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Author: Ken Ford
Publisher: History Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
The 78th Division was raised in 1942 specifically for the North African invasion. From the time that the Division landed at Algiers there were to be few easy days, and the campaigning through Tunisia, Sicily and Italy was a tale of bitterly fought actions in a harsh terrain against a skilful enemy. In its first year of action alone, the 78th Division suffered 10,000 casualties. Longstop Hill, Centuripe, Termoli, Cassino, the Gustav Line, the Argenta Gap; there was always one more river to cross, another defended mountain line to breach. Ken Ford brings out how quickly the Division developed its fighting power and shows how success resulted from an all-arms effort by infantry, armour, artillery, transport, and especially engineers. Yet it is the resilience and sacrifice of now vanished County infantry regiments that rightly form the core of the book. Using first hand accounts of men who actually fought with the 78th Division, and fully illustrated with photographs and maps, this is a fitting tribute to the soldiers of the Battleaxe Division.
Author: Ken Ford
Publisher: History Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
The 78th Division was raised in 1942 specifically for the North African invasion. From the time that the Division landed at Algiers there were to be few easy days, and the campaigning through Tunisia, Sicily and Italy was a tale of bitterly fought actions in a harsh terrain against a skilful enemy. In its first year of action alone, the 78th Division suffered 10,000 casualties. Longstop Hill, Centuripe, Termoli, Cassino, the Gustav Line, the Argenta Gap; there was always one more river to cross, another defended mountain line to breach. Ken Ford brings out how quickly the Division developed its fighting power and shows how success resulted from an all-arms effort by infantry, armour, artillery, transport, and especially engineers. Yet it is the resilience and sacrifice of now vanished County infantry regiments that rightly form the core of the book. Using first hand accounts of men who actually fought with the 78th Division, and fully illustrated with photographs and maps, this is a fitting tribute to the soldiers of the Battleaxe Division.
Author: Ken Ford
Publisher: Alan Sutton Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
In 1942, Britain's 78th (Battleaxe) Division was the elite spearhead for the imminent invasion of North Africa. The 78th had been assembled in Scotland that same year and adopted the insignia of a yellow Crusader's battleaxe on a black background. In November 1942, the 78th landed in Algiers as part of Operation Torch and fought a series of crucial actions there and in Tunisia. During the winter of 1942/3, it was involved in some of the most gruelling and costly fighting of the war: actions at Tebourba and Longstop Hill became famous as battles of dogged resistance against the odds. The two VCs which were won in these firefights, together with another awarded later on the Gustav Line in Italy in 1944, show that the division was constantly in the thick of the action.
Author: Richard Doherty
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473813875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 477
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Book Description
Eighth Army, Britain's most famous field army of the twentieth century, landed in Italy in September 1943 and fought continously until the defeat of the Germans in early-May 1945. This book studies the experience of Eighth Army in the Italian campaign, examining how a force accustomed to the open spaces of North Africa adjusted to the difficult terrain of Italy where fighting became much more a matter for the infantry than for the armour. It also compares the qualities of the commanders of Eighth Army in Italy: Montgomery; Leese and, finally, McCreery. The book uses official records at various levels, personal accounts - some never before published - and published material to present a picture of an army that, although defined as British, was one of the war's most cosmopolitan formations. Its soldiers came from the UK, Canada, India, Ireland, Nepal, New Zealand, Poland and South Africa as well as from Palestine - the Jewish Brigade - and from Italy itself.
Author: Peter Caddick-Adams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199974667
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Book Description
Selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013 The most horrific battles of World War II ring in the popular memory: Stalingrad, the Bulge, Iwo Jima, to name a few. Monte Cassino should stand among them. Waged deep in the Italian mountains beneath a medieval monastery, it was an astonishingly brutal encounter, grinding up ten armies in conditions as bad as the Eastern Front at its worst. Now the battle has the chronicle it deserves. In Monte Cassino, military historian Peter Caddick-Adams provides a vivid account of how an array of men from across the globe fought the most lengthy and devastating engagement of the Italian campaign in an ancient monastery town. Not simply Americans, British, and Germans, but Russians, Indians, Georgians, Nepalese, Ukrainians, French, Slovaks, Armenians, New Zealanders, and Poles, among others, fought and died there. Caddick-Adams offers a panoramic view, surveying the strategic heights and peering over the shoulders of troops fruitlessly digging for cover in the stony soil. Here are incisive sketches of the theater commanders--Field Marshal "Smiling Albert" Kesselring, who outmaneuvered Rommel to command German troops in Italy, and the English aristocrat General Harold Rupert Leofric George Alexander, tall, upbeat, "and--crucially for Churchill--looked every inch a general." Caddick-Adams puts Cassino into the context of the Italian campaign and larger Allied war plans, and takes readers into the savage, often hand-to-hand combat in the bombed-out medieval town. He captures the brutal weather and unforgiving terrain--the rubble and rocky slopes that splintered dangerously under artillery barrages and caused shellfire to echo with such volume that men had trouble keeping their sanity due to acoustics alone. Over four months, the struggle would inflict some 200,000 casualties, and Allied planes would level the historic monastery-and eventually the entire town as well. With scholarly care, insightful analysis, and narrative verve, Caddick-Adams has crafted a monumental account of one of World War II's lesser-known but no less devastating battles.
Author: Matthew Parker
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385513399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 445
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Book Description
Monte Cassino is the true story of one of the bitterest and bloodiest of the Allied struggles against the Nazi army. Long neglected by historians, the horrific conflict saw over 350,000 casualties, while the worst winter in Italian memory and official incompetence and backbiting only worsened the carnage and turmoil. Combining groundbreaking research in military archives with interviews with four hundred survivors from both sides, as well as soldier diaries and letters, Monte Cassino is both profoundly evocative and historically definitive. Clearly and precisely, Matthew Parker brilliantly reconstructs Europe’s largest land battle–which saw the destruction of the ancient monastery of Monte Cassino–and dramatically conveys the heroism and misery of the human face of war.
Author: Ken Ford
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 075249595X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
On the night of 9/10 July 1943, an Allied armada of 2,590 vessels launched one of the largest combined operations of the Second World War - the invasion of Sicily, Operation 'Husky'. Over the next thirty-eight days, half a million British, Canadian, American and French soldiers, sailors, and airmen grappled with their German and Italian counterparts for control of this rocky outcrop of Hitler's 'Fortress Europe'. The Allied assault on Sicily featured airborne and amphibious landings; mountain warfare; international rivalry; poorly performing troops; tenacious German resistance; and, improvements in tactical air support and the ultimate Allied victory on the island. Almost the whole of the progress of the Second World War is illustrated by this one campaign. It was the only action where the whole Allied war effort was brought to bear on a single objective, with one army commanded by Patton and one army commanded by Montgomery. Both men were insufferable egoists and insubordinate commanders; they always chose to do their own thing, regardless of others' sensibilities and always with one eye on how history would see them.The seeds of rivalry between these two key Allied commanders that were sown in the Sicily campaign eventually grew to fruition in the battles for Normandy and the Ardennes.
Author: James Holland
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802161057
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 584
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Book Description
Acclaimed WWII historian James Holland both narrates and reframes the controversial first months of the Italian Campaign and sets a new standard in the chronicling of war Following victory in Sicily, while the central command planned the spring 1944 invasion of France, Allied troops crossed into southern Italy in September 1943, expecting to drive Axis forces north and liberate Rome by Christmas. Italy quickly surrendered but German divisions fiercely resisted, and the hoped-for quick victory descended into one of the most challenging and protracted battles of the entire war. James Holland’s The Savage Storm, chronicling the dramatic opening months of the Italian Campaign in unflinching and insightful detail, is unlike any campaign history yet written. Holland has always narrated war at ground level, but here goes further by chronicling events almost entirely through the contemporary eyes of those who were there on all sides and at all levels—Allied, Axis, civilians alike. Weaving together a wealth of letters, diaries, and other documents—from the likes of American General Mark Clark, German battalion commander Georg Zellner, New Zealand lance-corporal Roger Smith, legendary war reporter Ernie Pyle, and Italian politician Filippo Caracciolo—Holland traces the battles as they were experienced across plains, over mountains, through shattered villages and cities, in intense heat and, towards the end of December 1943, frigid cold and relentless rain. Such close-up views persuade Holland to recast important aspects of the campaign, reappraising the reputation of Mark Clark himself and other senior commanders of the U.S. Fifth and British Eighth armies. Given the shortage of Allied shipping and materiel allocated to Italy because of the build-up for D-Day, more was expected of Allied troops in Italy than anywhere else, and, as accounts at the time attest, a huge price was paid by everyone for each bloodily contested mile. Putting readers vividly in the moment as events unfolded, with characters made unforgettable by their own words, The Savage Storm is a defining account of the pivotal months leading to Monte Cassino, and a landmark in the writing about war.
Author: Charles Messenger
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1783835079
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
The author explains how the tradition of loyalty to the regiment has served the British Army so well over the past 350 years and, in his vivid description of some of the major campaigns in which it has fought, shows what it was like at various times to have been an officer or a soldier in the British Army.
Author: Warlord Games
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472852702
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
With the Axis Powers ejected from North Africa, the Western Allies look to take the fight across the Mediterranean and into Mussolini's Italy. This supplement for Bolt Action focuses on Operation Husky, the airborne and naval invasion of Sicily, the hard-fought battles in the villages and rugged mountain passes of that island, and the advance up the Italian Peninsula towards Rome. With a host of scenarios, new units, special rules, and Theatre Selectors this book contains everything players need to refight these important battles in defence of the Regno d'Italia or to strike at the underbelly of Axis-controlled Europe.
Author: Tim Cook
Publisher: Penguin Canada
ISBN: 014319304X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 734
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Book Description
Co-winner of the 2014-2015 Charles P. Stacey Award Tim Cook, Canada’s leading war historian, ventures deep into World War Two in this epic two-volume story of heroism and horror, of loss and longing, sacrifice and endurance. Written in Cook’s compelling narrative style, this book shows in impressive detail how soldiers, airmen, and sailors fought—the evolving tactics, weapons of war, logistics, and technology. It gauges Canadian effectiveness against the skilled enemy whom they confronted in battlefields from 1939 to 1943, from the sweltering heat of Sicily to the frigid North Atlantic, and from the urban warfare of Ortona to the dark skies over Germany. The Necessary War examines the equally important factors of morale, discipline, and fortitude of the Canadian citizen-soldiers. The war was an engine of transformation for Canada. With a population of fewer than twelve million, Canada embraced its role as an arsenal of democracy, exporting war supplies, feeding its allies, and raising a million-strong armed forces that served and fought in nearly every theatre of war. The nation was mobilized like never before in the fight to preserve the liberal democratic order. The six-year-long exertion caused disruption, provoked nationwide industrialization, ushered in changes to gender roles, exacerbated the tension between English and French, and forged a new sense of Canadian identity. Canadians were willing to bear almost any burden and to pay the ultimate price in the pursuit of victory. As with his award-winning two-volume series on WWI, Tim Cook uses original sources, letters from soldiers, rare documents, and maps of battlefields to illustrate the contributions and sacrifices made by what is often called the greatest generation. Magisterial in its scope, The Necessary War illuminates Canada’s past as never before. From the Western Front to the home front, Canadians served many roles in a war that had to be fought and won.
