World War Ii Memoir

For the doomed stand American forces made in the Philippines at the start of World War II, two generals received their country’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor. One was the charismatic and controversial Douglas MacArthur, whose orders forced him to leave his soldiers on the islands to starvation and surrender but whose vow to return echoed around the globe. The other was the gritty Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, who became a hero to the troops whose fate he insisted on sharing even when it meant becoming the highest-ranking American prisoner of the Japanese.

The men and women honored in Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation speak in this collection of letters from and about the Depression and World War II.

On August 13, 1944, Joe Moser set off on his forty-fourth combat mission over occupied France. Soon, he would join almost 170 other Allied airmen as prisoners in Buchenwald, one of the most notorious and deadly of Nazi concentration camps. Tom Clavin's Lightning Down tells this largely untold and riveting true story.

Growing up in the Polish village of Tarnogrod on the fringes of a deep pine forest, Mala Szorer had the happiest childhood she could have hoped for. But at the age of 12, as the German invasion begins, her beloved village becomes a ghetto, and her family and friends are reduced to starvation.

One of the most important stories of World War II, already optioned by Steven Spielberg for a major motion picture: a spectacular, searing history that brings to light the extraordinary accomplishments of brave Jewish women who became resistance fighters - a group of unknown heroes whose exploits have never been chronicled in full, until now.

A naive young man, a railway enthusiast and radio buff, was caught up in the fall of the British Empire at Singapore in 1942. He was put to work on the 'Railway of Death' - the Japanese line from Thailand to Burma. Exhaustively and brutally tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio, Lomax was emotionally ruined by his experiences.

Like many Germans, Berlin schoolboy Erwin Bartmann fell under the spell of the Zeitgeist cultivated by the Nazis. Convinced he was growing up in the best country in the world, he dreamt of joining the Leibstandarte, Hitler's elite Waffen SS unit. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, and just 17-years-old, Erwin fulfilled his dream on Mayday 1941, when he gave up his apprenticeship at the Glaser bakery in Memeler Strasse and walked into the Lichterfelde barracks in Berlin as a raw, volunteer recruit.

At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise.

Relli, a Jewish girl in Poland, was denied a normal childhood. When Relli was just a baby, the Nazis occupied Poland and she, together with her parents, were imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, a way station before death. Her parents correctly assessed the new situation and decided to act heroically in order to save their only child. They succeeded in smuggling her out of the Ghetto and entrusted her to a Gentile Polish couple who agreed to hide her for the duration of the war under a false identity.

Based on years of archival research and interviews with the last surviving aides and Roosevelt family members, Nigel Hamilton offers a definitive account of FDR’s masterful - and underappreciated - command of the Allied war effort. Hamilton takes listeners inside FDR’s White House Oval Study - his personal command center - and into the meetings where he battled with Churchill about strategy and tactics and overrode the near mutinies of his own generals and secretary of war.

April 2004: Dan Mills and his platoon of snipers flew into Southern Iraq, part of an infantry battalion sent to win hearts and minds. They were soon fighting for their lives. Back home we were told they were peacekeeping. But there was no peace to keep. Because within days of arriving in theatre, Mills and his men were caught up in the longest, most sustained firefight British troops had faced for over 50 years.

They were known as “Rudder’s Rangers,” the most elite and experienced attack unit the Army had. In December 1944, they would be the spearhead into Germany, taking the war into Hitler’s homeland at last. Their colonel was given this objective: Take Hill 400. After two days, when they were finally relieved, only 16 Rangers remained to stagger down from the top of Hill 400. The Last Hill is filled with unforgettable action and characters—a gripping, finely detailed saga of what the survivors of the battalion would call “our longest day.”

In 1943, as the war against Nazi Germany raged abroad, President Franklin Roosevelt had a critical goal: a face-to-face sit-down with his allies Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. This first-ever meeting of the Big Three in Tehran, Iran, would decide some of the most crucial strategic details of the war. Yet when the Nazis found out about the meeting, their own secret plan took shape—an assassination plot that would’ve changed history.

As Assistant Private Secretary to four monarchs, 'Tommy' Lascelles had a ringside seat from which to observe the workings of the royal household and Downing Street during the first half of the 20th century. These fascinating diaries begin with Edward VIII's abdication and end with George VI's death and his daughter Elizabeth's Coronation. In between we see George VI at work and play, a portrait more intimate than any other previously published.

No Ordinary Time describes how the isolationist and divided United States of 1940 was unified under the extraordinary leadership of Franklin Roosevelt to become the preeminent economic and military power in the world.

The Saga Of The USSS PC 470 In WWII is a personal memoir from a member of the Greatest Generation. In vivid detail W. Neil Mc Bride describes both the homefront and the naval battlefront during WWII. His three years and eight months of service covers the multiple duties of a quartermaster aboard Patrol Craft USS PC 470, a new type of Subchaser introduced by the Navy early in 1942.

In the Spring of 1974, 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda of the Japanese army made world headlines when he emerged from the Philippine jungle after a thirty-year ordeal. Hunted in turn by American troops, the Philippine army and police, hostile islanders, and eventually successive Japanese search parties, Onoda had skillfully outmaneuvered all his pursuers, convinced that World War II was still being fought and waiting for the day when his fellow soldiers would return victorious.

In 1942, America's deadliest fighter pilot, or "ace of aces" - the legendary Eddie Rickenbacker - offered a bottle of bourbon to the first US fighter pilot to break his record of 26 enemy planes shot down. Seizing on the challenge to motivate his men, General George Kenney promoted what they would come to call the "race of aces" as a way of boosting the spirits of his war-weary command.

As Nemesis opens, Adolf Hitler has achieved absolute power within Germany and triumphed in his first challenge to the European powers. Idolized by large segments of the population and firmly supported by the Nazi regime, Hitler is poised to subjugate Europe. Nine years later, his vaunted war machine destroyed, Allied forces sweeping across Germany, Hitler will end his life with a pistol shot to his head.

Erik Wallin served with his unit in all of these locations, and provides the listener with a fascinating glimpse into these final battles. The book is written with a "no holds barred" approach which will captivate, excite, and maybe even shock the listener - his recollections do not evade the brutality of fighting against the advancing Red Army. Twilight of the Gods is destined to become a classic memoir of the Second World War.