World War Ii Memoir

In June 1944, the Nazis locked 18-year-old Dave Hersch into a railroad boxcar and shipped him from his hometown of Dej, Hungary, to Mauthausen Concentration Camp, the harshest, cruellest camp in the Reich. After 10 months in the granite mines of Mauthausen's nearby sub-camp, Gusen, he weighed less than 80 lbs., nothing but skin and bones. As Allied forces drew near Dave was forced to join a death march to Gunskirchen Concentration Camp, over 30 miles away. Soon after the start of the march, and more dead than alive, Dave summoned a burst of energy he did not know he had and escaped.

In Hitler's Death, author and expert Luke Daly-Groves rigorously looks at the question: Did Hitler shoot himself in the Führerbunker or did he slip past the Soviets and escape to South America? Countless documentaries, newspaper articles, and internet pages written by conspiracy theorists have led the ongoing debate surrounding Hitler's last days. Historians have not yet managed to make a serious response. Until now. This book is the first attempt by an academic to return to the evidence of Hitler's suicide in order to scrutinize the most recent conspiracy arguments.

For the first four months of 1942, U.S., Filipino, and Japanese soldiers fought what was America's first major land battle of World War II, the battle for the tiny Philippine peninsula of Bataan. It ended with the surrender of 76,000 Filipinos and Americans, the single largest defeat in American military history. The defeat, though, was only the beginning, as Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman make dramatically clear in this powerfully original book.

When Richard Hayes, a gifted polymath and cryptographer, was drafted by Irish intelligence services to track the movements of a prolific Nazi spy, Hermann Görtz, it set in motion one of the most remarkable episodes in Irish history. What followed was a high-stakes game of cat and mouse that would wind its way through the capital and its suburbs, reverberate through the corridors of power, test the sympathies of those in high society and even expand to jeopardise the Allied war effort.

In the darkest days of World War II, an unlikely civilian was sent to deliver a letter from Washington to General MacArthur in New Guinea. Eddie Rickenbacker was an icon, a pioneer of aviation, the greatest fighter pilot of the First World War, recipient of the Medal of Honor, who’d retired to become a renowned race car driver. Now in his fifties, one of the most admired men in America, Rickenbacker was again serving his nation, riding high above the Pacific as a passenger aboard a B-17. But soon the plane was forced to crash-land on the ocean surface, leaving its eight occupants adrift.

Kati and her younger sister, Ilonka, arrive in Canada with painful memories from the Holocaust, which has taken both of their parents. Their harrowing time alone in the Budapest ghetto is fresh in their minds, as are their fragile hopes to be adopted. But their lives in Toronto are far from what they expected, and full of broken promises. As the sisters navigate their new surroundings, they each grow fiercely strong and independent, while holding onto the comfort that they will be Never Far Apart.

In late 1944 the Allies invaded the Japanese-held Philippines, and soon the end of the Pacific War was within reach. But for the last 150 American prisoners of war still held on the island of Palawan, there would be no salvation. As soldiers, sailors, and marines were herded into shallow air raid shelters, Japanese soldiers doused them with gasoline and set them on fire. By the next morning, only 11 men were left alive - but their desperate journey to freedom had just begun.

Bronx-born top turret-gunner Arthur Meyerowitz was on his second mission when he was shot down in 1943. He was one of only two men on the B-24 Liberator known as Harmful Lil Armful who escaped death or immediate capture on the ground. After fleeing the wreck, Arthur knocked on the door of an isolated farmhouse, whose owners hastily took him in. Fortunately, his hosts not only despised the Nazis but had a tight connection to the French resistance group Morhange and its founder, Marcel Taillandier.

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.

From his early years with his loving Jewish family to the horrors of Auschwitz to his life as a Nobel Prize-winning writer, Elie Wiesel tells his story. Passionate and poignant, All Rivers Run to the Sea is an unforgettable book of love and rage, doubt and faith, despair and trust, and ultimately, of wisdom.

Best-selling author Jennet Conant brings us a stunning account of Julia and Paul Child's experiences as members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Far East during World War II. She also details the tumultuous years when they were caught up in the McCarthy Red spy hunt in the 1950s and behaved with bravery and honor. It is a fascinating portrait of a group of idealistic men and women who were recruited by the citizen spy service, slapped into uniform, and dispatched to wage political warfare.

When Winston Churchill was a boy of 16, he already had a vision for his purpose in life. "This country will be subjected somehow to a tremendous invasion...I shall be in command of the defenses of London...it will fall to me to save the Capital, to save the Empire." It was a most unlikely prediction. Perceived as a failure for much of his life, Churchill was the last person anyone would have expected to rise to national prominence as prime minister and influence the fate of the world during World War II.

Based on years of archival research and interviews with the last surviving aides and Roosevelt family members, Nigel Hamilton offers a definitive account of FDR’s masterful - and underappreciated - command of the Allied war effort. Hamilton takes listeners inside FDR’s White House Oval Study - his personal command center - and into the meetings where he battled with Churchill about strategy and tactics and overrode the near mutinies of his own generals and secretary of war.

The future looked bright for many young men before the United States entered World War II on December 7th, 1941. Richard (Dick) Loveless from Washington, DC, was no exception. He had joined an apprenticeship program to follow in his dads’ footsteps to become an electrician. The prospects were good for Dick as he seemed to have what it took to succeed. Handsome and athletic, he had charmed his way into the heart of Mary Lu Farrell, a beautiful and equally talented girl from Northwest Washington, DC.

From the acclaimed economist-historian and author of The Marshall Plan, a “timely, riveting” (The Washington Post) new perspective on the political career of Henry Wallace—one that will forever change how we view the making of US and Soviet foreign policy at the dawn of the Cold War.

From the Japanese soldiers' carefully calculated - and ultimately foiled - attempt to build a series of impregnable island forts on the ground to the tireless efforts of the Americans who struggled against a tenacious adversary and the temperature and terrain of the island itself, Robert Leckie captures the loneliness, the agony, and the heat of 24-hour-a-day fighting on Guadalcanal.

A daredevil pilot in the famed 352nd Fighter Squadron, the author of this remarkable memoir bailed out of his burning Mustang two days after D-Day and was launched on a thrilling adventure on the ground in Occupied France.

A Thief and a Hero tells the extraordinary story of Gentle Johnny Ramensky: the son of Lithuanian immigrant parents who went on to become a household name as the foremost safe-blower in the country. His daring escapes from prison would further endear him to the public and eventually bring him to the attention of the British army. When the Second World War broke, he was hand-picked to join the Commandos and rechristened himself Ramsay.

Raoul Wallenberg lived at a time when one of the worst outrages of inhumanity was occurring: the Holocaust. As a Swedish businessman in Hungary, he bore witness to this tragedy firsthand as Hungarian Jews were being shipped off to Auschwitz.

The vivid and emotional story of one soldier's heroic struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.1944: Norm Bussel, an introspective and happy-go-lucky teen from Memphis, finds himself bailing out of a burning B-17 bomber just months after his 19th birthday. Touching-down in a field outside Berlin, Norm was immediately seized by local farmhands, who were in the process of lynching him when a passing German soldier put a stop to the execution.