As war spread across the world at the end of 1941, the Soviet Union found itself between a rock known as Nazi Germany and a hard place called imperial Japan. With all its forces battling Germany in the west, the Soviet Union had to keep peace on its isolated and vulnerable eastern borders. To avoid risking its status as a neutral country in the war between the United States and Japan, the Soviet Union interned many American flyers who crashed or made emergency landings in Soviet territory after bombing Japanese targets.
This is the long-secret and nearly forgotten story of how the Soviet...

The 344 days of combat of the 88th Infantry Division were part of the bitterly contested struggle for supremacy in Italy during the Second World War. Here is the gripping story of the first selective service division committed to battle in the European Theater, seen from the unique vantage point of a battalion physician.

Using notes hastily scribbled on the backs of maps and finished out whenever he was rotated to rear areas for rest, Dr. Klaus Huebner captured in his diary the frustration, fear, boredom, devotion, and anger that were the daily portion of combat infantrymen. The result...

Drawing on numerous diaries, journals, and reminiscences, Richard Bruce Winders presents the daily life of soldiers at war; links the army to the society that produced it; shares his impressions of the soldiers he "met" along the way; and concludes that American participants in the Mexican War shared a common experiemce, no matter their rank or place of service.
In addition to the soldiers' mundane complaints--bad food, hard marches, and long periods of incredible boredom--Winders discovers a political awareness among the soldiers that, with some, led to displaying their political...

During the Second World War few countries provided a more difficult challenge for Gen. "Wild Bill" Donovan's Office of Strategic Services than did Yugoslavia. Working with its British counterpart, OSS sought to sustain the Yugoslav resistance in its struggle against the Axis occupiers. Unfortunately, OSS personnel, who first began entering the country in the late summer of 1943, found themselves caught up in a ruthless civil war between Draza Mihailovich's Nationalists or Chetniks and Josip-Broz Tito's Partisans.
OSS enjoyed some notable successes, ferrying badly needed supplies to Tito...

In 1970, the small nation of Cambodia was sucked into the vortex of Cold War geopolitics, a war whose denouement led to one of the worst bloodbaths in history. "Road to the Killing Fields" is the first book to deal exclusively with the military aspects of how that tragedy developed.
Because U.S. involvement in that part of Southeast Asia was largely clandestine, Americans have had little exposure to the events that led to the horrific citizen massacres known as the "killing fields." Author Wilfred P. Deac offers background information in his introductory chapters, describing Cambodia and...

In the summer of 1917, more than two hundred American men volunteered for service in England's Royal Flying Corps, where they would be trained to fly with the Allies until American squadrons could be organized.
John MacGavock Grider, assigned to Royal Air Force Number 85 Squadron,
flying SE-5a pursuit planes, was shot down and killed some twenty miles behind German lines in the summer of 1918. He was not a hero, nor were his training and combat experiences much different from those of his fellow pilots. He is set apart only by the records he kept of his experiences during that year....

On the morning of March 26, 1862, Confederate and Union armies met in Glorieta Pass in the southern Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. A series of skirmishes, jockeying for position, and a pitched battle on March 28 took a heavy toll on both sides and left the Rebels under Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley apparently victorious over Gen. John P. Slough's troops.
However, the tide turned when Union soldiers under Col. John Chivington located the Confederate supply train and destroyed it. Without supplies, replacement arms, and ammunition, the Rebel troops could not maintain themselves...

The Lost Colony of the Confederacy is the story of a grim, quixotic journey of twenty thousand Confederates to Brazil at the end of the American Civil War. Although it is not known how many Confederates migrated to South America-estimates range from eight thousand to forty thousand-their departure was fueled by bitterness over a lost cause and a distaste for an oppressive victor. Encouraged by Emperor Dom Pedro, most of these exiles settled in Brazil. Although at the time of the Civil War the exodus was widely known and discussed as an indicator of the resentment against the Northern invaders...

A victorious American army, having driven through Belgium almost unopposed, ran head-on into German soldiers on their own home ground, in some of the most rugged country in western Germany-and at the beginning of the worst fall and winter weather in decades. In late 1944, American forces advanced into the hilly, heavily wooded Hurtgen Forest southeast of Aachen, Germany. For weeks, without a clear-cut reason for attacking through the forest, U.S. commanders nevertheless ordered units of as many as seven divisions into the woods to be chewed up by German infantry and artillery. Small units,...