Download or read book Assignment To Catastrophe Vol 2 The Fall Of France June 1940 written by Major-General Sir Edward Louis Spears and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German victory in France at the onset of the Second World War was sudden, brutal and brilliant; by contrast the British and French preparations were miserable, faulty, badly carried through and fraught with mistrust. In the midst of these Allied responses was the eminent liaison officer Major-General Sir Edward Louis Spears, sent by the new prime Minister Winston Churchill to be his representative to the French Prime Minister. Spears was very well suited to his role as he had seen much military service and he had served in a senior liaison capacity between the British and French armies during the First World War. Keenly observant, well connected, urbane and respected by many of the French politicians and generals, his two volume memoirs are justly famous.

Download or read book Assignment to Catastrophe Vol 2 written by Sir Edward Louis Major-general Spears and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: General Spears tells the full story of his mission as Sir Winston Churchill's personal representative with the French government in 1940.

Download or read book Never Surrender written by John Kelly and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “WWII scholar John Kelly triumphs again” (Vanity Fair) in this remarkably vivid account of a key moment in Western history: The critical six months in 1940 when Winston Churchill debated whether England should fight Nazi Germany—and then decided to “never surrender.” London in April, 1940, is a place of great fear and conflict. The Germans have taken Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. The Nazi war machine now menaces Britain, even as America remains uncommitted to providing military aid. Should Britain negotiate with Germany? The members of the War Cabinet bicker, yell, and are divided. Churchill, leading the faction to fight, and Lord Halifax, cautioning that prudence is the way to survive, attempt to usurp one another by any means possible. In Never Surrender, we feel we are alongside these complex and imperfect men, determining the fate of the British Empire, and perhaps, the world. Drawing on the War Cabinet papers, other government documents, private diaries, newspaper accounts, and memoirs, historian John Kelly tells the story of the summer of 1940. Kelly takes readers from the battlefield to Parliament, to the government ministries, to the British high command, to the desperate Anglo-French conference in Paris and London, to the American embassy in London, and to life with the ordinary Britons. We see Churchill seize the historical moment and ultimately inspire his government, military, and people to fight. Kelly brings to life one of the most heroic moments of the twentieth century and intimately portrays some of its largest players—Churchill, Lord Halifax, Hitler, FDR, Joe Kennedy, and others. Never Surrender is a fabulous, grand narrative of a crucial period in World War II and the men and women who shaped it. “For lovers of minute-by-minute history, it’s a feast” (Huffington Post).

Download or read book Assignment to Catastrophe written by Edward Louis Spears and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Military Effectiveness Volume 2 The Interwar Period written by Allan R. Millett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This three-volume study examines the questions raised by the performance of the military institutions of France, Germany, Russia, the United States, Great Britain, Japan and Italy in the period from 1914 to 1945. Leading military historians deal with the different national approaches to war and military power at the tactical, operational, strategic, and political levels. They form the basis for a fundamental re-examination of how military organizations have performed in the first half of the twentieth century. Volume 2 covers the interwar period. Volumes 1 and 3 address World War I and World War II, respectively. Now in a new edition, with a new introduction by the editors, these classic volumes will remain invaluable for military historians and social scientists in their examination of national security and military issues. They will also be essential reading for future military leaders at Staff and War Colleges.

Download or read book Petain written by Nicholas Atkin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pétain (1856-1951) remains one of the most controversial figures in the history of modern France. He was saviour of his country at Verdun in 1916 during the First World War, but tried for treason as head of state of the collaborationist Vichy government after World War II. Were his actions those of a traitor? - or a patriot facing the total disintegration of his country? In exploring the actions of this controversial figure, Nicholas Atkin also reveals the divisions and uncertainties of France herself.

Download or read book Winston S Churchill Finest Hour 1939 1941 written by Martin Gilbert and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2015-04-05 with total page 1031 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sixth volume in the official biography: “A milestone, a monument, a magisterial achievement” (Andrew Roberts, author of The Storm of War). Starting with the outbreak of war in September 1939 and ending with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, this volume in the epic biography of Winston S. Churchill draws on remarkably diverse material: from the War Cabinet and other government records to Churchill’s own archive and diaries and letters of his private secretariat to the recollections of those who worked most closely with him. On the day Hitler invaded Poland, Churchill, aged sixty-four, had been out of office for ten years. Two days later, he became First Lord of the Admiralty, in charge of British naval policy and at the center of war direction. In May 1940 he became prime minister, leading his nation during a time of grave danger and setbacks. His first year and a half as prime minister included the Dunkirk evacuation, the fall of France, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the Battle of the Atlantic, the struggle in the Western Desert, and Hitler’s invasion of Russia. By the end of 1940, Britain under Churchill’s leadership had survived the onslaught and was making plans to continue the war against an enemy of unlimited ambition and ferocious will. One of Churchill’s inner circle said: “We who worked with Churchill every day of the war still saw at most a quarter of his daily tasks and worries.” Martin Gilbert has pieced together the whole, setting in context much hitherto scattered and secret evidence, in order to give an intimate and fascinating account of the architect of Britain’s “finest hour.” “The most scholarly study of Churchill in war and peace ever written.” —Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times

Download or read book Two Roads to War written by Robin Higham and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noted aviation historian Robin Higham has written this comparative study of the evolution of the French and British air arms from 1918 to 1940 to determine why the Armée de l’Air was defeated in June 1940 but the Royal Air Force was able to win the battle over Britain in September. After analyzing the structure, men, and matériel of the air arms, and the government and economic infrastructure of both countries, he concludes that the French force was dominated by the Armée de Terre, had no suitably powerful aero engines, and suffered from the chaos of French politics. In contrast, the independent RAF evolved into a sophisticated, scientifically based force, supported by consistent government practices. Higham’s thorough examination, however, finds the British not without error.

Download or read book Churchill 1940 1945 written by Walter Reid and published by Birlinn. This book was released on 2011-08-12 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April 1945, Churchill said to Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, 'There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them!' When he became Prime Minister on 10 May 1940 Churchill was without allies. Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain saved Britain from immediate defeat, but it was evident that Britain alone could never win the war. Churchill looked to America. He said that until Pearl Harbor 'no lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt'. But would Roosevelt have entered the war if Pearl Harbor had not taken place? Until then his actions were ambivalent, and even afterwards America's policy was largely shaped by self-interest and her idea of what a post-war world should be like.Lend-Lease, for instance, was far from what Churchill publicly described as 'the most unsordid act in the history of any nation', but rather a tool of American policy. Churchill's account of relations with his allies and associates was sanitised for the historical record and has been accepted uncritically. In reality he had to battle with the generals and the CIGS, Tory backbenchers and the War Cabinet, de Gaulle and the Free French and - above all - the Americans. Even his wife, Clementine, could on occasions be remarkably unsupportive. He told his secretary, 'The difficulty is not in winning the war; it is in persuading people to let you win it - persuading fools'. Walter Reid, the author of several acclaimed works on 20th-century military history, brings together the result of recent research to create a powerful narrative which reveals how much time and energy was devoted to fighting the war that was excluded from the official accounts, the war with the allies.

Download or read book Embassies in Crisis written by Rogelia Pastor-Castro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embassies are integral to international diplomacy, their staff instrumental to inter-governmental dialogue, strategic partnerships, trading relationships and cultural exchange. But Embassies are also discreet political spaces. Notionally sovereign territory ‘immune’ from local jurisdiction, in moments of crisis Embassies have often been targets of protest and sites of confrontation. It is this aspect of Embassy experience that this collection of essays explores and Embassies in Crisis revisits flashpoints in the recent lives of Embassies overseas at times of acute political crisis. Ranging across multiple British and other embassy crises, unusually, this book offers equal insights to international historians and members of the diplomatic community.

Download or read book The British Expeditionary Force 1939 40 written by E. Smalley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between September 1939 and June 1940, the British Expeditionary Force confronted the German threat to France and Flanders with a confused mind-set, an uncertain skills-set and an uncompetitive capability. This book explores the formation's origins, the scale of defeat in France and the campaign's considerable legacy.

Download or read book Les Parisiennes written by Anne Sebba and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Anne Sebba has the nearly miraculous gift of combining the vivid intimacy of the lives of women during The Occupation with the history of the time. This is a remarkable book.” —Edmund de Waal, New York Times bestselling author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes New York Times bestselling author Anne Sebba explores a devastating period in Paris's history and tells the stories of how women survived—or didn’t—during the Nazi occupation. Paris in the 1940s was a place of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation, and secrets. During the occupation, the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and danger lurked on every corner. While Parisian men were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories, the women of Paris were left behind where they would come face to face with the German conquerors on a daily basis, as waitresses, shop assistants, or wives and mothers, increasingly desperate to find food to feed their families as hunger became part of everyday life. When the Nazis and the puppet Vichy regime began rounding up Jews to ship east to concentration camps, the full horror of the war was brought home and the choice between collaboration and resistance became unavoidable. Sebba focuses on the role of women, many of whom faced life and death decisions every day. After the war ended, there would be a fierce settling of accounts between those who made peace with or, worse, helped the occupiers and those who fought the Nazis in any way they could.

Download or read book A Bibliography of British History 1914 1989 written by Keith Robbins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 962 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing over 25,000 entries, this unique volume will be absolutely indispensable for all those with an interest in Britain in the twentieth century. Accessibly arranged by theme, with helpful introductions to each chapter, a huge range of topics is covered. There is a comprehensiveindex.

Download or read book The forgotten French written by Nicholas Atkin and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. It is widely assumed that the French in the British Isles during the Second World War were fully fledged supporters of General de Gaulle, and that, across the channel at least, the French were a ‘nation of resisters’. This study reveals that most exiles were on British soil by chance rather than by design, and that many were not sure whether to stay. Overlooked by historians, who have concentrated on the ‘Free French’ of de Gaulle, these were the ‘Forgotten French’: refugees swept off the beaches of Dunkirk; servicemen held in camps after the Franco-German armistice; Vichy consular officials left to cater for their compatriots; and a sizeable colonist community based mainly in London. Drawing on little-known archival sources, this study examines the hopes and fears of those communities who were bitterly divided among themselves, some being attracted to Pétain as much as to de Gaulle.

Download or read book Supreme Command written by Eliot A. Cohen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SUPREME COMMAND is about leadership in wartime, or more precisely about the tension between two kinds of leadership, civil and military. Eliot Cohen uncovers the nature of strategy-making by looking at four great democratic war statesmen and seeing how they dealt with the military leaders who served them. In doing so he reveals fundamental aspects of leadership and provides not merely an historical analysis but a study of issues that remain crucial today. By examining the cases of four of the greatest war statesmen of the twentieth century he explores the problem of how people confront the greatest challenges that can befall them, in this case national leaders. Beginning with a discussion of civil-military relations from a theoretical point of view, Cohen lays out the conventional beliefs about how politicians should deal with generals and the extent to which either can influence the outcome of war. From these he draws broader lessons for students of leadership generally.

Download or read book War from the Top written by Alan F. Wilt and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1990-08-22 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wilt writes... well and offers many sound perceptions." -- Choice "... a stimulating book... a timely warning against overindulgence in hindsight in evaluating the great issues of the war... " -- Parameters "... a significant new study... a clearly written, excellent book... " -- Airpower Journal "... an impressive work of scholarship... " -- British Politics Group Newsletter "Wilt's comparative approach permits us fresh perspectives on both sides of the war. Moreover, Wilt has chosen to compare two of the major rival belligerents at the most stimulating and interesting level at which such comparison might be made, the level of the summit of decision making -- with the magnetic figures of Hitler and Churchill playing major roles in his narrative and analysis." -- Russell F. Weigley "This is a masterful treatment of a complex subject and a must read book for anyone writing about the Second World War." -- The Historian

Download or read book Appeasement written by Tim Bouverie and published by Crown. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • SUNDAY TIMES (UK) BESTSELLER • A gripping new history of the British appeasement of Hitler on the eve of World War II “An eye-opening narrative that makes for exciting but at times uncomfortable reading as one reflects on possible lessons for the present.”—Antonia Fraser, author of Mary Queen of Scots On a wet afternoon in September 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stepped off an airplane and announced that his visit to Hitler had averted the greatest crisis in recent memory. It was, he later assured the crowd in Downing Street, "peace for our time." Less than a year later, Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. Appeasement is a groundbreaking history of the disastrous years of indecision, failed diplomacy and parliamentary infighting that enabled Hitler's domination of Europe. Drawing on deep archival research and sources not previously seen by historians, Tim Bouverie has created an unforgettable portrait of the ministers, aristocrats, and amateur diplomats who, through their actions and inaction, shaped their country's policy and determined the fate of Europe. Beginning with the advent of Hitler in 1933, we embark on a fascinating journey from the early days of the Third Reich to the beaches of Dunkirk. Bouverie takes us not only into the backrooms of Parliament and 10 Downing Street but also into the drawing rooms and dining clubs of fading imperial Britain, where Hitler enjoyed surprising support among the ruling class and even some members of the royal family. Both sweeping and intimate, Appeasement is not only an eye-opening history but a timeless lesson on the challenges of standing up to aggression and authoritarianism--and the calamity that results from failing to do so.