World War Memoir

Tolkien and the Great War tells for the first time the full story of how he embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe. This biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme and introduces the circle of friends who spurred his mythology to life.

In 2022, Andrew Tate went from a little-known kickboxer and failed reality TV star to a lifestyle icon for legions of men and boys, and a figure that would define a new era of misogyny. Tate started the year as a fringe internet celebrity, but by August he was the most googled man in the world. In that same month, Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin gained access to his Bucharest compound and infamous War Room, making a documentary that would result in the first women coming forward to accuse him publicly of sexual and physical violence.

SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny became a legend in his own time. "Hitler's favorite commando" acquired a reputation as a man of daring, renowned for his audacious 1943 mission to extricate Mussolini from a mountain-top prison. He could be brave and resourceful, but was also a notorious egoist and an unrepentant Nazi until the end of his life. Stuart Smith draws on years of in-depth research to uncover the truth about Skorzeny's career and complex personality.

While he was the curator of the CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, a longtime military intelligence expert, began to discover tantalizing clues that suggested Ernest Hemingway's involvement in the Second World War was much more complex and dangerous than has been previously understood. Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy brings to light for the first time this riveting secret side of Hemingway's life - when he worked closely with both the American OSS and the Soviet NKVD to defeat Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment—a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution.

The Washington War is the story of how the Second World War was fought and won in the capital’s halls of power - and how the United States, which in December 1941 had a nominal army and a decimated naval fleet, was able in only 30 months to fling huge forces onto the European continent and shortly thereafter shatter Imperial Japan’s Pacific strongholds. Three quarters of a century after the overwhelming defeat of the totalitarian Axis forces, the terrifying, razor-thin calculus on which so many critical decisions turned has been forgotten....

Sent to France with the Royal Flying Corps at just 17, and later a member of the famous 56 Squadron, Cecil Lewis was an illustrious and passionate fighter pilot of the First World War, described by Bernard Shaw in 1935 as 'a thinker, a master of words, and a bit of a poet'. In this vivid and spirited account the author evocatively sets his love of the skies and flying against his bitter experience of the horrors of war. We then follow his progress from France and the battlefields of the Somme to his pioneering defence of London against deadly nighttime raids.

A main architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler was perhaps one of the most ruthless men that ever lived. For most, this would be hyperbole, but for Himmler, such words would seem like a rather apt description.

They were the final survivors of the millions who made up the American Expeditionary Forces, nineteenth-century men and women living in the twenty-first century. Self-reliant, humble, and stoic, they kept their stories to themselves for a lifetime, then shared them at the last possible moment so that they, and the war they won - the trauma that created our modern world - might at last be remembered. You will never forget them.

A Call to Duty The greatest conflict in human history started brothers Ray F. and John B. Lewis on a journey that they never imagined as farm boys picking cotton in the dusty fields of West Texas during the Great Depression. World War II took them across the Atlantic to places they had only read about in books or seen on movie screens when they could afford theater tickets. By the time they returned to the States, they had lost their country-boy naivete. In To War and Back: The World War II Journey of Two West Texas Farm Boys, award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction Preston Lewis ...

Erhard Steiniger joined his Wehrmacht unit on October 12, 1940, as a radio operator, a role which required his constant presence with troops at the Front, right in the midst of combat. On June 22, 1941, he accompanied his division to Lithuania where he experienced the catastrophic first day of Operation Barbarossa. He later witnessed intense clashes during the conquest of the Baltic islands and the battles leading up to Leningrad on the Volkhov and Lake Ladoga.

In 1945, US intelligence officers in Manila discovered that the Japanese had hidden large quantities of gold bullion and other looted treasure in the Philippines. President Truman decided to recover the gold but to keep its riches secret. These, combined with Japanese treasure recovered during the US occupation, and with recovered Nazi loot, would create a worldwide American political action fund to fight communism.

Four Brothers From Lowell tells the harrowing true life tale of the four Turcotte boys from Lowell, Massachusetts, who served in the United States Navy during WWII. In the midst of the war, the Turcotte brothers were described by one Lowell observer as “probably the fightingist group in the city…” Their stories are chronicled in action in the Pacific, Atlantic and South American theatres. Through the effective use of letters and photos, this book not only describes the dangers of war, but also illustrates the challenges and sacrifices of life on the home front, as well as the impact ...

The only Major League ballplayer whose baseball card is on display at the headquarters of the CIA, Moe Berg has the singular distinction of having both a 15-year career as a catcher for such teams as the New York Robins and the Chicago White Sox and that of a spy for the OSS during World War II. Here, Dawidoff provides "a careful and sympathetic biography" ( Chicago Sun-Times) of this enigmatic man.

A radio broadcaster and journalist for Edward R. Murrow at CBS, William L. Shirer was new to the world of broadcast journalism when he began keeping a diary while on assignment in Europe during the 1930s. Shirer’s Berlin Diary, which is considered the first full record of what was happening in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, appeared in 1941. Shirer returned to the European front in 1944 to cover the end of the war. End of a Berlin Diary chronicles this year-long study of Germany after Hitler.

Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Channel Dash, North Africa, Sicily, Dieppe, D-Day, and the fight against the V1 menace—Group Captain Bobby Oxspring saw action in many of the most famous battles of the Second World War. His memoir, Spitfire Command, is a remarkable account of life as one of The Few, charting his journey through the war, flying all marks of the Spitfire—from the Mk I to the Mk XIV—right through to when he ended operational duty just a week before the war ended.

Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first prisoner exchange of the nuclear age? Bridge of Spies vividly traces their paths to that electrifying moment on February 10, 1962, when their fates helped to define the conflicts and lethal undercurrents of the most dangerous years of the cold war.

In this moving and compelling memoir about parent and child, father and daughter, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lucinda Franks discovers that the remote, nearly impassive man she grew up with had in fact been a daring spy behind enemy lines in World War II. Sworn to secrecy, he began revealing details of his wartime activities only in the last years of his life, as he became afflicted with Alzheimer's. His exploits revealed a man of remarkable bravado.

For the first time, once-secret government records and interviews tell the full story of the thousands of Nazis—from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich—who came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. Many gained entry on their own as self-styled war “refugees.” But some had help from the U.S. government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories.

The incredible true story of Clifton B. "Lucky" Cates, whose service in World War I and beyond made him a legend in the annals of the Marine Corps. Cates knew that he and his small band of marines were in a desperate spot. Before handing the note over to a runner, he added three words that would resound through Marine Corps history: I WILL HOLD.