True World War Ii

The year 1963: Reeling from the death of her mother and President Kennedy’s assassination, Catherine Gray shows up on Elizabeth Bentley’s doorstep demanding answers to the shocking mystery she just uncovered about her family. What she doesn’t expect is for Bentley to ensnare her in her own story of becoming a controversial World War II spy and Cold War informer.

June 1940: Europe has fallen to Adolf Hitler’s army, and Britain is his next target. Winston Churchill exhorts the country to resist the Nazis, and the nation seems to rally behind him. But in secret, some British citizens are plotting to hasten an invasion. Agent Jack tells the incredible true story of Eric Roberts, a seemingly inconsequential bank clerk who, in the guise of “Jack King”, helped uncover and neutralize the invisible threat of fascism on British shores.

On November 8, 1943, U.S. Army nurse Agnes Jensen stepped out of a cold rain in Catania, Sicily, into a C-53 transport plane. But she and twelve other nurses never arrived in Bari, Italy, where they were to transport wounded soldiers to hospitals farther from the front lines. A violent storm and pursuit by German Messerschmitts led to a crash landing in a remote part of Albania, leaving the nurses, their team of medics, and the flight crew stranded in Nazi-occupied territory.

In November 1943, while on war patrol in the Makassar Strait, the USS Billfish submarine was spotted by the Japanese, who launched a vicious depth-charge attack. Explosions wracked the sub for 15 straight hours. With his senior officers incapacitated, diving officer Charlie Rush boldly assumed command and led key members of the crew in a heroic effort to keep their ship intact as they tried to escape.

The moving true story of how young Ukrainian Jewish piano prodigies Zhanna (alias “Anna”) and her sister Frina outplayed their pursuers while hiding in plain sight during the Holocaust. A middle grade nonfiction novel-in-verse by award-winning author Susan Hood with Greg Dawson (Zhanna’s son).

At All Costs transports you to the battlefront for more than two centuries of astonishing military confrontations. From the Battle of Minden in 1795 to dramatic Second World War stories and the Battle for Goose Green in the Falklands, Bryan Perrett gives astoundingly vivid accounts of international forces in daring actions, achieving victory against the odds.

Belgium, July 1939: Simone Lyon is the daughter of a Belgium national hero, the famous General Joseph Lyon. Her best friend Hava Daniels, is the eldest daughter of a devout Jewish family. Despite growing up in different worlds, they are inseparable. But when, in the spring of 1940, Nazi planes and tanks begin bombing Brussels, their resilience and strength are tested. Hava and Simone find themselves caught in the advancing onslaught and are forced to flee.

Hungary, 1944. Almost half a million Jewish Hungarians are deported to Auschwitz. Among the few surviving Hungarian Jews from this era were young men who, like Ervin Wolf, were forced into the brutal Labor Service where they were cut off from the outside world and forced to endure inhumane brutalities and servitude. Once freed, a new oppression took hold as communist rule under Stalin turned friends to foes, enveloped the nation in fear and suspicion, and tested everyone’s character and strength.

Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were talented, courageous, and strikingly attractive women who fought convention to make their names in the male-dominated field of flight in 1930s Germany. With the war, both became pioneering test pilots and were awarded the Iron Cross for service to the Third Reich. But they could not have been more different, and neither woman had a good word to say for the other.

> Sisters, Secrets and Sacrifice is the incredible true story of British special agents Eileen and Jacqueline Nearne, two sisters who risked everything to fight for our freedom during the Second World War. The death of an eccentric recluse is rarely an event to be given more than a few lines in a local newspaper. But when, in September 2010, police were called to a tiny, cluttered flat in Torquay and discovered the body of local "cat lady" Eileen Nearne, they also found a small bundle of possessions that told an amazing story....

For three years during World War II, 12,000 Nazis were held in a prisoner-of-war camp at the edge of Medicine Hat, an isolated city of 12,000 people on the bald Canadian prairie. The camp and the townsfolk lived cheerfully side-by-side, until two men were beaten and hanged by their fellow prisoners, and no one on the scene would admit to knowing anything about the crimes.

The history of the Spitfire contains many hitherto hidden or little-known stories of the men and women behind the plane - not only the gifted creators and inventors who brought the Spitfire to life or the brave fighter pilots from many countries who triumphed in battle but also the thousands of other people whose lives were affected by their personal connection to it - engineers, ground crew, factory or office workers, and their families. Spitfire Stories recounts the memories and stories of these people, from the birth of the iconic Spitfire in the 1930s to the present day.

The true story of the Edelweiss Pirates, working-class teenagers who fought the Nazis by whatever means they could. Fritz, Gertrud, and Jean were classic outsiders: Their clothes were different, their music was rebellious, and they weren’t afraid to fight. But they were also Germans living under Hitler, and any nonconformity could get them arrested or worse. As children in 1933, they saw their world change. Their earliest memories were of the Nazi rise to power and of their parents fighting Brownshirts in the streets, being sent to prison, or just disappearing.

Southern Italy in the 1930s was chaotic and violent - the rise of dictator Mussolini, the dawn of Europe's descent into another World War, and continuation of turf battles between Mafia families. This was certainly no place for a young woman to assume power, but 17-year-old Carina broke the mold. Forced to become the family matriarch after her father's sudden death, Carina finds herself responsible for the care of her 12 younger siblings.

In the spring of 1942, the United States government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona and sent them to incarceration camps across the West. Nearly 14,000 of them landed on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, at the base of Heart Mountain. Behind barbed wire fences, they faced racism, cruelty, and frozen winters. Trying to recreate comforts from home, they established Buddhist temples and sumo wrestling pits. Kabuki performances drew hundreds of spectators — yet there was little hope.

Wilhelm Canaris was appointed by Hitler to head the Abwehr (the German secret service) 18 months after the Nazis came to power. But Canaris turned against the Fuhrer and the Nazi regime, believing that Hitler would start a war Germany could not win. In 1938 he was involved in an attempted coup, undermined by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In 1940 he sabotaged the German plan to invade England, and fed General Franco vital information that helped him keep Spain out of the war.

Committed in utmost secrecy in April-May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly 50 years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi crime, their story unchallenged by Western governments fearful of upsetting a powerful wartime ally and Cold War adversary. Surviving Katyn explores the decades-long search for answers, focusing on the experience of those individuals with the most at stake.

Occupied Warsaw, Summer 1940: Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground operative, accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands interned at a new concentration camp, report on Nazi crimes, raise a secret army, and stage an uprising. The name of the camp - Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, and under the cruelest of conditions, Pilecki's underground sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder.

When Jeanne uncovers a dusty old box in her father’s garage, her world as she knows it is turned upside down. She has inherited a bookstore in a tiny French village, just outside of Paris, from a mysterious woman named Laurence. Traveling to France to search for answers about the woman her father has kept a secret for years, Jeanne finds the store boarded up, in complete disrepair. Inside, she finds a tiny silver pendant hidden beneath the blackened, scorched floorboards. As Jeanne pieces together Laurence’s incredible story, she discovers a woman whose bravery knew no bounds.

Six raids that changed the course of history. Operation Judgement: one of the most spectacular efforts of World War Two, where obsolete British biplanes attacked the Italian fleet in Taranto. Operation Archery: the first true combined operation carried out by all three British forces. This successful raid persuaded Hitler that the Allies were planning a full-scale invasion. Operation Biting: a cross-Channel raid into France that was the first major attack by the British Airborne Division and its first battle honour. Operation Gunnerside: a dramatic demolition assault on Hitler's atomic bomb plant in Norway....