Second World War
Showing 1–16 of 29 results
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Aftermath
£9.99Aftermath
Germany, 1945 – a country in ruins. Cities have been reduced to rubble and more than half of the population are where they do not belong or do not want to be. How can a functioning society ever emerge from this chaos? In bombed-out Berlin, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, journalist and member of the Nazi resistance, warms herself by a makeshift stove and records in her diary how a frenzy of expectation and industriousness grips the city. The Americans send Hans Habe, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and US army soldier, to the frontline of psychological warfare – tasked with establishing a newspaper empire capable of remoulding the minds of the Germans. The philosopher Hannah Arendt returns to the country she fled to find a population gripped by a manic loquaciousness, but faces a deafening wall of silence at the mention of the Holocaust.
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Alice’s Book
£20.00Alice’s Book
What happened to the books that were too valuable to burn? The story of a Jewish chef whose bestselling cookbook was expropriated under the Nazi regime. Alice Urbach had her own cooking school in Vienna, but in 1938 she was forced to flee to England, like so many others. Her younger son was imprisoned in Dachau, and her older son, having emigrated to the United States, became an intelligence officer in the struggle against the Nazis. Returning to the ruins of Vienna in the late 1940s, she discovers that her bestselling cookbook has been published under someone else’s name. Now, eighty years later, the historian Karina Urbach – Alice’s granddaughter – sets out to uncover the truth behind the stolen cookbook, and tells the story of a family torn apart by the Nazi regime, of a woman who, with her unwavering passion for cooking, survived the horror and losses of the Holocaust to begin a new life in America.
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Army Girls
£9.99Army Girls
They were female soldiers in a war Britain wanted to fight without conscripting women. It was a vain hope, by December 1941 for the first time in British history women were called up and a generation of girls came of age in khaki, serving king and country. Barbara trained to drive army-style in giant trucks and Grace swapped her servant’s pinafore for battledress and a steel hat, Martha turned down officer status for action on a gun-site and Olivia won the Croix de Guerre in France. Commemorating the 80th anniversary of conscription for women, this book captures remarkable stories from the last surviving veterans who served in Britain’s female army and brings to life a pivotal moment in British history. Precious memories and letters are entwined in a rich narrative that travels back in time and sheds new light on being young, female and at war.
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Barbarossa
£9.99Barbarossa
Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941, was the largest military operation in history, its aim nothing less than ‘a war of extermination’ to annihilate Soviet communism, liquidate the Jews and create lebensraum for the so-called German master race. But it led to the destruction of the Third Reich, and was entirely cataclysmic; in six months of warfare no less than six million were killed, wounded or registered as missing in action, and soldiers on both sides committed heinous crimes behind the lines on a scale without parallel in the history of warfare. In ‘Barbarossa’, drawing on hitherto unseen archival material – including previously untranslated Russian sources – in his usual gripping style, Jonathan Dimbleby recounts not only the story of the military campaign, but the politics and diplomacy behind this epic clash of global titans.
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Battles of Conscience
£20.00Battles of Conscience
Accounts of the Second World War usually involve tales of bravery in battle, or stoicism on the home front, as the British public stood together against the Nazi threat. However, the war looks very different when seen through the eyes of the 60,000 conscientious objectors who refused to take up arms and whose stories, unlike those of the First World War, have been almost entirely forgotten. Tobias Kelly invites us to spend the war with five of these individuals.
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Bletchley Park and D-Day
£10.99Bletchley Park and D-Day
Since the secret of Bletchley Park was revealed in the 1970s, the work of its codebreakers has become one of the most famous stories of the Second World War. But cracking the Nazis’ codes was only the start of the process. Thousands of secret intelligence workers were then involved in making crucial information available to the Allied leaders and commanders who desperately needed it. Using previously classified documents, David Kenyon casts the work of Bletchley Park in a new light, as not just a codebreaking establishment, but as a fully developed intelligence agency. He shows how preparations for the war’s turning point – the Normandy Landings in 1944 – had started at Bletchley years earlier, in 1942, with the careful collation of information extracted from enemy signals traffic.
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Blood and Ruins
£40.00Blood and Ruins
Richard Overy sets out to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. He argues that this was the ‘great imperial war’, a violent end to almost a century of global imperial expansion which reached its peak in the ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires. How war on a huge scale was fought, supplied, paid for, supported by mass mobilization and morally justified forms the heart of this account. Above all, Overy explains the bitter cost for those involved in fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked these imperial projects, the war and its aftermath. This war was as deadly for civilians as it was for the military, a war to the death over the future of the global order.
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East of West, West of East
£9.99East of West, West of East
This extraordinary book tells the story of a remarkable family caught in Japan at the outbreak of the Second World War in the Pacific.
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Faustian Bargain
£22.99Faustian Bargain
Offers the full story of a fateful alliance between past and future mortal enemies-long preceding the well-known Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact-whose dimensions were kept secret from the outside world and yet which set the stage for World War Two and its outcome.
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Going With the Boys
£10.99Going With the Boys
From the bestselling author of The Unfinished Palazzo, the untold history of six groundbreaking women who fought to become front-line correspondents during World War II
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Hitler’s American Gamble
£25.00Hitler’s American Gamble
This work dramatises the extraordinarily compressed and terrifying period between the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States. These five days transformed much of the world and have shaped our own experience ever since. Simms and Laderman’s aim in the book is to show how this agonising period had no inevitability about it and that innumerable outcomes were possible. Key leaders around the world were taking decisions with often poor and confused information, under overwhelming pressure and knowing that they could be facing personal and national disaster. And yet, there were also long-standing assumptions that shaped these decisions, both consciously and unconsciously.
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Last Stop Auschwitz
£8.99Last Stop Auschwitz
Eddy de Wind, a Dutch doctor and psychiatrist, was shipped to Auschwitz with his wife Friedel, whom he had met and married at the Westerbork labour camp in the Netherlands. At Auschwitz, they made it through the brutal selection process and were put to work. Each day, each hour became a battle for survival. For Friedel, it meant avoiding the Nazis’ barbaric medical experiments. Despite such daily stresses, love prevailed. Passing notes through the fence, sometimes stealing a brief embrace, Friedel and Eddy clung to life. As the end of the war approached and the Russian Army drew closer, the last Nazis fled, taking many prisoners with them, including Friedel. Eddy hid under a pile of old clothes and stayed behind. This book is an extraordinary account of life as a prisoner, a near real-time record of the daily struggle to survive.
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Miss Dior
£25.00Miss Dior
This is the story of a ghost who walked into my life on a sunlit morning and would not let go of me. She is a woman of courage, a devoted sister, a constant gardener, and a resistance heroine who lived life on her own terms. Her name is Catherine Dior. ‘Miss Dior’ paints a portrait of the enigmatic woman behind the designer Christian Dior: his beloved younger sister Catherine, who inspired his most famous perfume and shaped his vision of femininity.
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Mission France
£10.99Mission France
Looks at the full story of the thirty-nine female agents of SOE F section who went undercover in France, revealing for the first time how their fates contrasted and overlapped as the war progressed.
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National Treasures
£16.99National Treasures
As Hitler prepared to invade Poland during the sweltering summer of 1939, men and women from across London’s museums, galleries and archives formulated ingenious plans to send the nation’s highest prized objects to safety. Using stately homes, tube tunnels, slate mines, castles, prisons, stone quarries and even their own homes, a dedicated bunch of unlikely misfits packed up the nation’s greatest treasures and, in a race against time, dispatched them throughout the country on a series of top-secret wartime adventures. ‘National Treasures’ highlights a moment from our history when an unlikely coalition of mild-mannered civil servants, social oddballs and metropolitan aesthetes became the front line in the heritage war against Hitler.
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Operation Pedestal
£9.99Operation Pedestal
The Sunday Times bestseller
‘One of the most dramatic forgotten chapters of the war, as told in a new book by the incomparable Max Hastings’ DAILY MAIL
£9.99