World War Ii Political

The fascinating, improbable true story of Maxwell Knight - the great MI5 spymaster and inspiration for the James Bond character M. Maxwell Knight was perhaps the greatest spymaster in history. He did more than anyone in his era to combat the rising threat of fascism in Britain during World War II, in spite of his own history inside this movement. He was also truly eccentric - a thrice-married jazz aficionado who kept a menagerie of exotic pets - and almost totally unqualified for espionage. Yet he had a gift for turning practically anyone into a fearless secret agent.

Standing in history like a milestone marking the boundary between one era and the next, the Potsdam Conference brought together the leaders of the three major Allied powers - the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom - for the last time at the end of World War II and at the threshold of the Cold War. A follow up to the Yalta Conference just five months earlier, Potsdam attempted to work out the contours of the postwar world.

When the 1944 presidential election campaign geared up late that spring, Franklin D. Roosevelt had already been in office longer than any other president. Sensing likely weakness, the Republicans mounted an energetic and expensive campaign, hitting hard at FDR’s liberal domestic policies and the ongoing cost of World War II. Despite gravely deteriorating health, FDR and his feisty running mate, the unexpected Harry Truman, campaigned vigorously against young governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York.

Accounts of the Second World War usually involve tales of bravery in battle, or stoicism on the home front, as the British public stood together against Fascism. However, the war looks very different when seen through the eyes of the 60,000 conscientious objectors who refused to take up arms and whose stories, unlike those of the First World War, have been almost entirely forgotten.

In her latest investigative tour-de-force, New York Times best-selling author Michelle Malkin sets the historical record straight - and debunks radical ethnic alarmists who distort history to undermine common-sense, national security profiling. The need for this myth-shattering book is vital. President Bush's opponents have attacked every homeland defense policy as tantamount to the "racist" and "unjustified" World War II internment.

Just six weeks apart in the spring of 1981, Pope John Paul II and President ­Ronald Reagan took bullets from would-be assassins. Few realized at the time how close both men came to dying. Surviving these near-death experiences created a singular bond between the pope and the president that ­historians have failed to appreciate. When John Paul II and Reagan met only a year later, they confided to each other a shared conviction: that God had spared their lives for a ­reason. That reason? To defeat Communism. In private, Reagan had a name for this: “The DP” - the Divine Plan.

Beginning in the 1800s, Asian nations were gradually falling under European rule. Yet, despite Europe’s growing military, economic, and political dominance in the Eastern hemisphere, one country prevailed as the sole nation untouched by colonialism: Thailand (then known as Siam). Under difficult yet unprecedented circumstances, Thailand maintained its sovereignty. Their biggest challenge would come 20 years later, with the introduction of World War II.

La Segunda Guerra Mundial se alza en su inmensidad y complejidad sobre el resto de la historia humana. Un número de víctimas difícil de concebir, jamás superado por ningún otro coflicto; las masas de hombres, mujeres y recursos movilizados en una guerra que sacudió hasta los confines más remotos del planeta; la batalla ideológica entre el totalitarismo y la democracia, entre el fascismo y el comunismo, las pasiones y odios que despertó; el horror inimaginable y el fanatismo del holocausto.

La Segunda Guerra Mundial se alza en su inmensidad y complejidad sobre el resto de la historia humana. Un número de víctimas difícil de concebir, jamás superado por ningún otro conflicto; las masas de hombres, mujeres y recursos movilizados en una guerra que sacudió hasta los confines más remotos del planeta; la batalla ideológica entre el totalitarismo y la democracia, entre el fascismo y el comunismo, las pasiones y odios que despertó; el horror inimaginable y el fanatismo del holocausto; los juegos geopolíticos.

La Segunda Guerra Mundial se alza en su inmensidad y complejidad sobre el resto de la historia humana. Un número de víctimas difícil de concebir, jamás superado por ningún otro conflicto; las masas de hombres, mujeres y recursos movilizados en un conflicto que sacudió hasta los confines más remotos del planeta; la batalla ideológica entre el totalitarismo y la democracia, entre el fascismo y el comunismo, las pasiones y odios que despertó; el horror inimaginable y el fanatismo del holocausto; los juegos geopolíticos.

As Adolf Hitler’s Nazi armies threatened Europe, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt urged a divided America to mobilize to defend democracy and freedom. Many Republicans accused FDR of leading the nation needlessly into war and demanded that America remain neutral. On June 20, 1940, FDR shocked the world by announcing that two prominent Republicans would take posts in his cabinet in the name of national unity.

In the last winter of the Second World War, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin arrived in the Crimean resort of Yalta. Over eight days of bargaining, bombast, and intermittent bonhomie, they decided on the conduct of the final stages of the war against Germany, on how a defeated and occupied Germany should be governed, on the constitution of the nascent United Nations, and on spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Greece.

In 1941: Fighting the Shadow War: A Divided America in a World at War, historian Marc Wortman thrillingly explores the little-known history of America's clandestine involvement in World War II before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Prior to that infamous day, America had long been involved in a shadow war. Winston Churchill, England's beleaguered new prime minister, pleaded with Franklin D. Roosevelt for help. FDR concocted ingenious ways to come to his aid without breaking the Neutrality Acts.

Less than 21 years after the end of the First World War, the Second World War broke out in September 1939 when, on the third day of that month, the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany, which had invaded Poland two days earlier. The Second World War would last for nearly six years (although some historians consider the war to have started in Asia in 1937), and all of Europe was ravaged.

Christmas 1941 came little more than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The shock - in some cases overseas, elation - was worldwide. While Americans attempted to go about celebrating as usual, the reality of the just-declared war was on everybody’s mind. United States troops on Wake Island were battling a Japanese landing force and, in the Philippines, losing the fight to save Luzon. In Japan, the Pearl Harbor strike force returned to Hiroshima Bay and toasted its sweeping success.

In the summer of 1941, the Atlantic Charter marked the first of many meetings between President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The Charter laid out eight articles promoting ideals such as equality among nations and promising post-war freedom of the seas. It was ironic that in a conference concerning war aims, the United States was still a neutral country and the British were far from sure they could win the war against Germany.

Michael Fullilove’s work on global affairs has appeared in major publications such as the New York Times. In Rendezvous with Destiny, Fullilove examines the exceptional men at the heart of America’s transformation into a global power.

Susan Butler's brilliantly listenable audiobook firmly places FDR where he belongs, as the American president engaged most directly in diplomacy and strategy, who not only had an ambitious plan for the postwar world but had the strength, ambition, and personal charm to overcome Churchill's reluctance and Stalin's suspicion to bring about what was, in effect, an American peace and to avoid the disastrous consequences that followed the botched peace of Versailles in 1919.

An insightful historical account, Democrat and Diplomat exposes the dark underbelly of 1930s Germany and explores the terrible burden of those who realized the horror that was to come. Dodd was the U.S. Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, arriving in Berlin with his wife and daughter just as Hitler assumed the chancellorship. An unlikely candidate for the job - and not President Roosevelt's first choice - Dodd quickly came to realize that the situation in Germany was far grimmer than was understood in America.

Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms provides the first comprehensive account of what was once hailed by a leading American newspaper as the greatest spy story of World War II. This dramatic yet little-known saga, replete with telephone taps, kidnappings, and police surveillance, centres on the furtive escapades of Tyler Kent, a handsome, womanising 28-year-old Ivy League graduate who doubles as a US Embassy code clerk and Soviet agent.