Author: Arthur Ward
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848848085
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
By the spring of 1940, the phoney war suddenly became very real. In April Hitler's forces, invaded Norway and a month later began their assault on France and the Low Countries. The Anglo/French allies were routed. The British escaped to fight another day after evacuating the bulk of their armies at Dunkirk. When on 10 May Winston Churchill became Prime Minister he soon discovered that the nation's defenses were in a parlous state and a Nazi invasion was a very real possibility. By the end of the month, nearly a million British citizens had joined the Local Defense Volunteers, soon to become the Home Guard, of Dad's Army fame. Churchill, however, realized the Home Guard was initially of little more than PR value, an important morale booster. A more serious deterrent needed to be created if Hitler's panzer divisions and the full might of the blitzkrieg were to be thwarted. Consequently, to supplement the sorely ill-equipped regular forces (all of their tanks and most of their artillery had been abandoned in France) a new, British resistance force was required. The intentionally blandly named 'Auxiliary Units' might have been the answer. Formed in the Summer of 1940, in great secrecy, this force of 'stay behind' saboteurs and assassins was intended to cause havoc behind the German front line should the Wehrmacht gain a foothold in Britain. Their mission was to go to cover, hiding in underground bunkers for the first 14 days of invasion and then springing up, at nightfall, to gather intelligence, interrogate prisoners, destroying fuel and ammunition dumps as they went about their deadly business. Each Auxilier knew his life expectancy was short, a matter of weeks. He also knew he could not tell a soul about his activities, even his spouse. 'Dads Army' they were not. Following the publication of his 50th anniversary history of the Battle of Britain, A Nation Alone, written in association with the RAF Museum, Arthur Ward looked deeper into the story of the Invasion Summer of 1940 and enjoyed unique opportunities to interview those involved with Auxiliary Units at the very top and in the front line, as volunteers in a six-man cell.
Author: Lester Grau
Publisher: Casemate
ISBN: 1612000096
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
A selection of the Military Book Club. This third edition of the The PartisanÕs Companion is the last-and-best Red Army manual used to train partisans to fight the Nazi invader. Its usefulness outlived World War II. It was later used to train Òthird-worldÓ guerrillas in their wars of national liberation in the 1950sÐ70s and even the Fedayeen guerrillas who fought U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. Once upon a time, the Boy Scout Manual concentrated almost exclusively on camping, field craft and first aid. The PartisanÕs Companion adds guns, demolitions, hand-to-hand combat, assorted mayhem and multiple forms of Nazi-bashing. It is like the old Boy Scout Manual on steroids. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Red Army was hard pressed to cope with the ÒinvincibleÓ Wehrmacht. The initial partisan resistance efforts also had problems. No locals were welcome, and the only guerrillas recognized by Moscow were surrounded Red Army units and units of loyal party members who were sent into unfamiliar territory to battle the Nazis. The initial training manual was a reprint from the Russian Civil War, and most of these units were wiped out. Finally the Soviets began recruiting partisans from the local communityÑbut with Red Army officers and secret police agents. The partisan effort improved. By the end of 1942, it was obvious that Germany was losing the war. The partisan ranks grew as did the training requirements for the partisan commanders. The 1942 edition of the PartisanÕs Companion helped quickly train new guerrillas to a common standard. Besides field craft, it covers partisan tactics, German counter-guerrilla tactics, demolitions, German and Soviet weapons, scouting, camouflage, anti-tank warfare and anti-aircraft defense for squad and platoon-level instruction. It contains the Soviet lessons of two bitter years of war and provides a good look at the tactics and training of a mature partisan force. The partisans moved and lived clandestinely, harassed the enemy, and supported the Red Army through reconnaissance and attacks on the German supply lines. They were also the agents of Soviet power and vengeance in the occupied regions. Soviet historians credit the partisans with tying down ten percent of the German army and with killing almost a million enemy soldiers. They clearly frustrated German logistics and forced the Germans to periodically sideline divisions to hunt the partisans. The partisans, and this third edition, were clearly part of the eventual Soviet victory over Germany. Les Grau is a retired US Army officer who fought guerrillas in South VietnamÑand left on a stretcher. Consequently, his appreciation for guerrilla tactics came early in his career. The Army later taught him Russian, and his tours of duty included frequent trips to the Soviet Union and elsewhere. He has is the author of three books on the Soviet-Afghan War, including The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War (with Ali Jalali). Mike (Misha) Gress grew up in the wilds of Siberia where everyone's dad, including his own, was a veteran of the fight against the Nazis. He joined the Soviet Army and served in the infantry (motorized rifle) forces, and afterward produced The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost with Les Grau.
Author: Jeffrey Herf
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300155832
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
This groundbreaking history connects Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language propaganda during World War II to anti-Semitism in the Middle East in the decades since. Jeffrey Herf, a leading scholar in the field, offers the most extensive examination to date of Nazi propaganda activities targeting Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East during World War II and the Holocaust. He draws extensively on previously unused and little-known archival resources, including the shocking transcriptions of the “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic” radio programs, which convey a strongly anti-Semitic message. Herf explores the intellectual, political, and cultural context in which German and European radical anti-Semitism was found to resonate with similar views rooted in a selective appropriation of the traditions of Islam. Pro-Nazi Arab exiles in wartime Berlin, including Haj el-Husseini and Rashid el-Kilani, collaborated with the Nazis in constructing their Middle East propaganda campaign. By integrating the political and military history of the war in the Middle East with the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the propagandistic diffusion of Nazi ideology, Herf offers the most thorough examination to date of this important chapter in the history of World War II. Importantly, he also shows how the anti-Semitism promoted by the Nazi propaganda effort contributed to the anti-Semitism exhibited by adherents of radical forms of Islam in the Middle East today.
Author: Stephen P. Halbrook
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781598133073
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"Nazi Germany invaded France in 1940. In every occupied town, Nazi soldiers put up posters that demanded that civilians surrender their firearms within twenty-four hours or else be shot. Despite the consequences, many French citizens refused to comply with the order. In Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance, Stephen P. Halbrook tells this story of Nazi repression and the brave French men and women who refused to surrender to it. Taking advantage of a prewar 1935 French gun registration law, the Nazis used registration records kept by the French police to easily locate gun owners to enforce their demand that firearms be surrendered. Countless French citizens faced firing squads for refusing to comply. But many French citizens had resisted the 1935 decree, preventing the Nazis from fully enforcing the confiscation order. Throughout the Nazi occupation, the French Resistance grew, arming itself to conduct resistance activities and fight back against the occupation. Drawing on records of the German occupation and testimonies from members of the French resistance, Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France is the first book to focus on the Nazis' efforts to disarm the French"--
Author: Joshua D. Zimmerman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107014263
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 473
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Book Description
Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.
Author: Stephen P. Halbrook
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0786751185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
Countless books have been written on the military history of World War II, however astonishingly little information has appeared about the one country that stared the Nazis down and refused to become an accomplice to the horrors of the Third Reich. This book provides an objective, year-by-year account of Switzerland's military role in World War II, including her defensive strategies, details of Nazi invasion plans, and Switzerland's moral, material and humanitarian links to the Allies. Swiss neutrality in World War II has been criticized in recent years, but the country was entirely surrounded by Axis powers and managed, as revealed here, to render considerable assistance to the Allies.
Author: Julian Jackson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019162232X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
On 16 May 1940 an emergency meeting of the French High Command was called at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris. The German army had broken through the French lines on the River Meuse at Sedan and elsewhere, only five days after launching their attack. Churchill, who had been telephoned by Prime Minister Reynaud the previous evening to be told that the French were beaten, rushed to Paris to meet the French leaders. The mood in the meeting was one of panic and despair; there was talk of evacuating Paris. Churchill asked Gamelin, the French Commander in Chief, 'Where is the strategic reserve?' 'There is none,' replied Gamelin. This exciting book by Julian Jackson, a leading historian of twentieth-century France, charts the breathtakingly rapid events that led to the defeat and surrender of one of the greatest bastions of the Western Allies, and thus to a dramatic new phase of the Second World War. The search for scapegoats for the most humiliating military disaster in French history began almost at once: were miscalculations by military leaders to blame, or was this an indictment of an entire nation? Using eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Julian Jackson recreates, in gripping detail, the intense atmosphere and dramatic events of these six weeks in 1940, unravelling the historical evidence to produce a fresh answer to the perennial question of whether the fall of France was inevitable.
Author: Malcolm Atkin
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473872839
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
“Everyone knows about the Home Guard but what about the other Secret Intelligence Services (SIS and M16)? You can read about them in [this book].” —This England When Winston Churchill made his “we shall never surrender” speech in 1940, he was speaking in the knowledge that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service was planning a civilian British resistance movement to mobilize after the country had been occupied. Britain’s planning for clandestine warfare developed out of a fierce battle between the Secret Intelligence Service and the War Office for the control of guerrilla warfare and conflicting ideas over the legitimacy of armed civilians. A multi-layered system of secret organizations was the result. The Auxiliary Units are the best known of these “ungentlemanly” forces, but in this perceptive new study based on painstaking original research, Malcolm Atkin clearly demonstrates that they were never intended as a resistance organization. Instead, they were designed as a short-term guerrilla force, whilst their Special Duties Branch was designed to spy on the British public as much as any Nazi invader. Meanwhile, deep in the shadows, was the real resistance organization—Section VII of SIS. Malcolm Atkin’s conclusions will cause controversy among military historians and will change our understanding of the preparations made in Britain to resist Nazi occupation in the Second World War. “[A] detailed yet accessible historical study.” —ProtoView
Author: Nathan Stoltzfus
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300220995
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430
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Book Description
History has focused on Hitler’s use of charisma and terror, asserting that the dictator made few concessions to maintain power. Nathan Stoltzfus, the award-winning author of Resistance of Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Germany, challenges this notion, assessing the surprisingly frequent tactical compromises Hitler made in order to preempt hostility and win the German people’s complete fealty. As part of his strategy to secure a “1,000-year Reich,” Hitler sought to convince the German people to believe in Nazism so they would perpetuate it permanently and actively shun those who were out of step with society. When widespread public dissent occurred at home—which most often happened when policies conflicted with popular traditions or encroached on private life—Hitler made careful calculations and acted strategically to maintain his popular image. Extending from the 1920s to the regime’s collapse, this revealing history makes a powerful and original argument that will inspire a major rethinking of Hitler’s rule.
Author: United Nations
Publisher: United Nations Publications
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
This report was prepared for the Working Group on the Crime of Aggression at the 8th session of Preparatory Commission, held in September-October 2001. The paper consists of four parts relating to: the Nuremberg tribunal; tribunals establish pursuant to Control Council Law number 10; the Tokyo tribunal; and the United Nations. Annexes contain tables regarding aggression by a State and individual responsibility for crimes against peace. The paper seeks to provide an objective, analytical overview of the history and major developments relating to aggression, both before and after the adoption of the UN Charter.
