Military World War Ii

The Battle of Stalingrad, perceived by historians as the most important battle of World War II and regarded by Russians as the most significant battle in their country’s history, cannot be viewed solely as a military engagement between two powerful, long-time foes. Stalingrad was a battle between the Allies and the Axis Powers; it was a struggle between the Soviet Union and Germany for victory; and it was also a test of wills between Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

At the height of World War II, LOOK Magazine profiled a small upstate New York community for a series of articles portraying it as the wholesome, patriotic model of life on the home front. Seventy years later, a history teacher tracks down the veterans with a connection to “Hometown, USA” who fought the war in the air over Europe, men who were tempered in the tough times of the Great Depression and forged in battle.

The celebrated 2010 HBO miniseries The Pacific, winner of eight Emmy Awards, was based on two classic books about the War in the Pacific, Helmet for My Pillow and With The Old Breed. Audible Studios, in partnership with Playtone, the production company co-owned by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and creator of the award-winning HBO series Band of Brothers, John Adams, and The Pacific, as well as the HBO movie Game Change, has created new recordings of these memoirs, narrated by the stars of the miniseries.

This groundbreaking book provides the first systematic comparison of America's modern wars and why they were won or lost. John D. Caldwell uses the World War II victory as the historical benchmark for evaluating the success and failure of later conflicts. Unlike WWII, the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraqi wars were limited, but they required enormous national commitments, produced no lasting victories, and generated bitter political controversies.

In this gripping memoir by the chief American interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, Richard Sonnenfeldt recounts a remarkable life. By age 22 he had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp, when he was appointed chief interpreter for the American prosecution of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.

During his service, he spent pretrial time with Hermann Göering as well as other top Nazi leaders.

The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the 20th century's most iconic moments. It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced, drank and made love until the small hours. These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war.

Sibert Honor author Deborah Hopkinson brings her signature action-packed narrative style to one of the most crucial battles of WWII. The WWII invasion known as D-Day was the largest military endeavor in history. By June 6, 1944, Hitler and his allies had a strong grip on the European continent, where Nazi Germany was engaged in the mass extermination of the Jewish people. The goal of D-Day was the total defeat of Hitler's regime and the defense of free democracies everywhere. Knowing they had to breach the French coast, the US, Great Britain, and Canada planned for the impossible.

On August 20, 1942, twelve Marine dive-bombers and nineteen Marine fighters landed at Guadalcanal. Their mission: defeat the Japanese navy and prevent it from sending more men and supplies to "Starvation Island," as Guadalcanal was nicknamed. The Japanese were turning the remote, jungle-covered mountain in the south Solomon Islands into an air base from which they could attack the supply lines between the U.S. and Australia.

During World War II, U.S. forces had to keep battle plans and other top secret information out of the enemy's hands. Coded messages were often used, but secret codes could be broken. To solve this problem, the U.S. military turned to an unexpected source to create an unbreakable code. The Navajo people spoke a complex language that few outsiders knew how to speak. Several Navajo soldiers were recruited to develop a code based on the Navajo language.

By June 1941, Germany's war machine looked to be unstoppable. The Nazi blitzkrieg had taken Poland, France, and Holland with shocking speed. The Luftwaffe had bombed London, while German U-boats wrought havoc on Allied shipping on the Atlantic. And yet, as James Holland shows at the start of The Allies Strike Back, 1941-1943 - the second volume in his magisterial narrative of World War II in the West - cracks were already appearing in Germany's apparent invincibility.

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 June 1944, German and American forces converged on an insignificant bridge a few miles inland from the invasion beaches. If taken by the Nazis, the bridge might have gone down in history as the reason the Allies failed on D-Day. The narrow road over it was each side’s conduit to victory. Continued Nazi control over the bridge near an old manoir known as La Fière—one of only two bridges in the region capable of supporting tanks and other heavy armor—would allow the Germans to reinforce their defenses at Utah Beach, one of the five landing areas chosen for Operation Overlord.

In terms of enemy aircraft shot down or destroyed, Squadron Leader Thomas "Pat" Pattle was the greatest fighter pilot of the Second World War.

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.

For Americans, World War II began in December of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; but for Poland, the war began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler's soldiers invaded, followed later that month by Stalin's Red Army. The conflict that followed saw the debut of many of the features that would come to define the later war-blitzkrieg, the targeting of civilians, ethnic cleansing, and indiscriminate aerial bombing-yet it is routinely overlooked by historians.

Evans interweaves a broad narrative of the war’s progress with viscerally affecting personal testimony from a wide range of people - from generals to front-line soldiers, from Hitler Youth activists to middle-class housewives. The Third Reich at War lays bare the dynamics of a nation more deeply immersed in war than any society before or since. Fresh insights into the conflict’s great events are here, from the invasion of Poland to the Battle of Stalingrad to Hitler’s suicide in the bunker.

When Aline Griffith was born in a quiet suburban New York hamlet, no one had any idea that she would go on to live “a life of glamour and danger that Ingrid Bergman only played at in Notorious” (Time). As the United States enters the Second World War, the young college graduate is desperate to aid in the war effort, but no one is interested in a bright-eyed young woman whose only career experience is modeling clothes.

Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands will be required listening for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history.

In December 1937, in the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking and within weeks not only looted and burned the defenseless city but systematically raped, tortured and murdered more than 300,000 Chinese civilians. Amazingly, the story of this atrocity- one of the worst in world history- continues to be denied by the Japanese government.

Listen to the definitive narrative history of the people, politics, and events of the Second World War - the conflict that shaped the modern world. From the build-up to the fighting, through to the reverberations still felt in the aftermath, this is a compelling, accessible, and immediate history of the war, perhaps the most complex, frightening, and destructive event in world history.