Kategoria BISAC: History >> Wars & Conflicts - World War II - General

An exciting account of a little-known, yet vital part of World War II, the Allied effort to blockade Axis forces in North Africa with a relatively small number of planes and submarines included some of the war's most spectacular air battles, and opened the way to the attack on Fortress Europe from the south. This is the first book-length treatment of the crucial struggle to cut Axis supply lines in the Tunisian campaign of 1942-1943, a battle often ignored or played down even by official historians. The campaign marked the first big U.S. victory against the Axis powers and served as a...

Did Hitler mean to pursue global conquest once he had completed his mastery of Europe? In this startling reassessment of Hitler's strategic aims, Duffy argues that he fully intended to bring the war to America once his ambitions in the Eurasian heartland were achieved. Detailed here for the first time are the Third Reich's plans for a projected series of worldwide offensives using the new secret weapons emerging from wartime research. Duffy also recounts other Axis schemes to attack American cities through the use of multi-stage missiles, submarine launched rockets, and suicide missions...

They were the deadliest ships of World War II--nine German commerce raiders disguised as peaceful cargo ships, flying the flags of neutral and allied nations. In reality, these heavily armed warships roamed the world's oceans at will, like 20th-century pirates. They struck unsuspecting freighters and tankers out of the darkness of night or from behind a curtain of fog and mist. For almost three years they led the Royal Navy on a deadly chase from sea to sea, seeding Allied ports with hundreds of mines and, on one occasion, even bombarding a shore installation.

Masquerading as unarmed...

The Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, marked the beginning of the German defeat in the West. Military historian Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. vividly recaptures the desperation of the Wehrmacht as the thin gray line in Normandy finally snapped, the 5th Panzer and 7th Armies collapsed, and the survivors fled the Allied steamroller in a mad dash back to the Reich. From the reactions of soldiers in the field to military decisions at the highest levels, this is the story of the Reich's unraveling told from a German perspective.

Fighting hedgerow to hedgerow in the pitted Normandy...

A topical presentation of firsthand accounts from some of the thousands of army and navy nurses who served both stateside and overseas during World War II, this book tells the stories of the brave women who used any and all resources to save as many lives as possible. Although military nurses could have made more money as civilians, thousands chose to leave the warmth and security of home to care for the young men who went off to war. They were not saints but vibrant women whose performance changed the face of both military and civilian nursing. Jackson's account follows both army and navy...

During World War II, radio broadcasts were fundamental to the morale of the allied troops. When Americans attempted to establish their own network, the Armed Forces Network (AFN), the BBC initially resisted. This documented account of the disputes between Britain and the United States in regard to the airwaves illustrates how, despite the tensions and with the intervention of General Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, the relationship succeeded. It details the political machinations with which the BBC attempted to thwart the development of the AFN and the strategies by which the Americans...

A brief, yet complete history of the Allied campaign for the liberation of Europe from the Normandy invasion to the surrender of Germany, this study describes not only what happened, but "why" it happened. While an enormous amount has been written about this campaign, most of it focuses upon a single army or an individual battle. This book stresses a true inter-Allied and all arms approach with a balance of both strategy and tactics; accounts of effort by land, sea, air forces; as well as the strong influence of logistics. Levine deals extensively with the German side, particularly morale...

Written by a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, this book examines the background of the ill-fated 63-day uprising that pitted poorly armed Polish civilians and volunteers against Hitler's well-armed and veteran forces. Borowiec also examines Stalin's decision to stand by while Warsaw and its defenders were destroyed.

Borowiec provides a day-by-day account of the combat and the efforts to resupply the partisans by Allied aircraft. In this, the first English-language history of the Uprising, Borowiec relies on his own experiences, those of other participants, and other materials not...

The Battle of the Bulge was the last hurrah for the German Army on the Western Front. With the help of various unpublished sources, Samuel Mitcham sets out to tell the story of that battle and of the Ardennes Offensive from the German point of view. The greatest military disaster the United States suffered in the European Theater of Operations in World War II occurred in the Ardennes Offensive, when most of the U.S. 106th Infantry Division was destroyed in the Schnee Eifel (Snow Mountains). Mitcham covers the Battle of the Schnee Eifel from the German point of view in greater depth than...

The relationship of the United States and Great Britain has been the subject of numerous studies with a particular emphasis on the idea of a special relationship based on traditional common ties of language, history, and political affinity. Although certainly special, Anglo-American cooperation arose from mutual necessity. Soybel examines the special relationship through a new lens--that of the most intimate of wartime collaborations, the naval intelligence relationship. Rather than looking at the uses of intelligence and espionage, Soybel explores how the cooperation was established and...

Why would a journalist who was an ardent socialist and an anti-Nazi during the waning years of the Weimar Republic decide to go to work for the Gestapo abroad? Hans Wesemann, a veteran of World War I and a successful journalist, fled his native Germany in 1933 after writing a number of anti-Nazi articles. Once in Britain, he found life difficult and dull, and thus, for a number of reasons, agreed to furnish the German Embassy in London with information about other refugees. Inevitably, Wesemann became ensnared in his own treachery and suffered the consequences.

During the volatile and...

The so-called Phony War from September 1939 to May 1940 occupies a peculiar yet distinct place in popular memory. All the sensations of war, except the fighting, were present; yet, instead of massed air attacks and great land battles, very little happened. The British government was said to be complacent, and the people downright bored. Then, France fell to German attack, and the small British army was evacuated (minus its equipment) from Dunkirk. Reaction to this major strategic catastrophe was naturally to blame the men deemed guilty for bringing the nation to the verge of humiliating...

A year before the much-heralded second front was opened at Normandy in 1944, the Allies waged a campaign in Sicily and Italy--an assault that was marked by argument and dissent from beginning to end, highlighting the fundamental differences in strategic thinking between the Americans and the British. Winston Churchill favored scrapping what would become the Normandy invasion entirely, focusing instead on the soft underbelly of Nazi Europe, but American planners summarily rejected any plan that relied solely on a southern option. This is the story of this backwater campaign, a series of...

Promoted as a means for rectifying the problems of a region in extreme need, the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (AACC) only exposed and exacerbated the underlying antagonisms between Britain and the United States over the economic and political structure of the post-war world. This study places the AACC, formed in 1942, within the context of the Anglo-American wartime special relationship, and examines the political, economic, and security motives at the heart of this unique and little-known collaboration. It exposes the determination of the United States to use exigencies of war to...

Connell uncovers a little known World War II top secret program. The United States demanded that Latin American governments deport--or allow the United States to take--anyone of Japanese ancestry and place them in camps in Texas and New Mexico. The plan was to trade them for American civilians held by the Japanese.

Although Peru was the most enthusiastic participant in this program, expelling nearly 5,000 Peruvian citizens of Japanese ancestry, other Latin American countries participated as well. Connell traces the reasons for prejudice and discrimination, the specific programs, and the...

Relying on extensive oral interviews with WWII veterans in Botswana, Schmitt argues that British military policy during the Second World War directly impacted Bechuanaland's entry into the war, the nature of the soldier's service, and the lives of the individual soldiers. Because Bechuanaland was considered a small, rather unimportant backwater of colonial possessions, policy decisions were often influenced by the political situation in South Africa and by its attitudes towards arming Africans. Unwilling to cause friction with South Africa, Great Britain mirrored that policy with the...

By the 1930s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini reached the conclusion that Italy faced a clear choice: expand its power at the expense of the British and French Empires or face stagnation and decline. He believed that the regimes in the democratic West would not be able to contain their inherent hostility toward fascist dynamism, while their demographic and political weaknesses provided the opportunity for the younger, demographically virile fascist Italy to carve a new empire in the Mediterranean status quo.

Through his intervention in the Spanish Civil War and his attempts to...

In October 1946, Colonel Presley Rixey arrived by destroyer at Chichi Jima to repatriate 22,000 Japanese who had been bypassed during the war in the Pacific. While waiting for a Marine battalion to arrive, the colonel met daily with a Japanese commission assigned to assist him. When asked what had happened to American prisoners on the island, the Japanese hatched a story to hide the atrocities that they had committed. In truth, the downed flyers had been captured, executed, and eaten by certain senior Japanese officers. This is the story of the investigation, the cover-up, and the last...

The French naval bases at St. Nazaire and Lorient, occupied by the Germans in June 1940, quickly became the homes of massive U-boat fortresses--nearly indestructible submarine pens, built by mostly slave labor. The Royal Air Force began an all-out bombardment of the two ports. Despite their extensive efforts--and those of the Americans who joined them in 1942--the fortresses would survive, surrounded by the decimated French towns and countryside. This is the story of what was, perhaps, the longest ongoing battle in Europe during the Second World War, seen through the eyes of someone who...