Search Results: History - World War II from I Cannot Live Without Books

The Battle of Midway by Craig L. Symonds
There are few moments in military history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as at the Battle of Midway. At dawn of June 4, 1942, a rampaging Japanese navy ruled the Pacific. By suncet, their vaunted carrier force (the Kido Butai) had been sunk by American planes. Though the Second World War had three more years to run, the Imperial Japanese Navy would never again initiate a strategic offensive.
In this spellbinding account of a key turning point, one of America's leading naval historians, Craig L. Symonds, paints a portrait of ingenuity, courage, sacrifice, and chance. Symonds begins with the arrival of Admiral Chestar A. Nimitz at Pearl Harbor after the devastating Japanese attack, and describes the events leading to the climactic battle, including both Coral Sea -- the first in history involving opposing carrier forces -- and Jimmy Doolittle's daring raid of Tokyo. He focuses throughout ont he people involved, offering… Read More

The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II by Antony Beevor
THERE IS A RED "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES
On September 17, 1944, General Kurt Student, the founder of Nazi Germany's parachute forces, heard the groaning roar of airplane engines. He went out onto his balcony above the flat landscape of southern Holland to watch the air armada of C-47 Skytrains and gliders, carrying the legendary American 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and the British 1st Airborne Division.
Operation Market Garden, the plan to end the war by capturing the bridges leading to the Lower Rhine and beyond, was a bold concept, but could it have ever worked? The cost of failure was horrendous, above all for the Dutch, who risked everything to help. German reprisals were pitiless and cruel and lasted until the end of the war.
In The Battle of Arnhem, Antony Beevor, using many overlooked and new sources from Dutch, American, British, Polish, and German archives, has reconstructed… Read More

Beyond the Call of Duty: Army Flight Nursing in World War II by Judith Barger
At the height of World War II, five hundred Army flight nurses served with the Army Air Forces as members of thirty-one medical air evacuation squadrons located throughout the world on both the European and Pacific fronts. Their work was not insignificant -- over one million patients were evacuated by air between January 1943 and May 1945. These specially trained Army nurses took nursing to new heights. Often decorated for their accomplishments, they exemplify the ability of a group of nurses to cope successfully with the challenges of war.
In her comprehensive book, author Judith Barger brings together information that is becoming less accessible as the former nurses succumb to age, infirmity, and death. Barger interviewed twenty-five of these pioneering women in 1986, when their recall fo their service experiences was still vivid and informative. Building on Barger's earlier research, their stories and the numerous… Read More

The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944 by Michael Neiberg
As the Allies struggled inland from Normandy in August of 1944, the fate of Paris hung in the balance. Other jewels of Europe -- sites like Warsaw, Antwerp, and Monte Cassino -- were, or would soon be, reduced to rubble during attempts to liberate them. But Paris endured, thanks to a fractious cast of characters, from Resistance cells to Free French operatives to an unlikely assortment of diplomats, Allied generals, and governmental officials. Their efforts, and those of the German forces fighting to maintain control of the city, would shape the course of the battle for Europe and color popular memory of the conflict for generations to come.
In The Blood of Free Men, celebrated historian Michael Neiberg deftly tracks the forces vying for Paris, providing a revealing new look at the city's dramatic and triumphant resistance against the Nazis. The salvation of Paris was not a foregone conclusion, Neiberg shows, and the liberation… Read More

The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany's Resistance Against the Nazis by Norman Ohler
Summertime, 1935. On a lake near Berlin, a young man is out sailing when he glimpses a woman reclining on 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 anti-fascist fighters that stretched across Berlin's bohemian underworld. Poets, philosophers, workers, and artists, they were all freethinkers united by a desire to bring down Hitler at any cost. Harro himself infiltrated German intelligence and began funneling Nazi battle plans to the Allies, including the details of Hitler's surprise attack on the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Libertas used her position at the propaganda ministry to begin collecting evidence of the mass murder of Jews. They knew the stakes… Read More

A Death in San Pietro: The Untold Story of Ernie Pyle, John Huston, and the Fight for Purple Heart Valley by Tim Brady
December 1943. In war-ravaged Italy near a small village north of Naples, the paths of three men -- platoon leader Captain Henry Waskow, award-winning journalist Ernie Pyle, and the young filmmaker John Huston -- crossed. They would never speak a word to each other, would never share a drink or a cigarette; but fate was about to draw them together. And as fate would have it, they were about to make one of the great stories of World War II.
By the time Mark Clark's Fifth Army reached the Liri Valley in south-central Italy, a tough but rapid sweep through Sicily had come to a muddy halt. A battle-hardened German army was entrenched on the mountains surrounding the tiny village of San Pietro with every intention of stopping Clark's determined march to Rome. On the slopes of one of those mountains, the death of a single platoon captain, Henry Waskow, would come to epitomize the struggle.… Read More

Deliver Us from Darkness: The Untold Story of Third Battalion 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment During Market Garden by Ian Gardner
THERE IS A RED "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES.
On September 17, 1944, the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment dropped into Holland as part of Operation Market Garden. The regiment, part of the 101st Airborne Division, was tasked with securing the main highway that passed through Eindhoven, which would allow British forces to push into Holland. But resistance was much heavier and more resolute than expected and the mission to secure Hell's Highway deteriorated into a bloody 72-day campaign.
Deliver us from Darkness, the follow-up to the critically acclaimed Tonight We Die As Men, draws on years of research and extended interviews with veterans and civilians caught up in the fighting to tell the gripping account of the paratroopers of the Third Battalion 506th Regiment. From the terror of parachuting behind enemy lines and the desperate struggle to stay… Read More

Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War by Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman
By early December 1941, war had changed much of the world beyond recognition. Nazi Germany occupied most of the European continent, while in Asia, the Second Sino-Japanese War had turned China into a battleground. But these conflicts were not yet inextricably linked -- and the United States remained at peace.
Hitler's American Gamble recounts the five days that upended everything: December 7 to 11, from Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor to Hitler's declaration of war on the United States. Tracing developments in real-time, historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman reveal how America's engagement against Germany was in fact far from inevitable. Instead, the fate of the world hung in the balance -- and it was decided in war rooms, across diplomatic cables, and through the political machinations of the era's most famous and powerful men: Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin. Only with… Read More

The Iron Sea: How the Allies Hunted and Destroyed Hitler's Warships by Simon Read
By 1941, the sea had become a mass grave. Hitler's four capital warships -- Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Tirpitz, and Bismarck, the largest warship on the ocean -- roamed the wind-swept waves, threatening the Allied war effort and sending thousands of men to the icy depths of the North Atlantic. Bristling with guns and steeled in heavy armor, these reapers of the sea could outrun and outgun any battleship in the Allied arsenal. The deadly menace kept Winston Churchill awake at night; he deemed them "targets of supreme consequence."
The campaign against Hitler's surface fleet would carry on through the final days of World War II and involve everything from massive warships engaged in bloody, fire-drenched battles to daring Commando raids in German-occupied harbors. This is the fast-paced story of the Allied bomber crews, brave sailors, and bold Commandos who "sunk the Bismarck" and won a hard-fought victory over Hitler's iron… Read More

Operation Chastise: The RAF's Most Brilliant Attack of World War II by Max Hastings
THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES.
Operation Chastise, the overnight destruction of the Mohne and Eder dams in northwest Germany by Britain's Royal Air Force 617 Squadron, was an epic wartime maneuver that has become military legend.
Max Hastings grew up embracing the story, the classic 1944 movie, and the memory of Guy Gibson, the twenty-four-year-old wing commander who led the raid. In the twenty-first century, however, Hastings urges that we should review the Dambusters in much more complex shades. The aircrew's heroism was wholly authentic, as was the brilliance of Barnes Wallis, the man who invented the "bouncing bombs" the crew used to great success. But commanders who promised their young fliers that a victory at the dams could shorten the war were living a fantasy. The raid, what Germans call the Mohnekatastrophe, imposed only a temporary disruption on the Nazi war machine rather… Read More

Sisters in Resistance: How a German Spy, a Banker's Wife, and Mussolini's Daughter Outwitted the Nazis by Tilar J. Mazzeo
In 1944, news of secret diaries kept by Italy's foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano had permeated the public consciousness. What wasn't reported, however, was how three women -- a fascist leader's daughter, a German spy, and an American socialite -- risked their lives to ensure the diaries would reach the Allies, who would later use them as evidence against the Nazis at Nuremberg.
In 1944, Benito Mussolini's daughter, Edda, gave Hitler and her father an ultimatum: Release her husband, Galeazzo Ciano, from prison, or risk her leaking her husband's journals to the press. To avoid the peril of exposing Nazi lies, Hitler and Mussolini hunted for the diaries for months, determined to destroy them.
Hilde Beetz, a German spy, was deployed to seduce Ciano to learn the diaries' location and take them from Edda. But the seducer became the seduced. Hilde converted and became a double agent,… Read More

Spies in the Congo: America's Atomic Mission in World War II by Susan Williams
In the 1940s, the brightest minds of the United States and Nazi Germany raced to West Africa with a single mission: to secure the essential ingredient of the atomic bomb -- and to make sure nobody saw them doing it.
Albert Einstein told President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 that the world's only supply of uniquely high-quality uranium ore -- the key ingredient for the atomic bomb -- could be found in the Katanga province of the Belgian Congo at the Shinkolobwe Mine. Once the U.S. Manhattan Project was committed to developing atomic weapons for the war against Germany and Japan, the rush to procure this uranium became a top priority -- one deemed "vital to the weflare of the United States."
But covertly exporting it from Africa posed a major risk: the ore had to travel via a spy-infested Angolan port or 1,500 miles by rail through the Congo, and then be shipped by boats or Pan Am Clippers to safety in the United States. It… Read More

Their Backs Against the Sea: The Battle of Saipan and the Largest Banzai Attack of World War II by Bill Sloan
In the midst of the largest banzai attack of the war, U.S. Army Lt. Col. William O'Brien, grievously wounded and out of ammunition, grabbed a sabre from a fallen Japanese soldier and flailed away at a small army of assailants, screaming to his men, "Don't give them a damn inch!" When his body was recovered the next day, thirty dead enemies were piled around him.
The Battle of Saipan lasted twenty-five hellish days in the summer of 1944, and the stakes couldn't have been higher. If Japan lost possession of the island, all hope for victory would be lost. For the Americans, its capture would result in secure air bases for the new B-29s that would put them within striking distance of the Japanese homeland. The outcome of the war in the Pacific lay in the balance.
In this gritty, vivid narrative, award-winning author Bill Sloan fuses fresh interviews, oral and unit histories, and unpublished… Read More