by greed, rebellion, and rage. An embattled dynasty, they were torn between the right and the wrong side of history. Their saga haunted Alexander’s life for the next seventy years.Only in reconciling with them can this man find the courage to move forward as son and heir to the startling legacy of a flawed yet grand tradition.

    Taking on the myths and misconceptions along with the outsized reality, he portrays—with characteristic wit and passion—a man of contagious bravery, breathtaking eloquence, matchless strategizing, and deep humanity. Fearless on the battlefield, Churchill had to be ordered by the king to stay out of action on D-Day; he pioneered aerial bombing and few could match his experience in organizing violence on a colossal scale,  yet he hated war and scorned politicians who had not experienced its horrors. He was the most famous journalist of his time and perhaps the greatest orator of all time, despite a lisp and chronic depression he kept at bay by painting. His maneuvering positioned America for entry into World War II, even as it ushered in England’s post-war decline. His openmindedness made him a trailblazer in health care, education, and social welfare, though he remained incorrigibly politically incorrect. Most of all, he was a rebuttal to the idea that history is the story of vast and impersonal forces; he is proof that one person—intrepid, ingenious, determined—can make all the difference.

    Critical acclaim for The Battle for Okinawa"An indispensable account of the fighting and of Okinawa's role in the Japanese defense of the home islands." --The Wall Street Journal"A fascinating, highly intelligent glance behind the Japanese lines." --Kirkus Reviews"The most interesting of the 'last battle of the war' books." --The Washington Post."A fascinating insider's view of the Japanese command." --Dallas Morning NewsCOLONEL HIROMICHI YAHARA was the senior staff officer of the 32nd Japanese Army at Okinawa.A Military Book Club Main Selection

    After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Nimitz assembled the forces, selected the leaders, and - as commander of all U.S. and Allied air, land, and sea forces in the Pacific Ocean - led the charge one island at a time, one battle at a time, toward victory. A brilliant strategist, he astounded contemporaries by achieving military victories against fantastic odds, outpacing more flamboyant luminaries like General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral "Bull" Halsey. And he was there to accept, on behalf of the United States, the surrender of the Japanese aboard the battleship USS Missouri in August 1945. In this first biography in over three decades, Brayton Harris uses long-overlooked files and recently declassified documents to bring to life one of America’s greatest wartime heroes.

     Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson was considered a maverick by many of his comrades-and seen as a traitor by some. He spent years observing guerrilla tactics all over the world, and knew that those tactics could be adapted effectively by the Marines. Carlson and an elite fighting force-the 2nd Raider Battalion-embarked upon a thirty-day mission behind enemy lines where they disrupted Japanese supplies, inflicted a string of defeats on the enemy in open combat, and gathered invaluable intelligence on Japanese operations on Guadalcanal. And in the process they helped lay the foundation for Special Forces in the modern military. Here for the first time is a riveting account of one man, one battalion, and one mission that would resonate through the annals of military history.

    As the tulips bloom and the Nazis tighten their grip across the city, the last signs of Dutch resistance are being swept away. Marijke de Graaf and her husband are arrested and deported to different concentration camps in Germany. Marijke is given a terrible choice: to suffer a slow death in the labour camp or—for a chance at survival—to join the camp brothel.On the other side of the barbed wire, SS officer Karl Müller arrives at the camp hoping to live up to his father’s expectations of wartime glory. But faced with a brutal routine of overseeing executions and punishments, he longs for an escape. When he encounters the newly arrived Marijke, this meeting changes their lives forever.Woven into the narrative across space and time is Luciano Wagner’s ordeal in 1977 Buenos Aires, during the heat of the Argentine Dirty War. In his struggle to endure military captivity, he searches for ways to resist from a prison cell he may never leave. From the Netherlands to Germany to Argentina, The Dutch Wife braids together the stories of three individuals who share a dark secret and are entangled in two of the most oppressive reigns of terror in modern history. This is a novel about the blurred lines between love and lust, abuse and resistance, and right and wrong, as well as the capacity for ordinary people to persevere and do the unthinkable in extraordinary circumstances.

    With sixteen others he broke out of Pasir Panjang camp and began an epic two-thousand-mile escape from the island of Singapore, through the jungles of Indonesia to Australia. With no compass and no map, and only the goodwill of villagers and their own wits to rely on, the British and Australian POWs’ escape took a staggering five months and only two out of the original seventeen men survived. You’ll Die in Singapore is Charles McCormac’s compelling true account of one of the most horrifying and amazing escapes in World War Two. It is a story of courage, endurance and compassion, and makes for a very gripping read.

    When accepted to a prominent university, she sets out on the road to independence. While in school, she develops a bond with Marten Demeester, a Jewish student who shares her goal of becoming a pediatrician. When Hitler breaks his promise and invades their country, everything changes. The peaceful land becomes a battlefield, and the Netherlands quickly falls to the overwhelming German forces. The Nazis, aided by local collaborators, begin a process of arrest, deportation, and extermination of Dutch Jews, with Marten's family targeted by a powerful Gestapo colonel. The race to save their Jewish neighbors puts Jenny and Marten, now members of the Dutch Resistance, squarely in the crosshairs of the cunning and ruthless Gestapo. Failure could mean death for them and for their families and friends. As the Nazis close in, the pair is forced to make fateful choices. What price are they willing to pay to save others? Written for the General Market (G) (I): Contains little or no; sexual dialogue or situations or strong language. May also contain content of an inspirational nature. Amazon customers who purchase the print version have the option to purchase the Kindle eBook at no charge.

    He had simply disappeared, missing for four months. The author, a British counter-intelligence officer, was given the task of solving this mystery. His brilliant piece of detective work not only proved that Hitler had killed himself in Berlin, but also produced one of the most fascinating history books ever written. His book tells the extraordinary story of those last days in the Berlin Bunker. The New Statesman has called this book "incomparable…by far the best written on any aspect of the second German war-a book sound in scholarship, brilliant in its presentation." Chapters include: Hitler & his court. Hitler in defeat. The court in defeat. Crisis & decision. Siege of the Bunker. Et Tu Brute. Death of Hitler. Epilogue. Notes on sources. Index.

    As the danger mounts, Michel turns his back on his marriage to begin hiding munitions for the Résistance. Inès fears they’ll be exposed, but for Céline, half-Jewish wife of Chauveau’s chef de cave, the risk is even greater—rumors abound of Jews being shipped east to an unspeakable fate.When Céline recklessly follows her heart in one desperate bid for happiness, and Inès makes a dangerous mistake with a Nazi collaborator, they risk the lives of those they love—and the champagne house that ties them together.New York, 2019: Liv Kent has just lost everything when her eccentric French grandmother shows up unannounced, insisting on a trip to France. But the older woman has an ulterior motive—and a tragic, decades-old story to share. When past and present finally collide, Liv finds herself on a road to salvation that leads right to the caves of the Maison Chauveau.

    And yet it is far less known than Stalingrad, which involved about half the number of troops. From the time Hitler launched his assault on Moscow on September 30, 1941, to April 20, 1942, seven million troops were engaged in this titanic struggle. The combined losses of both sides -- those killed, taken prisoner or severely wounded -- were 2.5 million, of which nearly 2 million were on the Soviet side. But the Soviet capital narrowly survived, and for the first time the German "Blitzkrieg" ended in failure. This shattered Hitler's dream of a swift victory over the Soviet Union and radically changed the course of the war.The full story of this epic battle has never been told because it undermines the sanitized Soviet accounts of the war, which portray Stalin as a military genius and his people as heroically united against the German invader. Stalin's blunders, incompetence and brutality made it possible for German troops to approach the outskirts of Moscow. This triggered panic in the city -- with looting, strikes and outbreaks of previously unimaginable violence. About half the city's population fled. But Hitler's blunders would soon loom even larger: sending his troops to attack the Soviet Union without winter uniforms, insisting on an immediate German reign of terror and refusing to heed his generals' pleas that he allow them to attack Moscow as quickly as possible. In the end, Hitler's mistakes trumped Stalin's mistakes.Drawing on recently declassified documents from Soviet archives, including files of the dreaded NKVD; on accounts of survivors and of children of top Soviet military and government officials; and on reports of Western diplomats and correspondents, "The Greatest Battle" finally illuminates the full story of a clash between two systems based on sheer terror and relentless slaughter.Even as Moscow's fate hung in the balance, the United States and Britain were discovering how wily a partner Stalin would turn out to be in the fight against Hitler -- and how eager he was to push his demands for a postwar empire in Eastern Europe. In addition to chronicling the bloodshed, Andrew Nagorski takes the reader behind the scenes of the early negotiations between Hitler and Stalin, and then between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill.This is a remarkable addition to the history of World War II.

    Army and Navy nurses were stationed in Guam and the Philippines at the beginning of World War II. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, five navy nurses on Guam became the first American military women of World War II to be taken prisoner by the Japanese. More than seventy army nurses survived five months of combat conditions in the jungles of Bataan and Corregidor before being captured, only to endure more than three years in prison camps. In all, nearly one hundred nurses became POWs. Many of these army nurses were considered too vital to the war effort to be evacuated from the Philippines. Though receiving only half the salary of male officers of the same rank, they helped establish outdoor hospitals and treated thousands of casualties despite rapidly decreasing supplies and rations. After their capture, they continued to care for the sick and wounded throughout their internment in the prison camps. This account of the nurses' imprisonment adds a vital chapter to the history of American personnel in the Pacific theater. Lt. Col. Madeline Ullom, one of the captured nurses, remarked, "Even though women were not supposed to be on the front lines, on the front lines we were. Women were not supposed to be interned either, but it happened to us. People should know what we endured. People should know what we can endure." When freedom came, the U.S. military ordered the nurses to sign agreements with the government not to discuss their horrific experiences. Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee have conducted numerous interviews with survivors and scoured archives for letters, diaries, and journals to uncover the heroism and sacrifices of these brave women. The authors' dedication to accuracy, combined with their personal expertise in medical care and military culture and discipline, has enabled them to produce a realistic reconstruction of the dramatic experiences of these POWs.

    In the vein of his other phenomenal compendiums of amazing battlefield blunders, How to Lose a Battle and How to Lose a War, Fawcett focuses on some amazing catastrophic missteps of Axis and Allies alike.

    The ship is instantly transformed into a fiery cauldron and sinks within minutes. Some 300 men go down with the ship. Nearly 900 make it into the water alive. For the next five nights and four days, almost three hundred miles from the nearest land, the men battle injuries, sharks, dehydration, insanity, and eventually each other. Only 316 will survive. For the better part of a century, the story of USS Indianapolis has been understood as a sinking tale. The reality, however, is far more complicated—and compelling. Now, for the first time, thanks to a decade of original research and interviews with 107 survivors and eyewit­nesses, Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic tell the complete story of the ship, her crew, and their final mission to save one of their own. It begins in 1932, when Indianapolis is christened and launched as the ship of state for President Franklin Roosevelt. After Pearl Harbor, Indianapolis leads the charge to the Pacific Islands, notching an unbroken string of victories in an uncharted theater of war. Then, under orders from President Harry Truman, the ship takes aboard a superspy and embarks on her final world-changing mission: delivering the core of the atomic bomb to the Pacific for the strike on Hiroshima. Vincent and Vladic provide a visceral, moment-by-moment account of the disaster that unfolds days later after the Japanese torpedo attack, from the chaos on board the sinking ship to the first moments of shock as the crew plunge into the remote waters of the Philippine Sea, to the long days and nights during which terror and hunger morph into delusion and desperation, and the men must band together to survive. Then, for the first time, the authors go beyond the men’s rescue to chronicle Indianapolis’s extraordinary final mission: the survivors’ fifty-year fight for justice on behalf of their skipper, Captain Charles McVay III, who is wrongly court-martialed for the sinking. What follows is a captivating courtroom drama that weaves through generations of American presidents, from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, and forever entwines the lives of three captains—McVay, whose life and career are never the same after the scandal; Mochitsura Hashimoto, the Japanese sub commander who sinks Indianapolis but later joins the battle to exonerate McVay; and William Toti, the captain of the modern-day submarine Indianapolis, who helps the survivors fight to vindicate their captain. A sweeping saga of survival, sacrifice, justice, and love, Indianapolis stands as both groundbreaking naval history and spellbinding narrative—and brings the ship and her heroic crew back to full, vivid, unforgettable life. It is the definitive account of one of the most remarkable episodes in American history.