World War Ii Memoir

Wernher von Braun was a rare and complex figure. He went on to become one of the most prominent figures not just in one country but in two. Although the first half of his life and his contributions to Nazi Germany remain extremely controversial, it can’t be denied that he was a pioneer. He oversaw the development of the first long-range guided ballistic missile, the V-2, which became a terrifying weapon in Nazi Germany’s arsenal. After the war, von Braun and many of his colleagues were brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip.

Probably no historical period has been discussed and dissected as much as World War II. Yet there is always something new to learn upon closer inspection. Events occurred at lightning speed during the war years, and you almost have to take things on a day-by-day basis to take them all in. That is why this book focuses solely on what transpired in 1940. The year 1940 was one of the most pivotal years of World War II. It was the year that Britain and France began offensive operations against the Germans.

Of all the heroic stories to come out of World War II, few are as extraordinary as that of Major Rocky Gause, who was captured by the Japanese, escaped from the infamous Bataan Death March, and, with a fellow soldier, endured a harrowing voyage across the enemy-held Pacific in a leaky, hand-crafted boat. In the battered notebook he kept throughout his journey, Gause traced his steps from the besieged city of Manila on New Year's Eve, 1941, to his safe landing on the Australian coast ten months later.

At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and, in an effort to fill its ranks with experts, the OSS turned to academia for recruits. Suddenly, literature professors, librarians, and historians were training to perform undercover operations and investigative work—and these surprising spies would go on to profoundly shape both the course of the war and our cultural institutions with their efforts.

Into Enemy Waters is the story of World War II's most elite and daring unit of warriors, the direct precursors to the Navy SEALs, told through the eyes of its last living member, ninety-five-year-old George Morgan. Morgan was just a wiry, seventeen-year-old lifeguard from New Jersey when he joined the Navy's new combat demolition unit, tasked to blow up enemy coastal defenses ahead of landings by allied forces. His first assignment: Omaha Beach on D-Day. When he returned stateside, Morgan learned that his service was only beginning.

In March 1941 Jimmy Stewart, America's boy next door and recent Academy Award winner, left fame and fortune behind and joined the United States Army Air Corps to fulfill his family mission and serve his country. He rose from private to colonel and participated in 20 often-brutal World War II combat missions over Germany and France. In mere months the war took away his boyish looks as he faced near-death experiences and the loss of men under his command. The war finally won, he returned home with millions of other veterans to face an uncertain future.

On the 50th anniversary of Churchill's death, Boris Johnson celebrates the singular brilliance of one of the most important leaders of the 20th century. Taking on the myths and misconceptions along with the outsized reality, he portrays - with characteristic wit and passion - a man of contagious bravery, breathtaking eloquence, matchless strategizing, and deep humanity.

They are three brothers, all navy men, who end up coincidentally and extraordinarily at the epicenter of three of the war's most crucial moments. Bill is picked by Roosevelt to run his first map room in Washington. Benny is the gunnery and antiaircraft officer on the USS Enterprise, one of the only carriers to escape Pearl Harbor and by the end of 1942 the last one left in the Pacific to defend against the Japanese. Barton, the youngest and least distinguished of the three, is shuffled off to the Navy Supply Corps because his mother wants him out of harm's way.

A fascinating personal memoir of underwater combat in World War II, told by a man who played a major role in those dangerous operations. Frank and beautifully written, this book will be of lasting value as a submarine history by an expert and as an enduring military and political analysis.

They are the most famous and controversial directors the CIA has ever had - Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey. Disciples is the story of these dynamic agents and their daring espionage and sabotage in wartime Europe under OSS Director Bill Donovan.

Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to record this unparalleled time, and maintained by devoted archivists, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before, from the stories of a Nazi sympathizing police officer to a Jewish journalist who documented daily activities at a transport camp.

Daniela Gerson and her wife Talia met at a picnic in Los Angeles, not knowing that 75 years earlier, their grandparents had left homes only blocks away from each other in a small Polish town, and fled east to Ukraine. The Gersons and the Inlenders would go on parallel odysseys of 5,000 miles to survive the Holocaust – one that would, after a deceitful loyalty test from Stalin, put them on cattle cars to a Soviet Gulag, send them to Siberia and Central Asia, and would end, after a decade on the run, with new lives built on secrets and lies.

British Heroes of World War II: True Stories of Individual Bravery from the Battlefields of World War II tells the incredible true stories of men and women whose bravery left a lasting impact on the Allies' victory. From covert operations behind enemy lines to heroic acts in fierce battlefield confrontations, these stories showcase the unbreakable human spirit in the face of overwhelming adversity.

From the acclaimed Modern Library Chronicles comes an exploration of a promising theory that when put to practice wreaked havoc on the world. An expert on communism, Richard Pipes follows the history of the Soviet Union from the 1917 revolution to the Cold War, and finally, to its deterioration and collapse.

General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the US Army during World War II, faced the daunting task not only of overseeing two theaters of a global conflict but also of selecting the best generals to carry out American grand strategy. Marshall and His Generals is the first and only book to focus entirely on that selection process and the performances, both stellar and disappointing, that followed from it. Stephen Taaffe explores how and why Marshall selected the Army's commanders.

The heart-wrenching but ultimately redemptive story of two World War II soldiers - a Japanese surgeon and an American sergeant - during a brutal Alaskan battle in which the sergeant discovers the medic's revelatory and fascinating diary that changed our war-torn society’s perceptions of Japan.

When German soldiers invaded Poland in September 1939, it began a six-year journey for then-ten-year-old Renee Salt and her mother Sala. Until their liberation in 1945, Renee and Sala were imprisoned in ghettos and concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen. The only light in the darkness and brutality for Renee was the unwavering grasp of her mother’s hand in hers–enduring, against all odds. It was this unbreakable bond, along with a few miracles, that kept Renee alive.

Following the Front is a compilation of WWII dispatches written by Sidney A. Olson for TIME and LIFE magazines, 1944-1945. Olson, who joined Time Inc. in 1939 and served as a senior editor there, asked to be assigned overseas as a war correspondent. In mid-December, 1944, he received his accreditation from the War Department and sailed for London. Attached to the European Theater of Operations (ETO), Olson followed the Allied Forces as they pushed the Nazis back into Germany. He typed up his reports and cabled them to his editors in New York.

The Vatican's silence in the face of Nazi atrocities remains one of the great controversies of our time. History has accused wartime pontiff Pius the Twelfth of complicity in the Holocaust and dubbed him "Hitler's Pope". But a key part of the story has remained untold. Pius ran the world's largest church, smallest state, and oldest spy service. Saintly but secretive, he skimmed from church charities to pay covert couriers, and surreptitiously tape-recorded his meetings with top Nazis.

Hailed as the most compelling biography of the German dictator yet written, Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the heart of its subject's immense darkness. From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales and overgrown with self-created myths. One truth prevails: the sheer scale of the evils that he unleashed on the world has made him a demonic figure without equal in the 20th century.