The First World War was a truly global conflict from the start, with many of the most decisive battles fought in or directly affecting the Balkans, Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. Even more than World War II, the First World War continues to shape the politics and international relations of our world, especially in hot spots like the Middle East and the Balkans. Strachan has done a masterful job of reexamining the causes, the major campaigns, and the consequences of the First World War, compressing a lifetime of knowledge into a single definitive volume tailored for the general reader. Written in crisp, compelling prose and enlivened with extraordinarily vivid photographs and detailed maps, The First World War re-creates this world-altering conflict both on and off the battlefield—the clash of ideologies between the colonial powers at the center of the war, the social and economic unrest that swept Europe both before and after, the military strategies employed with stunning success and tragic failure in the various theaters of war, the terms of peace and why it didn’t last. Drawing on material culled from many countries, Strachan offers a fresh, clear-sighted perspective on how the war not only redrew the map of the world but also set in motion the most dangerous conflicts of today. Deeply learned, powerfully written, and soon to be released with a new introduction that commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, The First World War remains a landmark of contemporary history.

    Those selected for Bomber Command operations went on to rain devastation upon the Third Reich in the great air battles over Europe, but their losses were high. German fighters and anti-aircraft guns took a terrifying toll. The chances of surviving a tour of duty as a bomber crew were almost nil.Murray Peden's story of his training in Canada and England, and his crew's operations on Stirlings and Flying Fortresses with 214 Squadron, has been hailed as a classic of war literature. It is a fine blend of the excitement, humour, and tragedy of that eventful era.

    Cullen is a retired business executive and veteran of The Battle of The Bulge. During the second world war, as an army staff sergeant, he trained infantrymen for battle, then volunteered to go to Europe and enter the trenches himself. He was awarded four battle stars—Normandy, Northern France, Ardennes, and Germany, Bronze Star, Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster, Combat Infantry Badge, and the Belgian fourragère of 1940. Once the war ended, he returned to life as a civilian. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Colgate University on the GI Bill. Mr. Cullen has been married to the love of his life for over fifty years. He has two children, and five grandchildren. He is active in veterans' groups, including the Battle of the Bulge Group, and has participated in a reenactment of the Battle of The Bulge with a group of WWII re-enactors in Washington state. James K. Cullen is 95 years old. Band Of Strangers is his first book.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    Helena, Napoleon Bonaparte has been remembered as either demi-god or devil incarnate. In The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the first volume of a two-volume cradle-to-grave biography, Robert Asprey instead treats him as a human being. Asprey tells this fascinating, tragic tale in lush narrative detail. The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte is an exciting, reckless thrill ride as Asprey charts Napoleon's vertiginous ascent to fame and the height of power. Here is Napoleon as he was-not saint, not sinner, but a man dedicated to and ultimately devoured by his vision of himself, his empire, and his world.

    However, few can match Hans Sturm in his astonishing rise from a mere private in an infantry regiment, thrown into the bloody maelstrom of the Eastern Front, to a highly decorated war hero. A young man who had displayed fearless heroism in combat, earning him some of Germany's highest military awards, Sturm hated bullies and injustice, and reacted in his normal pugnacious and outspoken manner when confronted with wrongdoing. From striking a member of the feared Sicherheitsdienst for his treatment of a Jewish woman, to refusing to wear a decoration he felt was tainted because of the treatment of enemy partisans, Sturm repeatedly stuck to his moral values no matter what the risk. Even with the war finally over, Sturm's travails would not end for another eight years as he languished in a number of Soviet labour camps until he was finally released in 1953. ** This electronic edition includes 60 black-and-white photographs **

    He was right. For his part, Napoleon reckoned “the English are bad troops and this affair is nothing more than eating breakfast.” He was wrong—and this gripping and dramatic narrative history shows just how wrong.Fought on Sunday, June 18th, 1815, by some 220,000 men over rain-sodden ground in what is now Belgium, the Battle of Waterloo brought an end to twenty-three years of almost continual war between imperial France and her enemies. A decisive defeat for Napoleon and a hard-won victory for the Allied armies of the Duke of Wellington and the Prussians, led by the stalwart Marshal Blucher, it brought about the French emperor’s final exile to St. Helena and cleared the way for Britain to become the dominant military power in the world.The Napoleonic Wars are a source of endless fascination and this authoritative volume provides a wide and colorful window into this all-important climatic battle.

     A shepherd’s son is enlisted as a soldier of the Army of Reserve. His name is Benjamin Randell Harris, private of the 95th Regiment of Foot. The Recollections of Benjamin Harris are the classic memoirs of a foot soldier during the Napoleonic Wars, originally published in 1848. With personal anecdotes, quick wit and vivid descriptions, The Recollections of Benjamin Harris is one of the few surviving accounts of military service from the Napoleonic era. The memoir charts Harris’s years of active service from joining the 95th Rifles in Ireland, to the Peninsular Wars of Northern Spain. Harris recollects the gripping campaign at Copenhagen, the engagement at the Battle of Rolica, the gruelling march to Salamanca and, finally, culminates with the Battle of Corunna. The Recollections of Benjamin Harris is a personal military account from the eyes of a foot soldier, and offers military history fans a unique insight into the Napoleonic wars. Praise for The Recollections of Benjamin Harris: “Wonderful memoirs... A piercing eye, a talent for description, and a constant good humour” – Bernard Cornwell Albion Press is an imprint of Endeavour Press. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.

    The bankruptcy of the French state and a bitter civil war within the royal family were followed by the defeat and capture of the King of France by the Black Prince at Poitiers. A peasant revolt and a violent revolution in Paris completed the tragedy. In a humiliating treaty of partition France ceded more than a third of its territory to Edward III of England. Not for sixty years would the English again come so close to total victory. France's great cities, provincial towns and rural communities resisted where its leaders failed. They withstood the sustained savagery of the soldiers and the free companies of brigands to undo most of Edward III's work in the following generation. England's triumphs proved to be brittle and short-lived.

    The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that raged for the next twenty-two years saw European powers manoeuvering for mercantile and political advantage in a complex and ever-changing web of alliances and coalitions. By 1815, the world was a different place; age-old certainties were shattered, established dynasties and kingdoms overthrown, the United States emerged as a world power, and a new age was dawning.This was to be the longest, hardest and cruelest war ever fought at sea, on a scale comparable only with the Second World War. Methods of battle under sail, little changed for centuries, would be forced to adapt at an unprecedented pace that brought with it the fearsome power of rockets, torpedoes and submarines. The Line Upon a Wind is also the story of the daily lives of the sailors on board the fighting ships, the blood and guts ferocity of engagement in an age of gentility, the struggle of ships’ surgeons to repair broken bodies and the daily struggle to keep the men fed and free of disease. It is a story of ordinary men and extraordinary bravery. The Great War, as it was known to contemporaries, spanned generations and continents. Noel Mostert has achieved a work of unparalleled research, rousing descriptions and illuminating analysis — maritime history at its very best.

    The war at sea was a critical contest, as sea-lanes provided the logistical arteries for British and subsequent Allied armies fighting on the three continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Land forces ultimately won World War II, but the battles at sea fundamentally altered the balance of military power on the ground.

    Army's UH-1H "Huey" Iroquois helicopter. He experiences screaming descents into hot landing zones to place military assault troops and rescue wounded soldiers. He has the clarity of mind to survive seven days of horror in a Vietnamese jungle swamp while the psychology of a fellow soldier is severely tested. He's got the guts to buck military orders and battle his own brass to pursue an investigation when a botched operation spells disaster for the men under him. Based on the authors' personal experiences in the Vietnam War, Huey is an authentic, action-filled book of historical fiction. Originally published 30 years ago, this moving novel became a New York Timesbestseller within days of publishing. Now it's available again on Kindle.

    In this remarkably rich and eminently readable historical account, acclaimed author Paul Strathern reconstructs a mission of conquest inspired by glory, executed in haste, and bound for disaster.In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, only twenty-eight, mounted the most audacious military campaign of his already spectacular career. With 335 ships, 40,000 soldiers, and a collection of scholars, artists, scientists, and inventors, he set sail for Egypt to establish an Eastern empire in emulation of Alexander the Great. Like everything Napoleon ever attempted, it was a plan marked by unquenchable ambition, heroic romanticism, and not a little madness. Napoleon saw himself as a liberator, freeing the Egyptians from the oppression of their Mameluke overlords. But while Napoleon thought his army would be welcomed as heroes, he tragically misunderstood Muslim culture and grossly overestimated the “gratitude” he could expect from those he’d come to save. Instead Napoleon and his men would face a grim war of attrition against an ad hoc army of Muslims led by the feared Murad Bey. Marching across seemingly endless deserts in the shadow of the pyramids, suffering extremes of heat and thirst, and pushed to the limits of human endurance, they would be plagued by mirages, suicides, and the constant threat of ambush. A crusade begun in honor and intended for glory would degenerate toward chaos and atrocity.But Napoleon’s grand failure in Egypt also yielded vast treasures of knowledge about a culture largely lost to the West, and through the recovery of artifacts like the Rosetta Stone, it prepared the way for the translation of hieroglyphics and modern Egyptology. And it tempered the complex leader who believed it his destiny to conquer the world. A story of war, adventure, politics, and a clash of cultures, Paul Strathern’s Napoleon in Egypt is history at once relevant and impossible to put down.From the Hardcover edition.

    The Soviet Union, which had climbed to power from the shambles of the 1917 Revolution that saw communism overthrow the czar, and Germany, which had risen from the ashes of World War I's Treaty of Versailles, certainly had a complicated history. Stalingrad was a battle between the Allies and the Axis Powers; it was a struggle between the Soviet Union and Germany for victory; and it was also a test of wills between Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, two totalitarian dictators who were willing to do whatever was necessary to demonstrate the supremacy of their systems of government.Inside you will read about...✓ Josef Stalin: Man of Steel ✓ Adolf Hitler: A Quest for Vengeance ✓ Operation Barbarossa ✓ The Stalingrad Street Fighting Academy ✓ The Heroes of Stalingrad And much more!Stalin had succeeded Vladimir Lenin as the leader of the Soviet Union, and his entry upon the world stage ushered in a reign of absolute power as he bent a battered nation to conform to his will. Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and promptly turned the beleaguered nation into a launch pad for Aryan domination. As their armies met at Stalingrad for a long and bloody struggle that would ultimately tally two million civilian and military casualties, the world would watch as two brutal regimes challenged one another while the fate of the free world hung in the balance.

    When Napoleon eventually died in exile, the Lords of the Admiralty ordered that the original dispatches from seven major fleet battles - The Glorious First of June (1794), St Vincent (1797), Camperdown (1797), The Nile (1798), Copenhagen (1801), Trafalgar (1805) and San Domingo (1806) - should be gathered together and presented to the Nation. These letters, written by Britain's admirals, captains, surgeons and boatswains and sent back home in the midst of conflict, were bound in an immense volume, to be admired as a jewel of British history. Sam Willis, one of Britain's finest naval historians, stumbled upon this collection by chance in the British Library in 2010 and soon found out that only a handful of people knew of its existence. The rediscovery of these first-hand reports, and the vivid commentary they provide, has enabled Willis to reassesses the key engagements in extraordinary and revelatory detail, and to paint an enthralling series of portraits of the Royal Navy's commanders at the time. In a compelling and dramatic narrative, In the Hour of Victory tells the story of these naval triumphs as never before, and allows us to hear once more the officer's voices as they describe the battles that made Britain great.