Tank Commander: From the Fall of France to the Defeat of Germany: The Memoirs of Bill Close


Bill Close - 2013
    He was wounded three times. He finished the war as one of the most experienced and resourceful of British tank commanders, and in later life, he set down his wartime experiences in graphic detail. His book is not only an extraordinary memoir; it is also a compelling account of the exploits of the Royal Tank Regiment throughout the conflict. As a record of the day-to-day experience of the tank crew of seventy-five years ago--of the conditions they faced and the battles they fought--it has rarely been equaled.

The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries, 1939 - 1955


John Colville - 1985
    An intimate and unvarnished view of Winston Churchill at his best.

Lion Rampant: The Memoirs of an Infantry Officer from D-Day to the Rhineland


Robert Woollcombe - 1970
    Vividly evoking the confusion, horror and comradeship of war - from the killing fields of Normandy bocage, through house-to-house fighting in shattered Flemish towns, to the final Rhine crossing - Lion Rampant is a powerful, authentic and moving story, telling with extraordinary clarity how the author, his fellow officers and the men of his company lived through one of the most bitter campaigns in history.

Beneath a Scarlet Sky


Mark T. Sullivan - 2017
    He’s a normal Italian teenager—obsessed with music, food, and girls—but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior.In an attempt to protect him, Pino’s parents force him to enlist as a German soldier—a move they think will keep him out of combat. But after Pino is injured, he is recruited at the tender age of eighteen to become the personal driver for Adolf Hitler’s left hand in Italy, General Hans Leyers, one of the Third Reich’s most mysterious and powerful commanders.Now, with the opportunity to spy for the Allies inside the German High Command, Pino endures the horrors of the war and the Nazi occupation by fighting in secret, his courage bolstered by his love for Anna and for the life he dreams they will one day share.Fans of All the Light We Cannot See, The Nightingale, and Unbroken will enjoy this riveting saga of history, suspense, and love.

Supernova in the East IV


Dan Carlin
    

Woodbine Red Leader: A P-51 Mustang Ace in the Mediterranean Theater


George G. Loving - 2003
    His first fighter was the famed Spitfire, hero of the Battle of Britain. By 1943, however, it was obsolescent and did not match up well against the first-line German Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs. Yet Loving survived 101 combat missions flying the Spitfire. In the spring of 1944, Loving’s 31st Fighter Group started flying P-51 Mustangs and was transferred to the new Fifteenth Air Force to escort heavy-bomber formations on long-range strategic strikes across southern Europe, including southeastern Germany. In the flak-filled skies over Ploesti, Vienna, Bucharest, Munich, and Stuttgart, where a number of the war’s fiercest air battles took place, Lieutenant Loving flew head-to-head against some of the Luftwaffe’s top fighter aces.By the time George Loving completed his 151st, and final, combat mission on August 21, 1944, he had risen from a lowly second lieutenant and untested wingman to captain, group leader, and Mustang ace. Loving’s gripping account captures the savage action he experienced in all its intensity.

The Road to Station X: From Debutante Ball to Fighter-Plane Factory to Bletchley Park, a Memoir of One Woman's Journey Through World War Two


Sarah Baring - 2020
    Only a few years later, at the height of World War Two, she was working alongside some of the greatest minds of Britain in their code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park.How did she end up in the top-secret world of cyphers and codes?And what did she do within the confines of Bletchley’s Hut 4 that allowed the British Navy to be always one step ahead of their foes?Like many young men and women across all levels of British society, the outbreak of war in 1939 dramatically altered the course of Sarah’s life.Knowing that she could not stand by while others were enlisting, she left her position in Vogue magazine and signed up to work as a telephonist at an Air Raid Precautions Centre before working in a fighter plane factory to do her bit. The women that she worked alongside were unlike those she had known in her high society life and opened her eyes to a completely different world.Yet, after just a few months, she was requested to leave the factory behind and was thrust into the world of intelligence, code-breaking and huge computers, rubbing shoulders with awkward geniuses like Alan Turing.

The Lost Airman: A True Story of Escape from Nazi Occupied France


Seth Meyerowitz - 2016
    He was one of only two men on the B-24 Liberator known as “Harmful Lil Armful” who escaped death or immediate capture on the ground.   After fleeing the wreck, Arthur knocked on the door of an isolated farmhouse, whose owners hastily took him in. Fortunately, his hosts not only despised the Nazis but had a tight connection to the French resistance group Morhange and its founder, Marcel Taillandier. Arthur and Taillandier formed an improbable bond as the resistance leader arranged for Arthur’s transfers among safe houses in southern France, shielding him from the Gestapo.   Based on recently declassified material, exclusive personal interviews, and extensive research into the French Resistance, The Lost Airman tells the tense and riveting story of Arthur’s trying months in Toulouse—masquerading as a deaf mute and working with a downed British pilot to evade the Nazis—and of his hair-raising journey to freedom involving a perilous trek over the Pyrenees and a voyage aboard a fishing boat with U-boats lurking below and Luftwaffe fighters looming above. With photographs and maps included, this is a never-before-told true story of endurance, perseverance, and escape during World War II.

Fighting with the Filthy Thirteen: The World War II Story of Jack Womer--Ranger and Paratrooper


Jack Womer - 2012
    Now, Jack Womer--one of the squad's integral members and probably its best soldier--delivers his long-awaited memoir.Originally a member of the 29th Rangers, which was suddenly dissolved, Womer asked for transfer to another elite unit, the Screaming Eagles, where room was found for him among the division's most miscreant squad of brawlers, drunkards, and goof-offs.Beginning on June 6, 1944, however, the Filthy Thirteen began proving themselves more a menace to the German Army than they had been to their own officers and the good people of England, embarking on a year of ferocious combat at the very tip of the Allied advance in Europe.In this work, with the help of Stephen DeVito, Jack provides an amazingly frank look at close-quarters combat in Europe, as well as the almost surreal experience of Dust-Bowl-era GI's entering country after country in their grapple with the Wehrmacht, finally ending up in Hitler's mountaintop lair in Germany itself."Jack Womer's story is entertaining, honest and forthright, just like the man. He does not shrink from describing what actually happened although occasionally one suspects just a hint of artistic license. However, there is nothing which is unbelievable given the chaotic and random nature of war." --Army Rumour Service

World War II Love Stories


Gill Paul - 2014
    The atrocities unleashed by the Nazi regime were unprecedented; families were torn apart, millions were murdered, and a cloud of fear cast over the world. But somewhere, love and hope remained ignited. World War II Love Stories tells the unforgettable stories of those couples brought together by war. They are enduring tales of great love, intense passion, and often tragedy, but most of all they are tales that celebrate the human spirit at its time of greatest trial.

We Escaped: A Family's Flight from Holland During WWII


Alexander H. ter Weele - 2015
    seasoned with the terror of war. We Escaped plunges the reader into the extraordinary World War II escapades of an ordinary couple and their children as they first escape from Nazi-occupied Holland; and then deal with the war years by leavening danger and stress with the joy and love of everyday family life. It is the song and dance of The Sound of Music seasoned with the terror of guns and blood. The story begins in the Netherlands, a peaceful nation protected by a treaty of neutrality and kinship with Hitler's Germany. The calm is shattered by the cacophony and confusion of battle as, under the guns of panzers, German troops overrun Holland's lines. The ter Weele family's subsequent exodus from their home is told from the points of view of the father, Lieutenant Carl ter Weele, a Dutch reservist called up to defend the Grebbeberg; his wife Margery, an American citizen raised in Boston, who delivers her third child in a hospital not far from the Grebbeberg as war threatens; their oldest son, six-year-old Jan, whose dark eyes and hair lead Nazis to suspect he is Jewish; and their second son, Alex, a blond and fair-skinned imp, who at the age of two charms a German border guard into allowing the family to cross into Switzerland. Within weeks of Germany's conquest of Holland, the family has to flee the dragnet of the Gestapo, which is arresting all Dutch military officers. As far as Carl can see, the only way out is through Germany, and from there it's a tortuous and terrifying journey through Switzerland, Vichy France, Spain, and Portugal, with the Gestapo a threat at every turn.

Spymaster: The Life of Britain's Most Decorated Cold War Spy and Head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield


Martin Pearce - 2016
    Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (commonly known as the SIS or MI6), he was the first Chief to be named and pictured in the press, and often alleged by them to be the model for the screen versions of both Ian Fleming’s M and John Le Carré’s George Smiley.This major study of Oldfield’s life portrays one of the UK’s most important and complex spies of the Cold War era. He was the first Chief of MI6 that hadn’t come from an upper-class background or studied at Eton or Oxbridge. Rather, he was a farmer’s son from a provincial grammar school who found himself accidentally plunged into the world of espionage by the outbreak of the Second World War. Oldfield was our man in Washington at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of JFK, and was largely responsible for keeping Britain out of the Vietnam War.This is the fascinating life story of Maurice Oldfield, written by his nephew Martin Pearce, who remembers asking his uncle what he did for a job. 'Oh it’s quite boring really, dear boy. I’m a kind of security guard at embassies,' was the reply...

The Lady Is a Spy: Virginia Hall, World War II Hero of the French Resistance (Scholastic Focus)


Don Mitchell - 2019
    Which was dangerous enough, but as fighting erupted across the continent, instead of returning home, she headed to France.In a country divided by freedom and fascism, Virginia was determined to do her part for the Allies. An ordinary woman from Baltimore, MD, she dove into the action, first joining a French ambulance unit and later becoming an undercover agent for the British Office of Strategic Services. Working as part of the intelligence network, she made her way to Vichy, coordinating Resistance movements, sabotaging the Nazis, and rescuing Allied soldiers. She passed in plain sight of the enemy, and soon found herself at the top of their most wanted list. But Virginia cleverly evaded discovery and death, often through bold feats and daring escapes. Her covert operations, capture of Nazi soldiers, and risky work as a wireless telegraph operator greatly contributed to the Allies' eventual win.

World War II: The Resistance


C. David North - 2015
    It was not until 1942 that widely dispersed underground organizations would band together to form a united opposition to the occupying Germans. It was not until then that resistance would become the Resistance - a disciplined multi-national movement that would play a significant part in the outcome of World War II. In each occupied nation, resistance groups would grow, gathering and sending information to London, planning increasingly complex sabotage operations, and assisting thousands of people, particularly Jews, in fleeing Nazi-occupied territories. Their actions would eventually become a focused counteroffensive against the German army in 1944, when Allied troops gathered in Great Britain to prepare for the invasion of France. As their widespread activity weakened German outposts in France and other occupied countries, the Allies would gain the foothold they needed to win the war. This is their story.

The Last Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Final Combat Mission of World War II


Don Brown - 2017
    Yellin enlisted two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on his 18th Birthday. After graduating from Luke Air Field as a fighter pilot in August of 1943, he spent the remainder of the war flying P-40, P- 47 and P-51 combat missions in the Pacific with the 78th Fighter Squadron. He participated in the first land based fighter mission over Japan on April 7, 1945, and also has the unique distinction of having flown the final combat mission of World War II on August 14, 1945 – the day the war ended. On that mission, his wing-man (Phillip Schlamberg) was the last man killed in a combat mission in WWII. After the war ended, Jerry struggled with severe undiagnosed PTSD. He always wondered why he survived, while so many of his comrades died during the war.Don Brown, a former U.S. Navy JAG officer and Special Assistant United States Attorney, is the author of eleven bestselling legal and military books. His work includes the novel Treason (2005) and the exposé Call Sign Extortion 17: The Shoot-Down of Team Seal Six (2015), a highly detailed account of the most deadly American loss-of-life in the Afghan War—the shoot-down of a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter carrying thirty Americans, including seventeen members of the vaunted SEAL Team Six.