Book picks similar to
Gray Ghost: The R.M.S. Queen Mary at War by Steve Harding
travel
wwii
historical-non-fiction
history-political
MIA Rescue
Kregg P.J. Jorgenson - 1995
Night was coming, the skies were dark, and so were the men's thoughts--they'd just found freshly dug NVA bunkers inside a scrub-brush tree line and their position was not secure. As they carefully searched for better night lager, they learned the hard way that they had walked into an ambush kill zone: NVA fire quickly downed two men and wounded two others. In minutes, Team 5-2 had been transformed from the hunters to the hunted. They had no radio comms with their headquarters and had just two rifles and fifteen magazines of ammunition.Two men were down, but the team was not out. MIA RESCUE is the story of Team 5-2 and the heroic and ultimately successful attempts to rescue them despite extraordinarily bad weather and an angry and aware enemy. "Seldom can an author stimulate emotions, from the taste of fear to sweaty palms to the feeling of relief when the mission is over, but Jorgenson does and much more. If the reader was never in combat, he will feel like a Nam vet when he finishes this book."--Jerry Boyle Author of Apache SunriseFrom the Paperback edition.
On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery
Robert M. Poole - 2009
They reached Arlington’s highest point, where they encircled an old cream-colored mansion with thick columns and a commanding view of the cemetery, the river, and the city beyond. The mansion’s flag, just lowered to half-staff, signaled that it was time to start another day of funerals, which would add more than twenty new conscripts to Arlington’s army of the dead.”
So does Robert Poole describe a day like so many others in the long and storied history of Arlington National Cemetery. Created towards the end of our greatest national crucible, the Civil War, its story—as revealed in On Hallowed Ground—reflects much of America’s own over the past century and a half. The mansion at its heart, and the rolling land on which it sits, had been the family plantation of Robert E. Lee before he joined the Confederacy; strategic to the defense of Washington, it became a Union headquarters, a haven for freedmen, and a burial ground for indigent soldiers before Secretary of War Edwin Stanton made it the latest in the newly established national cemetery system. It would become our nation’s most honored resting place.
No other country makes the effort the United States does to recover and pay tribute to its war dead—an effort Poole reveals in poignant details from the aftermaths of the Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, and the conflicts in the Gulf and Afghanistan today. Every tombstone at Arlington tells a story: from Private William Christman, the first soldier buried at Arlington on May 13, 1864, to Union General Montgomery Meigs, whose idea Arlington was; from Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, the first casualty of powered flight, to Audie Murphy, America’s most decorated soldier; from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, so lovingly tended today, to John F. Kennedy’s eternal flame; from scientists and slaves to jurists and generals and tens of thousands of ordinary citizen-warriors, among the more than 300,000 interred on Arlington’s 624 acres. Their sagas, and the rites and rituals that have evolved at Arlington—the horse-drawn caissons, marble headstones, playing of taps, and rifle salutes—speak to us all.
Devil's Own Luck: Pegasus Bridge to the Baltic 1944-45
Denis Edwards - 1999
He brilliantly conveys what it was like to be facing death, day after day, night after night, with never a bed to sleep in nor a hot meal to go home to. This is warfare in the raw ' brutal, yet humorous, immensely tragic, but sadly, all true.
Days of Fury: Ghost Troop and the Battle of 73 Easting
Mike Guardia - 2021
Within hours, the Kuwaiti defenses collapse under the onslaught of the Iraqi Army. In response, the US military leads a coalition of thirty-four nations in what becomes Operation Desert Storm—a violent campaign to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait. At the tip of the spear are the men of Ghost Troop in the US Army’s 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment.Commanded by Captain Joseph Sartiano, Ghost Troop was among the lead elements of the US VII Corps’ advance into Iraq. On February 26, 1991, Ghost Troop encountered a brigade-sized element of the Tawakalna Division— the elite frontline forces of Iraq’s Republican Guard. Although significantly outnumbered and outgunned, Ghost Troop won a decisive victory with minimal losses to their own ranks. History would call it the Battle of 73 Easting.Based on hours of interviews and archival research by author Mike Guardia, this minute-by-minute rendition of the battle reveals an intimate, no-holds-barred account of modern warfare…as told by the men who lived it."Days of Fury" is their story.
After the Voyage: An Irish American Story
Brenda Murphy - 2016
From different counties in Ireland, Maggie Qualter and Richard Terrett both sail to America as young adults in 1870 after surviving Ireland’s Great Hunger as children. Maggie works as a maid for a wealthy family. Richard finds work in a tannery. After the death of the young wife he loves passionately, Richard marries Maggie with the help of a deceptive go-between who brews trouble in their marriage that never goes away. They raise three children in the midst of Irish American culture, the Catholic Church, and Richard’s battles for the workingman in the Knights of Labor. Their daughter Mary dreams of being a nun, while Josie seeks the freedom of big-city life in Boston. Neither reckons on the future she will face, Mary as a wife and mother of nine children and Josie as a single working woman. Tom escapes factory life by joining the Navy, manages to see the world in the midst of two wars, and comes home to marry his sweetheart and start a new life. Their stories are both remarkable and familiar to everyone whose ancestors made their way to and in America.The events in the Terretts’ lives are as they emerge from the public record. But their inner lives, their thoughts, their relationships, their words are imagined as a route to understanding these five complicated and fascinating people
MRF Shadow Troop: The untold true story of top secret British military intelligence undercover operations in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1972-1974
Simon Cursey - 2013
They are 300 times more effective than an ordinary patrol... If we are going to have murderers and terrorists roaming the towns, then we have to have somebody who is able to go out and find them.” Contemporary press report Some think it stood for ‘Military Reconnaissance Force’, others ‘Mobile Reconnaissance Force’. Many people thought it didn’t exist at all and was made up, a figment of the press’s imagination. To the members of the group that was just fine. It added to the illusion, and the speculation about the unit’s name and mission only added to the uncertainty amongst their targets — terrorists — members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the IRA, the provos. For decades there has been argument in the media and amongst politicians about the possible existence and extent of a shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland. MRF Shadow Troop confirms there was such an agenda in the early, chaotic days of British military intervention across the Irish Sea. Amongst the mountain of speculation there is little of any accuracy or authority relating to this period. Simon Cursey was recruited into the Military Reaction Force — the unit’s true name — in 1972. This book is his personal account of his time with the group and in it he reveals the truth about their operations — the briefings, missions, political wrangling, and government-sanctioned law-bending. With documents and photographs to corroborate all his revelations, MRF Shadow Troop is a fascinating, exciting but above all accurate historical text about the pioneers of counter-terrorism.
Luck of a Lancaster: 107 Operations, 244 Crew, 103 of Them Killed in Action
Gordon Thorburn - 2013
W4964 was the seventieth Lanc to arrive on squadron, in mid April 1943. She flew her first op on the 20th, by which time No 9 had lost forty one of their Lancs to enemy action and another five had been transferred to other squadrons and lost by them. A further thirteen of the seventy would soon be lost by No 9. All of the remaining eleven would be damaged, repaired, transferred to other squadrons or training units, and lost to enemy action or crashes except for three which, in some kind of retirement, would last long enough to be scrapped after the war. Only one of the seventy achieved a century of ops or anything like it: W4964 WS-J. Across all squadrons and all the war, the average life of a Lancaster was 22.75 sorties, but rather less for the front-line squadrons going to Germany three and four times a week in 1943 and '44, which was when W4964 was flying her 107 sorties, all with No 9 Squadron and all from RAF Bardney. The first was Stettin (Szczecin in modern Poland), and thereafter she went wherever 9 Squadron went, to Berlin, the Ruhr, and most of the big ops of the time such as Peenemunde and Hamburg. She was given a special character as J-Johnny Walker, 'still going strong' and on September 15 1944, skippered by Flight Lieutenant James Douglas Melrose, her Tallboy special bomb was the only one to hit the battleship Tirpitz. During her career, well over two hundred airmen flew in J. None were killed while doing so, but ninety-six of them died in other aircraft. This is their story, and the story of one lucky Lancaster.
Codename: Hero: The True Story of Oleg Penkovsky and the Cold War's Most Dangerous Operation
Jeremy Duns - 2012
His first attempt was to approach two American students in Moscow. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. Inside was an offer to work as a 'soldier-warrior' for the free world. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through the showdown over Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis. He provided crucial intelligence, including photographs of rocket manuals that helped Kennedy end the Cuba crisis and avert a war. Codenamed HERO, Penkovsky is widely seen as the most important spy of the Cold War, and the CIA-MI6 operation, run as the world stood on the brink of nuclear destruction, has never been bettered. But how exactly did the Russians detect Penkovsky, and why did they let him continue his contact with his handlers for months afterwards? Could it be that the whole Cuban Missile Crisis was part of a Soviet deception operation - and has another betrayal hidden in plain sight all these years? Thrilling, evocative and hugely controversial, Codename: Hero blows apart the myths surrounding one of the Cold War's greatest spy operations.
Hitler's Children - Spitting Fire (Eyewitness Accounts - 12th SS Panzer 'Hitler Youth' in Normandy 1944)
Sprech Media - 2015
Who were these 15 to 17 year-old Hitler Youth soldiers, why were they so fanatical, and how could they be cleanly defeated? The Allied mood turned to bitterness and hatred as the brutal cunning and sheer ruthlessness of the boy soldiers and their adult leaders became clear. This book assembles a range of astonishing eyewitness testimony to the ferocious combat between Hitler Youth panzer troops, snipers and infantry against British and Canadian forces after D-Day. There are the disturbing combat experiences of surviving 12th SS Panzer fighters themselves, recorded after the war; eyewitness accounts from Allied soldiers who fought tank-to-tank and hand-to-hand against these opponents in the hedgerows, fields and streets of Normandy; and accounts too from terrified French civilians caught up in the firefights. The accounts featured are: The Tank Destroyer (Jagdpanzer IV) The Bocage Ambush (British Sergeant) The Battle for the Bunkers (12th SS Panthers) The Flail Tanks (French Civilian) The Panzerfaust Fighters (Hitlerjugend Panzergrenadiers) The Sniper (Canadian Captain) The War Crimes (12th SS Panzer Radio Operator) Panthers in the Smoke (British Cromwell Commander) Thunderbolts, Typhoons and Flak (12th Panzer Flak Unit) These are graphic and often shocking accounts of one of the strangest phases of the second world war in the west, and one that left a dreadful mark on so many who were involved in it. Sprech Media is an independent researcher and publisher of eyewitness testimonies to armed conflict in the 20th century.
Fighting the Flying Circus
Eddie Rickenbacker - 1919
The 94th ended the war in France with the highest number of air victories of any American squadron. Captain Rickenbacker later belonged to an association of pilots and Great War air veterans who, in the years immediately following the Second World War, invited many of the new "young" aces from the Pacific and European theaters for informal lectures. These men never lost their keen interest in aviation.
So Few Got Through: Gordon Highlanders with the 51st Division from Normandy to the Baltic
Martin Lindsay - 2000
The original 51st had gotten separated from the main British army before Dunkirk in 1940 and had been captured at St. Vale'ry, the surrender being taken by Irwin Rome in person. The reconstituted 51st had fought Rome in the desert and knew that 10,000 Scotsmen were now entering their fourth year in German prison camps.The original edition of So Few Got Through appeared just after the war and chronicles the campaigns of the 1st Gordon Highlanders from Normandy to V-E Day. Martin Lindsay was the Gordons' commander and his book has long been considered the best account of a British battalion in the war.
That Close: a memory of combat in Vietnam
Robert Driskill - 2017
The memoir tells his story starting from the ambivalence he had about being drafted through the firefights and wounds he experienced in Vietnam to the estrangement he felt as he walked out of Walter Reed hospital into a civilian world not very interested in a faraway war. It also tells a tale of the commonplace courage of the twenty-year-old infantrymen of Charley Company, 5th of the 12th, 199th Light Infantry Brigade, and of the cowardice and character flaws of a Lieutenant more interested in his own glory and advancement than the well-being of his platoon. The good, the bad, and the ugly of a country and an army fighting a distant war for unclear purposes are all on display in this account focused on nine months of war in 1969.
German Girl?
Vivian Bolten Herz - 2012
In thetone of voice that adults reserve for talking to six-year-olds,he asks again, “Now, tell me Vivian, when did you last seeyour Papa?”I shake my head and say, “No, I haven’t seen him for along time. I don’t know where he is.”The finger comes again, hooking my chin and forcingmy head up and toward him. I look into the pale, wateryeyes of the man in the gray Gestapo uniform. My heartpulses so hard in my ears that I can barely hear his words.“Have you seen Papa this week, Liebchen” (Sweetie), hecoos. “Who are his friends?” I shake my head “No,” knowingthat a few hours earlier Papa came to our street, near theapartment. He stood in the shadow of the corner house,watching me. I knew that he had come to see me, andsomehow, instinctively, I also knew that I should not go tohim and that he could not come to me. We looked at eachother, and then he turned and slipped away. It will bealmost ten years before I would see him again.The Gestapo man stands and abruptly leaves the bedroom.It isn’t until I see him in the living room, talking to Oma, that my tears come.In German Girl?, I reflect on my extraordinary childhood years, 1942 to 1953, growing up in Nazi Germany. As a "Mischling", a child with one Jewish parent and one Christian parent, my experiences during World War II, and its effect on the years that followed, provide a unique picture of wartime life as seen through the eyes of a child. My Lutheran grandparents hid and protected me while my mother was jailed and questioned tortuously on the whereabouts of my father. A Jewish man, my father lived “underground.” In "German Girl", I describe my father’s ingenuity and bravery, the enduring strength of my mother and the simple pleasures and comforting love of my grandparents stolen in a time of horror for so many. I have included copies of historical documents and photographs of the people discussed in the book.* In "German Girl", I have filled my book with memories, pictures, reproductions of forged documents and the incredible story of growing up alongside the appalling destruction of WWII in East Berlin.Copyright © 1998 Vivian Ert Bolten Herz.All rights reserved.The Library of Congress, catalog card number 2005351683United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,Washington D.C.Catalogue card number DS135.G5 H 4659 1998;Jüdisches Museum Berlin, GermanyYad Vashem Library, Jerusalem, Israel., catalog card number 105-0271Yad Vashem - Bet Vahlin Library, Israel., catalog card number HER-09
For Better For Worse
June Francis - 2020
Grace used to be besotted with the handsome man, but she is increasingly worried by his bullying behaviour and gambling. On her way home from seeing Dougie off at the docks, Grace is nearly run down by a truck driven by widower Ben, who is on his way to the hospital to see his young son. Soon, Grace has agreed to look after Ben’s child while he recovers from his accident. As they spend time together Ben struggles to ignore his growing feelings for Grace. But Dougie is determined not to let Grace go and when war breaks out he returns to England. With her old flame to contend with, never mind the relentless German bombers, will ever Grace find peace and love? From Liverpool’s much-loved saga novelist comes a tale of love and heartache in wartime, which fans of Kitty Neale and Katie Flynn will love.
Machu Picchu The History and Mystery of the Incan City
Jesse Harasta - 2013
Though local inhabitants had known about it for century, Bingham documented and photographed the ruins of a 15th century settlement nestled along a mountain ridge above the Urubamba Valley in Peru, placed so perfectly from a defensive standpoint that it’s believed the Spanish never conquered it and may have never known about it.