Military Occupation

After Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, leaders in China and the United States had high hopes of a lasting partnership between the two countries. More than 120,000 U.S. servicemen deployed to China, where Chiang Kai-shek's government carried out massive programs to provide them with housing, food, and interpreters. But, as Zach Fredman uncovers in The Tormented Alliance, a military alliance with the United States means a military occupation by the United States.

Hitler's Collaborators focuses the spotlight on one of the most controversial aspects of the Nazi wartime occupation of Europe: the citizens of those countries who helped Hitler. Author Philip Morgan moves away from the usual suspects and focuses instead on the businessmen and civil servants who felt obliged to cooperate with the Nazis. These were the people who faced the most difficult choices and dilemmas by dealing with the various Nazi authorities and agencies, and it was their choices which had the greatest impact on the lives and livelihoods of their fellow countrymen.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the United States Army became the principal agent of American foreign policy. The army designed, implemented, and administered the occupations of the defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan, as well as many other nations. Generals such as Lucius Clay in Germany, Douglas MacArthur in Japan, Mark Clark in Austria, and John Hodge in Korea presided over these territories as proconsuls.

Through the discovery of a precious friendship album which belonged to 12-year-old Alie, a Jewish schoolgirl in Amsterdam, Claudia Carli has traced and preserved the lives of an entire class of girls, most of whom did not survive the war. Alie and her friends are brought touchingly and vividly to life, along with their writings, in this extraordinary book. Their everyday hopes, pleasures and longings are offset by the constant fear of a knock on the door, a missing friend from class, a family member taken away.

Some people are born lucky. Others make their own luck. As a boy, Hank wanted nothing more than to fly like the fighter pilots he admires in the skies over Amsterdam. When the lives of Dutch citizens are turned upside down with the Nazi occupation of Holland, his dreams will have to wait as he witnesses the tragic unfolding of events affecting those around him before finding himself in a fight for his own life.

Pro tip: When a bunch of alien cats from outer space start blowing up cities without warning, prior plans may have to be altered. Be prepared to improvise. Yosi Weismann had a simple gig: Babysit a grossly irresponsible young man, who just happened to be a prince. Let His Excellency sow his wild oats. Don’t let him kill himself, or anyone else, in the process. Piece of cake for a man of his skills. A glorified vacation. That's how things were supposed to go, at any rate. Now Yosi is marooned on a foreign world, surrounded by people whom he doesn’t understand, hunted by enemies who ...

Even in our darkest hour, it must be stated clearly, the Living Goddess did not abandon Her flock. For beneath the alien jackboot, even when very hope itself seemed lost, there arose, by Her Grace, those yet willing to hold high the torch. We were rich. We were poor. We were young. We were old. We sprang from the soil of this planet. We came from far off-world. We were herdeiros. We were minorities. We held advanced degrees. We were illiterate. We’d been born to arms. We had never touched a weapon in our lives. We were as varied as Her Panoply, our paths to Her Truth – as many as the ...

It is difficult, I suppose, for the children of our safe, modern republic to imagine what life had been like in those days, under the Zin occupation. How does one explain the inexplicable? How does one describe the indescribable? How does one get across what it is like to live in a world with no safety, to expect, at any moment, the fatal knock on the door, to know, every waking minute of every waking day, that the very next breath might be one’s last? There are no words for such things. And so, when my grandchildren ask me, I tell them the only thing I can: We lived those days, I tell ...