Western Wars

American Civil Wars takes listeners beyond the battlefields and sectional divides of the US Civil War to view the conflict from outside the national arena of the United States. Contributors position the American conflict squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings - all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s.

America is under attack! Bug Out! Texas is the story of Texas Patriots who fight the invaders. In Bug Out! Texas Book 7, the Texas Patriots battle the enemy near San Marcos and on I-40 west of Amarillo. International outrage over the bloodshed in Texas threatens to bring direct involvement with the UN and the Federal Government, with Governor Nelson and his team working to hold everything together and continue the fight. Bug Out! Texas Book 8 - West Border Mayhem follows the Texas patriots as they move to hit the enemy supply lines in New Mexico, while shoring up the border in the southwest...

A breakneck, edge-of-your-seat thriller that moves from a resurgent Russian threat in the Aleutian Islands to North Korean spy ships to secret Sudanese prisons as former marines Logan West and John Quick, now members of an FBI special task force, uncover a global conspiracy that threatens America's position in the current international balance of power.

The star-crossed Union officer and Confederate spy find that it is not easy to escape their pasts. On the heels of the battle at Hoover's Gap, James Lockett receives a cryptic message regarding Anna Tucker's whereabouts and impending peril. Will he trust a man who once vowed to kill him? Stymied by General Bragg and the limited passes south through the hills, General Rosecrans and the Union army finally move on Hoover's Gap. Riding with Wilder's new mounted infantry brigade and armed with the experimental repeating Spencer rifle, Lockett and company find surprising success in the seven mile...

During the First World War, the British army's most consistent German opponent was Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Commanding more than a million men as a General, and then Field Marshal, in the Imperial German Army, he held off the attacks of the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French and then Sir Douglas Haig for four long years. But Rupprecht was to lose not only the war, but his son and his throne. In Haig's Enemy, Jonathan Boff explores the tragic tale of Rupprecht's war - the story of a man caught under the wheels of modern industrial warfare.

From July 10, 1943, the date of the Allied landing in Sicily, to May 8, 1945, when victory in Europe was declared - the entire time it took to liberate Europe - no regiment saw more action, and no single platoon, company, or battalion endured worse, than the ones commanded by Felix Sparks, who had entered the war as a greenhorn second lieutenant of the 157th "Eager for Duty" Infantry Regiment of the 45th "Thunderbird" Division. Sparks and his fellow Thunderbirds fought longest and hardest to defeat Hitler.

The Civil War tore at the very roots of our nation and destroyed most of a generation. In rural Arkansas, the Hancocks were devastated by that war. They not only lost everything, but experienced an unimaginable hell. How does a traumatized human being put themselves back together? Where does a person begin to heal his or her broken mind…and does one choose damnation or redemption? For the Hancock siblings: Doc, Sarah, Butler, and Billy, the American frontier becomes a metaphor for the wilderness within—raw, and capable of being shaped.

Spanning the years 1940 to 1965, Defender of the Realm, the third volume of William Manchester’s The Last Lion, picks up shortly after Winston Churchill became prime minister - when his tiny island nation stood alone against the overwhelming might of Nazi Germany. The Churchill portrayed by Manchester and Reid is a man of indomitable courage, lightning-fast intellect, and an irresistible will to action.

In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness.

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world.

Battalion 3/5 suffered the highest number of casualties in the war in Afghanistan. This is the story of one platoon in that distinguished battalion. Aware of U.S. plans to withdraw from the country, knowing their efforts were only a footprint in the sand, the fifty Marines of 3rd Platoon fought in Sangin, the most dangerous district in all of Afghanistan.

Private Ben Leeman, MM, is typical of so many unknown British Tommies who unhesitatingly answered the call to arms when Britain was in peril. Where Ben’s story differs from most, is that when he enlisted in the 15th (Bantam) Battalion, Notts and Derby Regiment, The Sherwood Foresters, he was just 15 years old. A Century of Silence tells Ben’s story from a happy childhood in Grimsby, through his enlistment and training in 1915, and his desperate fight for survival in the trenches of the Somme and the killing fields of Flanders.

A brutal siege. A forgotten heroine. A war-torn romance. And a historian determined to uncover the truth. Untold millions who saw Band of Brothers can finally know the whole story of what happened to American soldiers and civilians in Bastogne during that arduous Winter of 1944/45. In the television version of Band of Brothers, a passing reference is made to an African nurse assisting in an aid station in Bastogne. When military historian Martin King watched the episode, he had to know who that woman was; thus began a multi-year odyssey.

When Sheriff Ben Stillman’s deputy and best friend, Leon McMannigle, shoots a young woman who was about to shoot Stillman in the back, Leon takes the outlaw girl’s lifeless body back to her mountain ranch to turn her over to her family. He feels the need to explain himself, to personally account for the girl’s death. His explanation falls on deaf ears. Old Watt Hollister sends his wild sons led by his eldest boy, Nash, out on the trail to exact revenge for their poor dead sister. Wounded, McMannigle is alone and on the run in the Two-Bear Mountains, hunted.

The story of a physically strong and quietly determined Australian infantry Driver from World War I. When the first official Australian casualty lists of the War were released at the beginning of May 1915, William ‘Willy’ Thompson, from Newcastle, New South Wales, decided to enlist. He was in search of adventure. Willy was allocated to the 30th Battalion of a newly formed brigade in the Australian Imperial Force; he was an 8th Brigade Original. After training in Egypt, Willy’s Brigade fought in the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916, the first major engagement for Australians on the ...

Even at 17 years old, Carson Ryan knows enough about cow herding to realize the crew he's with is about the worst ever. They're taking the long way around to the Montana prairies, and they're seriously undermanned. While rounding up strays, Ryan hears gunshots ring across the range. Suspecting an Indian attack, he gallops straight into a US Army raid instead. The outfit he's with is nothing but a bunch of murdering cattle rustlers, and the law thinks he's one of them. Tied up, thrown in jail, and tried by a court that's more interested in hanging a man than learning the truth, Carson has only two options: escape or die trying.

It was the most famous bank robbery of all time, involving the legendary James-Younger gang's final shocking holdup - the infamous Northfield Raid - and the thrilling two-week chase that followed. Mark Lee Gardner, author of the critically acclaimed To Hell on a Fast Horse, takes us inside Northfield's First National Bank and outside to the streets as Jesse James and his band of outlaws square off against the heroic citizens who risked their lives to defeat America's most daring criminals.

Civil War veteran Clint Turner is a happy man working as a blacksmith in Macon, Texas. He loves to see his neighbors use the metals forged from his hands until all that changes dramatically when an outlaw gang kills his brother-in-law and his sister. From then on, he has only one thing on his mind – a mixture of justice and vengeance. To accomplish his mission, Clint campaigns to become sheriff of Macon County. The law enforcement job for Clint would see him put to good use his six shooter, his wits, and his sense of justice.

A shadow world behind the real world... When Jack West, Jr. won the Great Games, he threw the four legendary kingdoms into turmoil. A world with its own history, rules and prisons... Now these dark forces are coming after Jack...in ruthless fashion. That is reaching into our world...explosively... With the end of all things rapidly approaching, Jack must find the Three Secret Cities, three incredible lost cities of legend. It’s an impossible task by any reckoning, but Jack must do it while he is being hunted...by the greatest hunters ever.

The task for those in charge of professionalizing the military in the first half of the nineteenth century and transforming it from a militia-led army to a highly disciplined standing army was a difficult job. Americans had long supported a tradition of militia and distrusted professional soldiers.