Download or read book Battle for Warsaw 1939 1944 written by Michael Alfred Peszke and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Rising 44 written by Norman Davies and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2005-10-04 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a brilliant narrative of one of the most dramatic episodes in twentieth-century history, Davies spotlights sixty-three days in 1944 when the Wehrmacht crushed the Polish Resistance in Warsaw, slaughtered thousands and destroyed the city.

Download or read book Warsaw 1944 written by Alexandra Richie and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian Alexandra Rich presents the full untold story of how one of history's bravest revolts ended in one of its greatest crimes. In 1943, the Nazis liquidated Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. A year later, they threatened to complete the city's destruction by deporting its remaining residents. A sophisticated and cosmopolitan community a thousand years old was facing its final days—and then opportunity struck. As Soviet soldiers turned back the Nazi invasion of Russia and began pressing west, the underground Polish Home Army decided to act. Taking advantage of German disarray and seeking to forestall the absorption of their country into the Soviet empire, they chose to liberate the city of Warsaw for themselves. Warsaw 1944 tells the story of this brave, and errant, calculation. For more than sixty days, the Polish fighters took over large parts of the city and held off the SS's most brutal forces. But in the end, their efforts were doomed. Scorned by Stalin and unable to win significant support from the Western Allies, the Polish Home Army was left to face the full fury of Hitler, Himmler, and the SS. The crackdown that followed was among the most brutal episodes of history's most brutal war, and the celebrated historian Alexandra Richie depicts this tragedy in riveting detail. Using a rich trove of primary sources, Richie relates the terrible experiences of individuals who fought in the uprising and perished in it. Her clear-eyed narrative reveals the fraught choices and complex legacy of some of World War II's most unsung heroes.

Download or read book The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 written by Włodzimierz Borodziej and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description

Download or read book The Battle For Warsaw 1939 1945 written by Anthony Tucker-Jones and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2020-02-10 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Second World War five brutal battles were fought in and around Warsaw. Each proved to be dramatic, decisive and bloody, and in this volume of the Images of War series Anthony Tucker-Jones records them all in graphic detail. The first occurred in 1939 when the Polish army was defeated by the German invaders, and five years of occupation followed. The second was sparked by the Jewish Ghetto Uprising in 1943 which was ruthlessly suppressed by 1,200 SS troops and led to the deaths of 13,000 people. In the third the Red Army’s advance was beaten back at the gates of the city in the summer of 1944 and the fourth was fought at the same time when the Nazis crushed the rising of the Polish Home Army and sought to destroy the city in an act of revenge. The failure of the rising consigned the country to decades of communist rule. The photographs and the detailed narrative give the reader a powerful impression of the experience of the people of Warsaw during this tragic period in their history and document the widespread devastation the fighting left in its wake.

Download or read book The Polish Underground and the Jews 1939 1945 written by Joshua D. Zimmerman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.

Download or read book Battle of Warsaw written by and published by . This book was released on 1943 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Eagle Unbowed written by Halik Kochanski and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 783 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World War II gripped Poland as it did no other country. Invaded by Germany and the USSR, it was occupied from the first day of war to the last, and then endured 44 years behind the Iron Curtain while its wartime partners celebrated their freedom. The Eagle Unbowed tells, for the first time, the story of Poland’s war in its entirety and complexity.

Download or read book My Boyhood War written by Bohdan Hryniewicz and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bohdan Hryniewicz was only 8 when war broke out and 13 when it ended. In those years he saw more than most men would in 10 lifetimes; and his recall is extraordinary. He cites three days as defining this period: the saddest, 19 September 1939 as Russian tanks rolled into his home town of Wilno; the happiest, August 1 1944, when the Polish flag flew once again from the highest building in Warsaw; the most bitter, October 3 that year, when his commanding officer forbade him to join the other members of his battalion as they entered a prisoner of war camp. The Warsaw Uprising lasted 63 days and was the largest single military effort by any resistance movement in the war. Throughout, Bohdan was the personal runner of lieutenant Nalecz, CO of the battalion of the same name. Betrayed by Stalin, all the Poles were expelled to camps after surrender and the city dynamited. Bohdan is probably the last witness to this tragedy.

Download or read book The Civilian Population and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 written by Joanna K. M. Hanson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-08-12 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses of their reaction to the battle itself and to its political and diplomatic implications. It is a study, where possible, of public opinion. The first chapter of the book is a detailed description of life in occupied Warsaw from 1939 to 1944, as this forms an indispensable background to the work.

Download or read book The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 written by Charles River Editors and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-07-25 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the uprising from both sides *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "When we crush the uprising, Warsaw will get what it deserves: total annihilation." - Adolf Hitler "I kneel before the heroes who fought in Warsaw, however I think that the uprising was the biggest and most reckless catastrophe of Poland." - General Wladyslaw Anders After a brief revival following World War I, during which it successfully defeated a Soviet attempt to invade in an effort to carry "international revolution" into Germany and Central Europe, Poland once again fell victim to its neighbors in 1939. Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and Josef Stalin's USSR collaborated in the conquest, and then split Poland between them. The Germans carried out most of the fighting and gained the choicest parts of the nation. As a penetratingly bitter New York Times editorial stated on September 18th, 1939, "Germany having killed the prey, Soviet Russia will seize that part of the carcass that Germany cannot use. It will play the noble role of hyena to the German lion. This gross betrayal of the professions that Soviet Russia has been making for years is being defended in the manner with which the world has now grown sickeningly familiar. Because Poland has 'virtually ceased to exist, ' Russia is free to break every treaty with it (Sword, 1991, 292). The Germans instituted oppressive rule in their portion of Poland, executing some 7,000 people on political grounds and imprisoning thousands of others. 1.5 million Poles became forced laborers in Germany, and though seldom noted, the Soviets applied equally brutal methods in their sector, executing 22,000 Polish officers at the Katyn Forest Massacre. NKVD death squads murdered 40,000 civilians and deported 1.4 million people to Siberia and other remote areas, from which a sizable percentage never returned alive. As the Soviets began to push the Germans back west, the Red Army plunged headlong into Poland in late June 1944 on the heels of German Army Group Center's retreating forces. The British urged the AK to cooperate with the Soviets, but the Russians wanted Poland and treated the Resistance as enemy partisans. The NKVD arrested AK members by the thousands, executing their leaders out of hand. By late July, the Polish government in exile thought it was time to order the AK to lead an uprising in Warsaw. The sight of German units retreating, and Soviet tanks seen on July 31st very close to the city, prompted the order to openly retake Poland's capital for the nation. Unfortunately, it was a decision also predicated on a naively optimistic faith in Anglo-American support. As a result, the Poles fought bravely but futilely in August and September against the Nazis, and the Nazis, as they so often did, mercilessly destroyed the city causing the trouble. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the notorious SS, told his men, "The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation." In fact, the Germans had intended to destroy Warsaw from the beginning of the war, and they were terribly successful. One Allied pilot recalled, "There was no difficulty in finding Warsaw. It was visible from 100 kilometers away. The city was in flames but with so many huge fires burning, it was almost impossible to pick up the target marker flares." It's estimated that up to 200,000 Poles were killed in the process, and to top it all off, the Soviets arrested and executed countless more after the Nazis were finally gone. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944: The History of the Polish Resistance's Failed Attempt to Liberate Poland's Capital from Nazi Germany looks at the events that led to the uprising and the Nazi destruction of the city.

Download or read book Fighting Warsaw The Story of the Polish Underground State 1939 1945 written by Stefan Korbonski and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2016-03-28 with total page 757 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fighting Warsaw is a human story. Stefan Korbonski, the leader of the Polish Underground State, portrays the years of the German occupation during the Second World War and the beginning of anti-Soviet underground activities thereafter. His story presents the entire organization, strategy, and tactics of the Polish underground, which included armed resistance, civil disobedience, sabotage, and boycotts. “...The Polish Underground was perhaps the best organized and most active of all wartime undergrounds; and Stefan Korbonski is well qualified to tell its story....He was, almost immediately after the fighting had stopped, arrested by the Russians...he managed to regain his freedom, and it is to this happy release that we owe this book, an absorbing account of Poland’s fight for freedom These are the highly personal memoirs of an active conspirator and, in their vivid detail and exciting anecdotes, they are probably more successful in conveying a sense of what the resistance was actually like than a more comprehensive treatment would be...Few people who read the author’s chapters on this one aspect of the resistance will fail to be moved by them or to come away from them with an increased understanding of the prerequisites of successful opposition to an occupying power that is both efficient and ruthless.”—GORDON CRAIG, New York Herald Tribune “...Fighting Warsaw...is one of the most absorbing, inspiring and ultimately disheartening documents to come out of the last war....The book, which is detailed and written with humor, modesty, and a surprising lack of rancor, makes it quite plain that there is an indomitable quality in the Poles that will prevent them from ever giving up their great dream....”—The New Yorker

Download or read book A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising written by Miron Bialoszewski and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A blow-by-blow, ground-level account of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the 2-month Polish Resistance effort to liberate Warsaw from Nazi occupation. Poland’s most famous post-war poet offers “the finest book about the insurrection of 1944”—an essential read for fans of WW2 history (John Carpenter). On August 1, 1944, Miron Białoszewski, later to gain renown as one of Poland’s most innovative poets, went out to run an errand for his mother and ran into history. With Soviet forces on the outskirts of Warsaw, the Polish capital revolted against 5 years of Nazi occupation, an uprising that began in a spirit of heroic optimism. 63 days later it came to a tragic end. The Nazis suppressed the insurgents ruthlessly, reducing Warsaw to rubble while slaughtering some 200,000 people, mostly through mass executions. The Red Army simply looked on. First written over 25 years after the uprising, Białoszewski’s account gives readers an unforgettable sense of the chaos and immediacy of the final days of World War II. He tells of slipping back and forth under German fire, dodging sniper bullets, collapsing with exhaustion, rescuing the wounded, and burying the dead. This unusual memoir is a major work of literature and a reflection on memory that resists the terrible destruction it records. Madeline G. Levine has extensively revised her 1977 translation, and passages that were unpublishable in Communist Poland have been restored.

Download or read book The Warsaw Uprising written by George Bruce and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engrossing history of the largest resistance movement in the Second World War. Ideal for readers of Anthony Beevor, Max Hastings and Alex Kershaw. By the summer of 1944 Poland had been occupied by Nazi forces for nearly five years, but on August 1 the people of Warsaw attempted to throw off their shackles and rise up against their Nazi oppressors. For sixty-three days German tanks, planes and artillery crushed the ill-equipped Polish Home Army leading to the deaths of 16,000 Polish resistance fighters and over 150,000 civilians, as well as leaving only fifteen percent of the city intact. Could Britain, America and the Soviet Union have done more to rescue their allies? How did this Polish secret army organize itself and train while their city was under control of the Nazis? And in what ways did five years of occupation and events such as the Katyn massacre and Warsaw Ghetto Uprising shape the actions of the Polish resistance? George Bruce's book explores the history of Warsaw and Poland through the Second World War and provides an eye-opening account of the oppressed men, women and children's courageous attempt to resist the Nazis. 'One of the most heroic, as well as tragic, episodes of the Second World War ... movingly related in a valuable book' The Army Quarterly 'Mr Bruce has gone to immense trouble to research his facts and figures, and the result is yet another condemnation of the appalling brutality of the Hitler regime.' Manchester Evening News 'Mr Bruce's calm, comprehensive account is most welcome. His careful researches in London and Warsaw included personal interviews with many of the survivors of the Polish leadership.' The Economist 'George Bruce ... has accomplished a difficult task magnificently well, in producing a highly readable account of the tangled Polish uprising.' The Sunday Press, Dublin The Times described Bruce's books as 'well researched, with a keen eye for historical detail.' The Warsaw Uprising not only traces the sequence of events but examines the political and ideological background of the Uprising. It is a captivating work that should be essential reading for all who wish to learn more about this monumental event.

Download or read book Poland 1939 written by Steven J. Zaloga and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-10 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 began World War II in Europe, pitting the newly modernized army of Europe's great industrial power against the much smaller Polish army and introducing the world to a new style of warfare – Blitzkrieg. Panzer divisions spearheaded the German assault with Stuka dive-bombers prowling ahead spreading terror and mayhem. This book demonstrates how the Polish army was not as backward as it is often portrayed and fielded a tank force larger than that of the contemporary US Army. Its stubborn defence did give the Germans some surprises and German casualties were relatively heavy for such a short campaign.

Download or read book Days of Adversity written by Evan McGilvray and published by Helion. This book was released on 2015-07-19 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a reexamination of the decisions regarding the 1944 Warsaw Uprising made by the leadership of the underground Polish Army (AK), as well as the questionable attitudes of senior Polish commanders in exile in London. The questions raised are, was the uprising necessary and why was it so poorly conducted by a totally indifferent leadership? The challenge is made that the Polish leaders in Warsaw and in London were clearly unfeeling. In Warsaw the uprising was allowed to happen and was doomed from the very beginning owing to poor generalship. The Soviets can be seen rather than to have betrayed the Poles, to have behaved in the same manner as they had always behaved to the Poles and Poland, that is underhanded and with great deceit. Therefore why did the Warsaw Poles rise up when encouraged by the Soviets? The Poles should have known that it was a trick. Despite plans laid down by the Allies to support such uprisings, as had been the case in Paris during August 1944, the Red Army watched the AK be destroyed by the Germans, to save themselves the same job. Once the uprising failed, the Polish leadership went into what could only be described as ‘genteel’ captivity, compared with the fate of hundreds of thousands of their countrymen and women who were herded out of Warsaw by German armed forces and sent to concentration camps, illegal prisoner of war camps or forced into slave labor. In the West senior Polish commanders did not consider a 100% casualty rate to be unacceptable as they pushed for Allied flights to resupply Warsaw. This callous disregard for life was part of the lack of understanding in the leadership of the reality of the Polish situation in 1944: the war was not about Poland but the complete defeat of Germany. If Polish freedom came out of this, then good, otherwise the Allies were not going to be diverted from the constant aerial bombardment of Germany, as the Allies swept eastward and westward towards Germany. This work is supplemented with Polish sources as well as interviews with five women who had been involved in the Warsaw Uprising as young women and girls in 1944. Now in their 80s these ladies kindly granted interviews with the author in Poland during 2012.

Download or read book First to Fight the Polish War 1939 written by Roger Moorhouse and published by Jonathan Cape. This book was released on 2019-09-05 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing for the first time on Polish, German and Soviet sources, First to Fight is the definitive history of the German invasion of Poland, which opened the war in September 1939. Roger Moorhouse provides a dramatic narrative of military events, brought to life by a select cast of generals and politicians, soldiers and civilians from all sides. In the process, First to Fight explodes many of the myths that still surround the campaign and challenge our understanding of how Britain and France entered the war. Did Britain and France assist their Polish ally to the best of their abilities when the German armies crossed the border on 1 September 1939? While they went to war with Germany, why did they not declare war on the Soviet Union when its troops invaded Poland from the east later in the month? And if the violation of Poland had been the reason to go to war in 1939, how could the Western Allies justify handing the country over on a plate to Stalin in 1945? Published to tie in with the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, First to Fight explodes many of the myths around what is a shameful chapter in both British and French history, and forensically examines a pivotal moment in the war's history.