Showing titles in World War II

This is the true story of four brave women secretly sent into the darkness of Nazi-occupied France to carry out Winston Churchill’s plan to "set Europe ablaze." Caught in a web of deception surrounding the preparations for the D-Day invasion, their mission ended in betrayal and sacrifice. An engrossing history based on first-hand interviews with agents of the Special Operations Executive and revelations about the secret organization and the courageous women who served it.

On December 7, 1941, as the great battleships Arizona, Oklahoma, and Utah lie paralyzed and burning in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A crack team of U.S. Navy salvage divers headed by Edward C. Raymer are hurriedly flown to Oahu from the mainland. Their two-part orders are direct and straightforward: (1) rescue as many trapped sailors and Marines as possible, and (2) resurrect what remains of America's once mighty pacific fleet. Descent Into Darkness tells their story.

The heroic accounts of Australian Army Nursing Sisters Margaret Anderson and Vera Torney who survived the perilous evacuation of Singapore in 1942. The nursing profession is one historically filled with everyday heroes whose work often makes the difference between life and death. Yet Nursing...

Simo Häyhä was a man of action who spoke very little, but he was respected by his men and his superiors and given many difficult missions, including taking out specific targets. Able to move silently and swiftly through the landscape, melting into the snowbound surroundings in his white camouflage fatigues, his aim was deadly and his quarry rarely escaped. The Russians learned of his reputation as a marksman and tried several times to kill him by indirect fire. He was promoted from corporal to second lieutenant and he was awarded the Cross of Kollaa.

A tense, powerful, grand account of one of the most daring exploits of World War II. On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected troops from the elite U.S. Army 6th Ranger Battalion slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty miles in an attempt to rescue 513 American...

Summertime, 1935. On a lake near Berlin, a young man is out sailing when he glimpses a woman reclining in the prow of a passing boat. Their eyes meet - and one of history's greatest conspiracies is born. Harro Schulze-Boysen had already shed blood in the fight against Nazism by the time he and Libertas Haas-Heye began their whirlwind romance. She joined the cause, and soon the two lovers were leading a network of antifascists that stretched across Berlin's bohemian underworld.

After Germany's humiliating World War II defeat, numerous German generals published memoirs claiming that their country's brilliant military leadership had been undermined by the Führer's erratic decision making. The author of three highly acclaimed books on the era, Stephen Fritz upends this characterization of Hitler as an ill-informed fantasist and demonstrates the ways in which his strategy was coherent and even competent.

This is an eyewitness - and eye-opening - account of some of the most savage and brutal fighting in the war against Japan, told from the perspective of a young Texan who volunteered for the Marine Corps to escape a life as a traveling salesman. R. V. Burgin enlisted at the age of twenty and, with his sharp intelligence and earnest work ethic, climbed the ranks from a green private to a seasoned sergeant.

The last weeks of World War II on the Western Front in Europe witnessed extraordinary scenes of heroism, horror, melodrama and pathos. In Plunder, Max Hastings presents a cast of fascinating people British, American and German, in a series of great events in which some distinguished themselves...

Som ganske ung fik Birgitte Possing af sin mor overdraget en skotøjsæske med strenge pålæg om først at åbne den, når hun selv var blevet gammel. Æsken viste sig at indeholde et utal af breve, Birgitte Possings forældre havde skrevet til hinanden i deres ungdom under Anden Verdenskrig.

On the night of the 22 September, 1943, Pearl Witherington, a 29-year-old British secretary and Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent, was parachuted into Occupied France. Pearl had a dual mission: to fight for her beloved France and to find her lost love who had been taken prisoner. Her wartime record is unique. She became a legendary guerrilla leader training 3,800 Resistance fighters.

*The instant New York Times bestseller* The untold story of four of the most decorated soldiers of World War II—all Medal of Honor recipients—from the beaches of French Morocco to Hitler’s own mountaintop fortress, by the national bestselling author of The First Wave “Pitch-perfect...

Finding Hester explores the untold story of Hester Leggatt, a woman who helped trick the Nazis, and is a fascinating listen for fans of West End musical Operation Mincemeat and anyone with an interest in women’s war stories.

From best-selling author of Tail-End Charlie and Tornado Down comes this powerful and deeply moving account of Bomber Command’s 1944 Nuremberg Raid – the RAF’s bloodiest night of the Second World War More men from Royal Air Force Bomber Command died on one single night of the Second World...

Jasper Maskelyne was a world famous magician and illusionist in the 1930s. When war broke out, he volunteered his services to the British Army and was sent to Egypt when the desert war began. Here, he used his unique skills to save the vital port of Alexandria from German bombers and to 'hide' the Suez Canal from them. He invented all sorts of camouflage methods to make trucks look like tanks and vice versa. On Malta he developed 'the world's first portable holes': fake bomb craters used to fool the Germans into thinking they had hit their targets.

December 1943. A German fort sits impregnable atop a mountain. Standing between the Allied forces and their path to Rome is a steep climb up a 200-foot cliff, in the snow, in the middle of the night. As the future of civilisation hangs in the balance, with Axis forces sprawled around the world...

Until recent years, very little was known of the tens of thousands of foreign nationals from Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, and Spain who served voluntarily in the military formations of the German army and the German Waffen-SS. In Kaisergruber's book, the listener discovers important issues of collaboration, the apparent contributions of the volunteers to the German war effort, their varied experiences, their motives, the attitude of the German High Command and bureaucracy, and the reaction to these in the occupied countries.  

This is the remarkable story of a German soldier who fought throughout World War II, rising from conscript private to captain of a heavy weapons company on the Eastern Front. >William Lubbeck, age 19, was drafted into the Wehrmacht in August 1939. As a member of the 58th Infantry Division, he received his baptism of fire during the 1940 invasion of France. The following spring his division served on the left flank of Army Group North in Operation Barbarossa.

Formed in the fall of 1943, the Fifteenth Air Force was popularly known as the "The Forgotten Fifteenth," as its achievements were overshadowed by more glamorous exploits of the Eighth Air Force in the air war over Germany. Nevertheless, the Fifteenth's contribution to Allied victory was crucial, and a vital part of that was the role played by the escorting fighter groups from the Fifteenth Fighter Command who protected the B-17s and B-24s from the Luftwaffe in the skies over Romania.

A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR From one of our greatest living writers, comes a remarkable memoir of a forgotten England. 'The war went. We sang in the playground, "Bikini lagoon, an atom bomb’s boom, and two big explosions." David’s father came back from Burma and didn’t eat rice...