He has written the history of a utopian illusion and the tragic consequences it had for the people of the Soviet Union and the world." -- David Remnick, The New York Review of Books "In Martin Malia, the Soviet Union had one of its most acute observers. With this book, it may well have found the cornerstone of its history." -- Francois Furet, author of Interpreting the French Revolution "The Soviet Tragedy offers the most thorough scholarly analysis of the Communist phenomenon that we are likely to get for a long while to come...Malia states that his narrative is intended 'to substantiate the basic argument,' and this is certainly an argumentative book, which drives its thesis home with hammer blows. On this breathtaking journey, Malia is a witty and often brilliantly penetrating guide. He has much wisdom to impart." -- The Times Literary Supplement "This is history at the high level, well deployed factually, but particularly worthwhile in the philosophical and political context -- at once a view and an overview." -- The Washington Post

    For a period of nearly six years, the German U-boat force attempted to blockade and isolate the British Isles in hopes of forcing the British out of the war, thereby thwarting both the Allied strategic air assault on German cities and Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Occupied France. Fortunately for the Allies, the U-boat force failed to achieve either of these objectives, but in the attempt they sank 2,800 Allied merchant ships, while the Allies sank nearly 800 U-boats. On both sides, tens of thousands of sailors perished.     For decades, an authoritative and definitive history of the Battle of the Atlantic could not be attempted, since London and Washington agreed to withhold all official code-breaking and U-boat records in order to safeguard the secrets of code breaking in the postwar years. The accounts that did appear were incomplete and full of false conclusions and errors of fact, often leaving the entirely wrong impression that the German U-boats came within a whisker of defeating the Allies, a myth that is finally laid to rest in this account.     Clay Blair, acclaimed author of the bestselling naval classic Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, has drawn from the official records as well as the work of German, British, American, and Canadian naval scholars. Never before has Hitler's U-boat war been chronicled with such authority, fidelity, objectivity, and detail. The result is this magnificent and monumental work, crammed with vivid and dramatic scenes of naval actions and dispassionate but startling new revelations, interpretations, and conclusions about all aspects of the Battle of the Atlantic.

    The first full account of the experience of occupation, it offers a vividly human picture of resistance fighters and black marketeers, teenage German conscripts and Gestapo officers, Jews and starving villagers. "Fascinating. . . . [Mazower] succeeds in getting under the skin of the occupation. . . . [This book] conjures up, in vivid detail, life under an occupation that had shattered old certainties and replaced them with painful choices, cynical compromises, and hopes undercut by the daily death toll."—Mark Almond, New York Times "A vivid picture of the German occupier’s mind and actions. . . . Mazower’s arguments are always fair."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review "A superb book on the horrors afflicting wartime Greece. . . . [Mazower] has done vast archival research and emerged with a gripping, readable and human account, setting every moment of a tragic period in appropriate context."—Fritz Stern, Foreign Affairs "[A] sensitive, illuminating and richly textured account of painful, complex experience."—Richard Overy, Observer Mark Mazower is professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Dark Continent.

    In the aftermath of the Second Word War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. One of the lead investigators is Lieutenant Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who is now serving in the British Army. Rudolf Höss is his most elusive target. As Kommandant of Auschwitz, Höss not only oversaw the murder of more than one million men, women, and children; he was the man who perfected Hitler’s program of mass extermination. Höss is on the run across a continent in ruins, the one man whose testimony can ensure justice at Nuremberg. Hanns and Rudolf reveals for the very first time the full, exhilarating account of Höss’s capture, an encounter with repercussions that echo to this day. Moving from the Middle Eastern campaigns of the First World War to bohemian Berlin in the 1920s to the horror of the concentration camps and the trials in Belsen and Nuremberg, it tells the story of two German men- one Jewish, one Catholic- whose lives diverged, and intersected, in an astonishing way.

    40 years before the Jamestown colony, the Spanish founded a "Jamestown-type" colony in Virginia. Early explorers met Indians who surprisingly spoke English. Long before 1619 the recognized arrival of slaves, in 1526, the first African slaves were brought to America by the Spanish. A fierce competition arose between France, Spain and England to win the New World. Colonies floundered, were abandoned or destroyed by the English. It wasn’t easy surviving in this “new world” in spite of the early glowing reports. Why did Jamestown and Plymouth colonies succeed when others failed? The 2nd half of this book explores the first successful English colonies of Jamestown and Plymouth and why they succeeded when others could not. Strange and curious facts: the first Indian contact in Plymouth was an Indian asking for a glass of beer! Enjoy a detailed look of what really took place in America’s beginnings. It’s more interesting than your school history books!

    Himself an eyewitness to the shattering historical drama he vividly records, Werth offers an intensely detailed chronicle of the events that exceeded in savagery and hatred any other on Russian soil. From the hardships of the citizenry to the sweep of massive military operations to the corridors of diplomacy, this modern classic captures every aspect of the grim but heroic Soviet-German war that turned Russia into the most powerful nation in the Old World.

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    Churchill, 1948: World War II was the defining event of our age—the climactic clash between liberty and tyranny. It led to revolutions, the demise of empires, a protracted Cold War, and religious strife still not ended. Yet Churchill maintained that it was all avoidable. Here is a transformative view of Churchill’s theories, prescriptions, actions, and the degree to which he pursued them in the decade before the war. It shows that he was both right and wrong: right that Hitler could have been stopped; wrong that he did all he could to stop him. It is based on what really happened—evidence that has been “hiding in public” for many years, thoroughly referenced in Churchill’s words and those of his contemporaries. Richard M. Langworth began his Churchill work in 1968 when he organized the Churchill Study Unit, which later became the Churchill Centre. He served as its president and board chairman and was editor of its journal Finest Hour from 1982 to 2014. In November 2014, he was appointed senior fellow for Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project. Mr. Langworth published the first American edition of Churchill’s India, is the author of A Connoisseur’s Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill, and is the editor of Churchill by Himself, The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill, The Patriot’s Churchill, All Will Be Well: Good Advice from Winston Churchill, and Churchill in His Own Words. His next book is Winston Churchill, Urban Myths and Reality. In 1998, Richard Langworth was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by HM The Queen “for services to Anglo-American understanding and the memory of Sir Winston Churchill.”

    This sampler contains the story of Operation Judgement; believed to be one of the most incredible raids of World War Two.Six raids that changed the course of history...Operation Judgement: one of the most spectacular efforts of World War Two, where obsolete British biplanes attacked the Italian fleet in Taranto.Operation Archery: the first true combined operation carried out by all three British forces. THis successful raid persuaded Hitler that the Allies were planning a full scale invasion.Operation Biting: a cross-Channel raid into France that was the first major attack by the British Airborne Division and its first battle honour.Operation Gunnerside: a dramatic demolition assault on Hitler's atomic bomb plant in Norway.Operation Chariot: 'the greatest raid of all': the British amphibious attack on the Normandie dry dock at St Nazaire in German-occupied France.Operation Deadstick: the story of the first Allies into the fray on D-Day, tasked with seizing and holding two bridges to prevent an armoured German counter-attack.

    But the undertaking would prove to be anything but straightforward, and the story of Rabaul’s destruction remains one of the most gripping of World War II’s Pacific Theater. In Target: Rabaul, award-winning military historian Bruce Gamble expertly narrates the Allied air raids against the stronghold: the premature celebrations by George Kenney and Gen. Douglas MacArthur; the bequeathing of authority to Adm. “Bull” Halsey; the unprecedented number of near-constant air battles that immediately followed; the Japanese retreat to Truk Lagoon in 1944; and their ultimate surrender to Allied forces in August 1945. This amazing story, one that profiles the bravery and resolve of the Allies in the horrific Pacific battleground, is the turbulent conclusion to an acclaimed trilogy from one of today’s most talented nonfiction military authors.

    Life in the Third Reich draws extensively on interviews, letters and diaries from the earliest days of the Nazi Party to the final hours of the thousand-year Reich to reveal how the Hitler cult influenced and corrupted every aspect of life, from education, health, business, the press, the judicial system and the Church to sport, culture, work and the family.It reveals the stark contrast between the myth of 'One People, One Fuhrer' perpetuated by Nazi propaganda and the harsh realities of life in a dictatorship.Life in the Third Reich challenges the popular view of Nazi Germany as a nation united behind their despotic leader and asks 'What would you have done? Would you have behaved any differently if you had lived in Hitler's Germany?'

    Men come back and spend the rest of their lives trying to find out who they are ..." - Harry Whiteside, who served with the SAS and the Royal Australian Regiment in Vietnam."Surely God weeps," an Australian soldier wrote in despair of the conflict in Vietnam.But no God intervened to shorten the years of carnage and devastation in this most controversial of wars.Seen as the last "hot" frontline of the Cold War, the ten-year struggle in the rice paddies and jungles of South Vietnam unleashed the most devastating firepower on the Vietnamese nation and visited terrible harm on civilians and soldiers.Yet the Australian forces applied tactics that were very different from those of the Americans. Guided by their commanders" experience of jungle combat, Australian troops operated with stealth, deception and restraint in pursuing a "better war".Drawing on hundreds of accounts by soldiers, politicians, aid workers, entertainers and the Vietnamese people, Paul Ham reconstructs for the first time the full history of our longest military campaign.From the commitment to engage, through the fight over conscription and the rise of the anti-war movement, to the tactics and horror of the battlefield, Ham exhumes the truth about this politicians" war - which sealed the fate of 50,000 Australian servicemen and women.More than 500 soldiers were killed and thousands wounded. Those who made it home returned to a hostile and ignorant country and a reception that scarred them forever.This is their story. Paul Ham′s Vietnam: The Australian War was awarded the Australian History Prize at the 2008 NSW Premier′s Awards. The judges praised Ham for his comprehensive approach to Australia′s involvement in the Vietnam War and his ability to communicate with both specialist and general readers. They said:′A significant number of books have appeared over the past decade or so focusing on Australia′s involvement in World War I, World War II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars ... What distinguishes Paul Ham′s book is the comprehensive nature of its approach, which encompasses the political and military history of Australia′s involvement in Vietnam as well as the domestic social and cultural context. It is also a book that tells the human side of the war ... It is a beautifully told story of human frailty, of the shortcomings and lack of vision of those political leaders who committed Australian troops to Vietnam; and of the narrow-minded ideologies that drove some of those who opposed the war. It is a wonderful narrative, reflecting an extraordinary knowledge of the subject, which convincingly demonstrates the important role the Vietnam War played in shaping Australia′s history.′

    For eighteen months, John L. Rotundo and Don Ericson braved the test of war at its most bloody and most raw, specializing in ambushing the enemy and fighting jungle guerillas using their own tactics. From the undiluted high of a "contact" with the enemy to the anguished mourning of a fallen comrade, they experienced nearly every emotion known to man--most of all, the power and the pride of being the finest on America's front lines.From the Paperback edition.

    Navy had a total of 111 submarines. However, this fleet was not nearly as impressive as the number suggests. It was mostly a collection of aging boats from the late teens and early twenties, with only a few of the newer, more modern Gato-class boats. Fortunately, with the war in Europe was already two years old and friction with Japan ever-increasing, help from what would become known as the Silent Service in the Pacific was on the way: there were 73 of the new fleet submarines under construction. The Silent Service in World War II tells the story of America’s intrepid underwater warriors in the words of the men who lived the war in the Pacific against Japan. The enemy had already begun to deploy advanced boats, but the U.S. was soon able to match them. By 1943 the new Gato-class boats were making a difference, carrying the war not just to the Japanese Imperial Navy, but to the vital merchant fleet that carried the vast array of materiel needed to keep the land of the Rising Sun afloat.As the war progressed, American success in the Solomons, starting with Guadalcanal, began to constrict the Japanese sea lanes, and operating singly or in wolfpacks they were able to press their attacks on convoys operating beyond the range of our airpower, making daring forays even into the home waters of Japan itself in the quest for ever more elusive targets. Also taking on Japanese warships, as well as rescuing downed airmen (such as the grateful first President Bush), U.S. submarines made an enormous contribution to our war against Japan.This book takes you through the war as you learn what it was like to serve on submarines in combat, the exhilaration of a successful attack, and the terror of being depth-charged. And aside from enemy action, the sea itself could prove to be an extremely hostile environment as many of these stories attest. From early war patrols in obsolescent, unreliable S-boats to new, modern fleet submarines roving the Pacific, the forty-six stories in this anthology give you a full understanding of what it was like to be a U.S. Navy submariner in combat.

    Their orders were to man a curtain of armed balloons meant to deter enemy aircraft. One member of the 320th would be nominated for the Medal of Honor, an award he would never receive. The nation’s highest decoration was not given to black soldiers in World War II.Drawing on newly uncovered military records and dozens of original interviews with surviving members of the 320th and their families, Linda Hervieux tells the story of these heroic men charged with an extraordinary mission, whose contributions to one of the most celebrated events in modern history have been overlooked. Members of the 320th—Wilson Monk, a jack-of-all-trades from Atlantic City; Henry Parham, the son of sharecroppers from rural Virginia; William Dabney, an eager 17-year-old from Roanoke, Virginia; Samuel Mattison, a charming romantic from Columbus, Ohio—and thousands of other African Americans were sent abroad to fight for liberties denied them at home. In England and Europe, these soldiers discovered freedom they had not known in a homeland that treated them as second-class citizens—experiences they carried back to America, fueling the budding civil rights movement.In telling the story of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, Hervieux offers a vivid account of the tension between racial politics and national service in wartime America, and a moving narrative of human bravery and perseverance in the face of injustice.