World Military History

Twenty-five years after her passing, Audrey Hepburn remains the most beloved of all Hollywood stars, known as much for her role as UNICEF ambassador as for films like Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Several biographies have chronicled her stardom, but none has covered her intense experiences through five years of Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. According to her son, Luca Dotti, "The war made my mother who she was."

In Strategy: A History, Sir Lawrence Freedman, one of the world's leading authorities on war and international politics, captures the vast history of strategic thinking, in a consistently engaging and insightful account of how strategy came to pervade every aspect of our lives.

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.

A revealing and controversial account of the events surrounding Pearl Harbor. Pulitzer Prize - winning author John Toland presents evidence that FDR and his top advisors knew about the planned Japanese attack but remained silent. Infamy reveals the conspiracy to cover up the facts and find scapegoats for the greatest disaster in United States military history. New York Times best-seller.

The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler's personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion.

The histories of the first three SS corps are well known - the actions of I, II, and III (Germanic) SS-Panzerkorps and their subordinate divisions, including the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, Das Reich, Hitlerjugend, Hohenstaufen, Frundsberg, and Nordland divisions, have been thoroughly documented and publicized. Overlooked in this pantheon is another SS corps that never fought in the west or in Berlin but one that participated in many of the key battles fought on the Eastern Front during the last year of the war - the IV SS-Panzerkorps.

World History of Warfare covers worldwide military history from ancient times to the present and is designed for college courses. Its principal theme is an exploration of change and continuity, revolution and tradition, in three thousand years of warfare. It teaches students and general listeners how warfare evolved and how that evolution affected human society, with emphasis on major turning points in the conduct of warfare rather than a superficial general history of wars.

On the morning of June 4, 1942, doom sailed on Midway. Hoping to put itself within striking distance of Hawaii and California, the Japanese navy planned an ambush that would obliterate the remnants of the American Pacific fleet. On paper, the Americans had no chance of winning. They had fewer ships, slower fighters, and almost no battle experience. But because their codebreakers knew what was coming, the American navy was able to prepare an ambush of its own.

Painstakingly researched, the story behind the decision to send the Enola Gay to bomb Hiroshima is told through firsthand sources. From diplomatic moves behind the scenes to Japanese actions and the US Army Air Force's call to action, no detail is left untold. Touching on the early days of the Manhattan Project and the first inkling of an atomic bomb, investigative journalist Gordon Thomas and his writing partner Max Morgan-Witts, take WWII enthusiasts through the training of the crew of the Enola Gay and the challenges faced by pilot Paul Tibbets.

First published in 1875, General William T. Sherman's memoir was one of the first from the Civil War and was offered to the public because, as Sherman wrote in his dedication, "no satisfactory history" of the war was yet available. Although Memoirs has been revised and corrected many times over the years, Sherman famously never changed the original text of his recollections.

Andrew Lambert, author of The Challenge - winner of the prestigious Anderson Medal - turns his attention to Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and Britain, examining how their identities as "seapowers" informed their actions and enabled them to achieve success disproportionate to their size. Lambert demonstrates how creating maritime identities made these states more dynamic, open, and inclusive than their lumbering continental rivals. Only when they forgot this aspect of their identity did these nations begin to decline.

Picking up where his previous memoir leaves off, Sledge, a young marine in the First Division, traces his company's movements and charts his own difficult passage to peace following his horrific experiences in the Pacific. He reflects on his duty in the ancient city of Peiping (now Beijing) and recounts the difficulty of returning to his hometown of Mobile, Alabama, and resuming civilian life haunted by the shadows of close combat.

In 2009, three US professors with access to Adolf Hitler’s alleged remains startled the world with scientific DNA proof that the skull and bones that Russia had claimed since the end of World War II were Hitler’s actually belonged to a middle-aged woman whose identity remains unknown.

For almost four desperate years between 1939 and 1943, British and American navies fought a savage, losing battle against German submarine wolf packs. The Allies might never have turned the tide of that historic battle without an intelligence coup. The race to break the German U-boat codes is one of the last great untold stories of World War II.

In the glorious chronicles of the US Marine Corps, no name is more revered than that of Lt. Gen. Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller. The only fighting man to receive the Navy Cross five separate times - a military honor second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor - he was the epitome of a professional warrior.

The Rifle is the inspirational story of a 28-year-old US Marine, Andrew Biggio, who returned home from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, full of questions about the price of war. He found answers from those who survived the costliest war of all - WWII veterans. It began when Biggio bought a 1945 M1 Garand Rifle, the most common rifle used in WWII. When Biggio showed the gun to his neighbor, WWII veteran Corporal Joseph Drago, it unlocked memories Drago had kept unspoken for 50 years.

Whether you're looking for a way to enhance your appreciation of the events that took place or just want to refresh your memory without digging through countless volumes of World War II history, this book is right for you. Accurate and accessible, World War II for Dummies will help you explore a war that defined and shaped the world we live in today. You'll discover all the players who participated in the war and the politics that drove them. Battle by battle, you'll find out how the Axis powers initially took control of the war and how the Allies fought back to win the day.

In The Boer War, winner of the Netherland's 2013 Libris History Prize and shortlisted for the 2013 AKO Literature Prize, the author brings a completely new perspective to this chapter of South African history, critically examining the involvement of the Netherlands in the war. Furthermore, unlike other accounts, Martin Bossenbroek explores the war primarily through the experiences of three men uniquely active during the bloody conflict.

Drawing on previously unpublished eyewitness accounts, prizewinning historian Donald L. Miller has written what critics are calling one of the most powerful accounts of warfare ever published. Here are the horror and heroism of World War II in the words of the men who fought it, the journalists who covered it, and the civilians who were caught in its fury. Miller gives us an up-close, deeply personal view of a war that was more savagely fought - and whose outcome was in greater doubt - than one might imagine. This is the war that Americans on the home front would have read about had they had access to previously censored testimony.

Notes on one of the most infamous and bloody battles of World War II - from the German perspective. As the Allied armies swept toward the Reich in late 1944, the German high command embarked on an ambitious plan to gain the initiative on the western front and deal a crippling blow to the Allied war effort. As early as August 1944, when the Germans were being crushed in the east and hammered in Normandy, Hitler was talking of an offensive aimed at destroying as many American and British divisions as possible in a massive surprise assault.