Two madmen, Hitler and Stalin, engaged in a death struggle that would determine the course of history at staggering cost of human life. Craig has written the definitive book on one of the most terrible battles ever fought. With 24 pages of photos.

The bloodiest battle in the history of warfare, Stalingrad was perhaps the single most important engagement of World War II. A major loss for the Axis powers, the battle for Stalingrad signaled the beginning of the end for the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler.

During the five years William Craig spent researching the battle for Stalingrad, he traveled extensively on three continents, studying documents and interviewing hundreds of survivors, both military and civilian. This unique account is their story, and the stories of the nearly two million men and women who lost their lives.

This is the remarkable story of a German soldier who fought throughout World War II, rising from conscript private to captain of a heavy weapons company on the Eastern Front.

William Lubbeck, age 19, was drafted into the Wehrmacht in August 1939. As a member of the 58th Infantry Division, he received his baptism of fire during the 1940 invasion of France. The following spring his division served on the left flank of Army Group North in Operation Barbarossa. After grueling marches amidst countless Russian bodies, burnt-out vehicles, and a great number of cheering Baltic civilians, Lubbeck’s unit entered the outskirts of Leningrad, making the deepest penetration of any German formation.

The Germans suffered hardships the following winter as they fought both Russian counterattacks and the brutal cold. The 58th Division was thrown back and forth across the front of Army Group North, from Novgorod to Demyansk, at one point fighting back Russian attacks on the ice of Lake Ilmen.

A soldier who preferred to be close to the action, Lubbeck served as forward observer for his company, dueling with Russian snipers, partisans and full-scale assaults alike. His worries were not confined to his own safety, however, as news arrived of disasters in Germany, including the destruction of Hamburg where his girlfriend served as an Army nurse.

In September 1943, Lubbeck earned the Iron Cross and was assigned to officers’ training school in Dresden. By the time he returned to Russia, Army Group North was in full-scale retreat. Now commanding his former heavy weapons company, Lubbeck alternated sharp counterattacks with inexorable withdrawal to Memel on the Baltic. In April 1945 his company was nearly obliterated, but in the last scramble from East Prussia, he was able to evacuate on a newly minted German destroyer.

After his release from British captivity, Lubbeck immigrated to the United States where he raised a successful family. With the assistance of David B. Hurt, he has drawn on his wartime notes and letters, Soldatbuch, regimental history and personal memories to recount his frontline experience, including rare firsthand accounts of both triumph and disaster.

More than 70 years after it was first published, this book is still one of the all-time classics on the art of military marksmanship, and is required reading at the U.S. Marine Corps Sniper School. The author grew up learning to shoot in the backwoods of Indiana, and went on to compete nationally as a sharpshooter. When World War I broke out in Europe, he was so eager to fight that he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Wounded seven times and finally invalided home after nearly two years on the front lines, he was an enthusiastic soldier and a superb sniper, with over 100 confirmed kills. His story of his time in the trenches includes frequent lessons on the mindset, the tactics, and the weapons of sniping, and has much hard-won advice about personal survival on the battlefield. It stands out as one of the best first-person accounts of World War I.

When Germany invades Poland, Luftwaffe bombers devastate Warsaw and the city’s zoo along with it. With most of their animals killed, or stolen away to Berlin, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Żabiński begin smuggling Jews into the empty cages. More “guests” hide inside the Żabińskis’s villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing and, on rare occasions of calm, piano concerts. They call this refuge from the Nazi occupation “The House Under a Crazy Star”. As the war escalates Jan becomes increasingly involved in the anti-Nazi resistance. Ammunition is buried in the elephant enclosure and explosives stored in the animal hospital. Plans are prepared for what will become the Warsaw uprising. Through the ever-present fear of discovery, Antonina must keep her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and animal inhabitants—otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes—as Europe crumbles around them.

In September 2003, James ‘Ash’ Ashcroft, a former British Infantry Captain, arrived in Iraq as a ‘gun for hire’. It was the beginning of an 18-month journey into blood and chaos. In this action-packed page-turner, Ashcroft reveals the dangers of his adrenalin-fuelled life as a security contractor in Baghdad, where private soldiers outnumber non-US Coalition forces in a war that is slowly being privatised. From blow-by-blow accounts of days under mortar bombardment to revelations about life operating deep within the Iraqi community, Ashcroft shares the real, unsanitised story of the war in Iraq◦– and its aftermath◦– direct from the front line.

In October 1942, a panzer officer wrote ‘Stalingrad is no longer a town… Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure’. The battle for Stalingrad became the focus of Hitler and Stalin’s determination to win the gruesome, vicious war on the eastern front. The citizens of Stalingrad endured unimaginable hardship; the battle, with fierce hand-to-hand fighting in each room of each building, was brutally destructive to both armies. But the eventual victory of the Red Army, and the failure of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, was the first defeat of Hitler's territorial ambitions in Europe, and the start of his decline. An extraordinary story of tactical genius, civilian bravery, obsession, carnage and the nature of war itself, Stalingrad will act as a testament to the vital role of the soviet war effort.

Hitler made two fundamental and crippling mistakes during the Second World War: The first was his whimsical belief that the United Kingdom would eventually become his ally, which delayed his decision to launch a major invasion of Britain, whose army was unprepared for the force of blitzkrieg warfare. The second was the ill-conceived Operation Barbarossa—an invasion of Russia that was supposed to take the German army to the gates of Moscow. Antony Beevor’s thoughtfully researched compendium recalls this epic struggle for Stalingrad. No one, least of all the Germans, could foretell the deep well of Soviet resolve that would become the foundation of the Red Army; Russia, the Germans believed, would fall as swiftly as France and Poland. The ill-prepared Nazi forces were trapped in a bloody war of attrition against the Russian behemoth, which held them in the pit of Stalingrad for nearly two years. Beevor points out that the Russians were by no means ready for the war either, making their stand even more remarkable; Soviet intelligence spent as much time spying on its own forces—in fear of desertion, treachery, and incompetence—as they did on the Nazis. Due attention is also given to the points of view of the soldiers and generals of both forces, from the sickening battles to life in the gulags.

Many believe Stalingrad to be the turning point of the war. The Nazi war machine proved to be fallible as it spread itself too thin for a cause that was born more from arrogance than practicality. The Germans never recovered, and its weakened defenses were no match for the Allied invasion of 1944. We know little of what took place in Stalingrad or its overall significance, leading Beevor to humbly admit that “[t]he Battle of Stalingrad remains such an ideologically charged and symbolically important subject that the last word will not be heard for many years.” This is true. But this gripping account should become the standard work against which all others should measure themselves.

This gripping account of Germany's notorious campaign combines sophisticated use of previously published firsthand accounts in German and Russian along with newly available Soviet archival sources and caches of letters from the front. For Beevor (Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949), the 1942 German offensive was a gamble that reflected Hitler's growing ascendancy over his military subordinates. The wide-open mobile operations that took the 6th Army into Stalingrad were nevertheless so successful that Soviet authorities insisted they could be explained only by treason. (Over 13,000 Soviet soldiers were formally executed during the battle for Stalingrad alone.) Combat in Stalingrad, however, deprived the Germans of their principal force multipliers of initiative and flexibility. The close-gripped fighting brought men to the limits of endurance, then kept them there. Beevor juxtaposes the grotesque with the mundane, demonstrating the routines that men on both sides developed to cope with an environment that brought them to the edge of madness. The end began when German army commander Friedrich von Paulus refused to prepare for the counterattack everyone knew was coming. An encircled 6th Army could neither be supplied by air nor fight its way out of the pocket unsupported. Fewer than 10,000 of Stalingrad's survivors ever saw Germany again. For the Soviet Union, the victory became a symbol not of a government, but of a people. The men and women who died in the city's rubble could have had worse epitaphs than this sympathetic treatment. Agent: Andrew Nurnberg. History Book Club main selection; BOMC alternate selection; foreign sales to the U.K., Germany and Russia.

From critically acclaimed world historian, Antony Beevor, this is the first major account in more than twenty years to cover the whole invasion from June 6, 1944, right up to the liberation of Paris on August 25. It is the first book to describe not only the experiences of the American, British, Canadian, and German soldiers, but also the terrible suffering of the French caught up in the fighting. More French civilians were killed by Allied bombing and shelling than British civilians were by the Luftwaffe.

The Allied fleet attempted by far the largest amphibious assault ever, and what followed was a battle as savage as anything seen on the Eastern Front. Casualties mounted on both sides, as did the tensions between the principal commanders. Even the joys of liberation had their darker side. The war in northern France marked not just a generation, but the whole of the postwar world, profoundly influencing relations between America and Europe. Beevor draws upon his research in more than thirty archives in six countries, going back to original accounts, interviews conducted by combat historians just after the action, and many diaries and letters donated to museums and archives in recent years.

D-Day will surely be hailed as the consummate account of the Normandy invasion and the ferocious offensive that led to the liberation of Paris.

This is the story of a special breed of warrior, the fighter-bomber pilot; the story of valiant men who flew the F-105 Thunderchief ‘Thud’ Fighter-Bomber over the hostile skies of North Vietnam.

The book is based on Broughton’s tour of duty between September 1966 and June 1967 as Vice Commander of the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing, based at Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand. The narrative is anecdotal in nature, a commentary of his observations of persons, aircraft, and events during his tour, more or less chronologically, but without dated references. Few individuals are identified by other than first or nicknames, but Broughton develops most as characters through descriptions of their career backgrounds. Broughton’s accounts of missions “up north” were enhanced in both accuracy and verisimilitude by verbatim transcriptions of radio transmissions he recorded using a small tape recorder mounted in the cockpit of his aircraft.

In Broughton is highly critical of the U.S. command structure directing air operations against North Vietnam. He blames micromanagement by the highest levels in Washington down to the Thirteenth Air Force, a command echelon based in the Philippines, for losses of men and aircraft that he characterizes as “astronomical” and “worthless”. He is particularly critical, however, of the “bomber mentality” management by generals who came up through the Strategic Air Command and then occupied key command slots in the war, which was being fought by pilots of the Tactical Air Command.

The book came about when, at the completion of his tour of duty, Broughton and two of his pilots were court martialed by the USAF for allegedly conspiring to violate the rules of engagement regarding U.S. air operations. Although acquitted of the most serious charges, Broughton, who had been personally relieved of duty by Pacific Air Forcescommander Gen. John D. Ryan, was subsequently transferred to an obscure post in the Pentagon, allegedly as a vendetta because his punishment was so slight. Required by office protocol to work only two or three days a month, he used both his extra time and his bitterness at the Air Force to compose Thud Ridge while he awaited approval of an application to appeal of his conviction to the Air Force Board for Correction of Military Records.

After his conviction was overturned and expunged from his record because of “undue command influence”, Broughton retired from the Air Force in August 1968 and had the memoir published by J.B. Lippincott. The book appeared soon after as a Bantam paperback, with reprint editions in 1985, 2002, and 2006.

On 17th May 1943 nearly 350 million tonnes of water crashed into the valleys of the Ruhr, when the Lancasters of 617 Squadron breached the giant Moehne and Eder Dams with colossal ‘blockbuster’ bombs. “The Dam Busters” is the story of that raid and the squadron who carried it through. It tells how they took out the V3 rocket weapon and destroyed the “Tirpitz” in a Norwegian fjord. Again and again, the crews of 617 Squadron Bomber Command used their flying skills, their tremendous courage and Barnes Wallis’ highly accurate bombs to deal devastating blows to Nazi Germany. This story is one of the classics of the Second World War, a massive bestseller that became a film.

A searing, brutal account of a French teenager’s survival in Auschwitz… and a major addition to Holocaust literature.

In 1943, 18-year-old Pierre Berg picked the wrong time to visit a friend’s house—at the same time as the Gestapo. He was thrown into the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. But through a mixture of savvy and chance, he managed to survive… and ultimately got out alive. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Berg, “it was all shithouse luck, which is to say—inelegantly—that I kept landing on the right side of the randomness of life.

“Such begins the first memoir of a French gentile Holocaust survivor published in the U.S. Originally penned shortly after the war when memories were still fresh, recounts Berg’s constant struggle in the camps, escaping death countless times while enduring inhumane conditions, exhaustive labor, and near starvation. The book takes readers through Berg’s time in Auschwitz, his hair’s breadth avoidance of Allied bombing raids, his harrowing “death march” out of Auschwitz to Dora, a slave labor camp (only to be placed in another forced labor camp manufacturing the Nazis’ V1 & V2 rockets), and his eventual daring escape in the middle of a pitched battle between Nazi and Red Army forces.Utterly frank and tinged with irony, irreverence and gallows humour, ranks in importance among the work of fellow survivors Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. As we quickly approach the day when there will be no living eyewitnesses to the Nazi’s “Final Solution,” Berg’s memoir stands as a searing reminder of how the Holocaust affected us all.

When the nuclear-powered submarine USS was commissioned in November 1959, its commanding officer, Captain Edward L. Beach, planned a routine shakedown cruise in the North Atlantic. Two weeks before the scheduled cruise, however, Beach was summoned to Washington and told of the immediate necessity to prove the reliability of the Rickover-conceived submarine. His new secret orders were to take the Triton around the world, entirely submerged the total distance.

This is Beach’s gripping firsthand account of what went on during the 36,000 nautical-mile voyage whose record for speed and endurance still stands today. It brings to life the many tense events in the historic journey: the malfunction of the essential fathometer that indicated the location of undersea mountains and shallow waters, the sudden agonizing illness of a senior petty officer, and the serious problems with the ship’s main hydraulic oil system.

Intensely dramatic, Beach’s chronicle also describes the psychological stresses of the journey and some touching moments shared by the crew. A skillful story teller, he recounts the experience in such detail that readers feel they have been along for the ride of a lifetime.

In April 1982 Harry Benson was a 21-year-old Royal Navy commando helicopter pilot, fresh out of training and one of the youngest helicopter pilots to serve in the Falklands War. These pilots, nicknamed ‘junglies’, flew most of the land-based missions in the Falklands in their Sea King and Wessex helicopters. Much of what happened in the war – the politics, task force ships, Sea Harriers, landings, Paras and Marines – is well-known and documented. But almost nothing is known of the young commando helicopter pilots and aircrewmen who made it all happen on land and sea. This is their ‘Boys Own’ story, told for the very first time.

Harry Benson has interviewed forty of his former colleagues for the book creating a tale of skill, initiative, resourcefulness, humour, luck, and adventure. This is a fast-paced, meticulously researched and compelling account written by someone who was there, in the cockpit of a Wessex helicopter.

Few of these pilots have spoken publicly about:

• The two helicopter crashes and eventual rescue following a failed SAS mission high up on an in hospitable glacier in South Georgia

• The harrowing story of the Exocet strike that sunk the transport ship Atlantic Conveyor

• The daring missile raid on the Argentine high command in Port Stanley

• The constant mortar fire faced while supporting troops and evacuating casualties

• The hair-raising head-on attacks by Argentine jets on British helicopters

• The extraordinarty courage shown during the evacuation of the bombed landing ship

• The secret nighttime low-level missions to insert and resupply SAS and SBS using night vision goggles

If you liked , and you’ll love

The word “Scram” was used to warn other to go to ground or risk being shot down by their own side as Argentinean jets blasted through ‘bomb alley 014’.

Soon after the Argentine army invaded the Falklands in the early hours of 2 April 1982, it was the Royal Navy commando helicopter pilots, nicknamed , who flew most of the land-based missions in the Falklands in their Sea King and Wessex helicopters. Facing both mortar fire and head-on attacks by Argentine jets, they inserted SAS patrols at night, rescued survivors of Exocet attacks and mounted daring missile raids, as well as supporting the British troops and evacuating casualties, often in appalling weather conditions.

Harry Benson was a twenty-one-year-old Wessex pilot, fresh out of training, when war started. He has interviewed over forty of his former colleagues for this book, creating a fast-paced, meticulously researched and compelling account written by someone who was there, in the cockpit of a Wessex helicopter.

Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, the SAAF was South Africa’s first line of defence against Soviet expansionism in southern Africa. In this account, Peter Baxter examines and brings to life the squadrons and aviators that fought in both counter-insurgency and conventional warfare.

It is a common misunderstanding that the Red Army, on Stalin’s order, halted outside Warsaw in August 1944 to let the German troops suppress the Polish uprising in the capital. Joseph Stalin of course didn’t want to let a pro-British Polish government get a foothold in Warsaw. The fact is that on the last day of July (the night before the start of the uprising) the Red Army was on its way into Praga (the east part of Warsaw on the east bank of Vistula) when the German troops mounted a violent counter attack. This started the bitter fight that came to be called “The Battle for Praga” and was to continue until the end of September when the Red Army finally conquered Praga. By then it was too late for the Polish resistance inside the city. The fighting was among the toughest and most brutal on the Eastern Front during the war. Never before has this battle been described in the Swedish language and very seldom has it been mentioned in English literature. Furthermore we have managed to include unique pictures; photos that are vary rare and original colour illustrations by our internationally acknowledged illustrators; Maarten Swarts, Samuel Sward and Oliver Missing.

Topf and Sons designed and built the crematoria at the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Belzec, Dachau, Mauthausen and Gusen. At its height sixty-six Topf triple muffle ovens were in operation – forty-six of which were at Auschwitz. In five years the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz had been the engine of the holocaust, facilitating the murder and incineration of more than one million people, most of them Jews. Yet such a spectacularly evil feat of engineering was designed not by the Nazi SS, but by a small respectable firm of German engineers: the owners and engineers of J. A. Topf and Sons. These were not Nazi sadists, but men who were playboys and the sons of train drivers. They were driven not by ideology, but by love affairs, personal ambition and bitter personal rivalries to create the ultimate human killing and disposal machines – even at the same time as their company sheltered Nazi enemies from the death camps. The intense conflagration of their very ordinary motives created work that surpassed in its inhumanity even the demands of the SS. In order to fulfil their own ‘dreams’ they created the ultimate human nightmare.

This is a remarkable and unique story of Jim Brigginshaw. Having been captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in 1942, Jim was first sent to work in Burma, to build what has become known as the Death Railway. Unlike many of his comrades, Jim survived this ordeal, only to be transferred to Nagasaki, Japan, where he was sent to work in the mines of Sendryu. Jim describes how the conditions in the ‘Hell pits of Sendryu’ were even worse than those experienced in Burma, but were ultimately the reason why he survived the war. On the 9th August 1945, the Americans, dropped the second nuclear bomb on Nagaski. Jim was fortunately underground at the time, but through this book re-lives the harrowing aftermath of the attack when the ground shook violently.

On April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker as the Red Army closed in on Berlin. Within four days the Soviets had recovered his body. But the truth about what the Russian secret services found was hidden from history, when, three months later, Stalin officially declared to Truman and Churchill that Hitler was still alive and had escaped abroad. Reckless rumors about what really happened to Hitler began to spread like wildfire and, even today, they have not been put to rest. Until now. In 2017, after two years of painstaking negotiations with the Russian authorities, award-winning investigative journalists Jean-Christophe Brisard and Lana Parshina gained access to confidential Soviet files that finally revealed the truth behind the incredible hunt for Hitler’s body. Their investigation includes new eyewitness accounts of Hitler’s final days, exclusive photographic evidence and interrogation records, and exhaustive research into the power struggle that ensued between Soviet, British, and American intelligence services. And for the first time since the end of World War II, official, cutting-edge forensic tests have been completed on the human remains recovered from the bunker graves--a piece of skull with traces of a lethal bullet, a fragment of bone, and teeth. In The Death of Hitler—written as thrillingly as any spy novel—Brisard and Parshina debunk all previous conspiracy theories about the death of the Führer. With breathtaking precision and immediacy they penetrate one of the most powerful and controversial secret services to take readers inside Hitler’s bunker in its last hours—and solve the most notorious cold case in history.

Fallen Sentinel tells the story of Australian tanks in World War II, a dismal tale for both tankman and taxpayer. Against the backdrop of the sweeping conquest of Western Europe by Hitler's Panzers, the Australian Government, cash-strapped and resource poor, attempted to field its own tank force to do battle with the Axis forces. Three armoured divisions were created◦— and all three disbanded before they had seen action. In what became a prodigious waste of time, material, and human endeavour, sixty-six Australian cruiser tanks were produced◦— the Sentinel tank◦— none of which would ever take the field of battle. This is a book that portrays governments under pressure and the bureaucratic bungles that saw opportunities lost and precious resources squandered. Fallen Sentinel presents a careful dissection of government process in the crucible of war, a rare gem in an age when most wartime histories focus on the front-line soldier. Peter Beale presents a damning indictment of the frailty of government under pressure, a bureaucracy in crisis and the extraordinary failure of government process at the highest level. Modern-day governments would do well to heed the lessons of this book.

At a secret arms-design contest in Stalin’s Soviet Union, army technicians submitted a stubby rifle with a curved magazine. Dubbed the AK-47, it was selected as the Eastern Bloc’s standard arm. Scoffed at in the Pentagon as crude and unimpressive, it was in fact a breakthrough—a compact automatic that could be mastered by almost anyone, last decades in the field, and would rarely jam. Manufactured by tens of millions in planned economies, it became first an instrument of repression and then the most lethal weapon of the Cold War. Soon it was in the hands of terrorists.

In a searing examination of modern conflict and official folly, C. J. Chivers mixes meticulous historical research, investigative reporting, and battlefield reportage to illuminate the origins of the world’s most abundant firearm and the consequences of its spread. The result, a tour de force of history and storytelling, sweeps through the miniaturization and distribution of automatic firepower, and puts an iconic object in fuller context than ever before.

Throughout, animates unforgettable characters—inventors, salesmen, heroes, megalomaniacs, racists, dictators, gunrunners, terrorists, child soldiers, government careerists, and fools. Drawing from years of research, interviews, and from declassified records revealed for the first time, he presents a richly human account of an evolution in the very experience of war.

In 1968, a small, dilapidated American spy ship set out on a dangerous mission: to pinpoint military radar stations along the coast of North Korea. Packed with advanced electronic-surveillance equipment and classified intelligence documents, the USS was poorly armed and lacked backup by air or sea. Its crew, led by a charismatic, hard-drinking ex-submarine officer named Pete Bucher, was made up mostly of untested sailors in their teens and twenties.

On a frigid January morning while eavesdropping near the port of Wonsan, the was challenged by a North Korean gunboat. When Bucher tried to escape, his ship was quickly surrounded by more patrol boats, shelled and machine-gunned, and forced to surrender. One American was killed and ten wounded, and Bucher and his young crew were taken prisoner by one of the world’s most aggressive and erratic totalitarian regimes.

Less than forty-eight hours before the ’s capture, North Korean commandos had nearly succeeded in assassinating South Korea’s president in downtown Seoul. Together, the two explosive incidents pushed Cold War tensions toward a flashpoint as both North and South Korea girded for war—with fifty thousand American soldiers caught between them. President Lyndon Johnson rushed U.S. combat ships and aircraft to reinforce South Korea, while secretly trying to negotiate a peaceful solution to the crisis.