Krige

A lyrical and searing account of life on the front line of the wars between the Russian state and the Chechen people

This thorough update of a classic book includes fully revised content, new sections on the use of horses, handguns, incendiary weapons, and siege engines, and new illustrations.

'O day so ardently desired! O time of times the most memorable! O deed before all other deeds!'The fall of Jerusalem in the summer of 1099 to an exhausted and starving army of Western European soldiers was one of the most extraordinary events of the Middle Ages.It was both the climax of a great wave of visionary Christian fervour and the beginning of what proved to be a futile and abortive attempt to implant a new European kingdom in an overwhelmingly Muslim world.The legacy of these events continues to be argued over more than nine centuries later.This remarkable collection of first-hand accounts brings to life the First Crusade in all its cruelty and strangeness.

This volume details the military career and accomplishments of Walther Model, the youngest Generalfeldmarschall in the Wehrmacht in World War II and Hitler''s favorite commander. His role on the Eastern Front saw him involved in most of the key battles of the second half of the warm, including the battles of Kursk Leningrad and the desperate attempt to halt the Soviet Bagration offensive. He also played a key role in the west, where his drive and defensive prowess saw his forces inflict heavy casualties on British forces at Arnhem and US forces in the H├╝rtgen Forest.Model was a tough and tenacious commander, particularly when on the defense, and his career rise was virtually unprecedented in German military history. Model truly made his mark late in the war, when time was already running out for the Third Reich, but time and again he was rushed from one crumbling front to the next and succeeded in temporarily restoring the situation. Above all, Model deserves recognition as one of the great defensive commanders of modern military history.

Detailed guide to sites and ruins from Hitler's Third Reich located at Nazi HQs in Berchtesgaden and the Obersalzberg, Bavaria. This book gives the history of Hitler and his henchmen at their Bavarian homes, and also the military headquarters built to support Hitler's home area. Many hidden and out-of-the-way sites are highlighted with directions.

Expert and stunning illustrations show in painstaking detail the uniforms and their developments for all the major nations involved in World War I.

Alistair Urquhart was a soldier in the Gordon Highlanders captured by the Japanese in Singapore. He not only survived working on the notorious Bridge on the River Kwai , but he was subsequently taken on one of the Japanese 'hellships' which was torpedoed. Nearly everyone else on board died and Urquhart spent 5 days alone on a raft in the South China Sea before being rescued by a whaling ship. He was taken to Japan and then forced to work in a mine near Nagasaki. Two months later a nuclear bomb dropped just ten miles away . . .This is the extraordinary story of a young man, conscripted at nineteen and whose father was a Somme Veteran, who survived not just one, but three very close separate encounters with death - encounters which killed nearly all his comrades.

1 July 1916: the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The hot, hellish day in the fields of northern France that has dominated our perception of the First World War for just shy of a century. The shameful waste; the pointlessness of young lives lost for the sake of a few yards; the barbaric attitudes of the British leaders; the horror and ignominy of failure. All have occupied our thoughts for generations. Yet are we right to view the Somme in this way?Drawing on a vast number of sources such as letters, diaries and numerous archives, Bloody Victory describes in vivid detail the physical conditions, the combat and exceptional bravery against the odds but it also, uniquely, captures how the Somme defined the twentieth century in so many ways. This is an utterly gripping new analysis of one of the most iconic campaigns in history.

Were World Wars I and II inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment? In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen- Winston Churchill first among them-the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe's central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations. Among the British and Churchillian errors were: • The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France • The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that mutilated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler • Britain's capitulation, at Churchill's urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo-Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest • The greatest mistake in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939, ensuring the Second World War Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and "the Unnecessary War" is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.

Field Marshal William Slim stands alongside Montgomery as the outstanding British field commander of World War II. Defeat Into Victory is his classic account of the Burma campaign: a story of retreat, attrition and final hard-fought victory over the Japanese. Told by a commander always at the centre of events, this is a narrative which captures both the high drama and the harsh reality of war.

George Psychoundakis was a young shepherd boy who knew the island of Crete intimately when the Nazis invaded by air in 1941. He immediately joined the resistance and took on the crucial job of war-time runner. This book presents an account of George's activities across mountainous terrain, come blazing summer or freezing winter.

Heinz Guderian - master of the Blitzkrieg and father of modern tank warfare - commanded the German XIX Army Corps as it rampaged across Poland in 1939. Personally leading the devastating attack which traversed the Ardennes Forest and broke through French lines, he was at the forefront of the race to the Channel coast. Only Hitler's personal command to halt prevented Guderian's tanks and troops turning Dunkirk into an Allied bloodbath.Later commanding Panzergruppe 2 in Operation Barbarossa, Guderian's armoured spearhead took Smolensk after fierce fighting and was poised to launch the final assault on Moscow when he was ordered south to Kiev. In the battle that followed, he helped encircle and capture over 600,000 Soviet troops after days of combat in the most terrible conditions.Panzer Leader is a searing firsthand account of the most effective fighting force in modern history by the man who commanded it.

By the time the First World War ended in 1918, eight million people had died in what had been perhaps the most apocalyptic episode the world had known. This Very Short Introduction provides a concise and insightful history of 'the Great War', focusing on why it happened, how it was fought, and why it had the consequences it did.

In the early hours of New Year's Eve, 1994, Russian troops invaded the Republic of Chechnya, plunging the country into a prolonged and bloody conflict that continues to this day. sne Seierstad was a foreign correspondent in Moscow at the time, and travelled regularly to Chechnya to report on the war, describing its effects on those trying to live their daily lives amidst the violence. In 2006 and 2007 she returned, travelling in secret, under constant danger. The tragedy in Chechnya had continued, but the world had moved on, its attention on other conflicts. In a broken, devastated society, she meets the orphans, the wounded, the lost. And she meets the children of Grozny, those who will shape their country's future. What happens to a child who grows up surrounded by war, who grows accustomed to violence? Whose childhood is ruined? A compelling, intimate and often heartbreaking portrait of Chechnya today, The Angel of Grozny also offers a vivid account of its violent history, and its ongoing battle for freedom.

The world at the beginning of the 20th century seemed for most of its inhabitants stable and relatively benign. Globalizing, booming economies married to technological breakthroughs seemed to promise a better world for most people. Instead, the 20th century proved to be overwhelmingly the most violent, frightening and brutalized in history with fanatical, often genocidal warfare engulfing most societies between the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Cold War. What went wrong? How did we do this to ourselves? The War of the World comes up with compelling, fascinating answers. It is Niall Ferguson s masterpiece.

Following the enormous success of HITLER: HUBRIS this book triumphantly completes one of the great modern biographies. No figure in twentieth century history more clearly demands a close biographical understanding than Adolf Hitler; and no period is more important than the Second World War. Beginning with Hitler's startling European successes in the aftermath of the Rhinelland occupation and ending nine years later with the suicide in the Berlin bunker, Kershaw allows us as never before to understand the motivation and the impact of this bizarre misfit. He addresses the crucial questions about the unique nature of Nazi radicalism, about the Holocaust and about the poisoned European world that allowed Hitler to operate so effectively.

Richard Evans' brilliant book unfolds perhaps the single most important story of the 20th century: how a stable and modern country in less than a single lifetime led Europe into moral, physical and cultural ruin and despair. A terrible story not least because there were so many other ways in which Germany's history could have been played out. With authority, skill and compassion, Evans recreates a country torn apart by overwhelming economic, political and social blows: the First World War, Versailles, hyperinflation and the Great Depression. One by one these blows ruined or pushed aside almost everything admirable about Germany, leaving the way clear for a truly horrifying ideology to take command.

Rudolph Hoess was Commandant of Auschwitz during the war. He was taken prisoner by the British. Between his trial and his execution he was ordered to write his autobiography. This is it.

'The room was filled with a blinding light. She was paralysed by fear, fixed still in her chair for a long moment. Everything fell.'2015 is the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima, when, on 6 August at 8.15am, an atomic bomb was dropped over the Japanese city, killing one hundred thousand men, women and children in its white fury. John Hersey's spare, devastating report on the attack was first published in the New Yorker in 1946. Written in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, it chronicles what happened through the eyes of six civilians who survived against the odds. It is a classic piece of journalism, and a defining moment of the nuclear age.'One of the most powerful writers of modern times' Washington Post

Taken from Appian's Roman History, the five books collected here form the sole surviving continuous historical narrative of the era between 133-35 BC - a time of anarchy and instability for the Roman Empire. A masterly account of a turbulent epoch, they describe the Catiline conspiracy; the rise and fall of the First Triumvirate; the murder of Julius Caesar; the formation of the Second Triumvirate by Antonius, Octavian, and Lepidus; and brutal civil war. A compelling depiction of the decline of the Roman state into brutality and violence, The Civil Wars portrays political discontent, selfishness and the struggle for power - a struggle that was to culminate in a titanic battle for mastery over the Roman Empire, and the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra by Octavian in 31 BC

Historians have portrayed British participation in World War I as a series of tragic debacles, with lines of men mown down by machine guns, with untried new military technology, and incompetent generals who threw their troops into improvised and unsuccessful attacks. In this book a renowned military historian studies the evolution of British infantry tactics during the war and challenges this interpretation, showing that while the British army's plans and technologies failed persistently during the improvised first half of the war, the army gradually improved its technique, technology, and, eventually, its' self-assurance. By the time of its successful sustained offensive in the fall of 1918, says Paddy Griffith, the British army was demonstrating a battlefield skill and mobility that would rarely be surpassed even during World War II.Evaluating the great gap that exists between theory and practice, between textbook and bullet-swept mudfield, Griffith argues that many battles were carefully planned to exploit advanced tactics and to avoid casualties, but that breakthrough was simply impossible under the conditions of the time. According to Griffith, the British were already masters of "e;storm troop tactics"e; by the end of 1916, and in several important respects were further ahead than the Germans would be even in 1918. In fields such as the timing and orchestration of all-arms assaults, predicted artillery fire, "e;Commando-style"e; trench raiding, the use of light machine guns, or the barrage fire of heavy machine guns, the British led the world. Although British generals were not military geniuses, says Griffith, they should at least be credited for effectively inventing much of the twentieth-century's art of war.

The liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is a story of courage and enduring triumph, of calamity and miscalculation. In this first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the ultimate victory of the Allied powers without a grasp of the great drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943.Beginning with the daring amphibious invasion in November 1942, An Army at Dawn follows the British and American armies as they fight the French in Morocco and Algeria, and then take on the Germans and Italians in Tunisia. Battle by battle, an inexperienced and sometimes poorly led army gradually becomes a superb fighting force. Central to the tale are the extraordinary but fallible commanders who come to dominate the battlefield: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Montgomery and Rommel.

Stand to attention for the definitive visual guide to 5,000 years of military historyThe Military History Book chronicles the changing technology and tactics of war from 5,000 years ago to the present day in stunning visual detail. Bringing military history to life like never before, find out all about the battles, leaders and weapons of war that have changed the course of history and shaped the world.From the siege towers and catapults of ancient times to Samurai armour, Russian Kalashnikovs and right up to the unmanned drones and stealth bombers used by today's armed forces, the evolution of battlefield technology is showcased in amazing detail. Plus, get up close with virtual tours of iconic pieces including the T-34 Tank, the Lockheed F-117 Stealth Bomber and the AH-64 Apache helicopter.The Military History Book is the perfect gift for military enthusiasts of all ages.

Brought to you by Penguin. He became a myth in his own lifetime and an international martyr-figure upon his death; he was a revolutionary fighter, a military strategist, a social philosopher, an economist, a medical doctor, and a friend and confidant of Fidel Castro. Che Guevara's dream was an epic one - to unite Latin America and the rest of the developing world through armed revolution, and to end once and for all the poverty, injustice and petty nationalisms that had bled it for centuries. In the end Che failed in his quest but he is recognized as that one-in-a-million personality who just might have pulled it off. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life shuttles between the revolutionary capitals of Havana and Algiers to the battlegrounds of Bolivia and the Congo; from the halls of power in Moscow and Washington to the exile havens of Miami, Mexico and Guatemala, in a gripping tale of revolution, international intrigue and covert operations. It has an epic sweep as it evokes an era of tumultuous change, describing major events like the Bay of Pigs invasion, the October Missile crisis and Kennedy's assassination. Among its cast of characters are scores of historic personalities including Castro, Kennedy, Kruschev, Mao Tse-tung, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, to name but a few. Jon Lee Anderson has been given unprecedented access to the Cuban Government's archives and has had total co-operation from Che's widow, Aleida March, who has never previously spoken for publication about her late husband. He has obtained hitherto unpublished documents, including several of Che's personal diaries and, in the course of his research, broke open a twenty-eight-year-old mystery - the whereabouts of Che's body in Bolivia. There is no doubt that this monumental work will stand as the definitive portrait of one of the twentieth century's most fascinating, yet largely unexplored, historical figures. (c) Jon Lee Anderson 1997 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

The controversial account of what really happened in the south Atlantic skies

In July 1917, when the Provisional Government issued a warrant for his arrest, Lenin fled from Petrograd; later that year, the October Revolution swept him to supreme power. In the short intervening period he spent in Finland, he wrote his impassioned, never-completed masterwork The State and Revolution. This powerfully argued book offers both the rationale for the new regime and a wealth of insights into Leninist politics. It was here that Lenin justified his personal interpretation of Marxism, savaged his opponents and set out his trenchant views on class conflict, the lessons of earlier revolutions, the dismantling of the bourgeois state and the replacement of capitalism by the dictatorship of the proletariat. As both historical document and political statement, its importance can hardly be exaggerated.Translated and edited with an introduction by Robert Service

Debunking what were accepted truths about the Second World War, the author argues provocatively that Hitler did not set out to cause the war as part of an evil master plan, but blundered into it partly by accident, aided by the shortcomings of others.