Showing titles in World War II

World War II tail gunner Gene Moran fell four miles through the sky without a parachute and lived. Captured by the Germans, he survived a harrowing eighteen months as a prisoner of war, including a six-hundred-mile death march in 1945 across Central Europe. When Gene returned home, he kept those memories locked up for nearly seventy years. His nine children knew little of their dad's war story. But when John, a young history teacher, learns of Gene's amazing fall, he's desperate to learn more. Finally, Gene agrees.

The epic story of the engineers and rail workers who ensured Allied victory in World War Two, published to coincide with the eightieth anniversary of D-Day, by an award-winning expert on trains and transportation.

On an August morning in England in 1943, a group of American airmen were told that before the day was out they would deliver the blow that would win the war. Flying the legendary B-17 Flying Fortress, their mission was to destroy the industrial facilities that kept the Nazi war machine in business-Schweinfurt's ball-bearing factories. But a determined and ferocious defense awaited the bomber crews of the USAAF's Mighty Eighth. Somehow, navigator Elmer Bendiner and his crew survived, their faithful B-17, Tondelayo, carrying them home. Hundreds of their young compatriots did not.

Dramatic, highly listenable, and painstakingly researched, The Great Desert Escape brings to light a little-known escape by 25 determined German sailors from an American prisoner-of-war camp.The disciplined Germans tunneled unnoticed through rock-hard, sunbaked soil and crossed the unforgiving Arizona desert. They were heading for Mexico, where there were sympathizers who could help them return to their fatherland. It was the only large-scale domestic escape by foreign prisoners in US history.

In June 1943, after long years of hardship and persecution, 13-year-old Thomas Geve and his mother were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Separated upon arrival, he was left to fend for himself in the men’s camp of Auschwitz I. During 22 harsh months in three camps, Thomas experienced and witnessed the cruel and inhumane world of Nazi concentration and death camps. Nonetheless, he never gave up the will to live. Miraculously, he survived and was liberated from Buchenwald at the age of 15.

Poland, 1939. Professional photographer Wilhelm Brasse is deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and finds himself in a deadly race to survive, assigned to work as the camp's intake photographer and take "identity pictures" of prisoners as they arrive by the trainload. The Auschwitz Photographer takes listeners behind the barbed wire fences of the world's most feared concentration camp, bringing Brasse's story to life as he clicks the shutter button thousands of times before ultimately joining the Resistance, defying the Nazis, and defiantly setting down his camera for good.

Immediately after Japan's December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt sought to restore the honor of the United States with a dramatic act of vengeance: a retaliatory bombing raid on Tokyo itself. In those early days of World War II, America was ill-prepared for any sort of warfare. But FDR was not to be dissuaded, and at his bidding a squadron of scarcely trained army fliers, led by the famous daredevil Jimmy Doolittle, set forth on what everyone regarded as a suicide mission.

Based on exclusive and unrestricted access to more than 5,000 pages of personal writings and family photos, this definitive biography of German physician and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef Mengele (1911-1979) probes the personality and motivations of Auschwitz's "Angel of Death". From May 1943 through January 1945, Mengele selected who would be gassed immediately, who would be worked to death, and who would serve as involuntary guinea pigs for his spurious and ghastly human experiments (twins were Mengele's particular obsession).

Six weeks after the United States entered World War II, Imperial Japan is annihilating American forces across the Far East while the Nazis stand triumphant over much of Europe. Adolf Hitler's forces are about to commence an assault along the East Coast of the United States, but this "Atlantic Pearl Harbor" would prove far more devastating than Japan's attack on Hawaii. The Western Hemisphere holds the key to victory, but only if the vast economic and military resources of North and South America can be carried across the Atlantic by Allied merchant ships.

The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That event became the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel’s right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust’s singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is.

Kenneth Macksey's highly regarded biography of Generaloberst Heinz Guderian gives clear insight into the mind and motives of the father of modern tank warfare. Panzer General shows Guderian as a man of ideas equipped with the ability to turn inspiration into reality. A master of strategy and tactics, he was the officer most responsible for creating blitzkrieg in World War II.

Sailing across the Pacific, the battle-scarred heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis had just delivered a secret cargo that would trigger the end of World War II. Heading westward, she was sunk by a Japanese submarine. In 12 minutes, some 300 men went down with her. More than 900 other spent four horrific days and five nights in the ocean with no water to drink, savaged by a pitiless sun and swarms of sharks. Incredibly, no one knew they were there until a navy patrol plane accidentally discovered them. In the end, only 316 crewmen survived. How could this have happened - and why?

The war on the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1945 was the bloodiest combat theater in the bloodiest war in history. Oberleutnant Friedrich Wilhelm Sander experienced this bloodshed firsthand when serving with the 11th Panzer-Regiment. This regiment made up the core of the 6th Panzer-Division, one of Hitler's top armored formations, which was involved in most of the major campaigns on the Eastern Front; campaigns such as Operation Barbarossa and Operation Winter Storm.

In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-shek, and their fellow victors, the question of justice seemed clear: Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.

World War II is the defining conflict of the 20th century, one that created a line in the sands of history dividing the pre-war and post-war eras. In this epoch-defining conflict lies another definitive moment: the invasion of a 50-mile stretch of coast in Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944. This battle, also known as D-Day, was the pivot point of the war in Europe. Its success led to a nearly yearlong, bloody campaign that saw the liberation of France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands, followed by the final defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich.

Explore how the Second World War began, the aftermath, and the events in between, while also getting an in-depth look into the extraordinary military operation called D-Day. The Second World War was one of the most traumatic events in human history. Across the world, existing conflicts became connected, entangling nations in a vast web of violence. D-Day was one of the most extraordinary achievements not only of the Second World War but in the whole of military history.

In a lifetime shaped by politics, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proved himself a master manipulator of Congress, the press, and the public. But when war in Europe and Asia threatened America's shores, FDR found himself in a world turned upside down, where his friends became his foes, his enemies his allies. To help wage democracy's first "total war", he turned to one of history's most remarkable triumvirates.

In December 1937, in the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking and within weeks not only looted and burned the defenseless city but systematically raped, tortured and murdered more than 300,000 Chinese civilians. Amazingly, the story of this atrocity- one of the worst in world history- continues to be denied by the Japanese government.

Explore the rise of Adolf Hitler. Was Hitler, as Ian Kershaw asked, a natural consequence of German history, or an aberration? Not that Hitler had been in hiding, waiting to attack. The Führer had actually been following an aggressive and savage foreign policy for almost 10 years, and been named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1938.

In 1932, Hazel Ying Lee, a nineteen-year-old American daughter of Chinese immigrants, sat in on a friend's flight lesson. It changed her life. In less than a year, a girl with a wicked sense of humor, a newfound love of flying, and a tough can-do attitude earned her pilot's license and headed for China to help against invading Japanese forces. In time, Hazel would become the first Asian American to fly with the Women Airforce Service Pilots. As thrilling as it may have been, it wasn't easy.