World War Ii Memoir

In June 1952 a woman was murdered by an obsessed colleague in a hotel in the South Kensington district of London. Her name was Christine Granville. That she died young was perhaps unsurprising; that she had survived the Second World War was remarkable. The daughter of a feckless Polish aristocrat and his wealthy Jewish wife, Granville would become one of Britain's most daring and highly decorated special agents.

Fourteen-year-old Lisa Jura was a musical prodigy who hoped to become a concert pianist. But when Hitler's armies advanced on pre-war Vienna, Lisa's parents were forced to make a difficult decision. Able to secure passage for only one of their three daughters through the Kindertransport, they chose to send gifted Lisa to London for safety. As she yearned to be reunited with her family while she lived in a home for refugee children on Willesden Lane, Lisa's music became a beacon of hope. A memoir of courage, survival, and the power of music to uplift the human spirit....

Not many people peer over the abyss, but Elke Babicki's family did. Her German grandfather objected to Hitler and as a result, ended up in a concentration camp while her mother’s family became destitute. Elke's father, Alex, who was born into a well-educated and wealthy Jewish family in Poland, spent five years in concentration camps before making his escape just before the end of the war.

As the head of the French Section of the British Special Operations Executive, Vera Atkins recruited, trained, and mentored special operatives whose job was to organize and arm the resistance in Nazi-occupied France. After the war, Atkins courageously committed herself to a dangerous search for 12 of her most cherished women spies who had gone missing in action. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Sarah Helm chronicles Atkins’s extraordinary life and her singular journey through the chaos of post-war Europe.

Authors Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, notable biographers of the World War II German leaders Joseph Goebbels and Herman Goring, delve into the life of one of the most sinister, clever, and successful of all the Nazi leaders: Heinrich Himmler. As the head of the feared SS, Himler supervised the extermination of millions. Here is the story of how a seemingly ordinary boy grew into an obsessive and superstitious man who ventured into herbalism, astrology, and homeopathic medicine before finally turning to the “science” of racial purity and the belief in the superiority of the Aryan people.

Irina Nikifortchuk was nineteen years old and a Ukrainian schoolteacher when she was abducted to be a forced laborer in the Leica camera factory in Nazi Germany. Eventually pulled from the camp hospital to work as a domestic in the Leica owners' household, Irina survived the war and eventually found her way to Canada.

A voice is calling across the land, "Bombardier Milligan." "Bombadier Milligan is dead," I replied in a disguised voice. The voice replied, "Then he's going to miss his breakfast." The fourth volume of Spike Milligan's legendary account of his time in the army during World War Two begins as he and his regiment land in sunny Italy in 1943 ("The ship touched the beach very gently, so gently I suspect it's not insured").

His name wasn’t Chester Nez. That was the English name he was assigned in kindergarten. And in boarding school at Fort Defiance, he was punished for speaking his native language, as the teachers sought to rid him of his culture and traditions. But discrimination didn’t stop Chester from answering the call to defend his country after Pearl Harbor, for the Navajo have always been warriors, and his upbringing on a New Mexico reservation gave him the strength to excel as a marine. This is the first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of WWII.

An unexpected phone call hurls Reshef into an intensive two-year journey, during which he has to solve a mystery that took shape in the 1930s and gradually unfolded in the present. A mysterious lot, a forgotten bank account, a people long gone - along with their memory which were obliterated during the Holocaust. All of these rise to the surface, bearing with them memories and emotions previously hidden away in the shoebox.

Captured by the Japanese after the fall of Bataan, Lester I. Tenney was one of the very few who would survive the legendary Death March and three and a half years in Japanese prison camps. With an understanding of human nature, a sense of humor, sharp thinking, and fierce determination, Tenney endured the rest of the war as a slave laborer in Japanese prison camps. My Hitch in Hell is an inspiring survivor's epic about the triumph of human will despite unimaginable suffering. This edition features a new introduction and epilogue by the author.e by the author.

Seventy-five years have passed since D-Day, the greatest seaborne invasion in history. The outcome of the Second World War hung in the balance on that chill June morning. Giles Milton’s bold new history narrates the day’s events through the tales of survivors from all sides: the teenage Allied conscript, the crack German defender, the French resistance fighter. Soldier, Sailor, Frogman, Spy, Airman, Gangster, Kill or Die lays bare the absolute terror of those trapped in the front line of Operation Overlord.

This gripping personal account of life as a young World War Two submariner on two famous Royal Navy submarines, Thrasher and Trenchant gives vivid detail of depth charging, gun actions and other operations including sinking the Japanese cruiser Ashigara, the largest enemy warship sunk by a British submarine during the war, sinking the German U-boat U-859 with its secret cargo, towing a midget submarine to attack the German battleship Tirpitz in the Norwegian Fjords, and taking a group of SBS soldiers to carry out a daring raid in Sumatra.

American journalist and author William L. Shirer was a war correspondent for six years in Nazi Germany, having a front-row seat to Hitler’s rise in influence and power. His most definitive work on the subject, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is a riveting account of life in the tyrannical state, a country transformed by war and dictatorship. The author was originally commissioned to write The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler for a young adult audience. This account loses none of the immediacy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich....

Do you want to learn more about the Winston Churchill, but don’t have time to listen to huge, long biographies. Then let The History Journals take you on an hourly history tour of his tenure in World War 2. Winston Churchill had undeniably given his all for King and country and an allied victory promised to be his finest hour; but he was wise to be cautious, and quite incredibly his own future as the nation’s Prime Minister was far from assured.

Only four men in American history have been promoted to the five-star rank of Admiral of the Fleet: William Leahy, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and William Halsey. These four men were the best and the brightest the navy produced, and together they led the U.S. Navy to victory in World War II, establishing the United States as the world's greatest fleet. In The Admirals, award-winning historian Walter R. Borneman tells their story in full detail for the first time.

Europe has fallen. Pearl Harbor is in flames. Enter: the Eighth. In 1941 the RAF fought a desperate battle of survival against the Luftwaffe over Britain. Then, from across the Atlantic, came a new generation of American pilots, gunners, and bombardiers, a new generation of flying machines called the B-17 Flying Fortress, the B-24 Liberator, the P-47 Thunderbolt, and the P-51 Mustang fighter.

Stuart Hills embarked his Sherman DD tank on to an LCT at 6:45 a.m., Sunday, June 4th, 1944. He was 20 years old, un-blooded, fresh from a public-school background, and officer cadet training. He was going to war. Two days later, his tank sunk; he and his crew landed from a rubber dinghy with just the clothes they stood in. After that, the struggles through the Normandy bocage in a replacement tank, engaging the enemy in a constant round of close encounters, led to a swift mastering of the art of tank warfare and remarkable survival in the midst of carnage and destruction.

Fueled by hate, incapable of forming normal human relationships, unwilling to listen to dissenting voices, Adolf Hitler seemed an unlikely leader, and yet he commanded enormous support and was able to exert a powerful influence over those who encountered him. How did Hitler become such an attractive figure to millions of people? That is the question at the core of Hitler's Charisma. Acclaimed historian and documentary filmmaker Laurence Rees examines the nature of Hitler's appeal and reveals the role his supposed "charisma" played in his success.

This is the incredible true story of the greatest spy you’ve never heard of - as told to the author by the woman herself. At the outbreak of World War Two, Nancy Wake’s glamorous life in the South of France seemed far removed from the fighting. But when her husband was called up for military service, Nancy felt she had just as much of a duty to fight for freedom. By 1943, her fearless undercover work even in the face of personal tragedy had earned her a place on the Gestapo’s "most wanted" list.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment—a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution.