An improvised game of cricket was often the circuit-breaker Harry and his team needed after the tension of operations. He began a tradition of organising matches wherever he was sent, whether it was in the mountains of East Timor with a fugitive rebel leader, or on the dusty streets of Baghdad, or in exposed Forward Operating Bases in the hills of Afghanistan. Soldiers, locals and even visiting politicians played in these spontaneous yet often bridge-building games.As part of the tradition, Harry also started to take a cricket bat with him on operational tours, eleven of them in total. They'd often go outside the wire with him and end up signed by those he met or fought alongside. These eleven bats form the basis for Harry's extraordinary memoir. It's a book about combat, and what it takes to serve in one of the world's most elite formations. It's a book about the toll that war takes on soldiers and their loved ones. And it's a book about the healing power of cricket, and how a game can break down borders in even the most desperate of circumstances.

    The death toll was like nothing experienced before, and it is estimated that over 11 million soldiers were killed, wounded, or went missing, and many of those bodies have never been found. Regardless of how people remember the First World War, and whether or not they romanticize the life of a soldier on the front lines, it is important that the world never forgets this brutal and bloody conflict. The tumult and chaos that remained in the wake of the First World War had far-reaching and devastating consequences, not just for Europe and the survivors of the war, but for the entire world. The ruins of Europe provided a fertile breeding ground for fierce nationalism, which led to the rise of the Third Reich and allowed the evil of Adolf Hitler to go unchecked for far too long. In World War 1: A Captivating Guide to the First World War, Including Battle Stories from the Eastern and Western Front and How the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 Impacted the Rise of Nazi Germany, you will discover topics such as The Fatal Shots That Set the Stage for War The Western Front and the First Battle of Marne War in the Trenches The Eastern Front and the Battle of Tannenberg The Battle of Ypres and the Christmas Truce Second Battle of Ypres and the Introduction of Chemical Warfare Chemical Warfare on the Western Front My Boy Jack, the Very Human Cost of the First World War The Gallipoli Campaign The Battle of Jutland The Decline of the Russian Empire The Battle of Verdun The Battle of the Somme America Joins the War The Final Days of the War and the Treaty of Versailles World Leaders Who Played a Pivotal Role in the First World War And much, much more! So if you want to learn more about World War 1, scroll up and click the "add to cart" button!

    Horton's experiences being thrown into heavy combat after just a few months of training. Recommended reading for all. Survival against all odds - in the trenches of Vietnam - I still can't believe they get out of there alive - couldn't put it down. This first person narrative of hand-to-hand combat in the trenches of Vietnam left me scared, glad to be alive and eternally grateful to those who died for my freedom Could not put it down - A friend had mentioned this book to me. Once I received it I could not put it down. Jerry Horton joined the army to simply be able to afford to go to college. 40 years later he has a PHD and multiple degrees but they were earned at a heavy price for this patriot. Jerry shares his experiences in Vietnam in an articulate, honest and direct assessment of his time in Vietnam, the men he served with and the horrors of war. Incredible story of leadership and survival. Shake N Bake Sergeant aka Instant NCO - Jerry Horton absolutely nailed the life of a "Shake 'n Bake" Sergeant when he tells the story of dedicated soldiers trained at Fort Benning, GA and then follows them to Vietnam. This book is not only absolutely dead on accurate but gives the reader every aspect of what it was like to experience the war as a Shake 'n Bake Sergeant. Instant NCO's were trained for only one reason - to lead United States soldiers into combat and they did it with heroic efficiency and effectiveness with limited resources. This book is not just a home run - it is a Grand Slam. Interesting, accurate, full of suspense and you can't put it down. This book should be required reading for everyone so they can understand that Freedom is not Free. There is a cost and sometimes that cost is heavy. Horton brings it all across in a nonstop action format. It is a great read! If you really want to know what it was like...This has to be the most realistic 'must read' book to come out of the VN war. If you ever read any book about this war - this is the one to read. You won't put it down and you won't ever forget it! From the book's review by the late COL(R) David Hackworth (most-decorated Vietnam veteran): "In 1968, the U.S. Army was running out of sergeants in Vietnam. Throughout military history, as least as far back as the Revolutionary War, sergeants were the backbone of the Army. This shortage of sergeants meant disaster in Vietnam. The NCO candidate school was created to solve this serious problem by doing one thing - train soldiers to lead men in combat. It was modeled after the Officer's candidate school but streamlined to meet this critical need for leaders in half the time. Graduates were known by most as "Shake 'n Bake Sergeants" or "Instant NCOs" since they got their rank fast from going to school. This book is the first time this important part of American history has ever been published. It is the first time anyone has given credit to Shake 'n Bake Sergeants - a credit that they so greatly deserved. At the time there were many who said they would fail. It seemed many did not respect them even though all were destined for front line positions. The book documents how they proved their worth over and over again as front line infantry leaders even though for thirty some years their sacrifices have been unknown." An unforgettable mixture of vivid realism, poignant sadness and unexpected humor. Once you begin reading The Shake 'n Bake Sergeant, you will find it hard to put it down. See www.shakenbakesergeant.com.

    As a result, snipers are regarded as the elite of their units and their skills command the ungrudging respect of their fellows - and the enemy. The Author is one such man who recently served a full tour of duty with 1st Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. James describes the highs and lows of almost daily front line action experienced by our soldiers deployed on active service in arguably the most dangerous area of the world. As part of the Battle Groups crack Mobile Operations Group, Jamess mission was to liquidate as many Taliban as possible. The reader experiences sniper tactics and actions, whether in ambush or quick pre-planned strikes, amid the ever present lethal danger of IEDs. His book, the first to be written by a trained sniper in Afghanistan, reveals the psychological pressures and awesome life-and-death responsibility of his role and, in particular, the deadly cat-and-mouse games with the enemy snipers intent on their own kills. These involved the clinical killing of targets at ranges of 1,000 meters or greater. Sniper in Helmand is a thrilling action-packed, yet very human, account of both front line service in the intense Afghanistan war and first-hand sniper action. Andy McNab inspired James to join the army and has written a moving foreword.

    The author describes how, with no French language ability, he approached recruiters for the French Foreign Legion in Paris and the demanding selection process that followed. When he was accepted, he and other prospective legionnaires were sent to Southern France to begin the harsh recruit training course. The mix of different nationalities and backgrounds among his fellows was enormous. New members are traditionally allowed to change their identities - the author chose to alter his age becoming 28 not 38! Elite paratrooper training followed in Corsica before the author earned his 'wings'.The FFL is never far from the front line and we read of challenging active service in former French colonies in Africa as well as during the First Gulf War, evicting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and operations in Bosnia and Sarajevo.This is a completely authentic book that lifts the veil of mystery and myth and reveals much about the realities of service in the Foreign Legion. The author is not given to exaggeration - there is no need for it. A gripping read.

    Birthplace of the Taliban decades earlier, this fertile region had since become Afghanistan's most deadly turf. It would soon turn deadlier still. Advised in the night by his intelligence officers that the Taliban had secretly amassed for a full-scale military assault, Fraser knew it would fall to him, his Canadians and their allies to avoid the wholesale slaughter of NATO troops, keep the Taliban from laying siege to Kandahar and restore control of the south of the country to a newly formed, democratic Afghan government.     The odds were solidy against Fraser's forces. The Taliban knew every millimetre of their own terrain. During the months of secret manoeuvres they had stocked every farmhouse, school, grape hut and tunnel with weapons and ammunition. They had drilled Soviet-era landmines into all of the marijuana and poppy fields, and dug IEDs into every roadway. Protected from detection by corrupt officials, their sophisticated warfare schools had successfully readied an army of zealous fighters to attack and fight to the death. And now their top commanders were poised to launch decisive military operations against freshly arrived troops who had never seen combat.     The bloodiest battle in NATO's history was about to begin.

    Army’s 10th Mountain Division, whose elite soldiers broke the last line of German defenses in Italy’s mountains in 1945, spearheading the Allied advance to the Alps and final victory.At the start of World War II, the US Army had two cavalry divisions—and no mountain troops. The German Wehrmacht, in contrast, had many well-trained and battle-hardened mountain divisions, some of whom by 1943 blocked the Allied advance in the Italian campaign. Starting from scratch, the US Army developed a unique military fighting force, the 10th Mountain Division, drawn from the ranks of civilian skiers, mountaineers, and others with outdoor experience. The resulting mix of Ivy League students, park rangers, Olympic skiers, and European refugees formed the first specialized alpine fighting force in US history. By the time it deployed to Italy at the beginning of 1945, this ragtag group had coalesced into a tight-knit unit. In the months that followed, at a terrible cost, they spearheaded the Allied drive in Italy to final victory.Ranging from the ski slopes of Colorado to the towering cliffs of the Italian Alps, The Winter Army is a saga of an unlikely band of soldiers forged in the heat of combat into a brotherhood whose legacy lives on in US mountain fighters to this day.

    How and why, then, did the Germans prolong the barbaric conflict for three and a half more years?In The German War, acclaimed historian Nicholas Stargardt draws on an extraordinary range of primary source materials—personal diaries, court records, and military correspondence—to answer this question. He offers an unprecedented portrait of wartime Germany, bringing the hopes and expectations of the German people—from infantrymen and tank commanders on the Eastern front to civilians on the home front—to vivid life. While most historians identify the German defeat at Stalingrad as the moment when the average German citizen turned against the war effort, Stargardt demonstrates that the Wehrmacht in fact retained the staunch support of the patriotic German populace until the bitter end.Astonishing in its breadth and humanity, The German War is a groundbreaking new interpretation of what drove the Germans to fight—and keep fighting—for a lost cause.

    I ran for about 70 yards carrying with me all the Lewis gun things I had brought up and dropped breathless into a shell hole headlong onto a German who had been dead for months.’Harold Drinkwater was not supposed to go to war. He was told he was half an inch too short. But, determined to fight for king and country, he found a battalion that would take him and was soon on his way to the trenches of the Somme. As the war dragged on, Harry saw most of the men he joined up with killed around him. But, somehow, he survived.Soldiers were forbidden from keeping a diary so Harry wrote his in secret, recording the horrendous conditions and constant fear, as well as his pleasure at receiving his officer's commission, the joy of his men when they escaped the trenches for the Italian Front and the trench raid for which he was awarded the Military Cross. Harry writes with such immediacy it is easy to forget that a hundred years have passed. He is by turns wry, exhausted, annoyed, resigned and often amazed to be alive. Never before published, Harry's War is a moving testament to one man's struggle to keep his humanity in the face of unimaginable violence.

    There were 20,000 Japanese troops on Saipan, but the US obliterated the opposition after a horrific all-arms campaign. The sudden silence only indicated it was now Tinian’s turn.By the time the US 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions switched their sights to Tinian, the island had already been bombarded for a month; meantime both sides had learned their lessons from the previous island-hopping invasions. The Americans had learned the arts of recon, deception, plus preliminary firepower so as not to suffer the huge casualties they’d suffered at Saipan, Guadalcanal, and Tarawa; the Japanese, for their part, had learned not to contest US strength on beaches but to draw it further inland where terrain and bomb-proof fortifications could assist.When the battle for Tinian finally took place the US acted with great skill. Historian Samuel Elliot Morrison called it “the most perfectly executed amphibious operation of the entire war.” Nevertheless, the Japanese resisted with their usual stubbornness, and the already decimated US Marines suffered hundreds of more casualties.During the battle Japanese shore batteries were able to riddle the battleship Colorado, killing scores, plus make multiple hits on a destroyer, killing its captain. On the island itself the US used napalm for the first time, paving the way for Marines painstakingly rooting out strongpoints. One last Banzai attack signaled the end to enemy resistance, as Marines fought toe-to-toe with their antagonists in the dark.In the end some 8,000 Japanese were killed, with only 300 surrenders, plus some others who hid out for years after the war. But those Japanese who resisted perhaps performed a greater service than they knew. After Tinian was secured the US proceeded to build the biggest airport in the world on that island—home to hundreds of B-29 Superfortresses. Among these, just over a year later, were the Enola Gay and Boxcar, which with their atomic bombs would quickly bring the Japanese homeland itself to its knees.

    But in the aftermath of the assassination in Sarajevo, the powers of Europe were sliding inexorably toward war, and not even the Middle East could escape the vast and enduring consequences of one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. The Great War spelled the end of the Ottomans, unleashing powerful forces that would forever change the face of the Middle East.In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story of the region's crucial role in the conflict. Bolstered by German money, arms, and military advisors, the Ottomans took on the Russian, British, and French forces, and tried to provoke Jihad against the Allies in their Muslim colonies. Unlike the static killing fields of the Western Front, the war in the Middle East was fast-moving and unpredictable, with the Turks inflicting decisive defeats on the Entente in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Gaza before the tide of battle turned in the Allies' favor. The great cities of Baghdad, Jerusalem, and, finally, Damascus fell to invading armies before the Ottomans agreed to an armistice in 1918.The postwar settlement led to the partition of Ottoman lands between the victorious powers, and laid the groundwork for the ongoing conflicts that continue to plague the modern Arab world. A sweeping narrative of battles and political intrigue from Gallipoli to Arabia, The Fall of the Ottomans is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the Great War and the making of the modern Middle East.

    Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world.Miranda Carter uses the cousins' correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell the tragicomic story of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world that was often preposterously out of kilter with its times, struggling to stay in command of politics and world events as history overtook it. George, Nicholas and Wilhelm is a brilliant and sometimes darkly hilarious portrait of these men--damaged, egotistical Wilhelm; quiet, stubborn Nicholas; and anxious, dutiful George--and their lives, foibles and obsessions, from tantrums to uniforms to stamp collecting. It is also alive with fresh, subtle portraits of other familiar figures: Queen Victoria--grandmother to two of them, grandmother-in-law to the third--whose conservatism and bullying obsession with family left a dangerous legacy; and Edward VII, the playboy "arch-vulgarian" who turned out to have a remarkable gift for international relations and the theatrics of mass politics. At the same time, Carter weaves through their stories a riveting account of the events that led to World War I, showing how the personal and the political interacted, sometimes to devastating effect.For all three men the war would be a disaster that destroyed forever the illusion of their close family relationships, with any sense of peace and harmony shattered in a final coda of murder, betrayal and abdication.

    In the three-and-a-half hours of the battle, they sustained 8,246 casualties. The Germans suffered no casualties at all. Why did the British Army fail so spectacularly? What can be said of the leadership of generals? And most importantly, could it have all been prevented? In The Donkeys, eminent military historian Alan Clark scrutinises the major battles of that fateful year and casts a steady and revealing light on those in High Command - French, Rawlinson, Watson and Haig among them - whose orders resulted in the virtual destruction of the old professional British Army. Clark paints a vivid and convincing picture of how brave soldiers, the lions, were essentially sent to their deaths by incompetent and indifferent officers – the donkeys. ‘An eloquent and painful book... Clark leaves the impression that vanity and stupidity were the main ingredients of the massacres of 1915. He writes searingly and unforgettably’ Evening Standard

    In a compelling narrative, Marlantes weaves riveting accounts of his combat experiences with thoughtful analysis, self-examination and his readings -- from Homer to the Mahabharata to Jung. He talks frankly about how he is haunted by the face of the young North Vietnamese soldier he killed at close quarters and how he finally finds a way to make peace with his past. Marlantes discusses the daily contradictions that warriors face in the grind of war, where each battle requires them to take life or spare life, and where they enter a state he likens to the fervor of religious ecstasy.Just as Matterhorn is already being acclaimed as a classic of war literature, What It Is Like To Go To War is set to become required reading for anyone -- soldier or civilian -- interested in this visceral and all too essential part of the human experience.

    Later we immerse ourselves with the author in the intrigues, scandals and humor of a large corporate boardroom in South Africa where longevity of service was as fleeting as the mists on the Matabele plains.