Bøger om 2. verdenskrig

A stunning look at World War II from the other side...From the turret of a German tank, Colonel Hans von Luck commanded Rommel's 7th and then 21st Panzer Division. El Alamein, Kasserine Pass, Poland, Belgium, Normandy on D-Day, the disastrous Russian front--von Luck fought there with some of the best soldiers in the world. German soldiers.Awarded the German Cross in Gold and the Knight's Cross, von Luck writes as an officer and a gentleman. Told with the vivid detail of an impassioned eyewitness, his rare and moving memoir has become a classic in the literature of World War II, a first-person chronicle of the glory--and the inevitable tragedy--of a superb soldier fighting Hitler's war.

Dok Sofija u¿iva u djetinjstvu sa svojim drugaricama Tijanom, Jelom, Katom i Kirom, njen krhki i siromäni drug Niko, sa plavim öima, iznenada misteriozno nestaje iz razreda, ostavljajuc¿i Sofiju sa mnogim pitanjima i poplavom emocija bez odgovora.Iako je röena u siromänoj porodici, Sofija oböava ¿kolu i mäta da postane u¿iteljica. Me¿utim, njen ¿ivot krec¿e u drugom smjeru nakon öeve smrti i svjetskim ratom na pragu. Sa petnaest godina pridru¿uje se grupi hrabrih ¿kolaraca ¿eljnih da se bore protiv fäizma, da promijene svijet i grade bolju buduc¿nost. Sa sedamnaest, ¿eli da pobjegne iz grada i träi utöi¿te kod partizana.Iznenada srec¿e starog prijatelja koji joj oduzima dah i daje razlog za ¿ivot.Ali kako möe da gleda u buduc¿nost i da se nada u tako turbulentnim vremenima, gdje je smrt normalnija od ¿ivota?

Surrexit de Caelo es una novela de ciencia ficción que te sumerge en un mundo alternativo lleno de misterio y suspense. La historia se desarrolla en un escenario donde la realidad tal como la conocemos ha sido alterada y los nazis han conquistado gran parte del planeta gracias a supuestos ángeles caidos del cielo. La trama sigue a una serie de personajes que luchan por sobrevivir en este mundo distópico. Entre ellos se encuentra Armandek, un hombre que despierta en un laboratorio sin recuerdos de su pasado. A lo largo de la historia se enfrentará a desafíos y momentos inesperados, mientras intenta descubrir la verdad sobre su identidad y su mundo.

?An astonishing and deeply moving work.??Booklist (starred review)?An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.??Kirkus ReviewsAmong the millions of Holocaust victims sent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1944, Priska, Rachel, and Anka each pass through the concentration camp's infamous gates with a secret. Separated from their husbands and strangers to one another, they are pregnant and scared. After losing so many other loved ones to the Nazis, these women are determined to hold on to all they have left: their lives and those of their unborn babies.Born Survivors follows them as, against all the odds, they give birth to their babies and go on to build new lives with their children after World War II. Theirs are stories of hardships and miracles as they narrowly escape the clutches of Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz; conceal their condition after they are sent to a Nazi slave-labor camp, where they are half-starved and almost worked to death; and as the Allies close in, survive a seventeen-day train journey to Mauthausen in Austria. By the time they arrive, all three babies have been born?but because the camp has run out of Zyklon B, their lives and those of their mothers are saved. Sixty-five years later, the three ?miracle babies? share a remarkable, inspirational story of three mothers who defied death at the hands of the Nazis to give their children life.

In this riveting book, Jack Sacco tells the realistic, harrowing, at times horrifying, and ultimately triumphant tale of an American GI in World War II as seen through the eyes of his father, Joe Sacco -- a farm boy from Alabama who was flung into the chaos of Normandy and survived the terrors of the Bulge.As part of the 92nd Signal Battalion and Patton's famed Third Army, Joe and his buddies found themselves at the forefront of the Allied push through France and Germany. After more than a year of fighting, but still only twenty years old, Joe had become a hardened veteran. Yet nothing could have prepared him and his unit for the horrors behind the walls of Germany's infamous Dachau concentration camp. They were among the first 250 American troops into the camp, and it was there that they finally grasped the significance of the Allied mission. Surrounded by death and destruction, the men not only found the courage and will to fight, but they also discovered the meaning of friendship and came to understand the value and fragility of life.

Amphibious Assault First Wave on Guam & Okinawa. Another Pacific War memoir about one young man's wartime experience. First Wave on Guam & Okinawa is not written as a novel with characters, it is written more as a military report which also gives it legitimacy as being a good historical research book on the topic.

An Unexpected Coddiwomple takes you on a journey through a captivating collection of World War II (WWII) letters abundant with humor, intrigue, and romance across the U.S., to the U.K., and back again. Join S/Sgt. Frank G. Thompson and his daughter Loretto on parallel "missions." Frank's mission is to survive the war as a B-17 radio operator gunner and get on with his life; Loretto's is to discover whatever she can about the father she never knew. Frank wrote his family almost daily, which transports you to the everyday life of a WWII soldier from the day he reports to the day he is discharged. Frank's story could belong to any one of the 16 million WWII soldiers who served. Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has a window with such an intimate view of WWII been opened to the world, seen this time through the eyes of a soldier. ---Learn from the pilot himself, "Big Sundin," what happened when they ditched Heavy Date in the North Sea in 1945, saving the lives of the entire crew. Had Big Sundin not executed a "perfect ditching," Loretto and her six siblings would not have been born. Through her father's words, she uncovers truths about her parentage that were buried with him in 1965, solving decades of mysteries that culminate with an invitation to Buckingham Palace. It's a story of family, duty, faith, and a life transformed. It's a story of love.---... By the time Loretto discovered the cache of WWII letters, her father had been dead almost 50 years. She'd accepted she would never know him. That changed when she decided to type his 500+ letters for her siblings. With each letter, she heard her father's voice. With each place she visited, each person she met, the 50 years without him melted away, and the enduring gap that had opened between them when she was four years old gradually began to close...----Coddiwomple (v.): To travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague, as-yet-unknown destination.

A young pilot disappears on a routine mission, resulting in a rescue attempt on a remote and inhospitable island in the South Pacific.

In the latter part of 1939, German leader Adolf Hitler made a pact with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to invade Poland. Confident that British and French leaders would opt for a weak peace settlement, Hitler's army stormed in from the north, south and west on September 1st, while Stalin's Red Army invaded from the east on September 17th. This story, part fact and part fiction, is an account of the suffering endured by the Polish people at this time, many of whom were imprisoned in Siberia and forced to work under dreadful conditions. Yet when Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Poland's exiled found common cause with their Russian captors to take up arms against Nazi oppression. Though the Allies emerged victorious in 1945, a heavy price was exacted from occupied Poland. Many survivors discovered they no longer had homeland to which they could return, their former communities now under firm Soviet control.

I am now over 80 and a working silversmith. I tell the story of my early life at the end of the Second World War and its aftermath of shortages and rationing. I continue with the great difficulty I had with reading and writing leading to my disastrous failures at school and my first employment as a scientific assistant in the nuclear industry. During my first job my life changed in two major ways while working for the Atomic Energy Research Establishment. Their very forward-looking attitude to further education allowed me to add more 'O' levels, including the very important English, but as importantly, during that time I got married and before long had a daughter as well. I then decided to make the leap and try to obtain a medical degree but with only very basic 'O' levels I would first have to gain higher qualifications. I left full time employment for a Technical College in an attempt to add the three 'A' levels required for admission to Medical School but this was of course complicated by having wife and young daughter. To support us during this time I worked as a toolmaker, chauffeur, gardener and eventually trained as a London Ambulance driver. This very tortuous journey eventually gained me a place at Guy's Hospital Medical School. I continue the tale with a number of vignettes of life at Guy's Hospital as a medical student and the many unusual ways I increased my income during my studentship. I cover the time spent after qualification as a houseman in other hospitals. I finish with life as a General Practitioner and in Medical Research where I gained a PhD. I found that the higher up the academic tree I climbed the less my dyslexia, which I discovered I had when a medical student, impinged on my work and life. As an aside I hope that any youngsters with dyslexia reading this account will take heart that being dyslexic is not the end of the world.

Becoming Eisenhower is the story of a young man who pursued the army for its free education but found his calling as an officer, of an officer who was initially overlooked but motivated by frustration to make himself the army's indispensable man, the story of how General Eisenhower carried these experiences to Supreme Command and the presidency.

Savage Skies, Emerald Hell is the story of the stirring and terrible air combat that made winning the fight for New Guinea possible. It includes descriptions of equipment as well as accounts from fighter, bomber, transport, and support crews, and places their actions within the broader context of strategy and tactics.

"Boldly conceived and richly realized…an emotional and powerful tale." -Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Girls of ParisA world at war. A beautiful young star. A mission no one expected.Paris, 1944 Celebrated singer Genevieve Dumont is both a star and a smoke screen. An unwilling darling to the Nazis, the chanteuse's position of privilege allows her to go undetected as an ally to the resistance. When her estranged mother, Lillian de Rocheford, is captured by Nazis, Genevieve knows it won't be long before the gestapo succeeds in torturing information out of Lillian that will derail the upcoming Allied invasion. The resistance movement must silence her by any means necessary-including assassination. But Genevieve refuses to let her mother become yet one more victim of the war. Reuniting with her long-lost sister, she must navigate the perilous crosscurrents of occupied France undetected-and in time to save Lillian's life.

Vietnam became the Western world's most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the 1968 Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and much less familiar miniatures such as the bloodbath at Daido?where a US Marine battalion was almost wiped out?together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh's warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed two million people. Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it overwhelmingly as one for the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming, naked girl seared by napalm, it forgets countless eviscerations, beheadings, and murders carried out by the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners' victory in privation and oppression. Here we are given testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bar girls, and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, and Huey pilots from Arkansas. No past volume has blended a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal experiences in the fashion that Hastings's readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle, and presents many lessons for the twenty-first century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. In Vietnam, Hastings marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record.

Diana Mosley was a society beauty who fell from grace when she left her husband, brewery heir Bryan Guinness, for Sir Oswald Mosley, an admirer of Mussolini and a notorious womanizer. This horrified her family and scandalized society.In 1933, Diana met the new German leader, Adolf Hitler. They became close friends and he attended her wedding as the guest of honor. During the war, the Mosleys' association with Hitler led them to be arrested and interned for three and a half years. Diana's relationships with Hitler and Mosley defined her life in the public eye and marked her as a woman who possessed a singular lack of empathy for those less blessed at birth.Anne de Courcy's revealing biography chronicles one of the most intriguing, controversial women of the twentieth century. It is a riveting tell-all memoir of a leading society hostess, a woman with intimate access to the highest literary, political, and social circles of her time. Written with Mosley's exclusive cooperation and based upon hundreds of hours of taped interviews and unprecedented access to her private papers, letters, and diaries, Lady Mosley's only stipulation was that the book not be published until after her death.

It's 1940 and Linda Voss, legal secretary extraordinaire, has a secret. She's head over heels in love with her boss, John Berringer, the pride of the Ivy League. Not that she even has a chance--he'd never take a second look at a German-Jewish girl from Queens who spends her time taking care of her faded beauty of a mother and following bulletins on the war in Europe. For Linda, though, the war will soon become all too real. Engulfing her nation and her life, it will offer opportunities she's never dreamed of. A chance to win the man she wants...a chance to find the love she deserves. Made into the movie of the same name starring Melanie Griffith, Michael Douglas, and Liam Neeson, Shining Through is a novel of honor, sacrifice, passion, and humor. This is vintage Susan Isaacs, a tale of a spirited woman who wisecracks her way into heroism and history--and into your heart.

In a stunning follow-up to her best-selling debut, Mrs. Kimble, Jennifer Haigh′s second novel, BAKER TOWERS, is a compelling story of love and loss in a western Pennsylvania mining town in the years after World War II. Bakerton is a company town, built on coal; a town of church festivals and ethnic neighborhoods, hunters′ breakfasts and firemen′s parades. Its children are raised in company houses - three rooms upstairs, three rooms down. Its ball club leads the coal company league. The twelve Baker mines offer good union jobs, and the looming black piles of mine dirt don′t bother anyone. Called Baker Towers, they are local landmarks, clear evidence that the mines are booming. Baker Towers mean good wages and meat on the table, two weeks′ paid vacation and presents under the Christmas tree. The mines were not named for Bakerton; Bakerton was named for the mines. This is an important distinction. It explains the order of things. Born and raised on Bakerton′s Polish Hill, the five Novak children come of age in wartime, a thrilling moment when the world seems on the verge of changing forever. The oldest, Georgie, serves on a mine sweeper in the South Pacific and glimpses life beyond Bakerton, a promising future he is determined to secure at all costs. His sister Dorothy, a fragile beauty, takes a wartime job in Washington D.C. and finds herself unprepared for city life. Brilliant Joyce longs to devote herself to something of consequence but instead becomes the family′s keystone, bitterly aware of the opportunities she might have had elsewhere. Her brother Sandy sails through life on looks and charm, and Lucy, the volatile baby, devours the family′s attention and develops a bottomless appetite for love. BAKER TOWERS is a family saga and a love story, a hymn to a time and place long gone, to America′s industrial past and the men and women we now call the Greatest Generation. This is a feat of imagination from an extraordinary new voice in American fiction, a writer of enormous power and skill.

"The true story of a vigilante group of Holocaust survivors who conspired to kill six million Germans, Nakam (Hebrew for 'vengeance') tells the story of 'the Avengers' (Nokmim), a group of young Holocaust survivors led by poet and resistance fighter Abba Kovner, who undertook a mission of revenge against Germany following the crimes of the Holocaust. Motivated by both the atrocities they had endured and the realization that murderous antisemitic attacks on survivors continued long after the Nazi surrender, these fifty young men and women sought retaliation at a level commensurate with the devastation caused by the Holocaust, making clear to the world that Jewish blood would no longer be shed with impunity. Had they been successful, they would have poisoned city water supplies and loaves of bread distributed to German POWs, with the aim of killing six million Germans. Kovner and his followers went to great lengths to carry out their plans, going so far as to obtain the plans for Nuremberg's municipal water system, secure large quantities of poison, infiltrate a POW camp and the bakery that supplied it, and distribute poisoned bread to prisoners - but their plots were ultimately stymied. Most of the members of Nakam eventually returned to Israel, where for decades many of them refused to speak publicly about their roles in the group. While the Avengers' story began to come to light in the 1980s, details of the relations between the group and Zionist leadership and the motivations of its members have remained unknown. Drawing on rich archival sources and in-depth interviews with the Avengers in their later years, historian Dina Porat examines the formation of the group and the clash between the formative humanistic values held by its members and their unrealized plans for violent retribution."--

"Brilliantly researched, utterly gripping history: the first full account of a remarkable group of Jewish refugees-a top-secret band of brothers-who waged war on Hitler." -Alex Kershaw, New York Times best-selling author of The Longest Winter and TheLiberatorThe incredible World War II saga of the German-Jewish commandos who fought in Britain's most secretive special-forces unit-but whose story has gone untold until now June 1942. The shadow of the Third Reich has fallen across the European continent. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees who have escaped to Britain. The resulting volunteers are a motley group of intellectuals, artists, and athletes, most from Germany and Austria. Many have been interned as enemy aliens, and have lost their families, their homes-their whole worlds. They will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top-secret unit becomes known as X Troop. Some simply call them a "suicide squad." Drawing on extensive original research, including interviews with the last surviving members, Leah Garrett follows this unique band of brothers from Germany to England and back again, with stops at British internment camps, the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of Terezin concentration camp-the scene of one of the most dramatic, untold rescues of the war. For the first time, X Troop tells the astonishing story of these secret shock troops and their devastating blows against the Nazis."Garrett's detective work is stunning, and her storytelling is masterful. This is an original account of Jewish rescue, resistance, and revenge." -Wendy Lower, author of The Ravine and National Book Award finalist Hitler's Furies

From the New York Times bestselling author of Devil in Disguise, the first book in her beloved Wallflowers series.The Wallflowers: four young ladies at the side of the ballroom make a pact to help each other find husbands . . . no matter what it takes.Proud and beautiful Annabelle Peyton could have her pick of suitors?if only she had a dowry. Her family is on the brink of disaster, and the only way Annabelle can save them is to marry a wealthy man. Unfortunately her most persistent admirer is the brash Simon Hunt, a handsome and ambitious entrepreneur who wants her as his mistress. Annabelle is determined to resist Simon's wicked propositions, but she can't deny her attraction to the boldly seductive rogue, any more than he can resist the challenge she presents. As they try to outmaneuver each other, they find themselves surrendering to a love more powerful than they could have ever imagined. But fate may have other plans?and it will take all of Annabelle's courage to face a peril that could destroy everything she holds dear.

The acclaimed author of The Secret Women and Things Past Telling returns with an engrossing historical novel about a little known aspect of World War II--the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only Black WACs to serve overseas during the conflict. In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Dorothy Thom, Spelman graduate, librarian and Francophile, joins the Women's Army Corps wanting to do her part for the war effort. Longing for adventure, she has one question for the recruiter: "Do you think I'll get to go abroad?"As Dorothy and her sister WACs discover, life in the Army is an adventure filled with unexpected deprivations and culture shock. Women from all levels of society, secretaries, teachers, and sharecroppers, work together to navigate a military segregated by race and gender. At boot camp, the "colored girls" are separated for processing. At Ft. Riley, the women's barracks are rustic and heated by coal-burning pot-bellied stoves while German POWs spend their incarceration in buildings with central heat and hot water.In early 1945, Dorothy and eight hundred African American WACs cross the turbulent North Atlantic to their post in England. Their orders are to process the mail sent to GIs from their loved ones back home, an estimated 17 million pieces. The women arrive to find mail stockpiled for over two years in warehouses and airplane hangars, many pieces in poor condition, the names illegible. In England and France, the WACs traverse a landscape of unimagined possibilities. With their outlooks changed forever, they return to the United States as the catalysts for change in America and build lives that transcend anything their ancestors ever dreamed of. No Better Time illuminates a love of country and duty that has been overlooked until now.

Vale la pena di morire per un dipinto? Ispirato a fatti realmente accaduti, un indimenticabile racconto su come amore, coraggio e sacrificio possono salvare il patrimonio di un Paese. Italia, 1943. Elena Marchetti lascia a malincuore la propria professione di curatrice d'arte in una Milano bombardata dagli Alleati, per fare ritorno dalla propria famiglia a Urbino. Per lei è pronto un ruolo a fianco di Pasquale Rotondi, Sovrintendente regionale alla cultura: assieme a lui, Elena proteggerà opere d'arte provenienti da tutta Italia, fino a quel momento tenute nascoste nella relativa sicurezza delle campagne. Durante una festa in famiglia, Elena incontra Luca, un caro amico di infanzia. Un evento sconvolgente, determinato dalle azioni degli occupanti tedeschi, rafforzerà la loro relazione, tanto che i due inizieranno a progettare la loro vita insieme. Quando si sparge la voce che i tedeschi stanno trafugando opere d'arte italiane, Pasquale escogita un piano audace per salvare gli inestimabili dipinti in proprio possesso. Elena e Luca saranno costretti a fare una scelta coraggiosa: decideranno di lanciarsi in questa missione impossibile, per salvare il patrimonio culturale italiano?