Europe War

Throughout the centuries, Spain has been subject to the lordship of other countries. It was occupied by the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Visigoths, the French, and the Muslims. It has been the playground of both the respectful and the ruthless. The Spanish coasts have been occupied by the trading empires of Carthage and Rome. All that time, Spain was told by others how to run their country, how to fight, whom to fight, and where to fight.

In Princes at War, Deborah Cadbury reveals evidence that the duke and duchess of Windsor colluded with Hitler to take back the British throne from Edward's younger brother, King George VI, should Germany prevail in the War.

“[A] brilliant book…by far the best study yet” (The Wall Street Journal) of the gripping history behind the Marshall Plan and its long-lasting influence on our world. In the wake of World War II, with Britain’s empire collapsing and Stalin’s on the rise, US officials under new...

Only three short years after the end of the Japanese occupation, war came again to Malaya. The Chinese-backed guerrillas called it the War of the Running Dogs—their contemptuous term for those in Malaya who remained loyal to the British. The British Government referred to this bloody and costly struggle as the 'Malayan Emergency'. Yet it was a war that lasted twelve years and cost thousands of lives. By the time it was over Malaya had obtained its independence—but on British, not on Chinese or Communist terms.

In the late summer of 1944, 80 British Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers undertook a covert commando raid, parachuting behind enemy lines into the Vosges Mountains in occupied France to sabotage Nazi-held roads, railways, and ammo dumps, and assassinate high-ranking German officers, undermining the final stand of Hitler's Third Reich. Despite their successes, more than half the men were captured, tortured, and executed. After the war ended, a top-secret black ops unit was formed to hunt down the SS commanders who had murdered their special forces comrades....

On October 14, 1943, 600 Jews imprisoned in Sobibor, a secret Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, revolted. They killed a dozen SS officers and guards, trampled the barbed wire fences, and raced across an open field filled with anti-tank mines. Against all odds, more than three hundred made it safely into the woods. Fifty of those men and women managed to survive the rest of the war. In this edition of Escape from Sobibor, fully updated in 2012, Richard Rashke tells their stories

A triumph of narrative, empathy and research, as gripping in its handling of individual witnesses to the war - those doomed to struggle with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and above all the absence of millions of family members - as of the gigantic military, social, technological and economic forces that swept the conflict along. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped our country.

The battle of Crécy in 1346 is one of the most famous and widely studied military engagements in history. The repercussions of this battle were felt for hundreds of years, and the exploits of those fighting reached the status of legend. Yet cutting-edge research has shown that nearly everything that has been written about this dramatic event may be wrong. In this new study, Michael Livingston reveals how modern scholars have used archived manuscripts, satellite technologies and traditional fieldwork to help unlock what was arguably the battle’s greatest secret.

History remembers the Soviets and the Nazis as bitter enemies and ideological rivals - the two opposing totalitarian regimes of World War II whose conflict would be the defining and deciding clash of the war. Yet for nearly a third of the conflict's entire timespan, Hitler and Stalin stood side by side as partners.

Peter Ratcliffe served in the SAS for 25 years. Blooded in Oman in the 1970s, he also saw action in Northern Ireland, in the Falklands War, and in the Gulf campaign. From his early days in the Paras to his time as Regimental Sergeant-Major in the Gulf, he has lived and fought by the motto 'who dares wins'. Eye of the Storm is his insider's account of that exceptional career.

Drawing on an unprecedented range and variety of original research, Hitler's Empire sheds new light on how the Nazis designed, maintained, and lost their European dominion - and offers a chilling vision of what the world would have become had they won the war. Mark Mazower forces us to set aside timeworn opinions of the Third Reich, and instead shows how the party drew inspiration for its imperial expansion from America and Great Britain.

When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters.

In this compelling new study, Paull Hill reveals what documentary records and the growing body of archaeological evidence can tell us about war and combat in the age of the great Anglo-Saxon kings. The violent centuries before the Norman Conquest come to life in this detailed account of how and why the Anglo-Saxons fought, how their warriors were armed and trained, how their armies were organized, and much more.

In the wake of the Nazi invasion of Europe, the tentative sparks of resistance in occupied countries were fanned by Britain's Special Operations Executive. Across the continent, SOE recruited women to "set Europe ablaze." Working as secret agents and saboteurs, these individuals bolstered resistance from within and provided much needed support and weapons. F Section's actions in France are renowned, and today some operatives have become household names.

Elizabeth of York would have ruled England, but for the fact that she was a woman. One of the key figures of the Wars of the Roses, daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, she married Henry Tudor to bring peace to a war-torn England. In Elizabeth of York: The First Tudor Queen, Alison Weir builds a portrait of this beloved queen, placing her in the context of the magnificent, ceremonious, often brutal world she inhabited.

Making use of the extensive memoirs of German and Russian soldiers to bring their story to life, the narrative follows on from On A Knife's Edge, which described the encirclement and destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad and the offensives and counter-offensives that followed throughout the winter of 1942-43.

When Rema chose to be crowned queen and join the rebel forces, she knew she'd face the fight of her life. What she didn't expect was to be kidnapped by an Emperion assassin and taken to the mainland to be executed in front of the emperor. How can she save Greenwood Island if she can't even save herself?

The Peloponnesian War broke out in 431 B.C. and continued intermittently for 27 years. It pitted the all-powerful land force of Sparta and its allies against the supremely powerful naval force of Athens. Thucydides actually participated in this conflict, a war that he realized would have a greater influence on the history of Greece than any other. He vividly narrates exciting episodes and carefully describes tactical aspects of the war, and also provides illuminating character profiles.

Heinz Linge worked with Adolf Hitler for a 10 year period from 1935 until the Fuhrer's death in the Berlin bunker in May 1945. He was one of the last to leave the bunker and was responsible for guarding the door while Hitler killed himself. During his years of service, Linge was responsible for all aspects of Hitler's household and was constantly by his side. He claims that only Eva Braun stood closer to Hitler over these years. Through a host of anecdotes and observations, Linge recounts the daily routine in Hitler's household; his eating habits, his foibles, his preferences, his sense of humour, and his private life with Eva Braun.

During the European Renaissance, an age marked equally by revolutionary thought and constant warfare, it was armies, rather than philosophers, who shaped the modern European nation state. "Mobile cities" of mercenaries and other paid soldiers - made up of astonishingly diverse aggregations of ethnicities and nationalities - marched across the land, looting and savaging enemy territories. In the 15th century, Poland hired German, Spanish, Bohemian, Hungarian, and Scottish soldiers.