Book picks similar to
Path Of The Storm by Douglas Reeman
historical-fiction
sea-stories
war
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Bloody Iced Bullet
Andrew McGregor - 2014
Leutnant Hausser, a young experienced infantry officer with the 76th Infantry Division is assigned with a handful of men to the south of Stalingrad. As the fighting heightens in the city, the officer and his men are sent to bolster the defences of their allies, the Romanians. The front is relatively quiet, most believe the Russian Army is finished. The end of the bitter war in the east may only be days away. Thinking of loved ones and home, they await the conclusion of the battle, comforted by promises that the victorious outcome will decide the war…that it will soon be all over. It may only be a matter of time before they see their families again. Daily life has become more relaxed, in warm bunkers and well dug defences, they write letters and socialise with their allies. It may soon be time to go home. As the German Sixth Army discovers just how vicious the fighting in Stalingrad can become, they take troops from their flanks in final attempts to take the city before the onset of 'another bitter Russian winter.' One last push will finish the Russians once and for all. The German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, has virtually driven the Red Air Force from the skies. The Russian high command, STAVKA, are secretly planning to turn the tide of the war in the southern sector of the front as they see the weaker German allies occupy defensive positions either side of the city that holds Stalin's name. As the Russian offensive engulfs the flanks around Stalingrad, the young officer and his men desperately begin a battle for survival against bitter temperatures and time, oblivious to what the overall picture may be…and what their future holds. Not everything is as it seems in the deepest cold of winter as a small group of men combat nature and a vicious and cunning enemy motivated by revenge to survive and escape. With temperatures dropping to minus 25 to 35 degrees Celsius and a vicious struggle for survival against both nature and the cruelties of war, the portrayal of individual human reaction to fate and historical events is a gripping insight into the soldier on the frontline, thousands of miles from the decisions that will forge their individual destinies. Having spent thirty years studying World War 2 and in particular, the Russian Front, these offerings are based on historical fact. The characters are fictitious, attempting to portray a realistic account of what the battle would have been like for individual soldiers. All units and actions are in accordance with actual events, including propaganda, deployment and individual division engagements. Bloody Iced Bullet is available as an E-Book on Kindle, paperback in US book stores and via mail order across the world. The author aims to provide a thoroughly enjoyable and imaginative reading experience at an affordable price for the reader. All three works from the author's World War 2 Series concentrating on Stalingrad have achieved Best Seller status on Amazon in the UK and many more stories are outlined. Imagination is personal, free and to be cherished.
Ghost Sniper
David Healey - 2014
On the dawn of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, two snipers find themselves fighting a battle all their own. One is a backwoods hunter from the Appalachian Mountains in the American South, while the other is the dreaded German “Ghost Sniper” who earned his nickname on the Eastern Front. Locked in a deadly duel across the hedgerow country of France, the hunter matches wits and tactics against the marksman, both of them one bullet away from victory—or defeat—as Allied forces struggle to gain a foothold in Europe.
Once an Eagle
Anton Myrer - 1968
Damon is a professional who puts duty, honor, and the men he commands above self interest. Massengale, however, brilliantly advances by making the right connections behind the lines and in Washington's corridors of power.Beginning in the French countryside during the Great War, the conflict between these adversaries solidifies in the isolated garrison life marking peacetime, intensifies in the deadly Pacific jungles of World War II, and reaches its treacherous conclusion in the last major battleground of the Cold War -- Vietnam.A study in character and values, courage, nobility, honesty, and selflessness, here is an unforgettable story about a man who embdies the best in our nation -- and in us all.
Das Boot
Lothar-Günther Buchheim - 1973
Over the coming weeks they must brave the stormy waters of the Atlantic in their mission to seek out and destroy British supply ships. But the tide is beginning to turn against the Germans in the war for the North Atlantic. Their targets now travel in convoys, fiercely guarded by Royal Navy destroyers, and when contact is finally made the hunters rapidly become the hunted. As the U-boat is forced to hide beneath the surface of the sea a cat-and-mouse game begins, where the increasing claustrophobia of the submarine becomes an enemy just as frightening as the depth charges that explode around it. Of the 40,000 men who served on German submarines, 30,000 never returned. Written by a survivor of the U-boat fleet, Das Boot is a psychological drama merciless in its intensity, and a classic novel of World War II.
The Lion at Sea
Max Hennessy - 1977
Confident and strong willed, Kelly Maguire knew from a young age that he could accomplish great things. A constant and abiding love of the ocean would prove to be the making of him.When the call of war is heard in the early 1910s, Kelly knows that he must answer it. Enlisting in the Royal Navy, he hopes to win both the war and personal glory. But from the barbarous battles of Gallipoli to the nightmarish action at Antwerp, Kelly, along with his young shipmates, begins to learn the trials a sailor must face, trials that will forge him from a boy into a man. As the epic battle of Jutland approaches, everything is at stake.A gritty adventure full of danger, blood and guts, perfect for fans of David McDine, Alan Evans and Alexander Fullerton.
The Saboteur
Andrew Gross - 2017
Both the Allies and the Nazis are closing in on attempts to construct the decisive weapon of the war.
Kurt Nordstrum, an engineer in Oslo, puts his life aside to take up arms against the Germans as part of the Norwegian resistance. After the loss of his fiancée, his outfit whittled to shreds, he commandeers a coastal steamer and escapes to England to transmit secret evidence of the Nazis’s progress towards an atomic bomb at an isolated factory in Norway. There, he joins a team of dedicated Norwegians in training in the Scottish Highlands for a mission to disrupt the Nazis’ plans before they advance any further.Parachuted onto the most unforgiving terrain in Europe, braving the fiercest of mountain storms, Nordstrum and his team attempt the most daring raid of the war, targeting the heavily-guarded factory built on a shelf of rock thought to be impregnable, a mission even they know they likely will not survive. Months later, Nordstrum is called upon again to do the impossible, opposed by both elite Nazi soldiers and a long-standing enemy who is now a local collaborator—one man against overwhelming odds, with the fate of the war in the balance, but the choice to act means putting the one person he has a chance to love in peril.Based on the stirring true story, The Saboteur is Andrew Gross’s follow-up to the riveting historical thriller, The One Man. A richly-woven story probing the limits of heroism, sacrifice and determination, The Saboteur portrays a hero who must weigh duty against his heart in order to singlehandedly end the one threat that could alter the course of the war.
Final Harbor
Harry Homewood - 1980
She was the USS Mako, as fearless and bold as any submarine that ever prowled the blue Pacific. Her mission: seek out and destroy the hitherto invincible ships of the Japanese Imperial Navy — and revenge the earlier defeats of a long and dirty war. Here is the story of the men who pitted their lives against impossible odds in the most dangerous branch of the American armed services. It is a story of men pushed to the breaking point and beyond in the most nerve-wracking, heart-stirring warfare of all. A story of glory, grit and guts, and of the astonishing resources that human beings call forth when put to the ultimate test. Author Harry Homewood was a qualified submariner before he was seventeen years old, having lied to the Navy about his age, and serving in a little "S"-boat in the old Asiatic Fleet. After Pearl Harbor he reenlisted and made eleven war patrols in the Southwest Pacific. He later became Chicago Bureau Chief for Newsweek, chief editorial writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, and for eleven years had his own weekly news program syndicated to thirty-two PBS television stations.
Flight of the Intruder
Stephen Coonts - 1986
Former Navy flyer Stephen Coonts gives an excellent sense of the complexities of modern air raids and how nerve-wracking it is, even for the best airmen, to technically solve sudden problems over and over, knowing that even a twist of fate like a peasant wildly firing a rifle from a field could wipe out the crew. Grafton alternates between remorse over the fate of his unseen Vietnamese victims on the ground and a gung-ho "let's win this war" sentiment that lashes at both policymakers who select less-than-important targets for the dangerous missions and advocates for peace back in the States.
A Splendid Little War
Derek Robinson - 2012
Not for long. By 1919, White Russians were fighting the Bolsheviks (Reds) for control of their country, and Winston Churchill (then Minister for War) wanted to see Communism 'strangled in its cradle'. So a volunteer R.A.F. squadron, flying Sopwith Camels and DH9 bombers, went there to duff up the Reds. 'There's a splendid little war going on,' a British staff officer told them. 'You'll like it.' Looked like fun. But the war was neither splendid nor little. It was big and it was brutal, a grim conflict of attrition, marked by cruelty, betrayal and corruption. Before it ended, the squadron wished that both sides would lose. If that was a joke, nobody was laughing. "A Splendid Little War" tests the pilots' gallows humour in a world of armoured trains and elegant barons, gruesome religious sects and anarchist guerrillas, unreliable allies and pitiless enemies. The comedy of this war, if it exists, is very bleak. Derek Robinson is at once our finest living comic novelist and a master of military fiction. Biggles was never like this.
Time and Tide: A Novel of World War II (Thomas Fleming Library)
Thomas Fleming - 1987
She has deserted her sister ships at the Battle of Savo Island - the worst naval defeat in U.S. history.The Jefferson City's captain, Kansas-born Arthur McKay, has relieved his best friend and Annapolis roommate, Captain Winfield Scott Schley Kemble, and must decide whether to protect his friend's reputation against the Navy's determination to blame him for the Savo disaster or root out the truth.McKay's tough-minded wife Rita wants him to destroy Kemble, a man she once loved and now loathes. But Rita's fragile, seemingly innocent sister Lucy is the secret commander of McKay's soul.McKay's struggle anchors the lives and fate of the officers and men aboard the Jefferson City - from the corrupt Executive Officer Daniel Boone Parker to the doubt-tormented Chaplain Emerson Bushnell to Jack Peterson, the arrogant fire controlman, compelled by his sailor's code to be unfaithful to every woman who loves him.Through these stories and many more, we follow the war: We are aboard the Jefferson City as she steams into the terrifying night battles off Guadalcanal, with Japanese shells thundering out of the darkness. From the Solomon Islands to the Bering Sea to the kamikaze-ridden skies of Okinawa, the Jefferson City provides a prism through which the Navy's Pacific war is brilliantly reflected as her captain and crew search for the meaning of such words as shipmate, honor, faith.Time and Tide is a passionate love story, a compelling war story, an epic of Americans on the cutting edge of history.
Torpedo Run
Robb White - 1962
Navy PT boat, the Slewfoot, is off the coast of New Guinea during World War II. The new captain can only operate "by the book" which causes deep resentment and even mutiny, resulting in a test of wills.
Killing Rommel
Steven Pressfield - 2008
AN ELITE BRITISH ARMY UNIT IS ON A DEADLY MISSION. Autumn, 1942: Hitler's legions have swept across Europe. Soviet Russia reels under the German onslaught while across the channel, Britain struggles on.And in North Africa, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps have routed the 8th Army, threatening the oil fields of the Middle East. The war hangs in the balance...Out of this, the British hatch a desperate plan - to send a small, highly mobile fighting force behind enemy lines to strike a blow that will stop Rommel's army in its tracks. It is to be called the Long Range Desert Group and its exploits will become the stuff of legend.Based on real events, Steven Pressfield's bold novel brings to pulse-racing life the ingenuity and daring of this maverick commando unit - a disparate, dedicated 'band of brothers' who sacrificed so much for the sake of freedom...
The Auschwitz Escape
Joel C. Rosenberg - 2014
The Nazi regime, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, has surged to power and now hold Germany by the throat. All non-Aryans - especially Jews like Jacob and his family - are treated like dogs.When tragedy strikes during one terrible night of violence, Jacob flees and joins rebel forces working to undermine the regime. But after a raid goes horribly wrong, Jacob finds himself in a living nightmare - trapped in a crowded, stinking car on the train to the Auschwitz death camp.As World War II rages and Hitler begins implementing his "final solution" to systematically and ruthlessly exterminate the Jewish people, Jacob must rely on his wits and a God he's not sure he believes in to somehow escape from Auschwitz and alert the world to the Nazi's atrocities before Fascism overtakes all of Europe. The fate of millions hangs in the balance.©2014 Joel C. Rosenberg; (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
The King's Coat
Dewey Lambdin - 1989
So much so that his callous father believes a bit of navy discipline will turn the boy around. Fresh aboard the tall-masted Ariadne, Midshipman Lewrie heads for the war-torn Americas, finding--rather unexpectedly--that he is a born sailor, equally at home with the randy pleasures of the port and the raging battles on the high seas. But in a hail of cannonballs comes a bawdy surprise. . . .
Ordinary Heroes
Scott Turow - 2005
David, had served in World War II, but had told very little about his experiences. When he finds, after his father's death, a packet of wartime letters to a former fiancee and learns of David's court-martial, Stewart is driven to uncover the truth about the enigmatic distant man he never knew. Using military archives, old letters, and David's own notes, he discovers that David, a JAG lawyer, had pursued a maverick U.S. officer in Europe, fallen in love with a beautiful resistance fighter, and fought in the war's deadliest conflicts. In reconstructing the terrible events and agonizing choices his father faced on the battlefield, in the courtrfoom, and in love, Stewart gains a closer understanding of his father's secret past and of the brutal nature of war itself.-- back cover