Download or read book Berlin at War written by Roger Moorhouse and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thrilling and definitive history of World War I in the Middle East By 1914 the powers of Europe were sliding inexorably toward war, and they pulled the Middle East along with them into one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story of the region's crucial role in the conflict. Unlike the static killing fields of the Western Front, the war in the Middle East was fast-moving and unpredictable, with the Turks inflicting decisive defeats on the Entente in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Gaza before the tide of battle turned in the Allies' favor. The postwar settlement led to the partition of Ottoman lands, laying the groundwork for the ongoing conflicts that continue to plague the modern Arab world. A sweeping narrative of battles and political intrigue from Gallipoli to Arabia, The Fall of the Ottomans is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the Great War and the making of the modern Middle East.

Download or read book The Last Battle written by Cornelius Ryan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 675 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic account of the final offensive against Hitler’s Third Reich. The Battle for Berlin was the culminating struggle of World War II in the European theater, the last offensive against Hitler’s Third Reich, which devastated one of Europe’s historic capitals and marked the final defeat of Nazi Germany. It was also one of the war’s bloodiest and most pivotal battles, whose outcome would shape international politics for decades to come. The Last Battle is Cornelius Ryan’s compelling account of this final battle, a story of brutal extremes, of stunning military triumph alongside the stark conditions that the civilians of Berlin experienced in the face of the Allied assault. As always, Ryan delves beneath the military and political forces that were dictating events to explore the more immediate imperatives of survival, where, as the author describes it, “to eat had become more important than to love, to burrow more dignified than to fight, to exist more militarily correct than to win.” The Last Battle is the story of ordinary people, both soldiers and civilians, caught up in the despair, frustration, and terror of defeat. It is history at its best, a masterful illumination of the effects of war on the lives of individuals, and one of the enduring works on World War II.

Download or read book Berlin in the Cold War written by Allan Hailstone and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating insight into Berlin in a key period of the Cold War.

Download or read book All the Way to Berlin written by James Megellas and published by Presidio Press. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In mid-1943 James Megellas, known as “Maggie” to his fellow paratroopers, joined the 82d Airborne Division, his new “home” for the duration. His first taste of combat was in the rugged mountains outside Naples. In October 1943, when most of the 82d departed Italy to prepare for the D-Day invasion of France, Lt. Gen. Mark Clark, the Fifth Army commander, requested that the division’s 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Maggie’s outfit, stay behind for a daring new operation that would outflank the Nazis’ stubborn defensive lines and open the road to Rome. On 22 January 1944, Megellas and the rest of the 504th landed across the beach at Anzio. Following initial success, Fifth Army’s amphibious assault, Operation Shingle, bogged down in the face of heavy German counterattacks that threatened to drive the Allies into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Anzio turned into a fiasco, one of the bloodiest Allied operations of the war. Not until April were the remnants of the regiment withdrawn and shipped to England to recover, reorganize, refit, and train for their next mission. In September, Megellas parachuted into Holland along with the rest of the 82d Airborne as part of another star-crossed mission, Field Marshal Montgomery’s vainglorious Operation Market Garden. Months of hard combat in Holland were followed by the Battle of the Bulge, and the long hard road across Germany to Berlin. Megellas was the most decorated officer of the 82d Airborne Division and saw more action during the war than most. Yet All the Way to Berlin is more than just Maggie’s World War II memoir. Throughout his narrative, he skillfully interweaves stories of the other paratroopers of H Company, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. The result is a remarkable account of men at war.

Download or read book Berlin on the Brink written by Daniel F. Harrington and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-06-24 with total page 635 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Berlin blockade brought former allies to the brink of war. Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union defeated and began their occupation of Germany in 1945, and within a few years, the Soviets and their Western partners were jockeying for control of their former foe. Attempting to thwart the Allied powers' plans to create a unified West German government, the Soviets blocked rail and road access to the western sectors of Berlin in June 1948. With no other means of delivering food and supplies to the German people under their protection, the Allies organized the Berlin airlift. In Berlin on the Brink: The Blockade, the Airlift, and the Cold War, Daniel F. Harrington examines the "Berlin question" from its origin in wartime plans for the occupation of Germany through the Paris Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in 1949. Harrington draws on previously untapped archival sources to challenge standard accounts of the postwar division of Germany, the origins of the blockade, the original purpose of the airlift, and the leadership of President Harry S. Truman. While thoroughly examining four-power diplomacy, Harrington demonstrates how the ingenuity and hard work of the people at the bottom—pilots, mechanics, and Berliners—were more vital to the airlift's success than decisions from the top. Harrington also explores the effects of the crisis on the 1948 presidential election and on debates about the custody and use of atomic weapons. Berlin on the Brink is a fresh, comprehensive analysis that reshapes our understanding of a critical event of cold war history.

Download or read book Checkpoint Charlie written by Iain MacGregor and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “constantly captivating…well-researched and often moving” (The Wall Street Journal) history of Checkpoint Charlie, the famous military gate on the border of East and West Berlin where the United States confronted the USSR during the Cold War. In the early 1960s, East Germany committed a billion dollars to the creation of the Berlin Wall, an eleven-foot-high barrier that consisted of seventy-nine miles of fencing, 300 watchtowers, 250 guard dog runs, twenty bunkers, and was operated around the clock by guards who shot to kill. Over the next twenty-eight years, at least five thousand people attempt to smash through it, swim across it, tunnel under it, or fly over it. In 1989, the East German leadership buckled in the face of a civil revolt that culminated in half a million East Berliners demanding an end to the ban on free movement. The world’s media flocked to capture the moment which, perhaps more than any other, signaled the end of the Cold War. Checkpoint Charlie had been the epicenter of global conflict for nearly three decades. Now, “in capturing the essence of the old Cold War [MacGregor] may just have helped us to understand a bit more about the new one” (The Times, London)—the mistrust, oppression, paranoia, and fear that gripped the world throughout this period. Checkpoint Charlie is about the nerve-wracking confrontation between the West and USSR, highlighting such important global figures as Eisenhower, Stalin, JFK, Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Zedung, Nixon, Reagan, and other politicians of the period. He also includes never-before-heard interviews with the men who built and dismantled the Wall; children who crossed it; relatives and friends who lost loved ones trying to escape over it; military policemen and soldiers who guarded the checkpoints; CIA, MI6, and Stasi operatives who oversaw operations across its borders; politicians whose ambitions shaped it; journalists who recorded its story; and many more whose living memories contributed to the full story of Checkpoint Charlie.

Download or read book Kennedy s Wars written by Lawrence Freedman and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2002 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the Cold War mindset of JFK, this unique portrait of his presidency introduces readers to the wars he inherited and started all over the world.

Download or read book Special Forces Berlin written by James Stejskal and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The previously untold story of a Cold War spy unit, “one of the best examples of applied unconventional warfare in special operations history” (Small Wars Journal). It is a little-known fact that during the Cold War, two US Army Special Forces detachments were stationed far behind the Iron Curtain in West Berlin. The existence and missions of the two detachments were highly classified secrets. The massive armies of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies posed a huge threat to the nations of Western Europe. US military planners decided they needed a plan to slow the expected juggernaut, if and when a war began. This plan was Special Forces Berlin. Their mission—should hostilities commence—was to wreak havoc behind enemy lines and buy time for vastly outnumbered NATO forces to conduct a breakout from the city. In reality, it was an ambitious and extremely dangerous mission, even suicidal. Highly trained and fluent in German, each of these one hundred soldiers and their successors was allocated a specific area. They were skilled in clandestine operations, sabotage, and intelligence tradecraft, and were able to act, if necessary, as independent operators, blending into the local population and working unseen in a city awash with spies looking for information on their every move. Special Forces Berlin left a legacy of a new type of soldier, expert in unconventional warfare, that was sought after for other deployments, including the attempted rescue of American hostages from Tehran in 1979. With the US government officially acknowledging their existence in 2014, their incredible story can now be told—by one of their own.

Download or read book Battle of Berlin World War II written by Hourly History and published by Hourly History. This book was released on 2018-12-25 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Battle of Berlin - World War II The Battle of Berlin was a monumental battle between two adversaries who despised one another. For the Russians who had endured the horrific suffering and loss of lives in defending their nation against the Nazi invasion, the opportunity for vengeance seemed as if fate was on their side. For the German civilians who remained in Berlin, the approach of the Red Army invoked terror. The Germans hoped that the Americans would reach them first; they would have preferred to surrender to the Americans. But the Russians were advancing swiftly from the east, and by April of 1945, the Battle of Berlin was underway. Inside you will read about... ✓ From Stalingrad to Berlin ✓ The Battle of the Oder-Neisse ✓ The Russians Enter Berlin ✓ The Last Days of Adolf Hitler ✓ The Rape of Berlin And much more! Hitler died by his own hand on April 30, and the Third Reich was crumbling. The loss of life on both sizes was catastrophic, but the Germans had no way of replacing the defenders of the city, and on May 2, Berlin surrendered to the Soviet forces intent on retaliation. The Russians attempted to provide services and food to the starving Germans, but not all of the Russian soldiers were inspired by compassion or altruism. Looting and rape replaced law in the city, and more than 100,000 women of Berlin were raped by Allied soldiers. By the time the Americans and British arrived, the scars of the Russian occupation were seared upon the memories of the German people. The country and its capital would be divided, and the Soviet presence would remain in the country for decades, a bitter reminder that Adolf Hitler's grand promises of glory had brought Germany to defeat. World War II came to an end in 1945, but for the Germans, their nation became a sacrifice to the Cold War which took its place.

Download or read book Checkmate in Berlin written by Giles Milton and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a master of popular history, the lively, immersive story of the race to seize Berlin in the aftermath of World War II as it’s never been told before BERLIN’S FATE WAS SEALED AT THE 1945 YALTA CONFERENCE: the city, along with the rest of Germany, was to be carved up among the victorious powers— the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. On paper, it seemed a pragmatic solution. In reality, once the four powers were no longer united by the common purpose of defeating Germany, they wasted little time reverting to their prewar hostility toward—and suspicion of—one another. The veneer of civility between the Western allies and the Soviets was to break down in spectacular fashion in Berlin. Rival systems, rival ideologies, and rival personalities ensured that the German capital became an explosive battleground. The warring leaders who ran Berlin’s four sectors were charismatic, mercurial men, and Giles Milton brings them all to rich and thrilling life here. We meet unforgettable individuals like America’s explosive Frank “Howlin’ Mad” Howley, a brusque sharp-tongued colonel with a relish for mischief and a loathing for all Russians. Appointed commandant of the city’s American sector, Howley fought an intensely personal battle against his wily nemesis, General Alexander Kotikov, commandant of the Soviet sector. Kotikov oozed charm as he proposed vodka toasts at his alcohol-fueled parties, but Howley correctly suspected his Soviet rival was Stalin’s agent, appointed to evict the Western allies from Berlin and ultimately from Germany as well. Throughout, Checkmate in Berlin recounts the first battle of the Cold War as we’ve never before seen it. An exhilarating tale of intense rivalry and raw power, it is above all a story of flawed individuals who were determined to win, and Milton does a masterful job of weaving between all the key players’ motivations and thinking at every turn. A story of unprecedented human drama, it’s one that had a profound, and often underestimated, shaping force on the modern world – one that’s still felt today.

Download or read book Berlin in the Cold War written by Thomas Flemming and published by . This book was released on 2024-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dramatic events that touched the whole world: the blockade, the airlift, the uprising of June 1953, the construction of the Wall, stories of escape and espionage, and the fall of the Iron Curtain

Download or read book The Berlin Airlift written by Barry Turner and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed historian Barry Turner presents a new history of the Cold War's defining episode. Berlin, 1948 – a divided city in a divided country in a divided Europe. The ruined German capital lay 120 miles inside Soviet-controlled eastern Germany. Stalin wanted the Allies out; the Allies were determined to stay, but had only three narrow air corridors linking the city to the West. Stalin was confident he could crush Berlin's resolve by cutting off food and fuel. In the USA, despite some voices still urging 'America first', it was believed that a rebuilt Germany was the best insurance against the spread of communism across Europe. And so over eleven months from June 1948 to May 1949, British and American aircraft carried out the most ambitious airborne relief operation ever mounted, flying over 2 million tons of supplies on almost 300,000 flights to save a beleaguered Berlin. With new material from American, British and German archives and original interviews with veterans, Turner paints a fresh, vivid picture the airlift, whose repercussions – the role of the USA as global leader, German ascendancy, Russian threat – we are still living with today.

Download or read book Battleground Berlin written by David E. Murphy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two veteran intelligence agents, one from the CIA and the other from the KGB, join together in an unprecedented collaboration to trace the activities of the two intelligence agencies at the start of the Cold War in postwar Berlin. UP.

Download or read book Letters From Berlin written by Kerstin Lieff and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Margarete Dos moved with her family to Berlin on the eve of World War II, she and her younger brother were blindly ushered into a generation of Hitler Youth. Like countless citizens under Hitler’s regime, Margarete struggled to understand what was happening to her country. Later, as a nurse for the German Red Cross, she treated countless young soldiers—recruited in the eleventh hour to fight a losing battle—they would die before her eyes as Allied bombs racked her beloved city. Yet, her deep humanity, intelligence, and passion for life—which sparkles in every sentence of her memoir—carried Margarete through to war’s end. But just when she thought the worst was over, and she and her mother were on a train headed to Sweden, they were suddenly rerouted deep into Russia… This powerful account draws back the curtain on a piece of history that has been largely overlooked—the nightmare that millions of German civilians suffered, simply because they were German. That Margarete survived to tell her tale so vividly and courageously is a gift to us all.

Download or read book A Wall of Our Own written by Paul M. Farber and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-02-17 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Berlin Wall is arguably the most prominent symbol of the Cold War era. Its construction in 1961 and its dismantling in 1989 are broadly understood as pivotal moments in the history of the last century. In A Wall of Our Own, Paul M. Farber traces the Berlin Wall as a site of pilgrimage for American artists, writers, and activists. During the Cold War and in the shadow of the Wall, figures such as Leonard Freed, Angela Davis, Shinkichi Tajiri, and Audre Lorde weighed the possibilities and limits of American democracy. All were sparked by their first encounters with the Wall, incorporated their reflections in books and artworks directed toward the geopolitics of division in the United States, and considered divided Germany as a site of intersection between art and activism over the respective courses of their careers. Departing from the well-known stories of Americans seeking post–World War II Paris for their own self-imposed exile or traveling the open road of the domestic interstate highway system, Farber reveals the divided city of Berlin as another destination for Americans seeking a critical distance. By analyzing the experiences and cultural creations of "American Berliner" artists and activists, Farber offers a new way to view not only the Wall itself but also how the Cold War still structures our thinking about freedom, repression, and artistic resistance on a global scale.

Download or read book Home Fires Burning written by Belinda J. Davis and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-06-19 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging assumptions about the separation of high politics and everyday life, Belinda Davis uncovers the important influence of the broad civilian populace--particularly poorer women--on German domestic and even military policy during World War I. As Britain's wartime blockade of goods to Central Europe increasingly squeezed the German food supply, public protests led by "women of little means" broke out in the streets of Berlin and other German cities. These "street scenes" riveted public attention and drew urban populations together across class lines to make formidable, apparently unified demands on the German state. Imperial authorities responded in unprecedented fashion in the interests of beleaguered consumers, interceding actively in food distribution and production. But officials' actions were far more effective in legitimating popular demands than in defending the state's right to rule. In the end, says Davis, this dynamic fundamentally reformulated relations between state and society and contributed to the state's downfall in 1918. Shedding new light on the Wilhelmine government, German subjects' role as political actors, and the influence of the war on the home front on the Weimar state and society, Home Fires Burning helps rewrite the political history of World War I Germany.

Download or read book In the garden of beasts written by Erik Larson and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the 'New Germany,' she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance - and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.