Great American World War II Stories

Great American World War II Stories PDF Author: Tom McCarthy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493084291
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Here are stunning long-buried stories that give proof to the words Admiral Chester Nimitz used to describe the hero Marines on Iwo Jima: “Uncommon valor was a common virtue.” Painstakingly selected from the most moving battle accounts about American heroism and breathtaking courage during the largest war in world history, this anthology brings readers to the front lines in inspiring detail. Courage, duty, and honor became watchwords for Americans in combat—most of whom were volunteer soldiers, sailors and Marines. Freedom and principle mattered more than their own lives. Moving, emotional, and gripping, Great American WWII Stories offers hidden gems from major battles like Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It puts readers on Omaha Beach during D-Day. But here also is the story of USS Nautilus, which engaged the Japanese on fourteen different patrols, from the Battle of Midway to the liberation of the Philippines. Here too is the story of Operation Tidal Wave, the bloodiest air battle in the history of war; and a gripping account of American paratroopers, isolated behind enemy lines, fighting the elite German SS in Normandy after D-Day. Great American WWII Stories is a magnificent collection of gripping accounts of battles great and small. It is tribute to Americans who were willing to risk it all, and in many cases did.

Great American World War II Stories

Great American World War II Stories PDF Author: Tom McCarthy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493084291
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
Here are stunning long-buried stories that give proof to the words Admiral Chester Nimitz used to describe the hero Marines on Iwo Jima: “Uncommon valor was a common virtue.” Painstakingly selected from the most moving battle accounts about American heroism and breathtaking courage during the largest war in world history, this anthology brings readers to the front lines in inspiring detail. Courage, duty, and honor became watchwords for Americans in combat—most of whom were volunteer soldiers, sailors and Marines. Freedom and principle mattered more than their own lives. Moving, emotional, and gripping, Great American WWII Stories offers hidden gems from major battles like Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It puts readers on Omaha Beach during D-Day. But here also is the story of USS Nautilus, which engaged the Japanese on fourteen different patrols, from the Battle of Midway to the liberation of the Philippines. Here too is the story of Operation Tidal Wave, the bloodiest air battle in the history of war; and a gripping account of American paratroopers, isolated behind enemy lines, fighting the elite German SS in Normandy after D-Day. Great American WWII Stories is a magnificent collection of gripping accounts of battles great and small. It is tribute to Americans who were willing to risk it all, and in many cases did.

Great American Fighter Pilots of World War II

Great American Fighter Pilots of World War II PDF Author: Robert D. Loomis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description


Above the Reich

Above the Reich PDF Author: Colin Heaton
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593183908
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Sensational eyewitness accounts from the most heroic and legendary American aviators of World War II, never before published as a book They are voices lost to time. Beginning in the late 1970s, five veteran airmen sat for private interviews. Decades after the guns fell silent, they recounted in vivid detail the most dangerous missions that made the difference in the war. Ed Haydon dueled with the deadliest of German aces—and forced him to the ground. Robert Johnson racked up twenty-seven kills in his P-47 Thunderbolt, but nearly lost his life when his plane was shot to ribbons and his guns jammed. Cigar-chomping Curtis LeMay was the Air Corps general who devised the bomber tactics that pummeled Germany's war machine. Robin Olds was a West Point football hero who became one of the most dogged, aggressive fighter pilots in the European theater, relentlessly pursuing Germans in his P-38 Lightning. And Jimmy Doolittle became the most celebrated American airman of the war—maybe even of all time—after he led the audacious raid to bomb Tokyo. Today these heroes are long gone, but now, in this incredible volume, they tell their stories in their own words.

Moral Combat

Moral Combat PDF Author: Michael Burleigh
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062078666
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1197

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Book Description
"Magnificent. . . . Seldom has a study of the past combined such erudition with such exuberance." —The Guardian "No-one with an interest in the Second World War should be without this book; and indeed nor should anyone who cares about how our world has come about." —The Daily Telegraph Pre-eminent WWII historian Michael Burleigh delivers a brilliant new examination of the day-to-day moral crises underpinning the momentous conflicts of the Second World War. A magisterial counterpart to his award-winning and internationally bestselling The Third Reich, winner of the Samuel Johnson prize, Moral Combat offers a unique and riveting look at, in the words of The Times (London), "not just the war planners faced with the prospect of bombing Dresden or the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also the individuals working at the coalface of war, killing or murdering, resisting or collaborating."

Looking for the Good War

Looking for the Good War PDF Author: Elizabeth D. Samet
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374716129
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
“A remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words . . . A stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war.” —Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States’ “exceptional” history and destiny. Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation—attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II. As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century’s decades of devastating conflict.

Land of Hope

Land of Hope PDF Author: Wilfred M. McClay
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594039380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 642

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Book Description
For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. Too often they reflect a fragmented outlook that fails to convey to American readers the grand trajectory of their own history. This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding and its aspirations; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative to its young effectively. Of course, it goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale of the past. It will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But as Land of Hope brilliantly shows, there is no contradiction between a truthful account of the American past and an inspiring one. Readers of Land of Hope will find both in its pages.

When Books Went to War

When Books Went to War PDF Author: Molly Guptill Manning
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544535170
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
This New York Times bestselling account of books parachuted to soldiers during WWII is a “cultural history that does much to explain modern America” (USA Today). When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned 100 million books. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops, gathering 20 million hardcover donations. Two years later, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million specially printed paperbacks designed for troops to carry in their pockets and rucksacks in every theater of war. These small, lightweight Armed Services Editions were beloved by the troops and are still fondly remembered today. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy, in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific, in field hospitals, and on long bombing flights. This pioneering project not only listed soldiers’ spirits, but also helped rescue The Great Gatsby from obscurity and made Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, into a national icon. “A thoroughly engaging, enlightening, and often uplifting account . . . I was enthralled and moved.” — Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried “Whether or not you’re a book lover, you’ll be moved.” — Entertainment Weekly

"The Good War"

Author: Studs Terkel
Publisher: New Press/ORIM
ISBN: 1595587594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 707

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Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize: “The richest and most powerful single document of the American experience in World War II” (The Boston Globe). “The Good War” is a testament not only to the experience of war but to the extraordinary skill of Studs Terkel as an interviewer and oral historian. From a pipe fitter’s apprentice at Pearl Harbor to a crew member of the flight that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, his subjects are open and unrelenting in their analyses of themselves and their experiences, producing what People magazine has called “a splendid epic history” of WWII. With this volume Terkel expanded his scope to the global and the historical, and the result is a masterpiece of oral history. “Tremendously compelling, somehow dramatic and intimate at the same time, as if one has stumbled on private accounts in letters locked in attic trunks . . . In terms of plain human interest, Mr. Terkel may well have put together the most vivid collection of World War II sketches ever gathered between covers.” —The New York Times Book Review “I promise you will remember your war years, if you were alive then, with extraordinary vividness as you go through Studs Terkel’s book. Or, if you are too young to remember, this is the best place to get a sense of what people were feeling.” —Chicago Tribune “A powerful book, repeatedly moving and profoundly disturbing.” —People

Whatever It Took

Whatever It Took PDF Author: Henry Langrehr
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063027445
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Published to mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day, an unforgettable never-before-told first-person account of World War II: the true story of an American paratrooper who survived D-Day, was captured and imprisoned in a Nazi work camp, and made a daring escape to freedom. Now at 95, one of the few living members of the Greatest Generation shares his experiences at last in one of the most remarkable World War II stories ever told. As the Allied Invasion of Normandy launched in the pre-dawn hours of June 6, 1944, Henry Langrehr, an American paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne, was among the thousands of Allies who parachuted into occupied France. Surviving heavy anti-aircraft fire, he crashed through the glass roof of a greenhouse in Sainte-Mère-Église. While many of the soldiers in his unit died, Henry and other surviving troops valiantly battled enemy tanks to a standstill. Then, on June 29th, Henry was captured by the Nazis. The next phase of his incredible journey was beginning. Kept for a week in the outer ring of a death camp, Henry witnessed the Nazis’ unspeakable brutality—the so-called Final Solution, with people marched to their deaths, their bodies discarded like cords of wood. Transported to a work camp, he endured horrors of his own when he was forced to live in unbelievable squalor and labor in a coal mine with other POWs. Knowing they would be worked to death, he and a friend made a desperate escape. When a German soldier cornered them in a barn, the friend was fatally shot; Henry struggled with the soldier, killing him and taking his gun. Perilously traveling westward toward Allied controlled land on foot, Henry faced the great ethical and moral dilemmas of war firsthand, needing to do whatever it took to survive. Finally, after two weeks behind enemy lines, he found an American unit and was rescued. Awaiting him at home was Arlene, who, like millions of other American women, went to work in factories and offices to build the armaments Henry and the Allies needed for victory. Whatever It Took is her story, too, bringing to life the hopes and fears of those on the homefront awaiting their loved ones to return. A tale of heroism, hope, and survival featuring 30 photographs, Whatever It Took is a timely reminder of the human cost of freedom and a tribute to unbreakable human courage and spirit in the darkest of times.

Great Photographs of World War II

Great Photographs of World War II PDF Author: Neil Kagan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Oxmoor House Great Photographs of World War II (Collectors Edition) The most evocative collection of World War II photographs ever published. Selected by Time Life editors from thousands of images from museums and collections around the world, these photographs tell the haunting story of the war's heroes and horrors. Famous images from LIFE magazine are juxtaposed with rare photographs to give us a unique glimpse of war through the eyes of soldiers and civilians caught up in the most destructive conflict of all time. The editors have assembled over 280 gripping images into 25 chronological photo essays. Here, the most cataclysmic events of the war, from the Battle of Britain and the attack on Pearl Harbor to D-Day and the fall of the Third Reich, are defined by some of the most dramatic photographs of the 20th century. February 2004280+ photos 304 pages1 0 1/2" x 10 1/4" Hardcover with jacket Carton 6, Item 130057 ISBN 0-8487-2818-1 $39.95 US UPC 7-49075-30057-7