Kenneth Macksey reveals Guderian as a brilliant rebel in search of ideals, and a general whose personality, genius, and achievements transcended those of Rommel. As well as throwing light on the crucial campaigns in Poland, France, and Russia, this biography illuminates the fatal struggles within the German hierarchy, and examines why Guderian was so admired by some and so denigrated by others.

    Gen. McClellan: “What troops are those fighting in the Pike?” Maj. Gen. Hooker: “General Gibbon’s brigade of Western men.” Maj. Gen. McClellan: “They must be made of iron.” And so, during the Battle of South Mountain, a prelude to the Battle of Antietam, this brigade earned its famous title as the “Iron Brigade”. Once McClellan had heard of their actions during the Second Battle of Bull Run, where they were facing off against a superior force under Stonewall Jackson, he is said to have stated that they were the “best troops in the world.” Rufus R. Dawes was a captain with the 6th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, that along with 2nd and 7th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiments, the 19th Indiana, Battery B of the 4th U.S. Light Artillery, and later in the war the 24th Michigan, formed the Iron Brigade. Although only in his early twenties at the beginning of the war he rapidly became an important leader in the famous brigade and by the end of the war was brevetted as a brigadier general for meritorious service. One of his most famous actions was on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg when he led a counterattack on the confederate forces under Brigadier General Joseph R. Davis and forced the surrender of more than two hundred enemy soldiers. Service With the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers records in brilliant detail all of the actions that he and his regiment were involved in, including Second Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, Cold Harbor and Petersburg. Yet this book is not simply an account of the military activities that took place as he also recorded his feelings and moods, and included details about daily camp life and individual soldiers. Rufus Dawes derived all of the books material from his diaries and letters. He realized the value of a statement made at the moment as to his experiences, and he appreciated fully the treacherous nature of memory. He believed contemporaneous expression in letters and diaries provided material of historical value. He had the material and the ability to write a superb history of the grueling service of this famous regiment, but he felt that the story of his personal experiences and impressions written at the time would be of greater value, and so this book is not only account of the regiment, it is also a very personal account of one man’s view of the Civil War. This book deserves to be read and enjoyed by all who wish to hear more about this brutal but fascinating conflict and to get to the heart of what the soldiers saw and thought. Rufus R. Dawes was a military officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War. After the war he became a businessman, Congressman and author. His book Service With the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers was first published in 1890. He passed away in 1899.

    There, I underwent a life-changing experience. As I walked the beaches with the American veterans who had returned for this anniversary, men in their sixties and seventies, and listened to their stories, I was deeply moved and profoundly grateful for all they had done. Ten years later, I returned to Normandy for the fiftieth anniversary of the invasion, and by then I had come to understand what this generation of Americans meant to history. It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced."        In this superb book, Tom Brokaw goes out into America, to tell through the stories of individual men and women the story of a generation, America's citizen heroes and heroines who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America. This generation was united not only by a common purpose, but also by common values--duty, honor, economy, courage, service, love of family and country, and, above all, responsibility for oneself. In this book, you will meet people whose everyday lives reveal how a generation persevered through war, and were trained by it, and then went on to create interesting and useful lives and the America we have today."At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting in the most primitive conditions possible across the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, and the coral islands of the Pacific. They answered the call to save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs. They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest. They succeeded on every front. They won the war; they saved the world. They came home to joyous and short-lived celebrations and immediately began the task of rebuilding their lives and the world they wanted. They married in record numbers and gave birth to another distinctive generation, the Baby Boomers. A grateful nation made it possible for more of them to attend college than any society had ever educated, anywhere. They gave the world new science, literature, art, industry, and economic strength unparalleled in the long curve of history. As they now reach the twilight of their adventurous and productive lives, they remain, for the most part, exceptionally modest. They have so many stories to tell, stories that in many cases they have never told before, because in a deep sense they didn't think that what they were doing was that special, because everyone else was doing it too. "This book, I hope, will in some small way pay tribute to those men and women who have given us the lives we have today--an American family portrait album of the greatest generation."                In this book you'll meet people like Charles Van Gorder, who set up during D-Day a MASH-like medical facility in the middle of the fighting, and then came home to create a clinic and hospital in his hometown. You'll hear George Bush talk about how, as a Navy Air Corps combat pilot, one of his assignments was to read the mail of the enlisted men under him, to be sure no sensitive military information would be compromised. And so, Bush says, "I learned about life." You'll meet Trudy Elion, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, one of the many women in this book who found fulfilling careers in the changed society as a result of the war. You'll meet Martha Putney, one of the first black women to serve in the newly formed WACs. And you'll meet the members of the Romeo Club (Retired Old Men Eating Out), friends for life.         Through these and other stories in The Greatest Generation, you'll relive with ordinary men and women, military heroes, famous people of great achievement, and community leaders how these extraordinary times forged the values and provided the training that made a people and a nation great.From the Hardcover edition.

    Maybe you heard about it yesterday. Maybe last month. But it was probably recent. And when it came up, did you wish that you could be the one to casually drop a fact that would have everyone in the room going, “Wow, I never knew that!” With this book, you can be that person. You can read it in just a few minutes a day. Chapters are bite-sized and easy to read, meant for normal people instead of war historians! Each chapter ends with a bonus helping of trivia and some quick questions to test your knowledge. You’ll zoom through this book and be hungry for more. Get ready to impress your friends with your knowledge – not just of the main events of World War Two, but of all the gritty details and weird true facts. By the time you finish this book, you’ll have a fact for every occasion, from the first moment someone thought about having a second World War, to the most recent blockbuster movies about it. So get ready to meet characters from Adolf Hitler, rejected art student, to Jack Churchill, the broadsword-swinging male model. Find out why World War Two started in the first place, and why it’s never a good idea to invade Russia in winter. Learn why the United States was going to stay out of the war, how Canadians stole airplanes for the British, and what an orange soft drink has to do with the Nazis. Some of the things you’re going to learn are sad. Some are scary. Some are sexy. And some are downright strange! It’s everything your history teacher never got around to telling you.

    In the slaughter that ensued, Rommel left behind a shaken, confused, and deeply shamed American army and a nearly collapsed Allied front. This is the full story of that massacre of youthful innocents. 31 photos. 262 pp.

    We can only wonder, as biographer Peter Longerich asks, how could such a banal personality attain such an historically unique position of power? How could the son of a prosperous Bavarian Catholic public servant become the organizer of a system of mass murder spanning the whole of Europe? In the first comprehensive biography of this murderous enigma, Longerich answers those questions with a superb account of Himmler's inner self and outward acts. Masterfully interweaving the story of Himmler's personal life and political career with the wider history of the Nazi dictatorship, Longerich shows how skillfully he exploited and manipulated his disparate roles in the pursuit of his far-reaching and grandiose objectives. Himmler's actual strength, he writes, consisted in redrawing every two or three years the master plans for his sphere of power. Himmler expanded that sphere with ruthless efficiency. In 1929, he took the SS - a small bodyguard unit - and swelled it into a paramilitary organization with elite pretensions. By the end of 1934 he had become Reich Chief of the Political Police, and began to consolidate all police power in his own hands. As Germany grabbed neighboring territory, he expanded the Waffen SS and organized the "Germanization" of conquered lands, which culminated in systematic mass murder. When the regime went on the defensive in 1942, Himmler changed his emphasis again, repressing any opposition or unrest. The author emphasizes the centrality of Himmler's personality to the Nazi murder machine - his surveillance of the private lives of his men, his deep resentments, his fierce prejudices - showing that man and position were inseparable. Carefully researched and lucidly written, Heinrich Himmler is the essential account of the man who embodied Hitler's apparatus of evil.

    These symbols of Nazi Germany were remnants of the residence’s forgotten history, and evidence that we never live far from the past. From that discovery unspooled the twisting, captivating tale of four of the remarkable people who had called this palace home. Their story is Europe’s, and The Last Palace chronicles the upheavals that have transformed the continent over the past century. There was the optimistic Jewish financial baron Otto Petschek, who build the palace after World War I as a statement of his faith in democracy, only to have that faith shattered; Rudolf Toussaint, the cultured, compromised German general who occupied the palace during World War II, ultimately putting his life at risk to save the house and Prague itself from destruction; Laurence Steinhardt, the first postwar US ambassador, whose quixotic struggle to keep the palace out of Communist hands was paired with his pitched efforts to rescue the country from Soviet domination; and Shirley Temple Black, an eyewitness to the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring by Soviet tanks, who determined to return to Prague and help end totalitarianism – and did just that as US ambassador in 1989.Weaving in the life of Eisen’s own mother to demonstrate how those without power and privilege moved through history, The Last Palace tells the dramatic and surprisingly cyclical tale of the endurance of liberal democracy.

    In 1940, Andrée “Dedee” de Jongh, a twenty-four-year-old Belgian nurse, is horrified by her country’s quick surrender to Nazi Germany. Every week she observes Germans inspecting the infirmary for injured Allied soldiers to ship off to work camps. Every day she witnesses new atrocities in the streets, such as Jewish countrymen being brutally beaten. Outraged at the injustice, Dedee devises a strategy with her father to aid in the resistance effort against the Germans. They hatch a plan to help downed Royal Air Force fliers escape Belgium and France and return to England, where they can rejoin the fight. It’s a dangerous endeavor and guaranteed death sentence if they’re caught, but Dedee is determined to do her part to defeat the enemy. Over time, the secret organization becomes one of the most successful wartime escape lines, saving more than eight hundred Allied fliers. Dedee manages to outwit the Nazis for a time, but with German soldiers hunting for the group and its leaders at every turn, will she be able to escape with her life?

    The attempt was masterminded by Count von Stauffenberg, a member of the German General Staff, who had been rushed back from Africa after losing his left eye and right hand. For his injuries, he had been decorated as a war hero. Never a supporter of Nazi ideology, he was increasingly attracted by the approaches of the German resistance movement. After an attempt to assassinate Hitler in November 1943 failed, Stauffenberg developed a new plot to kill him at the Wolf's Lair Headquarters on 20th July 1944. Besides the Fuhrer's assassination, Stauffenberg organized plans to take over command of the Germany forces and sue for peace with the Allies.The attempt ultimately failed. Only one bomb was detonated and Hitler was only injured: his life was probably saved because the bomb, hidden in Stauffenberg's suitcase, had been placed behind a heavy table leg which reduced the impact of the black.In remarkable detail, with photographs, explanatory maps and diagrams, author Nigel Jones dissects the lead up to the attempt, the events of the day in minute-by-minute detail, and the aftermath in which the conspirators were hunted down. No other work on the July Plot contains such accessible detail and full explanation of this attempt on Hitler's life. In addition to a forensic analysis of the day, the book includes short biographies of the key characters involved, the first-person recollections of witnesses, and a 'what if' section explaining the likely outcome of a successful assassination.

     These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten.  Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation.  In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over.  Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed.  Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved.  Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe.  Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places – particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France – they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities.Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe towards the end of the 1940s.  Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.

    This is followed by a comprehensive timeline, covering events in all theaters of the war. The opening chapter analyzes the build-up of hostility in the years leading up the war, both in Europe and in the Pacific. Similarly the final chapter analyzes the immediate and long-term consequences of the war and the way it has shaped recent history. In the chapters that cover the events of the war itself, the main spreads move from one theater of war to another but are linked by an easy-to-use system of cross referencing to earlier events and the consequences of the actions described on the spread. The main spreads are interspersed with features, eyewitness accounts, and galleries of weaponry and equipment. This title differs from DK's previous World War II title, in that it is a spread-by-spread account a la "History" (with "previous" and "following" tabs placing each spread in chronological context) of the war, rather than a narrative that needs to be read from start to finish.

    It ended with the surrender of 76,000 Filipinos and Americans, the single largest defeat in American military history. The defeat, though, was only the beginning, as Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman make dramatically clear in this powerfully original book. From then until the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the prisoners of war suffered an ordeal of unparalleled cruelty and savagery: forty-one months of captivity, starvation rations, dehydration, hard labor, deadly disease, and torture--far from the machinations of General Douglas MacArthur. The Normans bring to the story remarkable feats of reportage and literary empathy. Their protagonist, Ben Steele, is a figure out of Hemingway: a young cowboy turned sketch artist from Montana who joined the army to see the world. Juxtaposed against Steele's story and the sobering tale of the Death March and its aftermath is the story of a number of Japanese soldiers. The result is an altogether new and original World War II book: it exposes the myths of military heroism as shallow and inadequate; it makes clear, with great literary and human power, that war causes suffering for people on all sides.

    The men of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops were recruited to become phantom warriors in a ghost army to help win the Battle of Eurpoe. A thousand strong, they fought in more campaigns, from D Day to the Rhine River, with more Allied armies, than any other unit in the European Theater of Operations-yet not even their fellow American soldiers were aware of their presence. After Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., USNR, completed a tour of England and its special forces installations, the Hollywood star convinced the Navy brass to train an elite unit that eventually evolved into the only Army force of its kind. These elite soldiers counted among their number designer Bill Blass and painter Ellsworth Kelly, and was inspired by Hilton Howell Railey, the "P.T. Barnum of Deception." The Special Troops' mission was two-fold: to deceive the German Army into believing that the Allies possessed more troops and material than they actually did and, even more heroically, to draw enemy fire on their position to allow other units to advance free of lethal resistance. Through the art of camouflage, sonic deception, and illusion this extraordinary troop of brave, ingenious men saved countless American lives-while sometimes losing their own. From the use of inflatable rubber tanks and howitzers to elaborate sound effects, fake radio transmissions, special effects artillery, and other elments of stagecraft, these shadow soldiers put their lives on the line for their brother soldiers and for their country-only to disappear from history and memory. Secret Soldiers tells the astonishing story of this special troop whose mission was so top secret, information about it was only recently declassified. More than half a century later, these uniquely talented patriots can at long last take their place alongside the other honored veterans of World War II.

    

    Yet as historian David B. Woolner reveals, the end of FDR’s presidency might very well surpass it in drama and consequence.Drawing on new evidence, Woolner shows how FDR used every ounce of his diminishing energy to pursue the things that mattered most to him: the establishment of the United Nations, the reinvigoration of the New Deal, the possibility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and some quiet moments with his closest companions. We see a president shorn of the usual distractions of office, a man whose sense of duty and personal responsibility for the fate of the American people, and the world, bore heavily upon him. From his final Christmas at Hyde Park to his death on April 12, 1945, FDR strove to finish the work he had started twelve long years before.