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A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention into the Russian Civil War
Par Anna Reid. 2023
The first comprehensive history of the failed Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War, a decisive turning point in the…
relationship between Russia and the West Overlapping with and overshadowed by the First World War, the Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War was one of the most ambitious military ventures of the twentieth century. Launched in the summer of 1918, it drew in 180,000 troops from fifteen different countries in theaters ranging from the Caspian Sea to the Arctic, and from Poland to the Pacific. Though little remembered today, its consequences stoked global political turmoil for decades to come. In A Nasty Little War, top Russia historian Anna Reid offers a sweeping and deeply researched account of the conflict. Initially launched to prevent Germany from exploiting the power vacuum in Eastern Europe left by the Russian Revolution, the Intervention morphed into a bid to destroy the Bolsheviks on the battlefield. But Allied armaments, supplies, and loans could not prevent Russia&’s anti-Bolshevik armies from collapsing, and the Allies were forced to retreat in defeat. The humiliation sapped British imperial swagger, chastened American idealism, and stoked militarism and nationalism in France and Germany. Combining immersive storytelling with deep research, A Nasty Little War reveals how the Allied Intervention reshaped the West&’s relations with Russia, and set a pattern for other interventions to come.The NSA Report: Liberty and Security in a Changing World
Par President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, The, Richard A. Clarke, Michael J. Morell, Geoffrey R. Stone, Cass R. Sunstein, Peter Swire. 2014
The official report that has shaped the international debate about NSA surveillance"We cannot discount the risk, in light of the…
lessons of our own history, that at some point in the future, high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking. Americans must never make the mistake of wholly 'trusting' our public officials."—The NSA ReportThis is the official report that is helping shape the international debate about the unprecedented surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. Commissioned by President Obama following disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, and written by a preeminent group of intelligence and legal experts, the report examines the extent of NSA programs and calls for dozens of urgent and practical reforms. The result is a blueprint showing how the government can reaffirm its commitment to privacy and civil liberties—without compromising national security.Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort
Par Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer. 2013
A groundbreaking book that gathers key wartime intelligence reportsDuring the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School—Franz…
Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer—worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here for the first time.These reports provide a fresh perspective on Hitler's regime and the Second World War, and a fascinating window on Frankfurt School critical theory. They develop a detailed analysis of Nazism as a social and economic system and the role of anti-Semitism in Nazism, as well as a coherent plan for the reconstruction of postwar Germany as a democratic political system with a socialist economy. These reports played a significant role in the development of postwar Allied policy, including denazification and the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials. They also reveal how wartime intelligence analysis shaped the intellectual agendas of these three important German-Jewish scholars who fled Nazi persecution prior to the war.Secret Reports on Nazi Germany features a foreword by Raymond Geuss as well as a comprehensive general introduction by Raffaele Laudani that puts these writings in historical and intellectual context.Beginning in the fall of 1914, every French soldier on the Western Front received a daily ration of wine from…
the army. At first it was a modest quarter litre, but by 1917 it had increased to the equivalent of a full bottle each day. The wine ration was intended to sustain morale in the trenches, making the men more willing to endure suffering and boredom. The army also supplied soldiers with doses of distilled alcohol just before attacks to increase their ferocity and fearlessness. This strategic distribution of alcohol was a defining feature of French soldiers’ experiences of the war and amounted to an experimental policy of intoxicating soldiers for military ends.A Thirst for Wine and War explores the French army’s emotional and behavioural conditioning of soldiers through the distribution of a mind-altering drug that was later hailed as one of the army’s “fathers of victory.” The daily wine ration arose from an unexpected set of factors including the demoralization of trench warfare, the wine industry’s fear of losing its main consumers, and medical consensus about the benefits of wine drinking. The army’s related practice of distributing distilled alcohol to embolden soldiers was a double-edged sword, as the men might become unruly. The army implemented regulations and surveillance networks to curb men’s drinking behind the lines, in an attempt to ensure they only drank when it was useful to the war effort. When morale collapsed in spring 1917, the army lost control of this precarious system as drunken soldiers mutinied in the thousands. Discipline was restored only when the army regained command of soldiers’ alcohol consumption.Drawing on a range of archives, personal narratives, and trench journals, A Thirst for Wine and War shows how the French army’s intoxication of its soldiers constituted a unique exercise of biopower deployed on a mass scale.Atrocity on the Atlantic: Attack on a Hospital Ship During the Great War
Par Nate Hendley. 2024
How a German submarine sank a Canadian military hospital ship during the First World War and sparked outrage.On the evening…
of June 27, 1918, the Llandovery Castle — an unarmed, clearly marked hospital ship used by the Canadian military — was torpedoed off the Irish Coast by U-Boat 86, a German submarine.Sinking hospital ships violated international law. To conceal his actions, the U-86 commander had the submarine deck guns fire on survivors. One lifeboat escaped with witnesses to the atrocity. Global outrage over the attack ensued.The sinking of the Llandovery Castle was adjudicated at the Leipzig War Crimes Trials, an attempt to establish justice after hostilities ceased. The Llandovery Castle case resulted in a historic legal precedent that guided subsequent war crime prosecutions, including the Nuremberg Trials.Atrocity on the Atlantic explores the Llandovery Castle sinking, the people impacted by the attack, and the reasons why this wartime atrocity was largely forgotten.John Lisle reveals the untold story of the OSS Research and Development Branch—The Dirty Tricks Department—and its role in World…
War II.In the summer of 1942, Stanley Lovell, a renowned industrial chemist, received a mysterious order to report to an unfamiliar building in Washington, D.C. When he arrived, he was led to a barren room where he waited to meet the man who had summoned him. After a disconcerting amount of time, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), walked in the door. “You know your Sherlock Holmes, of course,” Donovan said as an introduction. “Professor Moriarty is the man I want for my staff…I think you’re it.”Following this life-changing encounter, Lovell became the head of a secret group of scientists who developed dirty tricks for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Their inventions included Bat Bombs, suicide pills, fighting knives, silent pistols, and camouflaged explosives. Moreover, they forged documents for undercover agents, plotted the assassination of foreign leaders, and performed truth drug experiments on unsuspecting subjects.Based on extensive archival research and personal interviews, The Dirty Tricks Department tells the story of these scheming scientists, explores the moral dilemmas that they faced, and reveals their dark legacy of directly inspiring the most infamous program in CIA history: MKULTRA.The Road to Passchendaele: The Heroic Year in Soldiers' Own Words and Photographs
Par Richard Van Emden. 2017
Passchendaele is the next volume in the highly regarded series of books from the best-selling First World War historian Richard…
van Emden. Once again, using the winning formula of diaries and memoirs, and above all original photographs taken on illegally held cameras by the soldiers themselves, Richard tells the story of 1917, of life both in and out of the line culminating in perhaps the most dreaded battle of them all, the Battle of Passchendaele. His pervious book, The Somme, has now sold nearly 20,000 copies in hardback and softback, proving that the public appetite is undiminished for new, original stories illustrated with over 150 rarely or never-before-seen battlefield images. The author has an outstanding collection of over 5,000 privately taken and overwhelmingly unpublished photographs, revealing the war as it was seen by the men involved, an existence that was sometimes exhilarating, too often terrifying, and occasionally even fun. Richard van Emden interviewed 270 veterans of the Great War, has written extensively about the soldiers' lives, and has worked on many television documentaries, always concentrating on the human aspects of war, its challenge and its cost to the millions of men involved. This book will be published in June 2017, in time for the 100th anniversary of the epic Battle of Passchendaele which began on 31st July 1917 Richard van Emdens books sold over 650,000 books and have appeared in The Times bestseller chart on a number of occasions. He lives in West London and regularly appears on television, mostly recently as BBC1s historian for the national commemorations of the Somme Battle. He has appeared on over forty television documentaries and has written nineteen books on the First World War.Great Power Cyber Competition: Competing and Winning in the Information Environment (Routledge Advances in Defence Studies)
Par David V. Gioe, Margaret W. Smith. 2024
This volume conceptualizes the threats, challenges, opportunities, and boundaries of great power cyber competition of the 21st century. This book…
focuses on a key dimension of contemporary great power competition that is often less understood due to its intangible character: the competition taking place in the cyber domain, including information and cyber operations. Democracies across the globe find themselves in an unrelenting competition with peer and near-peer competitors, with a prevailing notion that no state is "safe" from the informational contest. Adversarial powers, particularly China and Russia, recognize that most competition is principally non-kinetic but dominates the information environment and cyberspace, and the volume articulates the Russian and Chinese strategies to elevate cyber and information competition to a central position. Western governments and, in particular, the U.S. government have long conceived of a war–peace duality, but that perspective is giving way to a more nuanced perception of competition. This volume goes beyond analyzing the problems prevalent in the information space and offers a roadmap for Western powers to compete in and protect the global information environment from malicious actors. Its genesis is rooted in the proposition that it is time for the West to push back against aggression and that it needs a relevant framework and tools to do so. The book demonstrates that Western democratic states currently lack both the strategic and intellectual acumen to compete and win in the information and cyber domains, and argues that the West needs a strategy to compete with near-peer powers in information and cyber warfare. This book will be of much interest to students of cyber-warfare, information warfare, defense studies, and international relations in general, as well as practitioners.Cashing Out: The Flight of Nazi Treasure, 1945–1948
Par Neill Lochery. 2023
When Nazis looked to flee Europe with stolen art, gems, and gold in tow, certain &“neutral&” countries were all too…
willing to assist them. By the end of January 1945, it was clear to Germany that the war was lost. The Third Reich was in freefall, and its leaders, apart from those clustered around Hitler in his Berlin bunker, sought to abscond before they were besieged. But they wanted to take their wealth with them. Their escape routes were diverse: Sweden and Switzerland boasted proximity, banking, and industrial closeness, while Spain and Portugal offered an inviting Atlantic coastline and shipping routes to South America. And in various ways, each of these so-called neutral nations welcomed the Nazi escapees, along with the clandestine wealth they carried. Cashing Out tells the riveting history of the race to intercept the stolen assets before they disappeared, and before the will to punish Germany was replaced by the political considerations of the fast-approaching Cold War. Bestselling author Neill Lochery here brilliantly recounts the flight of the Nazi-looted riches—the last great escape of World War II—and the Allied quest for justice.Ethical Hacking (Law, Technology and Media)
Par Alana Maurushat. 2019
How will governments and courts protect civil liberties in this new era of hacktivism? Ethical Hacking discusses the attendant moral…
and legal issues. The first part of the 21st century will likely go down in history as the era when ethical hackers opened governments and the line of transparency moved by force. One need only read the motto “we open governments” on the Twitter page for Wikileaks to gain a sense of the sea change that has occurred. Ethical hacking is the non-violent use of a technology in pursuit of a cause—political or otherwise—which is often legally and morally ambiguous. Hacktivists believe in two general but spirited principles: respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of expression and personal privacy; and the responsibility of government to be open, transparent and fully accountable to the public. How courts and governments will deal with hacking attempts which operate in a grey zone of the law and where different ethical views collide remains to be seen. What is undisputed is that Ethical Hacking presents a fundamental discussion of key societal questions. A fundamental discussion of key societal questions. This book is published in English. - La première moitié du XXIe siècle sera sans doute reconnue comme l’époque où le piratage éthique a ouvert de force les gouvernements, déplaçant les limites de la transparence. La page twitter de Wikileaks enchâsse cet ethos à même sa devise, « we open governments », et sa volonté d’être omniprésent. En parallèle, les grandes sociétés de technologie comme Apple se font compétition pour produire des produits de plus en plus sécuritaires et à protéger les données de leurs clients, alors même que les gouvernements tentent de limiter et de décrypter ces nouvelles technologies d’encryption. Entre-temps, le marché des vulnérabilités en matière de sécurité augmente à mesure que les experts en sécurité informatique vendent des vulnérabilités de logiciels des grandes technologies, dont Apple et Google, contre des sommes allant de 10 000 à 1,5 million de dollars. L’activisme en sécurité est à la hausse. Le piratage éthique est l’utilisation non-violence d’une technologie quelconque en soutien d’une cause politique ou autre qui est souvent ambigue d’un point de vue juridique et moral. Le hacking éthique peut désigner les actes de vérification de pénétration professionnelle ou d’experts en sécurité informatique, de même que d’autres formes d’actions émergentes, comme l’hacktivisme et la désobéissance civile en ligne. L’hacktivisme est une forme de piratage éthique, mais également une forme de militantisme des droits civils à l’ère numérique. En principe, les adeptes du hacktivisme croient en deux grands principes : le respect des droits de la personne et les libertés fondamentales, y compris la liberté d’expression et à la vie privée, et la responsabilité des gouvernements d’être ouverts, transparents et pleinement redevables au public. En pratique, toutefois, les antécédents comme les agendas des hacktivistes sont fort diversifiés. Il n’est pas clair de quelle façon les tribunaux et les gouvernements traiteront des tentatives de piratage eu égard aux zones grises juridiques, aux approches éthiques conflictuelles, et compte tenu du fait qu’il n’existe actuellement, dans le monde, presque aucune exception aux provisions, en matière de cybercrime et de crime informatique, liées à la recherche sur la sécurité ou l’intérêt public. Il sera également difficile de déterminer le lien entre hacktivisme et droits civils. Ce livre est publié en anglais.A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of Virginia Hall, WWII's Most Dangerous Spy
Par Sonia Purnell. 2019
'A METICULOUS HISTORY THAT READS LIKE A THRILLER' BEN MACINTYRE, TEN BEST BOOKS TO READ ABOUT WORLD WAR II An…
astounding story of heroism, spycraft, resistance and personal triumph over shocking adversity. 'A rousing tale of derring-do' THE TIMES * 'Riveting' MICK HERRON * 'Superb' IRISH TIMES THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERIn September 1941, a young American woman strides up the steps of a hotel in Lyon, Vichy France. Her papers say she is a journalist. Her wooden leg is disguised by a determined gait and a distracting beauty. She is there to spark the resistance.By 1942 Virginia Hall was the Gestapo's most urgent target, having infiltrated Vichy command, trained civilians in guerrilla warfare and sprung soldiers from Nazi prison camps. The first woman to go undercover for British SOE, her intelligence changed the course of the war - but her fight was still not over. This is a spy history like no other, telling the story of the hunting accident that disabled her, the discrimination she fought and the secret life that helped her triumph over shocking adversity.'A cracking story about an extraordinarily brave woman' TELEGRAPH'Gripping ... superb ... a rounded portrait of a complicated, resourceful, determined and above all brave woman' IRISH TIMESWINNER of the PLUTARCH AWARD FOR BEST BIOGRAPHY"Exceptional military history worthy of its heroic subject." —Matthew J. DavenportIn the vein of Band of Brothers and American Sniper, a…
riveting history of Alvin York, the World War I legend who killed two dozen Germans and captured more than 100, detailing York's heroics yet also restoring the unsung heroes of his patrol to their rightful place in history—from renowned World War I historian James Carl Nelson.October 8, 1918 was a banner day for heroes of the American Expeditionary Force. Thirteen men performed heroic deeds that would earn them Medals of Honor. Of this group, one man emerged as the single greatest American hero of the Great War: Alvin Cullum York. A poor young farmer from Tennessee, Sergeant York was said to have single-handedly killed two dozen Germans and captured another 132 of the enemy plus thirty-five machine guns before noon on that fateful Day of Valor. York would become an American legend, celebrated in magazines, books, and a blockbuster biopic starring Gary Cooper. The film, Sergeant York, told of a hell-raiser from backwoods Tennessee who had a come-to-Jesus moment, then wrestled with his newfound Christian convictions to become one of the greatest heroes the U.S. Army had ever known. It was a great story—but not the whole story.In this absorbing history, James Carl Nelson unspools, for the first time, the complete story of Alvin York and the events that occurred in the Argonne Forest on that day. Nelson gives voice, in particular, to the sixteen “others” who fought beside York. Hailing from big cities and small towns across the U.S. as well as several foreign countries, these soldiers included a patrician Connecticut farmer whose lineage could be traced back to the American Revolution, a poor runaway from Massachusetts who joined the Army under a false name, and a Polish immigrant who enlisted in hopes of expediting his citizenship. The York Patrol shines a long overdue spotlight on these men and York, and pays homage to their bravery and sacrifice. Illustrated with 25 black-and-white images, The York Patrol is a rousing tale of courage, tragedy, and heroism.An account of Germany's little known U-boat campaign against merchant shipping along the North American Atlantic coast during the first…
six months of 1942. It also documents the failure of the US Navy to meet the German attack.Good to Go: The Life And Times Of A Decorated Member of the U.S. Navy's Elite Seal Team Two
Par Harold Constance, Randall Fuerst. 1997
"Fractions of a second in time. What amazing violence can be meted out in the blink of an eye."In the…
mid-nineteen sixties, Harry Constance made a life-altering journey that led him out of Texas and into the jungles of Vietnam. As a young naval officer, he went from UDT training to the U.S. Navy's newly formed SEAL Team Two, and then straight into furious action. By 1970, he was already the veteran of three hundred combat missions and the recipient of thirty-two military citations, including three Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.Good To Go is Constance's powerful, firsthand account of his three tours of duty as a member of America's most elite, razor-sharp stealth fighting force. It is a breathtaking memoir of harrowing missions and covert special-ops—from the floodplains of the Mekong Delta to the beaches of the South China Sea—that places the reader in the center of bloody ambushes and devastating firefights. But his extraordinary adventure goes even farther—beyond 'Nam—as we accompany Constance and the SEALs on astonishing missions to some of the world's most dangerous hot-spots . . . and experience close-up the courage, dedication, and unparalleled skill that made the U.S. Navy SEALs legendary.Includes 8 Pages of SEAL Team Action Photos!Indestructible: The Unforgettable Memoir of a Marine Hero at the Battle of Iwo Jima
Par Jack H. Lucas, D. K. Drum. 1945
Medal of Honor recipient Jack H. Lucas’s classic memoir of his heroics at the Battle of Iwo Jima—with a foreword…
by Bob Dole and reissued to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the battle in 2020.On February 20, 1945, the second day of the assault on Iwo Jima—one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific theater in World War II—Private Jack Lucas, who was only seventeen, and three other Marines engaged in a close-proximity firefight with Japanese soldiers. When two enemy grenades landed in their trench, Lucas jumped on one and pulled the other under his body to save the lives of his comrades. Lucas was blown into the air as his body was torn apart by 250 entrance wounds. He was so severely wounded that his team left him for dead. Miraculously, he survived.While on the hospital ship Samaritan, his spirit soared to see the American flag flying atop Mount Suribachi—the same flag immortalized in Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. Lucas endured twenty-one grueling surgeries and carried 200 pieces of shrapnel in his body for the rest of his life. Awarded the Medal of Honor, he became the youngest Marine in U.S. history—and the youngest of all World War II servicemen—to receive the honor.Indestructible tells the remarkable story of an extraordinary American possessed with a fierce determination to serve his country.Compared to Casablanca by the Washington Post, The Freedom Line is a page-turning story of a group of resistance workers who secreted downed…
Allied fighter pilots through France and into safety in Spain during World War II—perfect for fans of Apple TV's Masters of the Air.As war raged against Hitler's Germany, an increasing number of Allied fliers were shot down on missions against Nazi targets in occupied Europe. Many fliers parachuted safely behind enemy lines only to find themselves stranded and hunted down by the Gestapo. The Freedom Line traces the thrilling and true story of Robert Grimes, a 20–year–old American B–17 pilot whose plane was shot down over Belgium on Oct. 20, 1943. Wounded, disoriented, and scared, he was rescued by operatives of the Comet Line, a group of tenacious young women and men from Belgium, France, and Spain who joined forces to rescue the Allied aircrews and take them to safety. And on Christmas Eve 1943, he and a group of fellow Americans faced unexpected sudden danger and tragedy on the border between France and Spain.The road to safety was a treacherous journey by train, by bicycle, and on foot that stretched hundreds of miles across occupied France to the Pyrenees Mountains at the Spanish border. Armed with guile and spirit, the selfless civilian fighters of the Comet Line had risked their lives to create this underground railroad, and by this time in the war, they had saved hundreds of Americans, British, Australians, and other Allied airmen.Based on interviews with the survivors and in–depth archival research, The Freedom Line is the story of a group of friends who chose to act on their own out of a deep respect for liberty and human dignity. Theirs was a courage that presumed to take on a fearfully powerful foe with few defences.A former FBI Special Agent and leading cyber-security expert offers a devastating and essential look at the misinformation campaigns, fake…
news, and electronic espionage operations that have become the cutting edge of modern warfare—and how we can protect ourselves and our country against them.Clint Watts electrified the nation when he testified in front of the House Intelligence Committee regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election. In Messing with the Enemy, the cyber and homeland security expert introduces us to a frightening world in which terrorists and cyber criminals don’t hack your computer, they hack your mind. Watts reveals how these malefactors use your information and that of your friends and family to work for them through social media, which they use to map your social networks, scour your world affiliations, and master your fears and preferences.Thanks to the schemes engineered by social media manipulators using you and your information, business executives have coughed up millions in fraudulent wire transfers, seemingly good kids have joined the Islamic State, and staunch anti-communist Reagan Republicans have cheered the Russian government’s hacking of a Democratic presidential candidate’s e-mails. Watts knows how they do it because he’s mirrored their methods to understand their intentions, combat their actions, and coopt their efforts.Watts examines a particular social media platform—from Twitter to internet Forums to Facebook to LinkedIn—and a specific bad actor—from al Qaeda to the Islamic State to the Russian and Syrian governments—to illuminate exactly how social media tracking is used for nefarious purposes. He explains how he’s learned, through his successes and his failures, to engage with hackers, terrorists, and even the Russians—and how these interactions have generated methods of fighting back. Shocking, funny, and eye-opening, Messing with the Enemy is a deeply urgent guide for living safe and smart in a super-connected world.Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies
Par Barry Meier. 2021
A Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist’s journey into a billon-dollar secret industry that is shaping our world – the booming…
business of private spying, operatives-for-hire retained by companies, political parties and the powerful to dig up dirt on their enemies and, if need be, destroy them. For decades, private eyes from Allan Pinkerton, who formed the first detective agency in the U.S., to Jules Kroll, who transformed the investigations business by giving it a corporate veneer, private spies were content to stand in the shadows. Now, that is all changing. High-profile stories grabbing recent headlines – the Steele Dossier, Black Cube, the Theranos scandal, Harvey Weinstein’s attacks on his accusers – all share a common thread, the involvement of private spies. Today, operatives-for-hire are influencing presidential elections, the news media, government policies and the fortunes of companies.. They are also peering into our personal lives as never before, using off-the shelf technology to listen to our phone calls, monitor our emails, and decide what we see on social media. Private spying has never been cheaper and the business has never been more lucrative—just as its power has never been more pervasive. Spooked is a fast-paced, disturbing and, at times, hilarious tour through the shadowlands of private spying and its inhabitants, a grab-bag collection of ex-intelligence operatives, former journalists and lost souls. In this hidden world, information is currency, double-crosses are commonplace, and hacking can be standard procedure. Drawing on his journalistic expertise and unique access to sources, Barry Meier uncovers the secrets private spies want to keep hidden.Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War
Par Linda Hervieux. 2015
"An utterly compelling account of the African Americans who played a crucial and dangerous role in the invasion of Europe.…
The story of their heroic duty is long overdue.” —Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest GenerationThe injustices of 1940s Jim Crow America are brought to life in this extraordinary blend of military and social history—a story that pays tribute to the valor of an all-Black battalion whose crucial contributions at D-Day have gone unrecognized to this day.In the early hours of June 6, 1944, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, a unit of African-American soldiers, landed on the beaches of France. 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.Black May: The Epic Story of the Allies' Defeat of the German U-Boats in May 1943
Par Michael Gannon. 1998
In May 1943, Allied sea and air forces won a stunning, dramatic, and vital victory over the largest and most…
powerful submarine force ever sent to sea, sinking forty-one German U-boats and damaging thirty-seven others. It was the forty-fifth month of World War II, and by the end of May the Germans were forced to acknowledge defeat and recall almost all of their remaining U-boats from the major traffic lanes of the North Atlantic. At U-Boat Headquarters in Berlin, despondent naval officers spoke of "Black May." It was a defeat from which the German U-boat fleet never recovered.Black May is a triumph of scholarship and narrative, an important work of history, and a great sea story. Acclaimed historian Michael Gannon, author of Operation Drumbeat, has done enormous research and produced the most thoroughly documented study ever done of these battles. In his compelling historical saga, the people are as significant as the technical information.Given the strategic importance of the events of May 1943, it is natural to ask, How did Black May happen and why? Who or what was responsible? Were new Allied tactics adopted or new weapons employed?This book answers those questions and many others. Drawing on original documents in German, British, U.S., and Canadian archives, as well as interviews with surviving participants, Gannon describes the exciting sea and air battles, frequently taking the reader inside the U-boats themselves, aboard British warships, onto the decks of torpedoed merchant ships, and into the cockpits of British and U.S. aircraft.Throughout, Gannon tells the Black May story from both the German and Allied perspectives, often using the actual words of captains and crews. Finally, he allows the reader to "listen in" on secretly recorded conversations of captured U-boat men in POW quarters during that same incredible month, giving intimate and moving access to the thoughts and emotions of seamen that is unparalleled in naval literature. Rarely, if ever, has the U-boat war been presented so accurately, so graphically, and so personally as in Black May.