World Military History

From the young airmen who took their frail machines high above the trenches of World War I and fought their foes in single combat, there emerged a renowned company of brilliant aces - among them Ball, Bishop, McCudden, Collishaw, and Mannock - whose legendary feats have echoed down half a century. But behind the elite pilots in the Royal Flying Corps, there were many hundreds of airmen who flew their hazardous daily sorties in outdated planes without ever achieving fame.

Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. This Pulitzer Prize–winning history tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities. The Depression was both a disaster and an opportunity. As David Kennedy vividly demonstrates, the economic crisis of the 1930s was far more than a simple reaction to the alleged excesses of the 1920s.

Few events have ever shaken a country in the way that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor affected the United States. After the devastating attack, Japanese forces continued to overwhelm the Allies, attacking Malaya with its fortress of Singapore, and taking resource-rich islands in the Pacific - Borneo, Sumatra, and Java - in their own blitzkrieg offensive. Allied losses in these early months after America's entry into the war were great, and among the most devastating were those suffered during the Java Sea Campaign.

In this definitive history of the modern Arab world, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan draws extensively on Arab sources and texts to place the Arab experience in its crucial historical context for the first time. Tracing five centuries of Arab history, Rogan reveals that there was an age when the Arabs set the rules for the rest of the world. Today, however, the Arab world's sense of subjection to external powers carries vast consequences for both the region and Westerners who attempt to control it.

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.

The history of espionage is far older than any of today's intelligence agencies, yet the long history of intelligence operations has been largely forgotten. In this audiobook, distinguished historian Christopher Andrew recovers much of the lost intelligence history of the past three millennia - and shows its relevance today.

The battle of Stalingrad was the turning point of World War II. The German capture of the city, their encirclement by Soviet forces shortly afterwards, and the hard-fought but futile attempts to relieve them, saw bitter attritional fighting and extremes of human misery inflicted on both sides. In this title, a renowned expert on warfare on the Eastern Front reveals the often-overlooked German counteroffensive post-Stalingrad, and how it prevented the whole Axis front line from collapsing.

On a moonless night in January 1991, a dozen US aircraft appeared in the skies over Baghdad. To the Iraqi air defenses, the planes seemed to come from nowhere. Each aircraft was more than 60 feet in length and with a wingspan of 40 feet, yet its radar footprint was the size of a ball bearing. Here was the first extensive combat application of Stealth technology. And it was devastating.

In Gladius, Guy de la Bedoyere takes us straight to the heart of what it meant to be a part of the Roman army. Rather than a history of the army itself, or a guide to military organization and fighting methods, this book is a ground-level recreation of what it was like to be a soldier in the army that made the empire. Surveying numerous aspects of life in the Roman army between 264 BCE and 337 CE, Gladius draws not only on the words of famed Roman historians, but also those of the soldiers themselves.

Stephen R. Platt is widely respected for his incisive nonfiction, particularly in regard to his knowledge and understanding of China. With Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, Platt details the absorbing narrative of the Taiping Rebellion, which resulted in the loss of 20 million lives. Occurring in the 1850s, this is the story of a cultural movement characterized by intriguing personages such as influential military strategist Zeng Guofan and brilliant Taiping leader Hong Rengan.

In The Boer War, winner of the Netherland's 2013 Libris History Prize and shortlisted for the 2013 AKO Literature Prize, the author brings a completely new perspective to this chapter of South African history, critically examining the involvement of the Netherlands in the war. Furthermore, unlike other accounts, Martin Bossenbroek explores the war primarily through the experiences of three men uniquely active during the bloody conflict.

George Wilson has garnered much acclaim for this shattering and enlightening memoir. Detailing his odyssey from July, 1944 until the following summer, If You Survive is a startling first-person account of the final year of World War II. Wilson was the only man from his original company to finish the war. As a Second Lieutenant, he went ashore at Utah Beach after the D-Day invasion amidst burned vehicles, sunken landing craft, and broken fortifications.

Based on exclusive and unrestricted access to more than 5,000 pages of personal writings and family photos, this definitive biography of German physician and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef Mengele (1911-1979) probes the personality and motivations of Auschwitz's "Angel of Death". From May 1943 through January 1945, Mengele selected who would be gassed immediately, who would be worked to death, and who would serve as involuntary guinea pigs for his spurious and ghastly human experiments (twins were Mengele's particular obsession).

A monumental retelling of world history through the lens of maritime enterprise, revealing in breathtaking depth how people first came into contact with one another by ocean and river, lake and stream, and how goods, languages, religions, and entire cultures spread across and along the world's waterways, bringing together civilizations and defining what makes us most human.

World War II began with a metallic roar as the German Blitzkrieg raced across Europe, spearheaded by the most dreaded weapon of the 20th century: the Panzer. No German tank better represents that thundering power than the infamous Tiger, and Otto Carius was one of the most successful commanders to ever take a Tiger into battle, destroying well over 150 enemy tanks during his incredible career.

Using archival records, in this book, David Stahel presents a history of Germany's summer campaign from the perspective of the two largest and most powerful Panzer groups on the Eastern front. Stahel's research provides a fundamental reassessment of Germany's war against the Soviet Union, highlighting the prodigious internal problems of the vital Panzer forces and revealing that their demise in the earliest phase of the war undermined the whole German invasion.

In a burnished, driving prose, incorporating a myriad of fresh sources, John Keegan tells the story of the Allies' greatest military achievement as he chronicles the 1944 invasion of Normandy, from D-Day to the liberation of Paris.

Alexander was born into the royal family of Macedonia, the kingdom that would soon rule over Greece. Tutored as a boy by Aristotle, Alexander had an inquisitive mind that would serve him well when he faced formidable obstacles during his military campaigns. Shortly after taking command of the army, he launched an invasion of the Persian Empire, and continued his conquests as far south as the deserts of Egypt and as far east as the mountains of present-day Pakistan and the plains of India.

Tantor Audio presents the complete audio version of the long awaited one-volume campaign history from the leading experts of the decisive clash of Nazi and Soviet forces at Stalingrad. Stalingrad is an abridged edition of the five-volume Stalingrad Trilogy.

In The Vanquished, a highly original and gripping work of history, Robert Gerwarth asks us to think again about the true legacy of the First World War. In large part it was not the fighting on the Western Front that proved so ruinous to Europe's future but the devastating aftermath, as countries on both sides of the original conflict were savaged by revolutions, pogroms, mass expulsions, and further major military clashes.