France War

A true narrative of events surrounding the Nazi occupation of France… Few nineteen-year-old girls had the opportunity to spend their junior year of college abroad in 1929, much less middle-class Montana girls like Elizabeth Matheson. Her brave and adventurous spirit led her to study French at Le Sorbonne in Paris that year, where she fell in love—with the language, the country, and much later, a Frenchman. Elizabeth returned to the States and became a teacher in Faribault, Minnesota. Some years later, her students were paired as pen pals with the students of a Monsieur Jean Darbelnet at...

As far as the public knew, Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) did not exist. After the defeat of the French Army and Britain's retreat from the Continent in June 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill created the top-secret espionage operation to "set Europe ablaze". Of the many brave men and women conscripted, two Anglo-American recruits, the Starr brothers, stood out to become legendary figures to the guerillas, assassins, and saboteurs they led.

The famous D-Day landings of 6 June, 1944, marked the beginning of Operation Overlord, the battle for the liberation of Europe. Republished as part of the Pan Military Classics series, Max Hastings’ acclaimed account overturns many traditional legends in this memorable study. Drawing together the eyewitness accounts of survivors from both sides, plus a wealth of previously untapped sources and documents, Overlord provides a brilliant, controversial perspective on the devastating battle.

If the Wright brothers' 1903 flights in Kitty Hawk marked the birth of aviation, World War I can be called its violent adolescence - a brief but bloody era that completely changed the way planes were designed, fabricated, and flown. The war forged an industry that would redefine transportation and warfare for future generations.

For nearly 200 years huge wooden warships called “ships of the line” dominated war at sea and were thus instrumental in the European struggle for power and the spread of imperialism. Foremost among the great naval powers were Great Britain and France, whose advanced economies could support large numbers of these expensive ships. This book, the first joint history of these great navies, offers a uniquely impartial and comprehensive picture of the two forces - their shipbuilding programs, naval campaigns, and battles, and their wartime strategies and diplomacy.

This is a novel about a young German woman in the early 1940's who leaves Germany to fight with the French resistance against the Naxi occupation of Vichy France.

La historia de Juana parece ser una novela en vez de una parte de la historia. Fue una salvadora excepcional en su caballo de guerra, agitando su estandarte blanco y llamando a sus soldados a la victoria; pero también fue compasiva e intensamente humana, una joven que lloraba y sufría igual que el resto de nosotros. En el mismo sentido, es muy sencillo relacionarse con Juana como sorprenderse con su increíble personaje.

In the autumn of 2020 Ned Boulting (ITV head cycling commentator and Tour de France obsessive) bought a length of Pathé news film from a London auction house. All he knew was it was film from the Tour de France, a long time ago. Once restored it became clear it was a short sequence of shots from stage 4 of the 1923 Tour de France. No longer than 2.5 minutes long, it featured half a dozen sequences, including a lone rider crossing a bridge. Ned set about learning everything he could about the sequence – studying each frame, face and building – until he had squeezed the meaning from it.

In this revisionist account of France's crushing defeat in 1940, Philip Nord argues that the nation's downfall has long been misunderstood. Nord assesses France's diplomatic and military preparations for war with Germany, its conduct of the war once the fighting began, and the political consequences of defeat on the battlefield. Ultimately, he finds that the longstanding view that France's collapse was due to military unpreparedness and a decadent national character is unsupported by fact.

On June 29, 1919, one day after the Treaty of Versailles brought about the end of World War I, nearly seventy cyclists embarked on the thirteenth Tour de France. From Paris, the war-weary men rode down the western coast on a race that would trace the country’s border, through seaside towns and mountains to the ghostly western front. Traversing a cratered postwar landscape, the cyclists faced near-impossible odds and the psychological scars of war. Most of the athletes had arrived straight from the front, where so many fellow countrymen had suffered or died.

In a world where attitudes and behaviors that were taboo not long ago are now acceptable in a world where the future is frightening to many, we appear to be the helpless onlookers of a process we have no control over. So, finding out that there are underlying efforts by governments, the media, or private groups to influence particular attitudes and social behaviors on a large scale, for the purpose of producing desired results or certain characteristics in particular segments of the population, would be shocking to many people. It is even more shocking when the social engineers are ...

That France and Germany were enemies in 1940 was not news to anyone. That Germany was bitter at the terms of its surrender at the end of World War I was hardly a surprise. That another war would follow all too soon was apparent to many. Yet no one could have expected that Germany’s rise to military power under the leadership of Adolf Hitler would have given birth to such an evil regime. The churning resentment that Hitler and many other Germans felt against its enemies, particularly France, was destined to sow the seeds for vengeance.

Susan Tate Ankeny was sorting through the belongings of her late father - a World War II bombardier who had bailed from a burning B-17 over Nazi-occupied France in 1944 - when she found two boxes. One contained her dad's Air Force uniform, and the other an unfinished memoir, stacks of envelopes, black-and-white photographs, mission reports, dog tags, and the fake identity cards he used in his escape. Ankeny spent more than a decade from that moment tracking down letter writers, their loved ones, and anyone who had played a role in her father's story.

The Hundred Years' War: A Captivating Guide to One of the Most Notable Conflicts of the Middle Ages and in European History and the Life of Joan of Arc contains two captivating manuscripts in one audiobook: The Hundred Years’ War: A Captivating Guide to the Conflicts Between the English House of Plantagenet and the French House of Valois That Took Place During the Middle Ages and Joan of Arc: A Captivating Guide to a Heroine of France and Her Role During the Lancastrian Phase of the Hundred Years’ War.

This gripping historical novel brings to life the challenges of the Reformation period of the 16th and 17 centuries, including the rise of John Calvin's Protestant ministry in Geneva, Switzerland. The book also delves into the plight of English kings and queens, rebellion, civil war, the Spanish Armada and the Puritan exile during this pivotal moment in history. The English Stillwell family find themselves at the forefront of this tumultuous era that is marked by extreme religious intolerance. As they attempt to navigate the treacherous religious landscape, they must confront the harsh ...

What was it like to be a citizen fighting the Nazis? Lucie Aubrac, of Catholic and peasant background, was teaching history in a Lyon school and had just married Raymond, a Jewish engineer, when World War II erupted and divided France. This is Lucie's harrowing account of her participation in the Resistance, when, though pregnant, she planned and took part in raids to free comrades - including her husband, under Nazi death sentence - from the prisons of the infamous "Butcher of Lyon," Klaus Barbie.

The most celebrated general in history, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) has for centuries attracted eminent male writers. Since Thomas Carlyle first christened him “our last Great Man”, regiments of biographers have marched across the same territory, weighing campaigns and conflicts, military tactics and power politics. With Napoleon, Ruth Scurr, one of our most eloquent and original historians, emphatically rejects the shibboleth of the “Great Man” theory of history, instead following the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon’s life through gardens, parks, and forests.

FNH Audio presents a slightly abridged performance of this third volume of Charles Oman's military history classic. In this third volume, a detailed examination is made of the period from September 1809 to December 1810. This volume covers the battles of Ocana, Cadiz and Bussaco. It also examines in detail Massena's march through Portugal to the lines of Terres Vedras, the lines themselves, and his final retreat away in a desperate search for food.

Volume Five begins on an optimistic note. The French recognition of the United States on February 6, 1778, along with the promise of military assistance, renewed Washington’s confidence in eventual success. But before that day arrived in 1781, three years of hardship, privation, and suspense would intervene. Throughout this ordeal George Washington’s towering presence was the catalyst that kept everything together.

Agnès Humbert was an art historian in Paris during the German occupation in 1940. Though she might well have weathered the oppressive regime, Humbert was stirred to action by the atrocities she witnessed. In an act of astonishing bravery, she joined forces with several colleagues to form an organized resistance - very likely the first such group to fight back against the occupation. (In fact, their newsletter, Résistance, gave the French Resistance its name.)