World War II

A classic work of World War II history that brings to vivid, dramatic life one of the bloodiest battles ever fought - and the beginning of the end for the Third Reich....

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1961, this worldwide bestselling classic chronicles the most infamous era of our times.

The Dressmakers of Auschwitz presents a powerful chronicle of the women who used their sewing skills to survive the Holocaust, stitching beautiful clothes at an extraordinary fashion workshop created within one of the most notorious WWII death camps....

At the height of World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was home to 75,000 residents, consuming more electricity than New York City. But to most of the world, the town did not exist....

On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away....

There are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as at the Battle of Midway....

In the first major biography of Bonhoeffer in 40 years, New York Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas takes both strands of Bonhoeffer's life - the theologian and the spy - to tell a searing story of incredible moral courage in the face of monstrous evil....

In this landmark biography of Winston Churchill based on extensive new material, the true genius of the man, statesman, and leader can finally be fully understood - by the best-selling, award-winning author of Napoleon and The Storm of War....

Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power....

Through a connected set of portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated out from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime’s leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question, how does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil?

Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen - Winston Churchill first among them - the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided....

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....

Masters of the Air is the riveting history of the American Eighth Air Force in World War II, the story of the young men who flew the bombers that helped bring Nazi Germany to its knees, brilliantly told by historian and World War II expert Donald Miller....

Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists had a different view. Malcolm Gladwell reexamines moments from the past and asks whether we got it right the first time....

We see a perspective of D-Day which deserves to be added to the historical record, in which ordinary German troops struggled to make sense of the onslaught that was facing them....

Using new technology, recently discovered documents and sophisticated investigative techniques, an international team—led by an obsessed retired FBI agent—has finally solved the mystery that has haunted generations since World War II....

Here for the first time, in rich human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed....

A powerful, moving memoir - and a practical guide to healing - written by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, an eminent psychologist whose own experiences as a Holocaust survivor help her treat patients....

The untold story of four special operations officers who fought together behind enemy lines across multiple theaters of World War II, and then continued to serve, officially and unofficially, for decades after in the hottest parts of the Cold War....

Stephen E. Ambrose draws from hundreds of interviews with US Army veterans and the brave Allied soldiers who fought alongside them to create this exceptional account of the day that shaped the twentieth century....

In April 1942, the Combined Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy was at the zenith of its power. It had struck a severe blow against the US Navy at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, before spearheading the Japanese advance through Southeast Asia and rampaging across the South Pacific.

A gripping, behind-the-scenes account of the personalities and contending forces in Tokyo during the volatile decade that led to World War II, as seen through the eyes of the American ambassador who attempted to stop the slide to war....

The planning, the strategy, the sacrifices and heroics - on both sides - illuminating the greatest naval war in history....

From the award-winning historian, war reporter, and author Damien Lewis (Zero Six Bravo, Judy) comes the incredible true story of the top-secret "butcher-and-bolt" black ops units Prime Minister Winston Churchill tasked with stopping the unstoppable German war machine....

As the Allies raced to defeat Hitler, four men, all in the same unit, earned medal after medal for battlefield heroism. Maurice “Footsie” Britt, a former professional football player, became the very first American to receive every award for valor in a single war....

For the first time ever, acclaimed naval historian James D. Hornfischer, “the dean of World War II naval history," writing with his son David J. Hornfischer, explores Capt. E. Evans’s incredible story, from his humble upbringing as a child of a Cherokee and Creek family in Pawnee, Oklahoma, and his graduation from the Naval Academy in 1931, to his service on fighting ships during the Pacific War and his selfless bravery and cool command during a valiant faceoff with the pride of the Japanese Navy.

Bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands narrates the fierce debate over America's role in the world in the runup to World War II through its two most important figures: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who advocated intervention, and his isolationist nemesis, aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh.

June 6, 1944: Nineteen boys from Bedford, Virginia—population just 3,000 in 1944—died in the first bloody minutes of D-Day. They were part of Company A of the 116th Regiment of the 29th Division, and the first wave of American soldiers to hit the beaches in Normandy. Later in the campaign, three more boys from this small Virginia town died of gunshot wounds. Twenty-two sons of Bedford lost—it is a story one cannot easily forget and one that the families of Bedford will never forget. The Bedford Boys is the true and intimate story of these men and the friends and families they left behind.

On a cold morning in December, 1944, deep in the Ardennes forest, a platoon of eighteen men under the command of twenty-year-old lieutenant Lyle Bouck were huddled in their foxholes trying desperately to keep warm. Suddenly, the early morning silence was broken by the roar of a huge artillery bombardment and the dreadful sound of approaching tanks. Hitler had launched his bold and risky offensive against the Allies—his "last gamble"—and the small American platoon was facing the main thrust of the entire German assault.

Churchill. Hitler. Stalin. Mussolini. Roosevelt. Five of the most impactful leaders of WW2, each with their own individualistic and idiosyncratic approach to warfare. But if we want to understand their military strategy, we must first understand the strategist. In The Strategists, Professor Phillips Payson O'Brien shows how the views these five leaders forged in WW1 are crucial to understanding how they fought WW2.

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.

Enter Averell Harriman: a railroad magnate and, at the start of the war, the fourth-richest man in America. At Roosevelt’s behest, he traveled to Britain to serve as a liaison between the president and Churchill and to spearhead what became known as the Harriman Mission. Together with his fashionable young daughter Kathy, an unforgettable cast of British diplomats, and Churchill himself, he would eventually manage to wrangle Stalin into the partnership the Allies needed to defeat Hitler.

In this vividly rendered historical narrative, M. G. Sheftall layers the stories of hibakusha—the Japanese word for atomic bomb survivors—in harrowing detail, to give a minute-by-minute report of August 6, 1945, in the leadup and aftermath of the world-changing bombing mission of Paul Tibbets, Enola Gay, and Little Boy.

No Road Leading Back is the remarkable story of a dozen prisoners who escaped from the site where more than 70,000 Jews were shot in the Lithuanian forest of Ponar after the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941. Anxious to hide the incriminating evidence of the murders, the S.S. later in the war enslaved a group of Jews to exhume every one of the bodies and incinerate them all in a months-long labor—an episode whose specifics are staggering and disturbing, even within the context of the Holocaust.

The Few tells the dramatic and unforgettable story of eight young Americans who joined Britain's Royal Air Force, defying their country's neutrality laws and risking their U.S. citizenship to fight side-by-side with England's finest pilots in the summer of 1940—over a year before America entered the war. Flying the lethal and elegant Spitfire, they became "knights of the air" and with minimal training but plenty of guts, they dueled the skilled and fearsome pilots of Germany's Luftwaffe. By October 1940, they had helped England win the greatest air battle in the history of aviation.

With the announcement of World War Two and a change that sends shockwaves through her family, Kehinde is forced to put aside her dreams of writing and become the third wife of Mr Ogunjobi. Kehinde makes her peace by selling snacks at a small market. When she gets the chance to assist the leader of the Lagos Women’s Market Association, fighting for the rights the British are trying to take away, Kehinde finally feels useful again. But if her husband finds out he’ll abandon her.

War has always led to prisoners. In ancient times, many were turned into slaves by the victorious armies, while in medieval Europe, they were often returned to their families in return for a ransom, leading to fortune or poverty depending upon which side one was on. By the Napoleonic era, as armies grew in size and professionalism, many were kept in camps for the duration of the fighting, their captors not wanting to restore their enemies' manpower while the fate of nations hung in the balance.

A powerful and authentic account of WWII from 101-year-old veteran John Humphreys, from boy soldier in the Royal Engineers to jumping into Arnhem with the Parachute Regiment in 1944, spearheading the attack on the bridge. For days they held on, outnumbered and outgunned by a German army fighting to the last bullet. But the Bridge Too Far is only the climax of this extraordinary story... Coinciding with the 80th anniversary of Operation MARKET GARDEN, The Last Para is be the final firsthand account of this legendary action, told with incredible honesty and irrepressible spirit.

As the war began to swing in the favor of the Allies, it became clear that no final defeat of the Third Reich would be possible until the armored monsters of the Panzerwaffe were defeated. But who would, or even could, take on the mighty Tigers and Panthers, just a handful of which could stop entire formations in their tracks? The answer lay with the formation of a new type of unit, the Tank Destroyer Battalion.

Hamilton McWhorter III's service to family and country make him a standout among America's Greatest Generation. A Georgia native whose family roots date from that region's settlement during the 1700s, McWhorter was a naval aviation cadet undergoing training when Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan on December 7, 1941. After earning his Wings of Gold in early 1942, Ensign McWhorter was trained as a fighter pilot in the robust but technologically outmoded F4F Wildcat. Initially assigned to VF-9, he saw first combat in November 1942 against Vichy French forces in North Africa.

From our country's most important war historian, a gripping account of the turbulent relationship between Canada and the US during the Second World War. The two nations entered the war amidst rivalry and mutual suspicion, but learned to fight together before emerging triumphant and bound by an alliance that has lasted to this day.

In 1934, at the age of fourteen, Colette Brull-Ulmann knew that she wanted to become a pediatrician. By 1942, Brull-Ulman and her family had become registered Jews under the ever-increasing statutes against them enacted by Petain's government. Her father had been arrested and interned at the Drancy detention camp and Brull-Ulman had become an intern at the Rothschild Hospital.

Step into the world of Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis in the heart of Amsterdam during the Holocaust and World War II. A Brief History of Anne Frank - Unravelling a Tale of Courage and Survival in the Holocaust and World War II takes you on a profound journey through the pages of her diary, offering a glimpse into the life of a family clinging to hope in a time of despair. If you've ever been moved by Anne Frank's story or wished to understand the depths of human endurance and bravery, this book is an indispensable companion.

With incredible wit, startling confessions, and unique observations, Ned Mathews went from being a twenty-eight-year-old Art Historian and Restorer to an infantryman in the bloodiest fought battle of World War Two. Always with an eye for entertaining his bride at home, Ned’s letters were filled with witty points of view of army life, explaining the difficulties of overtaking the German forces from their dug-in defenses, admiring the architecture of Europe, and watching the bombing of Monte Cassino.

Kati and her younger sister, Ilonka, arrive in Canada with painful memories from the Holocaust, which has taken both of their parents. Their harrowing time alone in the Budapest ghetto is fresh in their minds, as are their fragile hopes to be adopted. But their lives in Toronto are far from what they expected, and full of broken promises. As the sisters navigate their new surroundings, they each grow fiercely strong and independent, while holding onto the comfort that they will be Never Far Apart.