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History of the 745th Tank Battalion.
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My fascination with underwater adventure began as a teenager, when I accompanied a Russian expedition to the deepest archaeological site on the planet. I descended three miles deep into the Bermuda Triangle aboard a Soviet-era submersible to explore a mysterious wooden shipwreck inadvertently discovered during the search for astronaut Gus Grissom’s lost space capsule Liberty Bell 7. Since then, I’ve contributed to a number of historic shipwreck discoveries, including World War II treasure ships, lost Nazi U-Boats, Admiral Balchen’s HMS Victory,and the treasure steamship SS Connaught. These adventures and others serve as the inspiration for my novels.
Brilliantly told and deeply tragic, Iron Coffinsrecounts the Battle of the Atlantic from the firsthand perspective of one of the few surviving German submarine captains.
Herbert A. Werner’s service took him on multiple tours, including the Mediterranean and various battlegrounds in the Atlantic, where he sank ships, dodged sub hunters, and watched the Third Reich crumble, all the while as his personal losses and wartime guilt mounted.
The former German U-boat commander Herbert Werner navigates readers through the waters of World War II, recounting four years of the most significant and savage battles. By war's end, 28,000 out of 39,000 German sailors had disappeared beneath the waves.
Having been born two months before Pearl Harbor, as I grew older, I vaguely remember hearing my parents talking about the war. When I was able, I used to pull my little red wagon around the neighborhood to collect bacon grease I donated to the local butcher shop to support the war. After retiring from the technology industry, I tried my hand at writing books. After a few futile attempts, I finally started writing novels about WWII. I first wrote Return to La Roche-en-Ardenne, then Innocence Lost - A Childhood Stolen, and finally Thou Shall Do No Harm – Diary of an Auschwitz Physician which will be re-released in early 2023.
I love reading true stories of WWII told by people who lived through it. I find it difficult to understand how ordinary men could live, fight, and die in a foreign land without questioning in order to protect the United States; they were certainly true patriots. In the fall of 1944, two hundred true patriots of K Company, 333rd Infantry, 84th Division landed in Europe. For the next one hundred days, they were on the edge of the Allied spearhead into Nazi territory. If you ever wanted to be in the infantry, you need to read this book.
Offers a moving dramatic portrait of the soldiers and officers of the K Company and their experiences on the Siegfried Line, at the Battle of the Bulge
Having been born two months before Pearl Harbor, as I grew older, I vaguely remember hearing my parents talking about the war. When I was able, I used to pull my little red wagon around the neighborhood to collect bacon grease I donated to the local butcher shop to support the war. After retiring from the technology industry, I tried my hand at writing books. After a few futile attempts, I finally started writing novels about WWII. I first wrote Return to La Roche-en-Ardenne, then Innocence Lost - A Childhood Stolen, and finally Thou Shall Do No Harm – Diary of an Auschwitz Physician which will be re-released in early 2023.
Being a pilot who flew F-4’s over North Vietnam, I have always been fascinated by WWII planes and how sophisticated they seemed at the time but, in retrospect, they were quite unsophisticated flying machines. The first model plane I built as a child was the P-38 and this book puts me right in the cockpit. The P-38 was a huge advancement in technology and demanded special skills to fly as it foreshadowed the complexity of the upcoming generation of jet fighters. Why not join me in the cockpit?
One of America's greatest military aviation historians relates the astonishing--and true--story of the only American warplane to fight in every operational theater in World War II from Pearl Harbor to Alaska and North Africa to Northern Europe.
Having been born two months before Pearl Harbor, as I grew older, I vaguely remember hearing my parents talking about the war. When I was able, I used to pull my little red wagon around the neighborhood to collect bacon grease I donated to the local butcher shop to support the war. After retiring from the technology industry, I tried my hand at writing books. After a few futile attempts, I finally started writing novels about WWII. I first wrote Return to La Roche-en-Ardenne, then Innocence Lost - A Childhood Stolen, and finally Thou Shall Do No Harm – Diary of an Auschwitz Physician which will be re-released in early 2023.
Little has been published about the Battle of Okinawa having been overshadowed by the recent victory on Iwo Jima the prior week, and yet the United States needed control of Okinawa to launch its upcoming invasion of Japan. Okinawa was considered part of the Japanese homeland and the Japanese were determined to fight to the end, and they had a new terror weapon; the Kamikaze. To be on board a Navy ship surrounded by a swarm of Kamikkazes must have been a terrifying experience.
My father never talked about his experiences during the war. After he died at 67, we found his handwritten itinerary of three years and ten days in the Army Signal Corps. Plotting it on a map sparked a passion that continued for years, taking me twice to sites in Europe and through hundreds of records and books. I am amazed at all he never told us—the Queen Mary troopship, his radar unit’s landing on Omaha Beach (D+26), the Normandy Breakout, Paris after liberation, fleeing Bastogne, and so on. I grew up on WWII films but never grasped till now what my dad may have seen.
Matthew Rozell was teaching history in Hudson Falls, NY, when he asked his students to find people in town who had served in World War II. Interviewing them was very well received and became his passion. By 2004, he had published his first book of interviews with WWII veterans. Since then, he has produced seven additional volumes, spanning both European and Pacific Theaters. Face-to-face interviews are becoming harder to come by and Rozell did a wonderful job for history in compiling personal descriptions that detail the daily lives of soldiers in WWII.
WHEN YOU STEP OFF THE LANDING CRAFT into the sea, bullets flying at 0630, how do you react to your vision of your mother opening the telegram that you have been killed? WHEN YOUR GLIDER CRASHES AND BREAKS APART, what do you when you are shot and the Germans are bearing down on you, and you know your dogtags identify you as a Jew? — “I had a vision, if you want to call it that. At my home, the mailman would walk up towards the front porch, and I saw it just as clear as if he's standing beside…
While I was child growing up in London, the war was a powerful presence in my life. It was there in the films we watched, in the comics my brothers read, and in my vague understanding of what it meant to be British. It was not a subject we ever studied at school and as an adult I’ve always felt frustrated by my inadequate knowledge of this world-changing conflict. When I first had the idea of writing about the six remarkable women who pioneered the way for female war journalists, it wasn’t just their personal stories that drew me in but the chance to learn more about WW2 itself.
Lee Miller was the most unlikely of war correspondents. As a fashion model for Condé Nast, a surrealist collaborator of Man Ray, and a celebrity New York photographer, world events never impacted much on her work. But when she moved to London to become a photojournalist for Vogue, she found her own special subject in the war. Among the highlights of this handsome collection is Miller’s vivid report of the battle for St Malo where, as the darling of the US 83rd Division, she and her camera were given unfettered access. No less compelling are her accounts of liberated Paris, her haunting photographs and descriptions of concentrations camps; and one of the most iconic images in this book is the photograph taken of Lee sitting naked in Hitler’s own bathtub as she scrubs off the filth and stink of Dachau.
Lee Miller's work for Vogue from 1941-1945 sets her apart as a photographer and writer of extraordinary ability. The quality of her photography from the period has long been recognized as outstanding, and its full range is shown here, accompanied by her brilliant despatches. Starting with her first report from a field hospital soon after D-Day, the despatches and nearly 160 photographs show war-ravaged cities, buildings and landscapes, but above all they portray the war-resilient people - soldiers, leaders, medics, evacuees, prisoners of war, the wounded, the villains and the heroes. There is the raw edge of combat portrayed at…
As a kid, I always wanted to be a Secret Service agent. As an adult, I became one. The job introduced me to the classified and shadowy world of national security. I traveled the globe, working in places I'd only read about in novels and meeting people who seemed like well-written characters from a book. When I was assigned as a liaison agent to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, I attended numerous FBI and CIA schools—even the facility known as The Farm. But through it all, I read! When I retired and had time to think about what I did, I figured I'd try writing.
I have always been fascinated with WWII war stories, especially those involving intelligence operations.
Double Cross is one of the most unbelievable stories I've ever read. It's a nonfiction book that's so incredible it almost sounds like fiction. The British scored success after success against all the German intelligence services to keep the Germans guessing about dozens of Allied military activities, including the actual site of the D-Day landings.
MI6 might get all the cool James Bond movies made about it, but MI5 was the real star of this book.
D-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit, aimed at convincing the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong invasion force.
The deception involved every branch of Allied wartime intelligence - the Bletchley Park code-breakers, MI5, MI6, SOE, Scientific Intelligence, the FBI and the French Resistance. But at its heart was the 'Double Cross System', a team of double agents controlled by the secret Twenty Committee, so named because twenty…
I grew up during the war years and remembered the backouts, ration cards, and the newscasts from the front and worrying about my cousins who were in the middle of it. My cousin Gerald always made sure I had a model airplane kit every Christmas, even though he was fighting in Europe. As a journalist, I was lucky to work with a few war correspondents that covered Dieppe and D-Day and heard what they went through. One of those people was Bill Anderson who died two years ago. I recorded a video interview of him when he was still 97 about his experiences in Canada and Europe
Shapiro, a Canadian war correspondent, landed with the troops on the beaches on D-Day and his other experiences rise to the surface in his novel about life during the blitz and the events leading up to D-Day. Shapiro always considered his a historical novel. His descriptions are those of someone who lived the tale. The hero is a U.S. soldier who found himself deeply in love with an English woman. This book came out a few years after the war when the war was fresh in our minds. It was like reliving those wonderful days all over again.
The Sixth of June tells the story of American soldier Brad Parker, who joins the U.S. Army to fight in World War II. When he arrives in London, he meets lonely Valerie Russell, and they fall in love despite their loyalties to wife and future husband. Although they are certain that their love could overcome every obstacle, everything changes after the Normandy Invasion.
I'm a Frenchman with a great interest in the history of the Second World War, specializing in the correspondence of Allied soldiers. Almost 20 years of collecting WWII letters led to the publication of my first book Till Victory which was an award-winning bestseller in France, before it was released in English worldwide in 2021. I also host a podcast (Till Victory: a podcast about WWII and Peace), where I interview British and American veterans, and have made documentaries such as Red Beret & Dark Chocolate or The Missing Highlander. It's all about trying to understand what the young men who fought and died to liberate my country went through when they were my age.
Although it has no illustrations (and seeing the face of the soldier writing the letters is very important to feel connected), reading these archives from the Imperial War Museum, focusing on British Forces’ Personal Letters and Diaries during the Second World War, was a fantastic read. The soldiers’ names and personal stories are disclosed and there’s a historical context for the neophytes. It also deals with battles that we seldom hear about (looking at you, books about D-Day on Omaha Beach!!).
Using the Imperial War Museum's vast archive of personal diaries, this remarkable anthology examines the stories of ordinary men and women who fought, and in some cases died, on the front line and home front during the Second World War. "The Words of War" features diverse first-hand accounts from individuals who took part in the key campaigns of the war. In the words of the young officer facing defeat and capture at Dunkirk, the pilot officer losing friends and comrades during the Battle of Britain, the Land Girl dealing with a new life in the countryside, the Royal Naval seaman…
I’m a Southern girl from Atlanta who writes ‘entertainment with a soul’ from my writing chalet—tool shed—outside Lyon, France where my husband and I have worked with a non-profit for over 30 years. I love to incorporate little-known historical facts into my award-winning and best-selling contemporary, historical, and time-slip fiction. I want my reader to find not only a good story and an interesting plot, but also the soul in my book and in my characters with themes of betrayal, regret, redemption, forgiveness, and faith that allow my reader to think, to ask questions, to laugh and cry and hope. To be entertained way down in her soul.
When Ceelie, reeling from everything cancer has stolen from her, sets out to track down her ailing friend’s father, who disappeared decades ago, she uncovers a story of faith, heroism, and heartbreak dating back to the Normandy beaches in World War II—and finds her own life transformed.
Michele Phoenix does it again inFragments of Light. With prose that takes your breath away, she expertly navigates two time periods while exploring themes of loss, love, forgiveness, regret, and redemption. And France! What could be better! These themes often populate my novels and Michele’s novel was an inspiration for me.
Ripples that cascade seventy-five years into the present.
And two lives transformed by the tenuous resolve to reach out of the darkness toward fragments of light.
Cancer stole everything from Ceelie-her peace of mind, her selfimage, perhaps even her twenty-three-year marriage to her college sweetheart, Nate. Without the support of Darlene, her quirky elderly friend, she may not have been able to endure so much loss.
So when Darlene's own prognosis turns dire, Ceelie can't refuse her seemingly impossible request-to find a WWII paratrooper named Cal, the father who disappeared when Darlene…
