Worlds Elite Military

This work offers a firsthand account of the Battle of Tora Bora and an insider's look at the extraordinary nature of America's supersecret counterterrorist unit---an elite and mysterious group known as Delta Force.

It is difficult to find another soldier's story to equal Captain Darrell Watt's in terms of time spent on the field of battle and challenges faced. Even by the lofty standards of the SAS and Special Forces, one has to look far to find anyone who can match his record of resilience and valor in the face of such daunting odds and with resources so paltry. In the fight, he showed himself to be a military maestro. After 12 years in the cauldron of war, his cause slipped from beneath him, and Rhodesia gave way to Zimbabwe.

Liddell Hart stressed movement, flexibility, surprise. He saw that in most military campaigns dislocation of the enemy's psychological and physical balance is prelude to victory. This dislocation results from a strategic indirect approach. Reflect for a moment on the results of direct confrontation (trench war in World War I) versus indirect dislocation (Blitzkreig in World II). Liddell Hart is also tonic for business and political planning: Just change the vocabulary and his concepts fit.

On a scorching September day in 1942, the Special Air Service (SAS), a special forces unit of the British Army, pulled off one of the most daring, top-secret ruses of the Second World War. The plan (sanctioned by Churchill): cover a grueling 2,000 miles of the Sahara desert to attack German general Erwin Rommel's seemingly impregnable port fortress in North Africa from the rear to break free and arm more than 30,000 Allied POWs.

In the late summer of 1944, 80 British Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers undertook a covert commando raid, parachuting behind enemy lines into the Vosges Mountains in occupied France to sabotage Nazi-held roads, railways, and ammo dumps, and assassinate high-ranking German officers, undermining the final stand of Hitler's Third Reich. Despite their successes, more than half the men were captured, tortured, and executed. After the war ended, a top-secret black ops unit was formed to hunt down the SS commanders who had murdered their special forces comrades....

The OSS - Office of Strategic Services - created under the command of William Donovan, has been celebrated for its cloak-and-dagger operations during World War II and as the precursor of the CIA. As the "Oh So Social", it has also been portrayed as a club for the well-connected before, during, and after the war.

In June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, Lyudmila Pavlichenko left her university studies and ignored the offer of a position as a nurse to become one of Soviet Russia's 2,000 female snipers. Less than a year later, she had 309 recorded kills, including 29 enemy sniper kills. She was withdrawn from active duty after being injured. She was also regarded as a key heroic figure for the war effort.

In the predawn hours of March 4, 2002, just below the 10,000-foot peak of a mountain in eastern Afghanistan, a fierce battle raged. Outnumbered by Al Qaeda fighters, Air Force Combat Controller John Chapman and a handful of SEALs struggled to take the summit in a desperate bid to find a lost teammate. Chapman, leading the charge, was gravely wounded in the initial assault. Believing he was dead, his SEAL leader ordered a retreat. Chapman regained consciousness, alone with the enemy closing in on three sides, beginning the most difficult and exceptional fight of his life.

It is the winter of 1944. Allied forces have succeeded in liberating most of Axis-occupied Italy - with one crucial exception: the Nazi headquarters north of the Gothic Line. Heavily guarded and surrounded by rugged terrain, the mountain fortress is nearly impenetrable. But British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is determined to drive a dagger into the "soft underbelly of Europe." The Allied's plan: drop two paratroopers into the mountains-and take the fortress by storm....

In this book, Capa recounts his terrifying journey through the darkest battles of World War II and shares his memories of the men and women of the Allied forces who befriended, amused, and captivated him along the way. His photographs are masterpieces - John G. Morris, Magnum Photos' first executive editor, called Capa "the century's greatest battlefield photographer" - and his writing is by turns riotously funny and deeply moving.

Kandahar. The ancient desert crossroads and, as of fall of 2001, ground zero for the Taliban and al-Qa'ida in southern Afghanistan. In the northern part of the country, the US-supported Northern Alliance has made progress on the battlefield, but in the south, the country is still under the Taliban's bloody hold and al-Qa'ida continues to operate there. With no "Southern Alliance" for the US to support, a new strategy is needed if victory is to be achieved. Veteran CIA officer Duane Evans is dispatched to Pakistan to "get something going in the South." Foxtrot in Kandahar is his story.

The extraordinary firsthand account of an American special forces unit in the jungles of southeast Asia and their guerilla operations against the Japanese during World War II!

Britain's Special Air Service - or SAS - was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II's African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel's desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: Given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war matériel.

St Nazaire, 1.22 a.m. 28th March 1942. HMS Cambeltown, supported by seventeen wooden motor launches, approached the German-held port intending to smash into the lock gates of the largest dock in the world; the Normandie Dock-Operation Chariot was in full swing. Against vicious Nazi gunfire, the commandos stormed the docks, and within half an hour, succeeded in their chief demolition objectives, but in the heat of battle, the Royal Navy had lost nearly all of its small vessels intended to carry them back to England.

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. Criminals, rogues, and survivalists, the brutal tactics and grit of these "deniables" would define a military unit the likes of which the world had never seen.

What does an elite Navy SEAL Team operator trained to kill the United States’ most dangerous enemies do when he realizes his skills aren’t being properly utilized? He leaves the Navy. In American Mercenary, Daniel Corbett takes listeners on a wild ride through the unadulterated, morally ambiguous, and riveting world of being a hired gun. From Abu Dhabi to Washington, D.C., Cairo to San Diego, Belgrade to places that must remain secret, this is a world where money rules, and where adventure, danger, and absurdity often follow.

From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen, Somalia, and beyond, Scahill speaks to the CIA agents, mercenaries, and elite Special Operations Forces operators who populate the dark side of American war-fighting. He goes deep into al Qaeda-held territory in Yemen and walks the streets of Mogadishu with CIA-backed warlords. We also meet the survivors of US night raids and drone strikes - including families of US citizens targeted for assassination by their own government - who reveal the human consequences of the dirty wars the United States struggles to keep hidden.

A single company of US paratroopers—calling themselves the "Chosen Few"—arrived in eastern Afghanistan in late 2007 hoping to win the hearts and minds of the remote mountain people and extend the Afghan government's reach into this wilderness. Instead, they spent the next fifteen months in a desperate struggle, living under almost continuous attack, forced into a slow and grinding withdrawal, and always outnumbered by Taliban fighters descending on them from all sides.

Simo Häyhä was a man of action who spoke very little, but he was respected by his men and his superiors and given many difficult missions, including taking out specific targets. Able to move silently and swiftly through the landscape, melting into the snowbound surroundings in his white camouflage fatigues, his aim was deadly and his quarry rarely escaped. The Russians learned of his reputation as a marksman and tried several times to kill him by indirect fire. He was promoted from corporal to second lieutenant and he was awarded the Cross of Kollaa.

In December of 1943, as Nazi forces sprawled around the world and the future of civilization hung in the balance, a group of highly trained US and Canadian soldiers from humble backgrounds was asked to do the impossible: capture a crucial Nazi stronghold perched atop stunningly steep cliffs. The men were a rough-and-ready group, assembled from towns nested in North America's most unforgiving terrain, where many of them had struggled through the Great Depression relying on canny survival skills and the fearlessness of youth.