Military History Nonfiction

From the overwhelming operational victories at Kerch and Kharkov in May to the catastrophic defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad, Death of the Wehrmacht offers an eye-opening new view of that decisive year. Building upon his widely respected critique in The German Way of War, Citino shows how the campaigns of 1942 fit within the centuries-old patterns of Prussian/German warmaking and ultimately doomed Hitler's expansionist ambitions.

In SPQR, world-renowned classicist Mary Beard narrates the unprecedented rise of a civilization that even 2,000 years later still shapes many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, and beauty.

On the night of June 13th, 1944, a 12-man SAS unit parachuted into occupied France. Their objective: hit German forces deep behind the lines, cutting the rail-tracks linking Central France to the northern coastline. In a country crawling with enemy troops, their mission was to prevent Hitler from rushing his Panzer divisions to the D-Day beaches and driving the Allied troops back into the sea. It was a Herculean task, but no risk was deemed too great to stop the Nazi assault.

In late 1971, the People's Army of Vietnam launched Campaign "Z" into northern Laos, escalating the war in Laos with the aim of defeating the last Royal Lao Army troops. The NVA troops numbered 27,000 and brought with them 130mm field guns and T-34 tanks, while the North Vietnamese air force launched MiG-21s into Lao air space. General Giap's specific orders to this task force were to kill the CIA army under command of the Hmong war lord Vang Pao and occupy its field headquarters in the Long Tieng valley of northeast Laos.

The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) was Europe's most destructive conflict prior to the two world wars. Two of European history's greatest generals faced each other at Lutzen in November 1632, midway through this terrible war. This book is the first to combine analysis of the battle itself with an assessment of its cultural, political, and military legacy, and the first to incorporate recent archaeological research within a reappraisal of the events and their significance.

The Holocaust was perpetrated by the Germans, but it would not have been possible without the assistance of other countries. If we are to understand how and why the Holocaust happened, Götz Aly argues in this groundbreaking study, we must examine its prehistory throughout Europe. We must look at countries as far-flung as Romania and France, Russia and Greece, where, decades before the Nazis came to power, a deadly combination of envy, competition, nationalism, and social upheaval fueled a surge of anti-Semitism, creating the preconditions for the deportations and murder to come.

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world.

May 10, 1940. The Netherlands was swarming with Third Reich troops. In seven days it's entirely occupied by Nazi Germany. Joining a small resistance cell in the Dutch city of Haarlem were three teenage girls: Hannie Schaft, and sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, who would soon band together to form a singular female underground squad.

Relentless Strike tells the inside story of Joint Special Operations Command, the secret military organization that, during the past decade, has revolutionized counterterrorism, seamlessly fusing intelligence and operational skills to conduct missions that hit the headlines and those that have remained in the shadows - until now. Because JSOC includes the military's most storied special operations units - Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, the 75th Ranger Regiment - as well as America's most secret aviation and intelligence units, this is their story, too.

Rick Atkinson recounts the first 21 months of America’s violent war for independence. From the battles at Lexington and Concord in spring 1775 to those at Trenton and Princeton in winter 1777, American militiamen and then the ragged Continental Army take on the world’s most formidable fighting force. Full of riveting details and untold stories, The British Are Coming is a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Rick Atkinson has given stirring new life to the first act of our country’s creation drama.

The Watchmaker’s Daughter is one of the greatest stories of World War II that listeners haven’t heard: the remarkable and inspiring life story of Corrie ten Boom—a groundbreaking, female Dutch watchmaker, whose family unselfishly transformed their house into a hiding place straight out of a spy novel to shelter Jews and refugees from the Nazis during Gestapo raids. Even though the Nazis knew what the ten Booms were up to, they were never able to find those sheltered within the house when they raided it.

Cowboys Over Iraq tells the amazing story of leadership, innovation, initiative, and a brotherhood that was forged in the crucible of combat during the invasion of Iraq.

In 1971 William Reeder was a senior captain on his second tour in Vietnam. He had flown armed, fixed-wing OV-1 Mohawks on secret missions deep into enemy territory in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, on his first tour. He returned as a helicopter pilot eager to experience a whole new perspective as a Cobra gunship pilot. Believing that Nixon's Vietnamization would soon end the war, Reeder was anxious to see combat action. To him, it appeared that the Americans had prevailed, beaten the Viet Cong, and were passing everything over to the South Vietnamese Army so Americans could leave.

By 1943, the war was lost, and most German officers knew it. What kept the German army going in an increasingly hopeless situation? Where some historians have found explanations in the power of Hitler or the role of ideology, Robert M. Citino, the world's leading scholar on the subject, posits a more straightforward solution: Bewegungskrieg, the way of war cultivated by the Germans over the course of history. In this book, Citino charts the path by which Bewegungskrieg, or a "war of movement," inexorably led to Nazi Germany's defeat.

Storm Clouds over the Pacific begins the story long before Pearl Harbor, showing how the war can only be understood if ancient hatreds and long-standing geopolitics are taken into account. Harmsen demonstrates how Japan and China's ancient enmity led to increased tensions in the 1930s, which, in turn, exploded into conflict in 1937.

The Civil War divided a nation and turned brother against brother. Lasting four long years, it resulted in the deaths of more than 600,000 soldiers. IBOOKS For Young Readers presents a six-volume series devoted to this war, a war fought for liberation as well as reunification. With historic photographs and engaging text, "Civil War Chronicles recreates key battles and paints living portraits of the heroes who made the war of the states unforgettable."

World War I altered the landscape of the modern world in every conceivable arena. Millions died; empires collapsed; new ideologies and political movements arose; poison gas, warplanes, tanks, submarines, and other technologies appeared. "Total war" emerged as a grim, mature reality. In The Great War, Peter Hart provides a masterful combat history of this global conflict.

This revolutionary audiobook contains copies of two letters, top secret military transcripts and notes from the late Matilda O'Donnell MacElroy, an army air force nurse at the Roswell Army Air Field 509th Bomb Group in 1947. In her letters, she asserts that the transcripts are an exact recording of a series of interviews she conducted with an extraterrestrial being as part of her official duty as a flight nurse in the US Army Air Force.

In this vivid first-person narrative, a Special Operations Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) and his commanding general give fascinating and detailed accounts of America's fight against one of the most barbaric insurgencies the world has ever seen. In the summer of 2014, three years after America's full troop withdrawal from the Iraq War, President Barack Obama authorized a small task force to push back into Baghdad. Their mission: protect the Iraqi capital and US embassy from a rapidly emerging terrorist threat.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist William Tuohy follows Richard O'Kane, America's undersea ace of aces, and a few fearless submariners, during the U.S. submarine war in the Pacific. This grueling battle saw 10 million tons of Japanese shipping sunk by U.S. submarines, but the cost to the U.S. Navy was one in five of its boats, the highest casualty rate of the U.S. armed services.