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Hong Kong 1941-45
By Giuseppe Rava, Benjamin Lai. 2014
On 8th December 1941, as part of the simultaneous combine attack against Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) invaded…
the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia and the British colony of Hong Kong. After only 18 days of battle the defenders, a weak, undermanned brigade was overwhelmed by a superior force of two battle-harden IJA divisions. What makes the battle of Hong Kong was not the scale - just 14,000 defended the colony - but the intensity of this battle fought not only by the British Army, Navy and Air Force but also Canadians, Hong Kong's own defence force, the Indian Army as well as many civilians. The campaign itself is characterized by a fierce land battle, with long artillery duals and as well as fast naval actions with intense actions at the Gin Drinkers Line as well as the battle of Wong Nai Chung Gap where a handful of defenders took on an entire Japanese regiment. Less known but equally important are individual valour such as CSM John Robert Osborne winning a posthumous VC, throwing himself over a Japanese grenade to save fellow combatants. Capitulation by the defenders on 25 December 1941 marks the end of one battle and the beginning of another. A subject not significantly covered by Western historian is local resistance to Japanese occupation. Lead by the communist Chinese, many continued to fight the Japanese forming the Guangdong people's Anti-Japanese East River Guerrilla Detachment that by 1945 grew from 200 to a 6,000-strong force. The guerrillas rescued downed allied pilots, harassed the Japanese with bombing and assassinated traitors and collaborators. Those Allies POW that managed to escape to China continued the fight in a secretive new organization - the British Army Aid Group (BAAG).As the war draw to a close, the question of reestablishing British control became a highly contentious diplomatic dual between China, USA and Britain, but with the death President of Roosevelt in 1945, decolonization lost its main champion and Britain was able to outmaneuver Chiang Kai Shek, the Chinese Generalissimo, and recover Hong Kong as a British Colony. After three years and eight months of Japanese occupation, Rear Admiral Sir Harcourt sailed into Hong Kong on board the cruiser HMS Swiftsure to reestablish control over the colony and accepted the formal surrender of Japan on 16 September 1945.Now the Hell Will Start
By Koerner, Brendan I.. 2008
An epic saga of hubris , cruelty, and redemption, Now the Hell Will Start tells the remarkable tale of the…
greatest manhunt of World War II. Herman Perry, besieged by the hardships of the Indo-Burmese jungle and the racism meted out by his white commanding officers, found solace in opium and marijuana. But on one fateful day, Perry shot his unarmed white lieutenant in the throes of an emotional collapse and fled into the jungle. Brendan I. Koerner spent nearly five years chasing Perry's ghost to the most remote corners of India and Burma. Along the way, he uncovered the forgotten story of the Ledo Road's GIs, for whom Jim Crow was as powerful an enemy as the Japanese-and for whom Herman Perry, dubbed the jungle king, became an unlikely folk hero. .Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front
By Jeff Rutherford. 2014
By 1944, the overwhelming majority of the German Army had participated in the German war of annihilation in the Soviet…
Union and historians continue to debate the motivations behind the violence unleashed in the east. Jeff Rutherford offers an important new contribution to this debate through a study of combat and the occupation policies of three frontline infantry divisions. He shows that while Nazi racial ideology provided a legitimizing context in which violence was not only accepted but encouraged, it was the Wehrmacht's adherence to a doctrine of military necessity which is critical in explaining why German soldiers fought as they did. This meant that the German Army would do whatever was necessary to emerge victorious on the battlefield. Periods of brutality were intermixed with conciliation as the army's view and treatment of the civilian population evolved based on its appreciation of the larger context of war in the east.The First Heroes
By Craig Nelson. 2002
18 April 1942. Sixteen planes take off from a US Navy carrier in the mid-Pacific. A squadron of young, barely…
trained flyers under a famous daredevil, Jimmy Doolittle, they are America's first retaliation towards Japan since Pearl Harbor. Their mission: to bomb Japan's 's five main cities including Tokyo. Critically compromised by the discovery of the US fleet by Japanese spies, they are not expected to come back. Having successfully delivered their bombs, most of the squadron run out of fuel and are forced to crash land in Japan, China and the Soviet Union. The stories of their journeys home are as heroic as that of the raid itself. Incredibly of the 80 flyers who left the USS . . . 90% eventually returned alive to the US. The First Heroes tells the extraordinary story of the daring raid and shows for the first time the real story of what was to be the turning point in the war against Japan.Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust
By Elhanan Yakira, Michael Swirsky. 2010
This book contains three independent essays, available in English for the first time, as well as a post-scriptum written for…
the English edition. The common theme of the three essays is the uses and abuses of the Holocaust as an ideological arm in the anti-Zionist campaigns. The first essay examines the French group of left-wing Holocaust deniers. The second essay deals with a number of Israeli academics and intellectuals, the so-called post-Zionists, and tries to follow their use of the Holocaust in their different attempts to demonize and delegitimize Israel. The third deals with Hannah Arendt and her relations with Zionism and the State of Israel as reflected in her general work and in Eichmann in Jerusalem; the views that she formulates are used systematically and extensively by anti- and post-Zionists. Elhanan Yakira argues that each of these is a particular expression of an outrage: anti-Zionism and a wholesale delegitimation of Israel.Atrocity, Deviance, and Submarine Warfare: Norms and Practices during the World Wars
By Nachman Ben-Yehuda. 2013
In the early 20th century, the diesel-electric submarine made possible a new type of unrestricted naval warfare. Such brutal practices…
as targeting passenger, cargo, and hospital ships not only violated previous international agreements; they were targeted explicitly at civilians. A deviant form of warfare quickly became the norm. In Atrocity, Deviance, and Submarine Warfare, Nachman Ben-Yehuda recounts the evolution of submarine warfare, explains the nature of its deviance, documents its atrocities, and places these developments in the context of changing national identities and definitions of the ethical, at both social and individual levels. Introducing the concept of cultural cores, he traces the changes in cultural myths, collective memory, and the understanding of unconventionality and deviance prior to the outbreak of World War I. Significant changes in cultural cores, Ben-Yehuda concludes, permitted the rise of wartime atrocities at sea.The Economics of World War II
By Mark Harrison. 1998
This book provides a new quantitative view of the wartime economic experiences of six great powers; the UK, the USA,…
Germany, Italy, Japan and the USSR. What contribution did economics made to war preparedness and to winning or losing the war? What was the effect of wartime experiences on postwar fortunes, and did those who won the war lose the peace? A chapter is devoted to each country, reviewing its economic war potential, military-economic policies and performance, war expenditures and development, while the introductory chapter presents a comparative overview. The result of an international collaborative project, the volume aims to provide a text of statistical reference for students and researchers interested in international and comparative economic history, the history of World War II, the history of economic policy, and comparative economic systems. It embodies the latest in economic analysis and historical research.Axis Midget Submarines
By Paul Wright, Mark Stille. 2014
During World War II, Germany, Japan, and Italy built approximately 2,000 small, inherently stealthy, naval craft to perform special operations…
and conventional naval missions. Much more numerous and more technically advanced than their Allied counterparts, they saw service worldwide, operating in the Pacific, Mediterranean, Black Sea, Indian Ocean, North Sea, and the English channel. Manned by courageous crews, these vessels made daring attacks on Allied ships in heavily protected anchorages using torpedoes and mines. Most notable were attacks against Gibraltar - launched from an Italian cargo vessel interred in nearby neutral Spain that had been converted into a clandestine support base and equipped with an underwater hatch - and Pearl Harbor. They were used against shipping in coastal waters and, near the end of the war, in desperate attempts to offset their opponents' overwhelming naval superiority during the US advance across the Pacific and the Allied amphibious landings in France and Italy. This volume will detail the history, weapons, and operations of German, Japanese, and Italian midget submarines.Patton's Air Force
By David N. Spires. 2014
From the time the Third Army became operational on August 1, 1944, until the guns fell silent on May 8,…
1945, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton's troops covered more ground and took more enemy prisoners than any other Allied army in northwest Europe. Brig. Gen. Otto P. Weyland's XIX Tactical Air Command (TAC) provided air support every step of the way. Their combined success is something of an anomaly; air-ground relationships are notoriously confrontational and plagued with inter-service competition. How did Patton and Weyland work together to achieve such astounding success? Drawing on exclusive access to official records, David N. Spires finds that this success was due to four key developments: the maturation of tactical aviation doctrine, effective organizational procedures, a technical revolution in equipment, and, above all, the presence of pragmatic men of goodwill who made the system work. He focuses on the highly effective personal relationship between Patton and Weyland -- men who respected, trusted, and fully relied on each other and their respective subordinates. This collaboration extended all the way down the chain of command: Patton's ground troops and Weyland's airmen trained together in England, and so by the time they entered combat, they operated together as a single unit. Contrary to conventional wisdom, air-ground relationships in the field can be cooperative rather than confrontational. Today's air and ground officers can continue to benefit from the amazing success of the Third Army and the XIX TAC.War in Val d'Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944
By Virginia Nicholson, Iris Origo. 2001
In the Second World War Italy was torn apart by German armies civil war and the Allied…
invasion In a corner of Tuscany one woman born in England married to an Italian kept a record of daily life in a country at war Iris Origo s powerful diary War in Val d Orcia is the spare and vivid account of what happened when a peaceful farming valley became a battleground At great personal risk the Origos gave food and shelter to partisans deserters and refugees They took in evacuees and as the front drew closer they faced the knowledge that the lives of thirty-two small children depended on them Origo writes with sensitivity and generosity and a story emerges of human acts of heroism and compassion and the devastation that war can bringA Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940
By Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Iris Origo, Katia Lysy. 2017
In 1939 it was not a foregone conclusion that Mussolini would enter World War II on the side of Hitler…
In this previously unpublished and only recently discovered diary Iris Origo author of the classic War in Val d Orcia provides a vivid account of how Mussolini decided on a course of action that would devastate his country and ultimately destroy his regime Though the British-born Origo lived with her Italian husband on an estate in a remote part of Tuscany she was supremely well-connected and regularly in touch with intellectual and diplomatic circles in Rome where her godfather William Phillips was the American ambassador Her diary describes the Fascist government s growing infatuation with Nazi Germany as Hitler s armies marched triumphantly across Europe and the campaign of propaganda and intimidation that was mounted in support of its new aims The book ends with the birth of Origo s daughter and Origo s decision to go to Rome to work with prisoners of war at the Italian Red Cross Together with War in Val d Orcia A Chill in the Air o ers an indispensable record of Italy at war as well as a thrilling story of a formidable woman s transformation from observer to actor at a great historical turning pointWhen Churchill Slaughtered Sheep
By Giles Milton. 2015
In this marvellous collection of fascinating footnotes, Giles Milton delves into little-known stories from history. Covering everything from adventure, war,…
murder and slavery to espionage, including the stories of the last secret of the Cold War, the man who broke into Auschwitz, the worst banker in history and the woman who gave birth for Hitler, these tales deserve to be told.On the Defensive
By Sharon Marquart. 2015
On the Defensive considers how our ethical responses to the Nazi camps have unintentionally repressed and denied the experiences of…
their victims. Through detailed readings of survivor narratives, particularly the works of political deportees Jorge Semprun and Charlotte Delbo, Sharon Marquart examines how well-intentioned people - including victims, their family members, and readers of witness literature - respond to such testimony in ways that are understood as ethical by their communities but serve instead to ignore victims' experiences.As Marquart shows, collective disasters such as the Holocaust expose the limitations of our ethical theories. To cope with this instability we withdraw and defend ourselves through inattentive and formulaic responses that turn a blind eye to the plight of victims. Challenging contemporary theorizations of community, ethics, testimony, and trauma, On the Defensive is a far-reaching reflection on the ways in which communal understandings of our duties and responsibilities to others can facilitate the denial of an atrocity's horrors.MiG-3 Aces of World War 2
By Dmitriy Khazanov, Andrey Yurgenson. 2012
Created by ex-Polikarpov designers Ivanovic Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich, the MiG-1/3 family of fighters was built to satisfy a Soviet…
Air Force requirement for an advanced, fast, high altitude fighter. Entering service in the spring of 1941, the problematic MiG-1 had its handling problems rectified with the hasty production of the MiG-3 - the latter had its Mikulin engine moved further forward, increased outer wing dihedral and a strengthened fuselage. As of 22 June 1941, Air Force manoeuvre units in the five borderline military districts could field 917 MiG-3s. Many of these were destroyed on the ground when the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa. Nevertheless, enough examples survived to allow pilots such as Stepan Suprun (Twice Hero of the Soviet Union), Aleksandr Pokryshkin (Thrice Hero of the Soviet Union) and Lev Shestakov (Hero of the Soviet Union) to claim a number of victories on the type. Early successes by units such as 23rd and 28th IAPs resulted in 35 aerial victories being claimed by MiG-3 pilots in the first eight days of the Great Patriotic War. Other units enjoyed similar levels of success, with MiG-3-equipped 15 and 31st IAP proving themselves to be the most combat-ready fighter units on the Northwestern Front. By the end of 1941, a handful of pilots had 'made ace' flying the MiG-3, despite the Soviet air forces having taken a fearful beating at the hands of the Luftwaffe. In 1942 MiG pilots actively participated in the defence of Leningrad, Moscow, Odessa, Kiev and Sevastopol, with still more aviators becoming aces as the year progressed. Amongst them was Aleksandr Pokryshkin, the second-highest scoring Russian ace with 59 victories to his name. He claimed his first five kills while flying a MiG-3 with 55th IAP. Stalin terminated MiG-3 production in October 1941, although the fighter remained in frontline service in large numbers until mid-1942. Surviving examples continued to serve with national air defence regiments until 1943.B-24 Liberator Units of the Fifteenth Air Force
By Mark Rolfe, Robert Dorr. 2000
The B-24 was heavily utilised in the North African and Mediterranean theatres by the USAAF's Fifteenth Air Force, with operations…
over the Ploesti oilfields in Rumania being some of the most famous missions undertaken by the big American 'heavy' in World War II (1939-1945). The stirling work of the Fifteenth Air Force is often overshadowed by the glamorous 'Mighty Eighth', yet the men flying the B-24 fought ceaselessly right through to VE Day. This is the third of five titles planned to chart the operational history of the Consolidated heavy bomber, and is the first single volume to exclusively cover the Fifteenth Air Force's B-24 units.In The Time Of The Americans
By David Fromkin. 1995
Coming of age during World War I and attaining their finest hour in World War II and the Cold War,…
these men -- FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur -- transformed America from an isolated frontier nation into a global superpower. As he tells their stories, Fromkin, author of A Peace to End All Peace, shows how this generation not only made America great but largely succeeded in making it a force for good.Between the Dances
By Jacqueline Dinan. 2015
The start of World War 2 changed women's lives and their place in Australian society forever. Thousands of women ventured…
where few had gone before - into the services and workplaces previously considered the sole preserve of men. In preparation for her book Between the Dances, Jacqueline Dinan, interviewed over three hundred women around Australia to collect the last first hand stories from World War 2. Revealing poignant and personal conversations, photographs and letters, Between the Dances is a testament to real life during World War 2. From Malta to Australia, New Zealand to the UK, the challenges and adventures faced by these women were unprecedented. Their passion, courage, resilience and commitment during wartime were all a precursor to the astonishing changes brought about by this incredible generation. For the first time, women were doing their bit as nurses in war zones, members of the services, farmhands, factory workers or volunteers in community service. The last tradition left was the weekly dance, which ceremoniously brought these courageous women and men together for a quickstep, fox trot and brief respite from the rigours of wartime. The accounts are enhanced by poignant, amusing and insightful anecdotes along with scores of previously unpublished and unique photographs from personal albums. Jacqueline's former experience was in corporate and art communications and events, before she embarked on her own public relations and events business. Now a regular speaker with the Country Women's Association, Australian Rotary Clubs, Legacy, Red Cross and Memorial groups, Jacqueline has become a well-known figure amongst The Returned & Services League of Australia.Italian Aces of World War 2
By Richard Caruana, Giorgio Apostolo. 2000
Flying aircraft such as the Macchi 200-202, Fiat G.50 and biplane Fiat CR.42, the Italian fighter pilots were recognised by…
their Allied counterparts as brave opponents blessed with sound flying abilities, but employing under-gunned and underpowered equipment. Following the Italian surrender in September 1943, a number of aces continued to take the fight to the Allies as part of the Luftwaffe-run ANR, which was equipped with far more potent equipment such as the Bf 109G, Macchi 205V and Fiat G.55. Flying these types, the handful of ANR squadrons continued to oppose Allied bombing raids on northern Italy until VE-Day.P-36 Hawk Aces of World War 2
By Chris Davey, Lionel Persyn. 2009
The Curtiss P-36 began its life in the US where it was considered a revolution in performance design in comparison…
to other US fighters. Its pilots achieved some of the first American victories of the war and many went on to become aces. One P-36 pilot, Frances Gabreski, became the leading US ace in the European Theater. Yet by the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the P-40 was increasingly supplanting the P-36, which the US then exported to France under the guise of the Hawk 75. Flown by the French, captured by the Germans, sold to the Finns, transferred to India and Africa, and even incorporated into the RAF, the Hawk 75 saw service in every theater of operations and in a variety of combat environments. This book depicts the fascinating life of an aircraft that fought on both sides in the war, including the oft-overlooked Vichy French Air Force, with color artwork and photographs illustrating just how many national P-36 variants there were. First hand accounts recreate many of the conflicts that gave rise to over 60 pilots from several nations who became aces flying P-36 variants. This volume completes the Osprey Aircraft of the Aces coverage of the Curtiss Hawk family.Long Reach
By Michael O'Leary. 2000
This volume focuses on the little known official Army Air Force report commissioned by the Eighth Air Force's VIII Fighter…
Command (FC) in May 1944. The detailed document chronicled the experiences of 24 pilots who had seen extensive service in the frontline escorting B-17s and B-24s on daylight raids deep into Germany. Briefed to provide a candid report on combat flying that could be used as a teaching 'manual' for potential fighter pilots, the VIII FC veterans openly discuss their secrets to success, and survival in the deadly skies over occupied Europe. Exactly half of those pilots who contributed to The Long Reach subsequently achieved ace status.