Book picks similar to
Dead Ringer by William Cone
fiction-historical
historical
history
world-war-ii
The Chance Reilly Series
Patrick Lindsay - 2019
In his quest to establish a new life for himself, he will encounter challenges at every turn. Natural disasters, a lost gold shipment, old enemies and outlaws will all stand in his way as he tries to build a future with next-door neighbor Kate. When he's fighting for family and friends, Chance is a force to be reckoned with.
Highlanders To Lust For
Alisa Adams - 2019
3 wild lasses. Thousands of readers. A must-read box set.
Deception, combat, and desire await you in this boxset starring some of the most formidable men and impassioned ladies the Scottish Highlands has ever seen.
Each story transports you into the world of the Medieval Scottish Highlands--an unforgettable land of lush, verdant hills, babbling burns, and the sweet scent of heather. There you will be enraptured by 3 irresistible and exhilarating love stories like no other with no cheating, no cliffhangers, and a guaranteed happily ever after to leave you satisfied.This insatiable boxset includes:Highlander's Fate - Feisty and beautiful Alexa Montgomery swore never to let a man conquer her. Little does she know that from a ship coming from across the sea could alter her destiny forever.Highlander's Secret Nun - Handsome Gregor Carmichael committed himself to the life of monkhood but struggles to avoid the sins of the flesh. Yet, when a beautiful, out-of-place nun is thrown into his path, Gregor may find that the one place he believed to be safe from temptation could be his very undoing.Highlander's Imprisoned Love - The young beauty Kyla Montgomery has dreamed of finding true love for as long as she can remember. However, never once did she expect to find it hiding in the dungeon of the barbarians who kidnapped her.
"Highlanders To Lust For" has over 240,000 words packed with romance, action, and emotion set on the beautiful backdrop of the Scottish Highlands.
Voices of the Waffen SS
Gerry Villani - 2019
They were the forces that were feared by the enemy and praised by their allies. The two lightning bolts on the collar tabs and on their helmets were the mark of the soldiers of the New Order believing in the final victory of the Reich. The Waffen SS grew into a huge force of thirty-eight combat divisions comprising over 950,000 men. In the Nuremberg Trials, the Waffen SS was condemned as part of a criminal organisation, and therefore Waffen SS veterans were denied many of the rights afforded other German combat veterans. However the Nuremberg Trials exempted conscripts from that condemnation.On several occasions, the Waffen SS was criticised by Heer commanders for their reckless disregard for casualties while taking or holding objectives. However, the Waffen SS divisions eventually proved themselves to a skeptical Heer as capable soldiers.The poor initial performance of the Waffen SS units was mainly due to the emphasis on political indoctrination rather than proper military training before the war. This was largely due to the shortage of experienced NCOs, who preferred to stay with the regular army. Despite this, the experience gained from the Polish, French and Balkan campaigns and the peculiarly egalitarian form of training soon turned Waffen SS units into elite formations.These are the stories of the men that once were part of this elite force. In this book you get a bit of history about the SS and Waffen SS, the war crimes committed by them and against them, their training, but most important of all you'll get the stories from veterans of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, Das Reich, Totenkopf, Wiking, Hohenstaufen, Maria Theresia, Langemarck, SS-Fallschirmjägerbataillon 500 and Luftwaffe Fallschirmjäger, Italien, Wallonie, Nederland, 1st Estonian, and the notorious Dirlewanger Brigade. Seven decades after the war they finally have a voice...
The Hawaiians: by Steve Stelle
Steve Stelle - 2014
When a group of young Americans jump ship and start the first surf camp in a downtrodden and practically deserted Waikiki, Head Missionary Hiram Bingham becomes apoplectic with rage. A cast of memorable characters fill this novel with many plot twists and ideas that are as relevant today as they were almost two hundred years ago. In 1824 sixteen year old, orphaned William Goode was put aboard ship in New Orleans as an apprentice seaman against his will. A young man with unique abilites, he began an adventure that took him to Hawaii, forging friendships and making enemies along the way. Spanning more than a decade, this fast paced narrative is written in a blend of James Michener and James Patterson, full of accurate history and a rousing ensemble of characters presented in a page turning style. The Calvinist missionaries want to make sure no one is having any fun while William and his friends just want to work their little farm of taro patches and fish ponds and go surfing free from religious oppression. From the beaches of early Waikiki to the chilly winters of Boston, this novel moves back and forth, around the Horn and across the vast Pacific, with enterprising surfers, a beautiful Hawaiian princess, runaway slaves, and a renegade priest. You will fall in love with Hawaii, fall in love with the characters, and see Hawaiian history in a whole new way.
Torpedo Strike: A Novel of the Fleet Air Arm in the Mediterranean, 1940-41 (WWII Action Thriller Series Book 1)
John Wingate - 1964
Never Say Goodbye: A True Story
Robert Anstey - 2016
While this evil war has torn half the world apart, it has also pulled half the world together. Soldiers both men and women, under American and British flags, gather on the coast of England just days before D-Day. Four friends become brothers and face their greatest fears together. With the coastline packed with ships, and the sky full of planes, hundreds of thousands of soldiers prepare to stand in the crossroads of history. In an impossible moment in time, a young British woman meets an American soldier as he prepares to embark on his treacherous journey. He promised to return and she promised to wait. Join these courageous young men and women as they struggle to find the courage they never knew they had and the future they feared they'd never see.
Flakhelfer to Grenadier: Memoir of a Boy Soldier, 1943-1945
Karl H. Schlesier - 2014
Students were to arrive in batteries on February 18 1943. After serving from one year (those born in 1926) to thirteen months (those born in 1927), the boys were transferred into the Reich Labor Service and from there into the armed forces. They were replaced by boys born in 1928 who served to the end of the war. About 200,000 boys became Flakhelfer. Most were called up at sixteen, but many, like the author, Karl Heinz Schlesier, were only fifteen. The boys served in batteries of light and heavy flak. Although the government insisted school programs continue for Flakhelfer, the effort was a sham, especially where heavy bombing occurred. Schlesier, a student of Rethel Gymnasium in Dusseldorf, served as Flakhelfer in the regions that suffered the most numerous and heaviest air raids of the war in the Rhineland (Dusseldorf) and the Ruhr (Recklinghausen). His is a coming of age story in a world gone mad, where a teenage boy launched shrapnel into a sky filled with bombers, where Christmas-tree-like flares marked cities about to burn, where working beside Russian POWs, protecting industries with slave labor, courting a girl among bombed-out ruins, and spending leave with family hiding in claustrophobic bomb shelters was unremarkable, as was finally being thrown, unprepared, into a disintegrating frontline only fifty kilometers from his childhood home. The memoir is based solely on Schlesier's diary notes and memories of that period. He has consciously avoided including what he learned after the war. His views, opinions, and interpretations of events are from inside the Germany of that time. If some are inconvenient today, they mirror the chaos of the world he experienced. Then, to live or not to live was accidental. Schlesier wrote this memoir as an old man in response to a granddaughter's question about what he did in the war. This is his answer. Perhaps, he also gives a voice to the silent generation of boys born in Germany in 1926 and 1927. This generation has been silent because the horror it knew pales in comparison to the horror of the Holocaust."
The Long Range Desert Group 1940-1945: Providence Their Guide
David Lloyd Owen - 1980
This classic insider's account has been updated and supplemented with rare photographs from the LRDG collection in the Imperial War Museum.
The Rifle: Combat Stories from America's Last WWII Veterans, Told Through an M1 Garand
Andrew Biggio - 2021
Marine, Andrew Biggio, who returned home from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, full of questions about the price of war. He found answers from those who survived the costliest war of all -- WWII veterans. It began when Biggio bought a 1945 M1 Garand Rifle, the most common rifle used in WWII, to honor his great uncle, a U.S. Army soldier who died on the hills of the Italian countryside. When Biggio showed the gun to his neighbor, WWII veteran Corporal Joseph Drago, it unlocked memories Drago had kept unspoken for 50 years. On the spur of the moment, Biggio asked Drago to sign the rifle. Thus began this Marine’s mission to find as many WWII veterans as he could, get their signatures on the rifle, and document their stories. For two years, Biggio traveled across the country to interview America’s last-living WWII veterans. Each time he put the M1 Garand Rifle in their hands, their eyes lit up with memories triggered by holding the weapon that had been with them every step of the war. With each visit and every story told to Biggio, the veterans signed their names to the rifle. 96 signatures now cover that rifle, each a reminder of the price of war and the courage of our soldiers.
Winter Men
Jesper Bugge Kold - 2014
Karl, a former soldier and successful businessman, dutifully answers the call to defend his country, while contemplative academic Gerhard is coerced into informing for the Gestapo. Soon the brothers are serving in the SS, and as Hitler’s hateful agenda brings about unspeakable atrocities, they find themselves with innocent blood on their hands.Following Germany’s eventual defeat, Karl and Gerhard are haunted by their insurmountable guilt, and each seeks a way to escape from wounds that will never heal. They survived the war and its revelation of systematic horrors, but can they survive the unshakable knowledge of their own culpability?
Across the Winding River
Aimie K. Runyan - 2020
His only request of his daughter is to go through the long-forgotten box of memorabilia from his days as a medic on the western front. Then, among his wartime souvenirs, Beth finds a photograph of her father with an adoring and beautiful stranger—a photograph worth a thousand questions.It was 1944 when Max was drawn into the underground resistance by the fearless German wife of a Nazi officer. Together, she and Max were willing to risk everything for what they believed was right. Ahead of them lay a dangerous romance, a dream of escape, and a destiny over which neither had control.But Max isn’t alone in his haunting remembrances of war. In a nearby private care home is a fragile German-born woman with her own past to share. Only when the two women meet does Beth realize how much more to her father there is to know, all the ways in which his heart still breaks, and the closure he needs to heal it.
The Silver Music Box
Mina Baites - 2017
For Paul, with love. Jewish silversmith Johann Blumenthal engraved those words on his most exquisite creation, a singing filigree bird inside a tiny ornamented box. He crafted this treasure for his young son before leaving to fight in a terrible war to honor his beloved country—a country that would soon turn against his own family.A half century later, Londoner Lilian Morrison inherits the box after the death of her parents. Though the silver is tarnished and dented, this much-loved treasure is also a link to an astonishing past. With the keepsake is a letter from Lilian’s mother, telling her daughter for the first time that she was adopted. Too young to remember, Lilian was rescued from a Germany in the grips of the Holocaust. Now only she can trace what happened to a family who scattered to the reaches of the world, a family forced to choose between their heritage and their dreams for the future.
A Doctor's Occupation, The dramatic true story of life in Nazi-occupied Jersey
John Lewis - 1982
Possessed of great warmth, wit and, above all a humanity which informs every word in this extraordinary account of Jersey life during the German Occupation, he served the island community with unfailing resourcefulness and not a little courage for five long and stressful years. However, despite the awfulness of the time, Dr Lewis infuses his account of it with an irrepressible joie de vivre which is utterly delightful. It is an uplifting story of winning against the odds, by turns hysterically funny and then unbearably sad. Above all it has an immediacy which takes the reader right into the heart of the Occupation, you can smell the fear, feel the pain, suffer the loss, sense the victory as do the characters in this history and they are many and varied. You will meet the good Jersey folk like the brave and tragic Mrs Gould from St Ouens and the not so good Jersey folk in the shape of the collaborators and informers or the “Jerry bags” like the exotic Ginger Lou. Here too you will meet some of the most wretched victims of the war, the Russian Todt workers who were hidden and helped by the locals and of course the many sorts of Germans who made up the occupying force. It is a story of compelling interest.I had the good fortune to meet John Lewis and his wife in 1991 at his lovely Jersey home. He talked for hours that seemed like minutes of his life during the war years. He was just as I’d hoped he would be - endlessly kind, witty and understanding. I came away from that meeting feeling happy, elated and much wiser, as you will surely do after reading of the Doctor’s Occupation. John Nettles
The Third Reich: Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany, World War II And The Last German Empire
Frank D. Kennedy - 2015
This empire dominates western Europe from 800 until 1806, when it is defeated by Napoleon. The Second Reich: All of Germany is united behind Prussia under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck, victor of the Franco-Prussian War. Only Germany's defeat in World War I can break the power of the second German empire.What was the Third Reich?In 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany after convincing other members of the Reichstag that the Nazi party was better for the country than their feared rivals, the Communists. Within the year, the President of the German Republic will be dead, and Hitler will declare himself supreme leader of Germany.But how did it happen?The Third Reich: Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany, World War II and The Last German Empire takes you on a guided tour of German history for the last thousand years. You'll study the constitution of the Weimar republic and the Treaty of Versailles, and come to understand why Hitler believed it was crucial to build a new Nazi empire that was second to no one other nation in Europe in terms of military development. You'll learn how Hitler used the rhetoric of racism and nationalism to transform himself from a democratically elected member of government into a dictator whose word was law.Most importantly, you'll learn how those changes paved the way to World War II and the atrocities of the Holocaust.
A Pair of Silver Wings
James Holland - 2006
And for over half a century he had, for the most part, managed to put the memories of those years out of his mind. But fifty years on, he is alone - a widower - with a strained relationship with his only son, and a career behind him that has brought him respect but little affection.In 1995, Britain is celebrating the anniversary of the end of the war, and Edward finds himself forced to confront the tragedy he suffered during those years. Embarking on a journey of self-discovery and personal redemption, Edward travels from England to Malta and then to Italy, and in doing so comes face-to-face with the idealistic young man he once was, and the devastated and traumatised 23-year-old he was to become.Following his experiences over the skies of England in 1941, through the dark days of the Siege of Malta, to the partisan struggle in Italy, A Pair of Silver Wings is a story of friendship, love and the terrible legacy of war, exploring universal themes of grief and redemption, and one man's quest to heal the scars of the past.