Showing results by publisher "Quercus" in History

Judy, a beautiful liver and white English pointer, and the only animal POW of WWII, truly was a dog in a million. Whether she was dragging men to safety from the wreckage of a torpedoed ship, scavenging food to help feed the starving inmates of a hellish Japanese POW camp, or by her presence alone bringing inspiration and hope to men living through the 20th century's darkest days, she was cherished and adored by the British, Australian, American and other Allied servicemen who fought to survive alongside her.

From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a corrupt baby business at the Tennessee Children's Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents - hiding the fact that many weren't orphans at all but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died. The publication of Lisa Wingate's novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann's child trafficking.

It is the winter of 2001. A terror ship is bound for Britain carrying a horrifying weapon. The British military sends a crack unit of SAS and SBS to assault the vessel before she reaches London. So begins a true story of explosive action as this band of elite warriors pursues the merchants of death from the high seas to the harsh wildlands of Afghanistan. The hunt culminates in the single greatest battle of the Afghan war, the brutal and bloody siege of an ancient mud-walled fortress crammed full of hundreds of Al-Qaeda and Taliban.

In Who Dares Wins, Big Phil Campion reveals his chequered past, from terrible abuse suffered in a string of kids' homes to psychological abuse suffered at a top public school. Phil guides you through his soldiering career, from the so called 'green army' to the brutal trial of SAS selection and all that followed. This includes years spent providing private military services across war-torn and risk-laden Africa; in between he was body-guarded the likes of Led Zep, Oasis, Kasabian, Dizzy Rascal and Pro Green.

In Leningrad: Siege and Symphony, Brian Moynahan sets the composition of Shostakovich's most famous work against the tragic canvas of the siege itself and the years of repression and terror that preceded it. Drawing on extensive primary research in archives as well as personal letters and diaries, he vividly tells the story of the cruelties heaped by the twin monsters of the 20th century, Stalin and Hitler, on a city of exquisite beauty, and of its no less remarkable survival.

An eye-opening book about how societies are designed to support the status of those in power at the destructive expense of those without it. From 1958, China declared war on sparrows, contributing to the deaths of more than 10 million people. In the 19th century, the Shuar people of Ecuador were driven by economic need to wage bloody wars to procure shrunken heads for the Western curio market, which nearly destroyed their society. There have been 55 prime ministers of Great Britain, of whom 48 have been privately educated, creating a society built for and by the privileged.

Lieutenant Bill Fraser and the six SAS men he led were listed as Missing in Action (MIA) after their failure to return from a raid. Nine weeks later they emerged from a death-defying sojourn across the Sahara Desert, after evading and confounding the enemy.

In February 1944, the French Resistance in the Amiens area was in turmoil. Its strength had been decimated by German aggression and the work of a number of traitors in their midst, and hundreds of its members languished in the city's formidable jail, awaiting an almost certain death at the hands of their captors. When two Allied intelligence officers were incarcerated alongside them it became clear that immediate action was imperative.

In the summer of 2007 the British Army's 662 Squadron deployed its most potent weapons system in combat for the very first time - the iconic Apache attack helicopter. This is the definitive story of the aircraft and of the crew who fly her, and of their baptism of fire in the battle for Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Under the call-sign Ugly, four of the Army Air Corps' finest pilots flew a relentless series of missions during their 100-day deployment, stretching the aircraft, and themselves, to the limit. Apache Dawn recounts these operations.

The extraordinary story of a propaganda campaign like no other: the covert British operation to manipulate American public opinion and bring America into the Second World War. When William Stephenson - 'our man in New York' - arrived in the United States towards the end of June 1940 with instructions to secure aid for Britain and 'organise' American public opinion, Britain was on the verge of defeat. Surveys at that time showed that just 14 percent of the population wanted to go to war against Germany. But over the followings months, US public opinion shifted....

Smoky the Brave is the extraordinary, touching and true story of a heroic dog and her adoptive masters in the jungles of the Pacific War. In February 1944, as Japanese military advances threatened to engulf Australasia, a tiny, four-pound Yorkshire terrier was discovered hiding in a Japanese shell scrape amidst the thick jungles of Papua New Guinea. The GIs who discovered her presumed she had been some kind of Japanese army mascot, but it soon turned out that she understood neither commands rendered in Japanese nor English.

In the winter of 1939 in the cold snow of no-man's-land, two loners met and began an extraordinary journey together, one that would bind them for the rest of their lives. One was an orphaned puppy, abandoned by his owners as they fled the approaching Nazi forces. The other, a lost soul of a different sort - a Czech airman, flying for the French Air Force but soon to be bound for the RAF and the country that he would call home.

The thrilling and true story of the development and operational deployment of human torpedoes - Chariots - and X-craft midget submarines in British naval service during WWII and of the extraordinary men who crewed these dangerous vessels. The commando frogmen who rode the Chariots and operated as divers from the X-craft were the forerunners of today's Special Boat Service, the SBS. Their aim was to attach an explosive charge underneath an enemy ship to destroy the vessel.

SAS Great Escapes Three recounts the untold stories of six of the most daring escapes pulled off by warriors of the world's most famous fighting force in WWII. Ranging from the birth of the SAS, to the post D-day battles for Nazi-occupied Europe, they cover some of the most iconic operations of the Regiment, and its key characters, while also including untold tales of courage and endurance beyond measure.

Belinda Black was just seventeen years old when she began working as a nursing assistant at the large and foreboding 'madhouse', as it was then known to the villagers of her hometown in the north of England. Following in the footsteps of her mother, she went on to spend a decade caring for patients with widely varying mental health problems, all locked up together and out of view of society.