World Military History

In 1945 the United States and Japan fought the largest and most devastating land battle of their war in the Pacific, a month-long struggle for the city of Manila. It was a key piece of the campaign to retake control of the Philippine Islands, which itself signified the culmination of the war, breaking the back of Japanese strategic power and sealing its outcome. In The Battle of Manila, Nicholas Sarantakes offers the first in-depth account of this crucial campaign from the American, Japanese, and, significantly, Filipino perspective.

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.

The ninth book in the Canadian Battle Series, Breakout from Juno, is the first dramatic chronicling of Canada's pivotal role throughout the entire Normandy Campaign following the D-Day landings.

World War II was the most destructive war in history. Millions upon millions of people died, including innocent civilians. Both sides—the Allies and Axis Powers—pursued secret plans, tactics, and weapons to destroy each other resulting in horrors on a scale never before seen. Secrets of World War II reveals little-known stories of the people, weapons, and battles that have affected the maps on our walls and the allegiances in our hearts.

The dramatic, pulse-pounding story of Harry Truman's first four months in office, when this unlikely president had to take on Germany, Japan, Stalin, and the atomic bomb, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

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.

A dramatic countdown of the final months of World War II in Europe, The Last 100 Days brings to life the waning power and the ultimate submission of the Third Reich. To reconstruct the tumultuous hundred days between Yalta and the fall of Berlin, John Toland traveled more than 100,000 miles in twenty-one countries and interviewed more than six hundred people - from Hitler's personal chauffeur to Generals von Manteuffel, Wenck, and Heinrici.

This is the story of the war we won and the peace we lost, told with a clear historical perspective and a warm interest in the remarkable people who guided the United States through one of the most crucial periods. Foremost in the cast of characters is Woodrow Wilson, the shy, brilliant, revered, and misunderstood "schoolmaster", whose administration was a complex of apparent contradictions.

On the first Sunday in December 1941, an armada of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Six months later, in a sea fight north of the tiny atoll of Midway, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent into the abyss. Pacific Crucible tells the epic tale of these first searing months of the Pacific war, when the U.S. Navy shook off the worst defeat in American military history and seized the strategic initiative.

Established in 1918–19, in the wake of Germany’s catastrophic defeat in the First World War and the revolution that followed swiftly on its heels, the Weimar Republic ushered in widespread social reform, a radical cultural flowering and the most democratic conditions the German people had ever known. The Weimar Years is a vivid narrative of a dramatic period in German history. Year by year, from 1918 to 1933, Frank McDonough covers the major events in both domestic and foreign policy and the personalities who shaped them, together with developments in music, art, theatre and literature.

In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen - Winston Churchill first among them - the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins.

Autumn 1944. World War II is nearly over in Europe but is escalating in the Pacific, where American soldiers face an opponent who will go to any length to avoid defeat. The Japanese army follows the samurai code of Bushido, stipulating that surrender is a form of dishonor. Killing the Rising Sun takes listeners to the bloody tropical-island battlefields of Peleliu and Iwo Jima and to the embattled Philippines, where General Douglas MacArthur has made a triumphant return and is plotting a full-scale invasion of Japan.

Luliia was a dedicated member of the Komsomol (the Soviet communist youth organization) and her parents worked for the NKVD. She started at the sniper school and eventually became a valued member of her battalion during operations against Prussia. She persevered through eight months of training before leaving for the Front on 24th November 1944 just days after qualifying. Joining the third Belorussian Front her battalion endured rounds of German mortar as well as loudspeaker announcements beckoning them to come over to the German side.

When you want to win a battle, you get real men. When you want to win a war, you get The Rat Bastards. When they’re not fighting among themselves, they’re tearing raw, living chunks out of the enemy. Nothing - not death lurking in the jungle, not the wrath of a raging river - can stop the killer squad they call…The Rat Bastards.

In KL, Wachsmann fills this glaring gap in our understanding. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system.

From Martin Dugard, #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Bill O'Reilly's Killing series—with more than twelve million copies sold—comes a fast-paced, dramatic account of the famous yet little understood battle that turned the tide of World War II.

At once a gripping depiction of men at war and a compelling story of redemption, Ghost Soldiers joins such landmark works as Flags of Our Fathers and The Greatest Generation Speaks in preserving the legacy of World War II for future generations.

It is astonishing that Simón Bolívar, the great Liberator of South America, is not better known in the United States. He freed six countries from Spanish rule, traveled more than 75,000 miles on horseback to do so, and became the greatest figure in Latin American history. His life is epic, heroic, straight out of Hollywood: he fought battle after battle in punishing terrain, forged uncertain coalitions of competing forces and races, lost his beautiful wife soon after they married and died relatively young, uncertain whether his achievements would endure.

History for busy people. Listen to a concise history of World War One in just one hour. World War One brought with it the world’s first experience of Total War, involving all of the world’s great powers, polarized between the Triple Entente, led by Britain, France and Russia, and the Central Powers, dominated by Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary. Around nine million men lost their lives in a conflict that introduced the horrors of trench warfare, machine guns, and toxic gas attacks.

Discover all the foul facts about the Frightful First World War on audio, narrated by Terry Deary. Find out including what the 'Fat King' did with food scraps and dead horses, how sniffing your own pee could save your life in a gas attack and why a pair of old socks gave away top German secrets.