At the end of World War II, a garrison of the Twenty-eighth Japanese Army is deployed to Ramree Island, off the coast of Burma, to fight the Allies’ severe counteroffensive. While on the island, Superior Private Minoru Kasuga questions a local villager about the terrible smell coming from the saltwater creek. To his horror, the old man tells him it is the stench of death from the breath of man-eating crocodiles that inhabit Myinkhon Creek.

Fierce fighting drives the battalion to the island’s east coast, and they must evacuate to Burma by crossing the creek. Just before they embark, Kasuga smells the same putrid odor that he’d questioned the villager about and warns his commanding officer of the underwater danger. His sergeant ignores him, thinking Kasuga is obsessed with wild stories from the villagers, and he tells the soldiers to cross the creek.

Ordered to save the penned-in garrison, Second Lieutenant Yoshihisa Sumi arrives on Ramree Island. But what awaits him at Myinkhon Creek is a sight too horrible to contemplate…

In 1915, two spirited Australian sisters join the war effort as nurses, escaping the confines of their father’s farm and carrying a guilty secret with them. Used to tending the sick as they are, nothing could have prepared them for what they confront, first near Gallipoli, then on the Western Front.

Yet amid the carnage, Naomi and Sally Durance become the friends they never were at home and find themselves courageous in the face of extreme danger, as well as the hostility they encounter from some on their own side. There is great bravery, humor, and compassion, too, and the inspiring example of the remarkable women they serve alongside. In France, where Naomi nurses in a hospital set up by the eccentric Lady Tarlton while Sally works in a casualty clearing station, each meets an exceptional man: the kind of men for whom they might give up some of their precious independence—if only they all survive.

At once vast in scope and extraordinarily intimate, brings World War I to vivid, concrete life from an unusual perspective. A searing and profoundly moving tale, it pays tribute to men and women of extraordinary moral resilience, even in the face of the incomprehensible horrors of modern war.

The German invasion of Russia in 1941 – Operation Barbarossa – was shrouded in the utmost secrecy. Using German sources, the author has investigated an important aspect of the pre-attack deception, the degree to which the German public and armed forces were themselves caught unawares.

No single weapon has spread so much raw power to so many people in so little time—and had such a devastating effect—as the AK-47 assault rifle. This book examines the legacy of this world-changing weapon, from its creation as means of fighting the Nazis to its ubiquity today in every kind of conflict, from civil wars in Africa to gang wars in L.A.

Phil Klay’s takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos.

In “Redeployment”, a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in suburbia, surrounded by people “who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died.” In “After Action Report”, a Lance Corporal seeks expiation for a killing he didn’t commit, in order that his best friend will be unburdened. A Morturary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remains—of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both. A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious Colonel. And in the darkly comic "Money as a Weapons System”, a young Foreign Service Officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball. These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship and violence that make up a soldier’s daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldier’s homecoming.

In , acclaimed journalist Robert D. Kaplan continues his exploration of the American military’s challenging and varied commitments around the world. From protecting sea lanes, to providing disaster relief, to preparing for potential military confrontation with North Korea and Iran, Kaplan describes the astonishing, vital, and often unacknowledged operations regularly performed by American military personnel in the air, at sea, and on the ground.

Vivid and illuminating, this book takes us deep into the highly technical and exotic cultures of the armed forces, telling soldiers’ stories from the perspective of the troops on the ground.

A fascinating, unprecedented first-hand look at the soldiers on the front lines on the Global War on Terror. Plunging deep into midst of some of the hottest conflicts on the globe, Robert D. Kaplan takes us through mud and jungle, desert and dirt to the men and women on the ground who are leading the charge against threats to American security. These soldiers, fighting in thick Colombian jungles or on dusty Afghani plains, are the forefront of the new American foreign policy, a policy being implemented one soldier at a time. As Kaplan brings us inside their thoughts, feelings, and operations, these modern grunts provide insight and understanding into the War on Terror, bringing the war, which sometimes seems so distant, vividly to life.

Robert D. Kaplan is one of our leading international journalists, someone who can explain the most complicated and volatile regions and show why they’re relevant to our world. In , Kaplan illuminates the fault lines in the Horn of Africa, which is emerging as a crucial region for America’s ongoing war on terrorism.

Reporting from Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea, Kaplan examines the factors behind the famine that ravaged the region in the 1980s, exploring the ethnic, religious, and class conflicts that are crucial for understanding the region today. He offers a new foreword and afterword that show how the nations have developed since the famine, and why this region will only grow more important to the United States. Wielding his trademark ability to blend on-the-ground reporting and cogent analysis, Robert D. Kaplan introduces us to a fascinating part of the world, one that it would behoove all of us to know more about.

A fast-moving, action-packed account of Granger Korff’s two years’ service during 1980/81 with 1 Parachute Battalion at the height of the South African ‘bush war’ in South West Africa (Namibia) and Angola. Apart from the ‘standard’ counter-insurgency activities of Fireforce operations, ambushing and patrols, to contact and destroy SWAPO guerrillas, he was involved in several massive South African Defence Force (SADF) conventional cross-border operations, such as Protea, Daisy and Carnation, into Angola to take on FAPLA (Angolan MPLA troops) and their Cuban and Soviet allies.

Having grown up as an East Rand rebel street-fighter, Korff’s military ‘career’ is marred with controversy. He is always in trouble—going AWOL on the eve of battle in order to get to the front; facing a court martial for beating up, and reducing to tears, a sergeant-major in front of the troops; fist-fighting with Drug Squad agents; arrested at gunpoint after the gruelling seven-week, 700km Recce selection endurance march—are but some of the colorful anecdotes that lace this account of service in the SADF.

Korff’s writing is frontline punchy, brutal, self-deprecating and at times humorous but always honest, providing the reader with what it was like to be one of apartheid’s grunt soldiers.

It was a tank battle exceeded in size and significance only by the famous defeat of Germany’s Panzer force near Kursk in 1943. And yet, little is known about this weeklong clash of more than two thousand Soviet and German tanks in a stretch of northwestern Ukraine that came to be known as the “bloody triangle.”

This book offers the first in-depth account of this critical battle, which began on 24 June 1941, just two days into Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

Author Victor Kamenir describes the forces arrayed against each other across that eighteen-hundred-square-mile-triangle in northwestern Ukraine. Providing detailed orders of battle for both Wehrmacht and Red Army Forces and contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet and German tanks, he shows how the Germans slowly and decisively overwhelmed the Russians, apparently opening the way to Moscow and the ultimate defeat of the Soviet Union.

And yet, as Kamenir’s account makes clear, even at this early stage of the Russo-German war the Soviets were able to slow down and even halt the Nazi juggernaut. Finally, the handful of days gained by the Red Army did prove to have been decisive when the Wehrmacht attack stalled at the gates of Moscow in the dead of winter, foreshadowing the end for the Germans.

“During the summer of 1941, a marshy area of the Ukraine witnessed a battle between over 2,000 tanks in a pivotal, early armor clash of World War II. Victor Kamenir details the little known battle between Soviet and German forces that was a harbinger of things to come on the Eastern Front… Told largely in the words of the men who were there, this informative history shed new light on how the Soviet tank units melted away under the merciless onslaught of their determined and well equipped adversary. From the early planning stages, when German intelligence realized the Soviet command structure would more than likely be slow to respond to a rapidly changing tactical situation, to the final unsuccessful counteroffensive by the Russians, this book offers a complete picture of the entire event. Kamenir’s insightful analysis also compares and contrasts the strengths and weaknesses of the equipment utilized by both sides in the struggle.”

An almost total re-write, including end notes that assist the reader down the path of a convincing, alternate history. An alternate history based on facts and logic.

• On the border of West Germany; Stalin has 60 mechanized divisions, composed of the battle hardened veterans.

• The US and Britain have demobilized their armies.

• Britain is bankrupt and rationing bread. Its empire is crumbling and its colonies are in revolt.

• Tens of thousands of USAAF and RAF planes have been dumped into the ocean, pushed into piles, crushed and left rotting in jungles around the world.

• Gangs of deserters roam the European country side.

• The US has entered a period of isolationism.

• The people of Europe are starving.

• The Germans are being brutally punished for their part in the war.

• The Soviet Union has acquired the major secrets of every strategic weapons system that the West has developed since 1935, including the atomic bomb. They have prototypes of every major German Wonder Weapon system produced since 1943.

• Greece, Italy and even France are in danger of turning Communist.

• The US and Britain have large Communist parties with thousands of sympathizers

• 90% of the industry in the US and Britain has been transformed from producing weapons, to consumer goods.

• Europe is in chaos and Capitalism has failed in the eyes of many.

These are facts, and this was the state of the world in May 1946. This alternate history proposes that this was the opportune time for Stalin to strike. This was his best chance of furthering the cause of Communism. This was his moment.

Over 800,000 hits on the AlternativeHistory.com website.

These books are not written in any traditional style but is a combination of historical facts, oral histories, third person and first person accounts. I was inspired by (1984 in literature1984) by Studs Terkel and Cornelius Ryan’s wonderful books “The Longest Day” and “A Bridge too Far.” There is no hero or character development. The story is the story and not the characters. We hear from those who felt, saw, ran, lost and won as well as from officials and historians. The story is told using the techniques of reporters, oral historians, historians and politicians. Although told in a short stories, vignettes and in an episodic manner, the novel builds on what has gone before.

This second book is set in the World War Three 1946 universe. A universe where Stalin Learns of “Operation Unthinkable”, Churchill’s ill-conceived plan to invade the USSR. He strikes first and attacks the West when it is at its weakest point and the Red Army is at its strongest. In Book Two we continue to explore one of the greatest “what ifs” in history. Who would have prevailed the Red Army or the forces of the Free World in an all out war, after the defeat of the Axis powers?

As Book One World War Three 1946 — The Red Tide — Stalin Strikes First ends, we find the Red Army has smash the feeble western armies in Germany and then France. America’s atomic scientists have been incapacitated by a dirty bomb containing polonium, smuggled in and detonated by a real NKVD spy George Koval. Who in our reality had access to the world’s only supply of the deadliest substance on earth, when he worked on producing the Mark III atomic bomb. Sometimes facts are stranger than fiction.

The Allies have temporarily stopped Stalin on the border of Spain and France where the Pyrenees Mountains makes a formidable barrier. As the Soviet version of the Blitzkrieg grinds to a temporary halt, Britain is given a chance to see the error of its wicked, capitalistic ways and to join the workers of the world. When this offer is rejected the Red Air Force prepares for an all-out attack with odds approaching five to one. Will the many, once again owe so much to the few of the RAF?

And where are the Americans? Have they abandoned their greatest ally? Have they scrapped too many of their planes and can they retool their economy, an economy that has switched almost totally to consumer products. Can they once again become the arsenal of democracy? Will they be in time to save the Royal Air Force?

Using a combination of their own skills and well-designed late war planes like the Tu 2S, the Yak 3, Yak 9 and the Lag 7 along with their newest jet fighters the MiG 9 Fargo and Yak 15 Feather, the Soviets will battle the Spitfires, Typhoons, Lincolns and Meteors of the RAF in a second battle for the skies over the British Isles.

Stalin is convinced that the next war, against the capitalist Amerikosi, will be in the air over Europe and the Soviet industrial machine starts to concentrate on air to air and surface to air missiles. These missiles are improved versions of the German Wasserfal and X4 missile. These Nazi wonder weapons were not developed in time to save the Thousand Year Reich. Brought to fruition by the Soviet industrial complex under the guidance of Sergo Peskov, the missiles wreak early havoc to the bomber streams of the RAF and USAAF. The era of massed attacks, by the manned strategic bomber, appears to be over.

These books are not written in any traditional style. They are a combination of historical facts, oral histories, third person and first person fictional accounts. They read more like an oral history or an entertaining history book complete with footnotes. I was inspired by “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two by Studs Terkel (1985 Pulitzer Prize for General Fiction) and Cornelius Ryan’s wonderful books “The Longest Day” and “A Bridge too Far”. I was especially captivated by Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Where the author explores the history of everyday objects and tells stories that captivate and educate all of us on the history of… well everything. Hopefully I have used their techniques of storytelling competently enough to entertain you for a few days.

A dogged, absurd quest through the nightmare of the Syrian civil war Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work is the new novel from the greatest chronicler of Syria’s ongoing and catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination. Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is—after all—only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There’s only one problem: Their country is a war zone. With the landscape of their childhood now a labyrinth of competing armies, whose actions are at once arbitrary and lethal, the siblings’ decision to set aside their differences and honour their father’s request quickly escalates from a dutiful commitment into an epic and life-threatening quest. Syria is no longer any place for heroes, and the trials that confront the family along their journey—while they are captured and recaptured, interrogated, imprisoned, and bombed—will prove to have enormous consequences for them all. A mixture of brutal, front-line reportage and surreal humor evocative of Beckett and Kafka, Death Is Hard Work is an unforgettable journey into a contemporary heart of darkness.

This is the untold story of the small group of men who have devised the plans and shaped the policies on how to use the Bomb. The book (first published in 1983) explores the secret world of these strategists of the nuclear age and brings to light a chapter in American political and military history never before revealed.

The Battle of Iwo Jima has been memorialized innumerable times as the subject of countless books and motion pictures, most recently Clint Eastwood’s films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, and no wartime photo is more famous than Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning image of Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi. Yet most Americans know only one side of this pivotal and bloody battle. First published in Japan to great acclaim, becoming a bestseller and a prize-winner, So Sad to Fall in Battle shows us the struggle, through the eyes of Japanese commander Tadamichi Kuribayashi, one of the most fascinating and least-known figures of World War II. As author Kumiko Kakehashi demonstrates, Kuribayashi was far from the stereotypical fanatic Japanese warrior. Unique among his country’s officers, he refused to risk his men’s lives in suicidal banzai attacks, instead creating a defensive, insurgent style of combat that eventually became the Japanese standard. On Iwo Jima, he eschewed the special treatment due to him as an officer, enduring the same difficult conditions as his men, and personally walked every inch of the island to plan the positions of thousands of underground bunkers and tunnels. The very flagpole used in the renowned photograph was a pipe from a complex water collection system the general himself engineered. Exclusive interviews with survivors reveal that as the tide turned against him, Kuribayashi displayed his true mettle: Though offered a safer post on another island, he chose to stay with his men, fighting alongside them in a final, fearless, and ultimately hopeless three-hour siege. After thirty-six cataclysmic days on Iwo Jima, Kurbiayashi’s troops were responsible for the deaths of a third of all U.S. Marines killed during the entire four-year Pacific conflict, making him, in the end, America’s most feared—and respected—foe. Ironically, it was Kuribayashi’s own memories of his military training in America in the 1920s, and his admiration for this country’s rich, gregarious, and self-reliant people, that made him fear ever facing them in combat—a feeling that some suspect prompted his superiors to send him to Iwo Jima, where he met his fate. Along with the words of his son and daughter, which offer unique insight into the private man, Kuribayashi’s own letters cited extensively in this book paint a stirring portrait of the circumstances that shaped him. So Sad to Fall in Battle tells a fascinating, never-before-told story and introduces America, as if for the first time, to one of its most worthy adversaries.

He took part in a massacre, can he ever forgive himself? 1944. The German armies are collapsing on all fronts. In a church in a remote French village, 250 women and children are ruthlessly slaughtered by desperate Germans acting under orders they dare not disobey. And for Sergeant Herzog, awarded the Iron Cross for his part in the massacre, it is the beginning of another war. A war of principle as he faces court-martial for his refusal to wear the Cross. A war of strength and courage when, humiliated and stripped of rank, he is sent to the Eastern Front to fight in the bloodiest retreat in history. A war of pride when he finds himself confronting the arrogant Captain Ritter—an enemy as ruthless as the approaching Russians… Blood and Honour is a gripping tale of a man’s fight for honour in the midst of the horrors of war. Perfect for fans of Ken Follett and Andy McNab. Wolf Kruger is a pseudonym of Shaun Hutson. After being expelled from school, he worked at many jobs all of which he was sacked from—before becoming a professional author in 1983. He has since written over 30 bestselling novels as well as writing for radio, magazines and television.

**"As a Long Islander endlessly fascinated by events that happened in a place I call home, I hope with this book to give the secret six the credit they didn't get in life. The Culper spies represent all the patriotic Americans who give so much for their country but, because of the nature of their work, will not or cannot** **take a bow or even talk about their missions."** **-- Brian Kilmeade** When General George Washington beat a hasty retreat from New York City in August 1776, many thought the American Revolution might soon be over. Instead, Washington rallied--thanks in large part to a little-known, top-secret group called the Culper Spy Ring. Washington realized that he couldn't beat the British with military might, so he recruited a sophisticated and deeply secretive intelligence network to infiltrate New York. So carefully guarded were the members' identities that one spy's name was not uncovered until the twentieth century, and...

Kipling was reported missing, believed killed, in his first battle on the Western Front. From this time he was constantly in pain from a gastric ulcer. He published some (censored) articles of war journalism in 1915, collected as and .

In the final months of the Second World War in 1945, the German Army was in full retreat on both its Western and Eastern Fronts. British and American troops were poised to cross the River Rhine in the west, while in the East the vast Soviet war machine was steam-rolling the soldiers of the Third Reich back towards the capital, Berlin. Even in retreat, the German Army was still a force to be reckoned with and vigorously defended every last bridge, castle, town and village against the massive Russian onslaught.

Tony Le Tissier has interviewed a wide range of former German Army and SS soldiers to provide ten vivid first-hand accounts of the fighting retreat that, for one soldier, ended in Hitler’s Chancellery building in the ruins of Berlin in April 1945. The dramatic descriptions of combat are contrasted with insights into the human dimensions of these desperate battles, reminding the reader that many of the German soldiers whose stories we read shared similar values to the average British ‘Tommy’ or the American GI and were not all crazed Nazis.

Illustrated with photographs of the main characters and specially commissioned maps identifying the location and course of the battles, is a fascinating read for anyone who is interested in the final days of the Second World War.

From the air, the Pacific island of Iwo Jima looks like a large, gray pork chop. Its strategic location, midway between the U.S. B-29 airfields on the Marianas Islands and the Japanese home islands meant that it had to be seized no matter what the cost. On February 19, 1945, the invasion of Iwo Jima was launched. It became the greatest battle fought by the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II. From it came the most famous image of the war, the raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi. When it ended a month later, the Marines had suffered 20,000 casualties—almost 5,000 men killed in action. And an astonishing twenty-six Marines were awarded America's highest decoration for valor, the Medal of Honor.