Military World War Ii

Here is a gripping account of the major postwar trial of the Nazi hierarchy in World War II. The Nuremberg Trial brilliantly recreates the trial proceedings and offers a reasoned, often profound examination of the processes that created international law. From the whimpering of Kaltenbrunner and Ribbentrop on the stand to the icy coolness of Goering, each participant is vividly drawn.

In the summer of 1944, a handpicked group of young GIs—artists, designers, architects, and sound engineers, including such future luminaries as Bill Blass, Ellsworth Kelly, Arthur Singer, Victor Dowd, Art Kane, and Jack Masey—landed in France to conduct a secret mission. From Normandy to the Rhine, the 1,100 men of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, known as the Ghost Army, conjured up phony convoys, phantom divisions, and make-believe headquarters to fool the enemy about the strength and location of American units.

A rarely frank account of the US infantry experience in northern Europe, A Foot Soldier for Patton takes the listener from the beaches of Normandy through the giddy drive across France to the brutal battles on the Westwall, in the Ardennes, and finally to the conquest of Germany itself. Patton's army is best known for dashing armored attacks; its commander combining the firepower of tanks with their historic lineage as cavalry. But when the Germans stood firm, the greatest fighting was done by Patton's long undersung infantry.

As the Allies raced to defeat Hitler, four men, all in the same unit, earned medal after medal for battlefield heroism. Maurice “Footsie” Britt, a former professional football player, became the very first American to receive every award for valor in a single war. Michael Daly was a West Point dropout who risked his neck over and over to keep his men alive. Keith Ware would one day become the first and only draftee in history to attain the rank of general before serving in Vietnam. In WWII, Ware owed his life to the finest soldier he ever commanded, a baby-faced Texan named Audie Murphy.

In December 1943, with the rising realization that the Allies are planning to invade Fortress Europe, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is assigned the title of General Inspector for the Atlantic Wall. His mission is to assess their readiness. His superior, theater commander, crusty old Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who had led the Reich to victory in the early years of the war, is now fed up with the whole Nazi regime. He lives comfortably in a plush villa in a quiet Paris suburb, waiting for the inevitable Allied invasion that will bring about their final defeat.

How to Start a War is unlike any audiobook you’ve ever listened to. Adapted from the popular podcast miniseries of the same name, Michael Trapani immerses listeners in the dramatic events that led to the crime of the century – World War II and the Holocaust – documenting the actions of the criminals who carried it out. Listeners will feel like they are in the room as some of history’s most villainous characters plot to overthrow democracy, impose tyranny, and outmaneuver those who had the power to stop them.

World War II began with a metallic roar as the German Blitzkrieg raced across Europe, spearheaded by the most dreaded weapon of the 20th century: the Panzer. No German tank better represents that thundering power than the infamous Tiger, and Otto Carius was one of the most successful commanders to ever take a Tiger into battle, destroying well over 150 enemy tanks during his incredible career.

This is the strange and fascinating life of Erwin Rommel, from his days as a youth in Imperial Germany - when he had a child out of wedlock with an early girlfriend - through his lauded military exploits during World War I to his death by suicide during World War II, after he attempted a failed coup against Hitler. Rommel was a man of contradictions: a soldier who wrote a best-selling book about World War I, a commander who went from commanding Hitler's bodyguard to trying to kill him, and a serious military mind who was known for participating in practical jokes.

In Prevail Until the Bitter End, Alexandra Lohse explores the gossip and innuendo, the dissonant reactions and perceptions of Germans to the violent dissolution of the Third Reich. Mobilized for total war, soldiers and citizens alike experienced an unprecedented convergence of military, economic, social, and political crises.

The Watchmaker’s Daughter is one of the greatest stories of World War II that listeners haven’t heard: the remarkable and inspiring life story of Corrie ten Boom—a groundbreaking, female Dutch watchmaker, whose family unselfishly transformed their house into a hiding place straight out of a spy novel to shelter Jews and refugees from the Nazis during Gestapo raids. Even though the Nazis knew what the ten Booms were up to, they were never able to find those sheltered within the house when they raided it.

Telling the rousing story of a Jewish boy who fled persecution and returned to prosecute the Nazi oppressors, Walter Wolff's daughter Nina has reconstructed these events from family lore and her father’s own cache of more than 700 wartime letters and 200 photographs, which he revealed to her shortly before he died.

This is the extraordinary story of Vasily B. Emelianenko, the veteran pilot of one of the Soviet Union's most contradictory planes of the Second World War - the I1-2. Having flown 80 combat sorties against the Germans, Emelianenko was awarded the highest decoration - the Hero of the Soviet Union. He went on to complete a total of 92 sorties; his plane was shot down three times; and on each occasion, he managed to pilot the damaged aircraft home. Emelianenko's vivid memoirs provide a rare insight into the reality of fighting over the Eastern Front and the tactics of the Red Army Air Force.

Using archival records, in this book, David Stahel presents a history of Germany's summer campaign from the perspective of the two largest and most powerful Panzer groups on the Eastern front. Stahel's research provides a fundamental reassessment of Germany's war against the Soviet Union, highlighting the prodigious internal problems of the vital Panzer forces and revealing that their demise in the earliest phase of the war undermined the whole German invasion.

Pierre Clostermann DFC was one of the oustanding Allied aces of the Second World War. A Frenchman who flew with the RAF, he survived over 420 operational sorties, shooting down scores of enemy aircraft while friends and comrades lost their lives in the deadly skies above Europe. The Big Show, his extraordinary account of the war, has been described as the greatest pilot's memoir of WWII.

They began operations out of England in the spring of '43. They flew their Flying Fortresses almost daily against strategic targets in Europe in the name of freedom. Their astonishing courage and appalling losses earned them the name that resounds in the annals of aerial warfare and made the "Bloody Hundredth" a legend. Harry H. Crosby—soon to be portrayed by Anthony Boyle in the miniseries Masters of the Air developed by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg—arrived with the very first crews, and left with the very last.

This is the story of Nancy Harkness Love who, early in World War II, recruited and led the first group of 28 women to fly military aircraft for the US Army. Love was hooked on flight at an early age. At 16, after just four hours of instruction, she flew solo “a rather broken down Fleet biplane that my barnstorming instructor imported from parts unknown”. The year was 1930: Record-setting aviator Jacqueline Cochran (and Love’s future rival) had not yet learned to fly, and the most famous woman pilot of all time, Amelia Earhart, had yet to make her acclaimed solo Atlantic flight.

It is the winter of 1944. Allied forces have succeeded in liberating most of Axis-occupied Italy - with one crucial exception: the Nazi headquarters north of the Gothic Line. Heavily guarded and surrounded by rugged terrain, the mountain fortress is nearly impenetrable. But British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is determined to drive a dagger into the "soft underbelly of Europe." The Allied's plan: drop two paratroopers into the mountains-and take the fortress by storm....

Surprisingly neglected in accounts of Allied wartime triumphs, in 1941 British and Commonwealth forces completed a stunning and important victory in East Africa against an overwhelmingly superior Italian opponent. A hastily formed British-led force, never larger than 70,000 strong, advanced along two fronts to defeat nearly 300,000 Italian and colonial troops.

In the late 1930s, legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the 20th century at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

Our Crime Was Being Jewish contains 576 vivid memories of 358 Holocaust survivors. These are the true, insider stories of victims, told in their own words. They include the experiences of teenagers who saw their parents and siblings sent to the gas chambers; of starving children beaten for trying to steal a morsel of food; of people who saw their friends commit suicide to save themselves from the daily agony they endured.