World War II

The Marine Corps is known for its heroes, and Lieutenant General Lewis B. Puller has been considered the greatest of them all. With his bulldog face, barrel chest (which earned him the nickname Chesty), gruff voice, and common touch, Puller became the epitome of the marine combat officer....

I'm Staying with My Boys is a firsthand look inside the life of one of the greatest heroes of the Greatest Generation....

The USS Seawolf was one of the greatest submarine raiders of all time. Having narrowly avoided the attack on Pearl Harbor the Seawolf set out for the seas of the Pacific to wreak havoc on Japanese shipping....

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....

George Wilson has garnered much acclaim for this shattering and enlightening memoir....

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....

A complex portrait of the controversial Ronald Speirs, an iconic commander of celebrated Easy Company during D-Day and beyond, whose ferocious courage and drive across three wars were matched by a devotion to duty and a hidden heart shadowed by lost love....

One of the most eagerly anticipated military books of the year, this is the personal memoir of the legendary "triple ace” American fighter pilot and general officer in the U.S. Air Force, Robin Olds....

General George S. Patton, Jr., died under mysterious circumstances in the months following the end of World War II. For almost 70 years, there has been suspicion that his death was not an accident....

The first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of WWII....

From the author of the international best seller A Higher Call comes the riveting World War II story of an American tank gunner’s journey into the heart of the Third Reich, where he will meet destiny in an iconic armor duel - and forge an enduring bond with his enemy....

On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected troops from the elite US Army 6th Ranger Battalion slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines...

Here, in his own words, is the true story of America's wildest flying hero, of his extraordinary heroism, and of his greatest battle of all-the fight to survive....

Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced....

When Guy Sajer joins the infantry full of ideals in the summer of 1942, the German army is enjoying unparalleled success in Russia....

From the best-selling author of A Higher Call and Spearhead comes an unflinching firsthand chronicle of the heroic US Marines who fought on Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and in other pivotal battles during the Pacific War, a classic book now expanded with new stories....

The true story of the bloodiest and most dramatic march to victory of the Second World War....

In this superb audiobook, Tom Brokaw goes out into America to tell through the stories of individual men and women the story of a generation...

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....

General Chuck Yeager was the greatest test pilot of them all - the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound....

The Admirals tells the story of how history's only five-star admirals triumphed in World War II and made the United States the world's dominant sea power....

Flyboys is the true story of young American airmen who were shot down over Chichi Jima....

The career of the USS Wahoo in sinking Japanese ships in the farthest reaches of the Empire is legendary in submarine circles....

The story of Tang and her gallant crew ranks with the most amazing of naval history....

Tom Clavin's Lightning Down is the incredible true story of fighter pilot Joe Moser's war in the sky and survival at Buchenwald during World War II....

It was the summer of 1944 as liberating Allied forces surged toward Paris following the D-Day landings. For a large group of downed airmen being held in that city’s infamous Fresnes Prison, they were about to face evacuation into the blackest, bloody heart of Germany and experience the most acute evil of the war. Amid great secrecy, those 168 airmen—including several from Australia and New Zealand—were transported on a filthy, overcrowded nightmare train journey which ended at the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, accompanied by orders for their execution.

Bernard Montgomery, “the Spartan General”, was one of the giants of World War II. He was a field marshal, as well as an entirely powerful personality, who shaped much of how that aforementioned cataclysmic conflict turned out. If it weren’t for Montgomery’s steady hand in North Africa, for example, it would have been much harder for the Allies to prevail. Montgomery was born the humble son of a minister. As he matured, he grew increasingly bold and confident in his own abilities. He realized he was a natural leader of men—and others quickly came to realize it as well.

In this memoir of his experiences as a teenage infantryman in the US Third Army during World War II, Kotlowitz brings to life the harrowing story of the massacre of his platoon in northeastern France, in which he—by playing dead—was the only one to survive.

Reg Chard endured hell as an 18-year-old Australian soldier who fought in 1942 on the infamous Kokoda Trail in World War II. Ironically, Kokoda rescued Reg decades later when he decided to take his own life. After losing Betty, his wife of 66 years, the grief-stricken great-grandfather lost the will to live. But he found new purpose through educating young people, giving guided tours of Sydney's Kokoda Track Memorial Walkway. On these tours, Reg relives Kokoda every day. 

Historian Mark Hager builds on hundreds of hours of interviews with Harold Frank, sharing the intimate and heart-pounding account of Frank’s journey as a child of the Great Depression to the bloody shores of the D-Day invasion, into the bowels of Nazi Germany, and back to the U.S. where as a young man Harold would spend years resolutely dealing with the lingering effects of starvation rations while determinedly building a new life—a life always mindful of the legacy of his POW experience and his faithful service in America’s hard-fought war against Nazi aggression.

Stuart Hills embarked his Sherman DD tank on to an LCT at 6.45 a.m., Sunday 4 June 1944. He was 20 years old, unblooded, fresh from a public-school background and Officer Cadet training. He was going to war. Two days later, his tank sunk, he and his crew landed from a rubber dinghy with just the clothes they stood in. After that, the struggles through the Normandy bocage in a replacement tank, engaging the enemy in a constant round of close encounters, led to a swift mastering of the art of tank warfare and remarkable survival in the midst of carnage and destruction. 

He was called the Hangman of the Gestapo, the "butcher of Prague", with a reputation as a ruthlessly efficient killer. He was the head of the SS, and the Gestapo, second-in-command to Heinrich Himmler. His orders set in motion the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 and, as the lead planner of Hitler's Final Solution, he chaired the Wannsee Conference, at which details of the murder of millions of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe were toasted with cognac.

Joe Johnson Jr. ran away from home at the age of 12, hopping a freight train at the height of the Great Depression. He managed to talk his way into the U.S. Army two years later. Seeking freedom and adventure, he was sent to the Philippines. 

In March 1943, in their first fight with the Germans, American soldiers in North Africa were pushed back 50 miles by Rommel’s Afrika Korps and nearly annihilated. Only the German decision not to pursue them allowed the Americans to maintain a foothold in the area. General Eisenhower, the supreme commander, knew he needed a new leader on the ground, one who could raise the severely damaged morale of his troops. He handed the job to a new man: Lieutenant General George Patton.

Fans of Stephen E. Ambrose’s Band of Brothers will be drawn to this complex portrait of the controversial Ronald Speirs, an iconic commander of celebrated Easy Company during D-Day and beyond, whose ferocious courage and drive across three wars were matched by a devotion to duty and a hidden heart shadowed by lost love.