Résultats de recherche de titre
Articles 141 à 160 sur 351
A Short History of World War II (Short History Ser.)
Par James L. Stokesbury. 1980
A Short History of World War II is essentially a military history, but it reaches from the peace settlements of World…
War I to the drastically altered postwar world of the late 1940's. Lucidly written and eminently readable, it is factual and accurate enough to satisfy professional historians. A Short History of World War II will appeal equally to the general reader, the veteran who fought in the War, and the student interested in understanding the contemporary political world.New York Times BestsellerThe definitive story of the Ritchie Boys, as featured on CBS's 60 Minutes"An irresistible history of the WWII…
Jewish refugees who returned to Europe to fight the Nazis.” —NewsdayThey were young Jewish boys who escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe and resettled in America. After the United States entered the war, they returned to fight for their adopted homeland and for the families they had left behind. Their stories tell the tale of one of the U.S. Army’s greatest secret weapons.Sons and Soldiers begins during the menacing rise of Hitler’s Nazi party, as Jewish families were trying desperately to get out of Europe. Bestselling author Bruce Henderson captures the heartbreaking stories of parents choosing to send their young sons away to uncertain futures in America, perhaps never to see them again. As these boys became young men, they were determined to join the fight in Europe. Henderson describes how they were recruited into the U.S. Army and how their unique mastery of the German language and psychology was put to use to interrogate German prisoners of war.These young men—known as the Ritchie Boys, after the Maryland camp where they trained—knew what the Nazis would do to them if they were captured. Yet they leapt at the opportunity to be sent in small, elite teams to join every major combat unit in Europe, where they collected key tactical intelligence on enemy strength, troop and armored movements, and defensive positions that saved American lives and helped win the war. A postwar army report found that nearly 60 percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from the Ritchie Boys.Sons and Soldiers draws on original interviews and extensive archival research to vividly re-create the stories of six of these men, tracing their journeys from childhood through their escapes from Europe, their feats and sacrifices during the war, and finally their desperate attempts to find their missing loved ones. Sons and Soldiers is an epic story of heroism, courage, and patriotism that will not soon be forgotten.Every Man a Hero: A Memoir of D-Day, the First Wave at Omaha Beach, and a World at War
Par Ray Lambert, Jim DeFelice. 2019
The New York Times Bestseller | Winner of the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award Omaha Beach legend Ray Lambert's unforgettable firsthand account of D-Day “Lambert landed…
on [Omaha Beach] as a 23-year-old Army medic. ... As the bullets cut down his comrades, he raced repeatedly back into the sea to drag out wounded soldiers.” —New York TimesSeventy-five years ago, he hit Omaha Beach with the first wave. Now D-Day legend Ray Lambert (1920-2021) delivers one of the most remarkable memoirs of our time, a tour-de-force of remembrance evoking his role as a decorated World War II medic who risked his life to save the heroes of Normandy. At five a.m. on June 6, 1944, U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Ray Lambert worked his way through a throng of nervous soldiers to a wind-swept deck on a troopship off the coast of Normandy, France. A familiar voice cut through the wind and rumble of the ship’s engines. “Ray!” called his brother, Bill. Ray, head of a medical team for the First Division’s famed 16th Infantry Regiment, had already won a silver star in 1943 for running through German lines to rescue trapped men, one of countless rescues he’d made in North Africa and Sicily. “This is going to be the worst yet,” Ray told his brother, who served alongside him throughout the war.“If I don’t make it,” said Bill, “take care of my family.”“I will,” said Ray. He thought about his wife and son–a boy he had yet to see. “Same for me.” The words were barely out of Ray’s mouth when a shout came from below.To the landing craft!The brothers parted. Their destinies lay ten miles away, on the bloodiest shore of Normandy, a plot of Omaha Beach ironically code named “Easy Red.”Less than five hours later, after saving dozens of lives and being wounded at least three separate times, Ray would lose consciousness in the shallow water of the beach under heavy fire. He would wake on the deck of a landing ship to find his battered brother clinging to life next to him.Every Man a Hero is the unforgettable story not only of what happened in the incredible and desperate hours on Omaha Beach, but of the bravery and courage that preceded them, throughout the Second World War—from the sands of Africa, through the treacherous mountain passes of Sicily, and beyond to the greatest military victory the world has ever known.Never Call Me a Hero: A Legendary American Dive-Bomber Pilot Remembers the Battle of Midway
Par N. Jack Kleiss, Timothy Orr, Laura Orr. 2017
Hailed as "the single most effective pilot at Midway" (World War II magazine), Dusty Kleiss struck and sank three Japanese…
warships at the Battle of Midway, including two aircraft carriers, helping turn the tide of the Second World War. This is his extraordinary memoir. NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "AN INSTANT CLASSIC" —Dallas Morning NewsOn the morning of June 4, 1942, high above the tiny Pacific atoll of Midway, Lt. (j.g.) "Dusty" Kleiss burst out of the clouds and piloted his SBD Dauntless into a near-vertical dive aimed at the heart of Japan’s Imperial Navy, which six months earlier had ruthlessly struck Pearl Harbor. The greatest naval battle in history raged around him, its outcome hanging in the balance as the U.S. desperately searched for its first major victory of the Second World War. Then, in a matter of seconds, Dusty Kleiss’s daring 20,000-foot dive helped forever alter the war’s trajectory. Plummeting through the air at 240 knots amid blistering anti-aircraft fire, the twenty-six-year-old pilot from USS Enterprise’s elite Scouting Squadron Six fixed on an invaluable target—the aircraft carrier Kaga, one of Japan’s most important capital ships. He released three bombs at the last possible instant, then desperately pulled out of his gut-wrenching 9-g dive. As his plane leveled out just above the roiling Pacific Ocean, Dusty’s perfectly placed bombs struck the carrier’s deck, and Kaga erupted into an inferno from which it would never recover. Arriving safely back at Enterprise, Dusty was met with heartbreaking news: his best friend was missing and presumed dead along with two dozen of their fellow naval aviators. Unbowed, Dusty returned to the air that same afternoon and, remarkably, would fatally strike another enemy carrier, Hiryu. Two days later, his deadeye aim contributed to the destruction of a third Japanese warship, the cruiser Mikuma, thereby making Dusty the only pilot from either side to land hits on three different ships, all of which sank—losses that crippled the once-fearsome Japanese fleet. By battle’s end, the humble young sailor from Kansas had earned his place in history—and yet he stayed silent for decades, living quietly with his children and his wife, Jean, whom he married less than a month after Midway. Now his extraordinary and long-awaited memoir, Never Call Me a Hero, tells the Navy Cross recipient’s full story for the first time, offering an unprecedentedly intimate look at the "the decisive contest for control of the Pacific in World War II" (New York Times)—and one man’s essential role in helping secure its outcome. Dusty worked on this book for years with naval historians Timothy and Laura Orr, aiming to publish Never Call Me a Hero for Midway’s seventy-fifth anniversary in June 2017. Sadly, as the book neared completion in 2016, Dusty Kleiss passed away at age 100, one of the last surviving dive-bomber pilots to have fought at Midway. And yet the publication of Never Call Me a Hero is a cause for celebration: these pages are Dusty’s remarkable legacy, providing a riveting eyewitness account of the Battle of Midway, and an inspiring testimony to the brave men who fought, died, and shaped history during those four extraordinary days in June, seventy-five years ago.The definitive and dramatic account of what became known as "Operation Vengeance" -- the targeted kill by U.S. fighter pilots…
of Japan's larger-than-life military icon, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the naval genius who had devised the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. “AIR RAID, PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NO DRILL.” At 7:58 a.m. on December 7, 1941, an officer at the Ford Island Command Center typed what would become one of the most famous radio dispatches in history, as the Japanese navy launched a surprise aerial assault on U.S. bases on Hawaii. In a little over two hours, more than 2,400 Americans were dead, propelling the U.S.’s entry into World War II.Dead Reckoning is the epic true story of the high-stakes operation undertaken sixteen months later to avenge that deadly strike – a longshot mission hatched hastily at the U.S. base on Guadalcanal. Expertly crafting this "hunt for Bin Laden"-style WWII story, New York Times bestselling author Dick Lehr recreates the tension-filled events leading up to the climactic clash in the South Pacific skies – frontline moments loaded with xenophobia, spycraft, sacrifice and broken hearts. Lehr goes behind the scenes at Station Hypo on Hawaii, where U.S. Navy code breakers first discovered exactly where and when to find Admiral Yamamoto, on April 18, 1943, and then chronicles in dramatic detail the nerve-wracking mission to kill him. He focuses on Army Air Force Major John W. Mitchell, the ace fighter pilot from the tiny hamlet of Enid, Mississippi who was tasked with conceiving a flight route, literally to the second, for the only U.S. fighter plane on Guadalcanal capable of reaching Yamamoto hundreds of miles away – the new twin-engine P-38 Lightning with its fabled “cone of fire.”Given unprecedented access to Mitchell’s personal papers and hundreds of private letters, Lehr reveals for the first time the full story of Mitchell’s wartime exploits up to the face-off with Yamamoto, along with those of key American pilots Mitchell chose for the momentous mission: Rex Barber, Thomas Lanphier Jr., Besby Holmes, and Ray Hine. The spotlight also shines on their enemy target –Admiral Yamamoto, the enigmatic, charismatic commander in chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet, whose complicated feelings about the U.S.—he studied at Harvard—add rich complexity. In this way Dead Reckoning offers at once a fast-paced recounting of a crucial turning point in the Pacific war and keenly drawn portraits of its two main protagonists: Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, and John Mitchell, the architect of the Yamamoto’s demise.Dead Reckoning features black-and-white photos throughout.Denial: Holocaust History on Trial
Par Deborah E. Lipstadt. 2005
Now a major motion picture starring Rachel Weisz, Timothy Spall and Tom Wilkinson. “A compelling book: memoir and courtroom drama,…
a work of historical and legal import. ” -- Jewish WeekDeborah Lipstadt, author of the groundbreaking Denying the Holocaust, chronicles her six-year legal battle with controversial British World War II historian David Irving that culminated in a sensational 2000 trial in LondonIn her acclaimed 1993 book Denying the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt called putative World War II historian David Irving “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial”, a conclusion that she reached by examining his cunning manipulations of evidence, partisanship to Hitler, persistent exoneration of the Third Reich, and his confirmed celebrity among swelling ranks of anti-Semitic organizations internationally. In 1994, Irving filed a libel lawsuit, not in the U.S. courtroom—where the onus of proof lies on the plaintiff, but in the UK—where the onus of proof lies on the defendant. At stake were not only the reputations of two historians, but the record of history itself.The four-month trial took place in London in 2000 and drew international attention. With the help of a first-rate team of solicitors and historians and the support of her UK publisher, Penguin, Lipstadt won, her victory proclaimed on the front page of major newspapers around the world. Part history, part real life courtroom drama, Denial is Lipstadt’s riveting, blow-by-blow account of the trial that tested the standards of historical and judicial truths and resulted in a formal denunciation of the infamous Holocaust denier.Originally published as History on Trial."A gritty, first-person account. ... One can hear Shaw’s voice as if he were sitting beside you." —Wall Street JournalAn unforgettable…
soldier’s-eye view of the Pacific War’s bloodiest battle, by the first American officer ashore Okinawa. On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, 1.5 million men gathered aboard 1,500 Allied ships off the coast of the Japanese island of Okinawa. The men were there to launch the largest amphibious assault on the Pacific Theater. War planners expected an 80 percent casualty rate.The first American officer ashore was then-Major Art Shaw (1920-2020), a unit commander in the U.S. Army’s 361st Field Artillery Battalion of the 96th Infantry Division, nicknamed the Deadeyes. For the next three months, Shaw and his men served near the front lines of the Pacific’s costliest battle, their artillery proving decisive against a phantom enemy who had entrenched itself in the rugged, craggy island. Over eighty-two days, the Allies fought the Japanese army in a campaign that would claim more than 150,000 human lives. When the final calculations were made, the Deadeyes were estimated to have killed 37,763 of the enemy. The 361st Field Artillery Battalion had played a crucial role in the victory. The campaign would be the last major battle of World War II and a key pivot point leading to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to the Japanese surrender in August, two months after the siege’s end.Filled with extraordinary details, Shaw’s gripping account gives lasting testimony to the courage and bravery displayed by so many on the hills of Okinawa.Unknown Valor: A Story of Family, Courage, and Sacrifice from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima
Par Martha MacCallum, Ronald J. Drez. 2020
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER.In honor of the 75th Anniversary of one of the most critical battles of World War II,…
the popular primetime Fox News anchor of The Story with Martha MacCallum pays tribute to the heroic men who sacrificed everything at Iwo Jima to defeat the Armed Forces of Emperor Hirohito—among them, a member of her own family, Harry Gray.Admiral Chester Nimitz spoke of the “uncommon valor” of the men who fought on Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest and most brutal battles of World War II. In thirty-six grueling days, nearly 7,000 Marines were killed and 22,000 were wounded.Martha MacCallum takes us from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima through the lives of these men of valor, among them Harry Gray, a member of her own family.In Unknown Valor, she weaves their stories—from Boston, Massachusetts, to Gulfport, Mississippi, as told through letters and recollections—into the larger history of what American military leaders rightly saw as an eventual showdown in the Pacific with Japan. In a relentless push through the jungles of Guadalcanal, over the coral reefs of Tarawa, past the bloody ridge of Peleliu, against the banzai charges of Guam, and to the cliffs of Saipan, these men were on a path that ultimately led to the black sands of Iwo Jima, the doorstep of the Japanese Empire.Meticulously researched, heart-wrenching, and illuminating, Unknown Valor reveals the sacrifices of ordinary Marines who saved the world from tyranny and left indelible marks on those back home who loved them.The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed
Par Wendy Lower. 2021
A single photograph—an exceptionally rare &“action shot&” documenting the horrific final moment of the murder of a family—drives a riveting…
process of discovery for a gifted Holocaust scholarIn 2009, the acclaimed author of Hitler&’s Furies was shown a photograph just brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this case by German officials and Ukrainian collaborators. A Ukrainian shooter&’s rifle is inches from a woman's head, obscured in a cloud of smoke. She is bending forward, holding the hand of a barefooted little boy. And—only one of the shocking revelations of Wendy Lower&’s brilliant ten-year investigation of this image—the shins of another child, slipping from the woman&’s lap. Wendy Lower&’s forensic and archival detective work—in Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States—recovers astonishing layers of detail concerning the open-air massacres in Ukraine. The identities of mother and children, of the killers—and, remarkably, of the Slovakian photographer who openly took the image, as a secret act of resistance—are dramatically uncovered. Finally, in the hands of this brilliant exceptional scholar, a single image unlocks a new understanding of the place of the family unit in the ideology of Nazi genocide.The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero Who Infiltrated Auschwitz
Par Jack Fairweather. 2019
COSTA BOOK AWARD WINNER: BOOK OF THE YEAR • #1 SUNDAY TIMES (UK) BESTSELLER“Superbly written and breathtakingly researched, The Volunteer smuggles us…
into Auschwitz and shows us—as if watching a movie—the story of a Polish agent who infiltrated the infamous camp, organized a rebellion, and then snuck back out. ... Fairweather has dug up a story of incalculable value and delivered it to us in the most compelling prose I have read in a long time.” —Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and TribeThe incredible true story of a Polish resistance fighter’s infiltration of Auschwitz to sabotage the camp from within, and his death-defying attempt to warn the Allies about the Nazis’ plans for a “Final Solution” before it was too late.To uncover the fate of the thousands being interred at a mysterious Nazi camp on the border of the Reich, a thirty-nine-year-old Polish resistance fighter named Witold Pilecki volunteered for an audacious mission: assume a fake identity, intentionally get captured and sent to the new camp, and then report back to the underground on what had happened to his compatriots there. But gathering information was not his only task: he was to execute an attack from inside—where the Germans would least expect it. The name of the camp was Auschwitz.Over the next two and half years, Pilecki forged an underground army within Auschwitz that sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi informants and officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying truth that the camp was to become the epicenter of Nazi plans to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Pilecki realized he would have to risk his men, his life, and his family to warn the West before all was lost. To do so, meant attempting the impossible—an escape from Auschwitz itself.Completely erased from the historical record by Poland’s post-war Communist government, Pilecki remains almost unknown to the world. Now, with exclusive access to previously hidden diaries, family and camp survivor accounts, and recently declassified files, Jack Fairweather offers an unflinching portrayal of survival, revenge and betrayal in mankind’s darkest hour. And in uncovering the tragic outcome of Pilecki’s mission, he reveals that its ultimate defeat originated not in Auschwitz or Berlin, but in London and Washington.Commander In Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943 (FDR at War #2)
Par Nigel Hamilton. 2016
From Nigel Hamilton's acclaimed World War II saga, the astonishing story of FDR's yearlong, defining battle with Churchill in 1943,…
as the war raged in Africa and Italy.1943 was the year of Allied military counteroffensives, beating back the forces of the Axis powers in North Africa and the Pacific—the “Hinge of Fate,” as Winston Churchill called it. In Commander in Chief, Nigel Hamilton reveals FDR’s true role in this saga: overruling his own Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordering American airmen on an ambush of the Japanese navy’s Admiral Yamamoto, facing down Churchill when he attempted to abandon Allied D-day strategy (twice). This FDR is profoundly different from the one Churchill later painted. President Roosevelt’s patience was tested to the limit quelling the prime minister’s “revolt,” as Churchill pressured Congress and senior American leaders to focus Allied energy on disastrous fighting in Italy and the Aegean instead of landings in Normandy. Finally, in a dramatic showdown at Hyde Park, FDR had to stop Churchill from losing the war by making the ultimate threat, setting the Allies on their course to final victory. In Commander in Chief, Hamilton masterfully chronicles the clash of nations—and of two titanic personalities—at a crucial moment in modern history.Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler's Best
Par Neal Bascomb. 2021
Winner of the Motor Press Guild Best Book of the Year Award & Dean Batchelor Award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism…
For fans of The Boys in the Boat and In the Garden of Beasts, a pulse-pounding tale of triumph by an improbable team of upstarts over Hitler&’s fearsome Silver Arrows during the golden age of auto racing As Nazi Germany launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, three unlikely heroes—a driver banned from the best European teams because of his Jewish heritage, the owner of a faltering automaker company, and the adventurous daughter of an American multimillionaire—banded together to challenge Hitler&’s dominance at the Grand Prix, the apex of motorsport. Bringing to life this glamorous era and the sport that defined it, Faster chronicles one of the most inspiring, death-defying upsets of all time: a symbolic blow against the Nazis during history&’s darkest hour.The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942 (Fdr At War Ser.)
Par Nigel Hamilton. 2014
A dramatic, eye-opening account of how FDR took personal charge of the military direction of World War II.Based on years…
of archival research and interviews with the last surviving Roosevelt aides and family members, The Mantle of Command offers a radical new perspective on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s masterful—and underappreciated—leadership of the Allied war effort. After the disaster of Pearl Harbor, we see Roosevelt devising a global strategy that will defeat Hitler and the Japanese, rescue Churchill and the British people, and quell a near insurrection of his own American generals and War Department. All the while, Hamilton’s account drives toward Operation Torch—the invasion of French Northwest Africa—and the outcome of the war hangs in the balance. The Mantle of Command is an intimate, sweeping look at a great president in history’s greatest conflict.“This bold argument . . . will undoubtedly change the way we see Franklin Roosevelt.”—Christian Science Monitor “Masterly.”—Wall Street JournalThe Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground
Par Justus Rosenberg. 2020
"Thrillingly tells the story of an Eastern European Jew’s flight from the Holocaust and the years he spent fighting in…
the French underground.” —USA TodayAn American Library in Paris Book Award "Coups de Coeur" SelectionThe Art of Resistance is unlike any World War II memoir before it. Its author, Justus Rosenberg, has spent the past seventy years teaching the classics of literature to American college students. Hidden within him, however, was a remarkable true story of wartime courage and romance worthy of a great novel. Here is Professor Rosenberg’s elegant and gripping chronicle of his youth in Nazi-occupied Europe, when he risked everything to stand against evil.In 1937, after witnessing a violent Nazi mob in his hometown of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, sixteen-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent by his Jewish parents to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, the Nazis came again, as France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, Justus fled Paris, heading south. A chance meeting led him to Varian Fry, an American journalist in Marseille who led a clandestine network helping thousands of men and women—including many legendary artists and intellectuals, among them Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst—escape the Nazis. With his intimate understanding of French and German culture, and fluency in several languages, including English, Justus became an invaluable member of Fry’s operation as a spy and scout.After the Vichy government expelled Fry from France, Justus worked in Grenoble, recruiting young men and women for the Underground Army. For the next four years, he would be an essential component of the Resistance, relying on his wits and skills to survive several close calls with death. Once, he found himself in a Nazi internment camp, with his next stop Auschwitz—and yet Justus found an ingenious way to escape. He two years during the war gathering intelligence, surveying German installations and troop movements on the Mediterranean. Then, after the allied invasion at Normandy in 1944, Justus became a guerrilla fighter, participating in and leading commando raids to disrupt the German retreat across France.At the end of the Second World War, Justus emigrated to America, and built a new life. For the past fifty years, he has taught literature at Bard College, shaping the inner lives of generations of students. Now he adds his own story to the library of great coming-of-age memoirs: The Art of Resistance is a powerful saga of bravery and defiance, a true-life spy thriller touched throughout by a professor’s wisdom.Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935–1961
Par Nicholas E. Reynolds. 2018
The extraordinary untold story of Ernest Hemingway's dangerous secret life in espionageA NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A finalist for the…
William E. Colby Military Writers' Award"IMPORTANT" (Wall Street Journal) • "FASCINATING" (New York Review of Books) • "CAPTIVATING" (Missourian)A riveting international cloak-and-dagger epic ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the liberation of Western Europe, wartime China, the Red Scare of Cold War America, and the Cuban Revolution, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy reveals for the first time Ernest Hemingway’s secret adventures in espionage and intelligence during the 1930s and 1940s (including his role as a Soviet agent code-named "Argo"), a hidden chapter that fueled both his art and his undoing. While he was the historian at the esteemed CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, a longtime American intelligence officer, former U.S. Marine colonel, and Oxford-trained historian, began to uncover clues suggesting Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway was deeply involved in mid-twentieth-century spycraft -- a mysterious and shocking relationship that was far more complex, sustained, and fraught with risks than has ever been previously supposed. Now Reynolds's meticulously researched and captivating narrative "looks among the shadows and finds a Hemingway not seen before" (London Review of Books), revealing for the first time the whole story of this hidden side of Hemingway's life: his troubling recruitment by Soviet spies to work with the NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, followed in short order by a complex set of secret relationships with American agencies.Starting with Hemingway's sympathy to antifascist forces during the 1930s, Reynolds illuminates Hemingway's immersion in the life-and-death world of the revolutionary left, from his passionate commitment to the Spanish Republic; his successful pursuit by Soviet NKVD agents, who valued Hemingway's influence, access, and mobility; his wartime meeting in East Asia with communist leader Chou En-Lai, the future premier of the People's Republic of China; and finally to his undercover involvement with Cuban rebels in the late 1950s and his sympathy for Fidel Castro. Reynolds equally explores Hemingway's participation in various roles as an agent for the United States government, including hunting Nazi submarines with ONI-supplied munitions in the Caribbean on his boat, Pilar; his command of an informant ring in Cuba called the "Crook Factory" that reported to the American embassy in Havana; and his on-the-ground role in Europe, where he helped OSS gain key tactical intelligence for the liberation of Paris and fought alongside the U.S. infantry in the bloody endgame of World War II.As he examines the links between Hemingway's work as an operative and as an author, Reynolds reveals how Hemingway's secret adventures influenced his literary output and contributed to the writer's block and mental decline (including paranoia) that plagued him during the postwar years -- a period marked by the Red Scare and McCarthy hearings. Reynolds also illuminates how those same experiences played a role in some of Hemingway's greatest works, including For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, while also adding to the burden that he carried at the end of his life and perhaps contributing to his suicide.A literary biography with the soul of an espionage thriller, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy is an essential contribution to our understanding of the life, work, and fate of one of America's most legendary authors.Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields
Par Wendy Lower. 2013
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST. A revelatory history of the role of German women in the Holocaust, not only as plunderers…
and direct witnesses, but as actual killers on the Eastern Front during World War II.Lower, drawing on twenty years of archival research and fieldwork, presents startling evidence that these women were more than “desk murderers” or comforters of murderous German men: they went on “shopping sprees” and romantic outings to the Jewish ghettos; they were present at killing-field picnics, not only providing refreshment but also shooting Jews. And Lower uncovers the stories of SS wives with children of their own whose brutality is as chilling as any in history.Hitler’s Furies challenges our deepest beliefs: women can be as brutal as men, and the evidence can be hidden for seventy years.“Disquieting . . . Earlier books about the Holocaust have offered up poster girls of brutality and atrocity . . . [Lower’s] insight is to track more mundane lives, and to argue for a vastly wider complicity.” — New York Times“An unsettling but significant contribution to our understanding of how nationalism, and specifically conceptions of loyalty, are normalized, reinforced, and regulated.” — Los Angeles Review of Books“Compelling . . . Lower brings to the forefront an unexplored aspect of the Holocaust.” — Washington PostFDR At War: The Mantle of Command, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace (Fdr At War Ser. #3)
Par Nigel Hamilton. 2019
The definitive three-volume history that FDR did not live to write: the story of World War II from his perspective,…
showing his mastery of strategy, his vision, and how he overcame resistance from Churchill and his own generals to set the course for victory. Mantle of Command, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace have been celebrated as "masterly" (The Wall Street Journal).War And Peace: FDR's Final Odyssey: D-Day to Yalta, 1943–1945 (FDR at War #3)
Par Nigel Hamilton. 2019
The stirring climax to Nigel Hamilton&’s three-part saga of FDR at war—proof that he was the Second World War&’s key…
strategist, even on his deathbed &“A first-class, lens-changing work.&” —James N. Mattis, former US secretary of defense Nigel Hamilton&’s celebrated trilogy culminates with a story of triumph and tragedy. Just as FDR was proven right by the D-day landings he had championed, so was he found to be mortally ill in the spring of 1944. He was the architect of a victorious peace that he would not live to witness. Using hitherto unpublished documents and interviews, Hamilton rewrites the famous account of World War II strategy given by Winston Churchill in his memoirs. Seventy-five years after the D-day landings we finally get to see, close-up and in dramatic detail, who was responsible for rescuing, and insisting upon, the great American-led invasion of France in June 1944, and why the invasion was led by Eisenhower. As FDR&’s D-day triumph turns to personal tragedy, we watch with heartbreaking compassion the course of the disease, and how, in the months left him as US commander in chief, the dying president attempted at Hawaii, Quebec, and Yalta to prepare the United Nations for an American-backed postwar world order. Now we know: even on his deathbed, FDR was the war&’s great visionary.The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945–1953
Par Robert Dallek. 2011
"Robert Dallek brings to this majestic work a profound understanding of history, a deep engagement in foreign policy, and a…
lifetime of studying leadership. The story of what went wrong during the postwar period…has never been more intelligently explored." —Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Team of RivalsRobert Dalleck follows his bestselling Nixon and Kissenger: Partners in Power and An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 with this masterful account of the crucial period that shaped the postwar world. As the Obama Administration struggles to define its strategy for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Dallek's critical and compelling look at Truman, Churchill, Stalin, and other world leaders in the wake of World War II not only offers important historical perspective but provides timely insight on America's course into the future.A Thousand Places Left Behind: One Soldier’s Account of Jungle Warfare in WWII Burma
Par Peter K. Lutken Jr.. 2023
Born and raised in Mississippi, Peter K. Lutken, Jr. (1920–2014) joined the army in 1941 and was assigned to the…
Coast Artillery. Originally sent to India to guard airfields, he was reassigned to the British V Force, then the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services and precursor to the CIA) after he volunteered for reconnaissance missions behind Japanese lines. Skills he had learned as a boy in the backwoods and swamps around the Pearl River stood him in good stead, and by the end of the war, he attained the rank of major, commanding an entire battalion of ethnic Kachins and other local people of northern Burma (now called Myanmar). Lutken's stories carry the reader along as he sails on a troop ship to India, then treks into the mountainous jungles of northern Burma to gather intelligence and engage in guerrilla warfare with the Japanese. In his straightforward way, he describes how he learned the language of the Kachins and much about their customs and legends, and how he fought alongside them for the course of the war. Adventures of rafting uncharted rivers, surprise attacks, sabotage, natural hazards and disease, feasts and ceremonies, the plight of refugees, and tragic events of war are all told from the perspective of a young soldier, who finds himself half a world away from home. Based on hundreds of pages of transcripts from tapes recorded late in his life, A Thousand Places Left Behind recounts the untold story not just of one soldier’s experiences, but of the little-known history of American and British forces in Burma during World War II. Supported by original maps based on Lutken’s personal travels as well as photographs from his scrapbook, the book traces Lutken’s journey overseas, his expeditions into the jungle, and his return to Jackson, Mississippi in 1945. Beyond the war, Lutken’s connection with the Kachins culminated in “Project Old Soldier,” a crop exchange program which he and other veterans of OSS Detachment 101 initiated in the 1990s and which lasted until after his death in 2014. The book tells a remarkable story of bravery, friendship, history, and the unbreakable bonds forged in times of war.