Download or read book Flying in Defiance of the Reich written by Peter Russell and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the vivid memoir of a man who was twenty-one at the outbreak of World War II. Having joined the RAFVR before the war, he was mobilized in August 1939 and after training became operational on 233 Squadron Coastal Command flying Hudsons from Leuchars, Aldergrove and St Eval. After fourteen months he was rested and was tasked with training navigators for the impending enlargement of Bomber Command.In 1944 he joined 625 Squadron flying Lancasters over German targets and eventually took command of B Flight and was promoted Squadron Leader. His memories of the many raids, his crew and operational flying during this period until the end of the war are truly gripping. After the German capitulation, Peter joined Shield Force bound for the Far-east and the night bombing of Japan. However before they could become operational the atom bomb put an end to the war in that theater. His unit was redirected to relieve Hong Kong and the final chapters give a unique insight into how the Japanese garrison was replaced by British law and order. This was a purely land operation carried out by the RAF without the presence of the Army.

Download or read book Flying against Fate written by S. P. MacKenzie and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2017-08-04 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During World War II, Allied casualty rates in the air were high. Of the roughly 125,000 who served as aircrew with Bomber Command, 59,423 were killed or missing and presumed killed—a fatality rate of 45.5%. With odds like that, it would be no surprise if there were as few atheists in cockpits as there were in foxholes; and indeed, many airmen faced their dangerous missions with beliefs and rituals ranging from the traditional to the outlandish. Military historian S. P. MacKenzie considers this phenomenon in Flying against Fate, a pioneering study of the important role that superstition played in combat flier morale among the Allies in World War II. Mining a wealth of documents as well as a trove of published and unpublished memoirs and diaries, MacKenzie examines the myriad forms combat fliers' superstitions assumed, from jinxes to premonitions. Most commonly, airmen carried amulets or talismans—lucky boots or a stuffed toy; a coin whose year numbers added up to thirteen; counterintuitively, a boomerang. Some performed rituals or avoided other acts, e.g., having a photo taken before a flight. Whatever seemed to work was worth sticking with, and a heightened risk often meant an upsurge in superstitious thought and behavior. MacKenzie delves into behavior analysis studies to help explain the psychology behind much of the behavior he documents—not slighting the large cohort of crew members and commanders who demurred. He also looks into the ways in which superstitious behavior was tolerated or even encouraged by those in command who saw it as a means of buttressing morale. The first in-depth exploration of just how varied and deeply felt superstitious beliefs were to tens of thousands of combat fliers, Flying against Fate expands our understanding of a major aspect of the psychology of war in the air and of World War II.

Download or read book Lancaster written by Leo McKinstry and published by John Murray. This book was released on 2009-09-03 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spitfire and the Lancaster were the two RAF weapons of victory in the Second World War, but the glamour of the fighter has tended to overshadow the performance of the heavy bomber. Yet without the Lancaster, Britain would never have been able to take the fight to the German homeland. Highlights the scale of the bomber?s achievements, including the famous Dambusters attacks. With its vast bomb bay, ease of handling and surprising speed, the mighty Lancaster transformed the effectiveness of the Bomber Command. Whilst addressing the political controversy surrounding the bombing offensive against Germany, Leo McKinstry also weaves individual tales into this compelling narrative. Rich characters are brought to life, such as Roy Chadwick the designer, who taught himself engineering at night school and Sir Arthur Harris, the austere head of the Bomber Command. This is a rich saga, a story of triumph over disaster and the history of an iconic plane.

Download or read book Bomber Boys on Screen written by S. P. MacKenzie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Second World War, depictions of Royal Air Force operations in film and television drama have become so numerous that they make up a genre worthy of scholarly attention. In this illuminating study, S. P. MacKenzie explores the different ways in which the men of RAF Bomber Command have been represented in dramatic form on the big and small screen from the war years to the present day. Bomber Boys on Screen is the first in-depth study of how and why the screen-drama image of those who flew, those who directed them, and those who provided support for RAF bomber operations has changed over time, sometimes in contested circumstances. Until now dramas that focus on Bomber Command have tended to be mentioned only in passing or studied in isolation, despite the prevalence of surveys of both the British war film genre and of aviation cinema. In Bomber Boys on Screen MacKenzie examines the development, presentation, and reception of significant dramas on a decade-by-decade basis. Titles from the beginning of the war (The Lion Has Wings, 1939) to the start of new century (Bomber's Moon, 2014) are situated in the context of technical possibilities and limitations, evolving social and cultural norms in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and the development of moral and utilitarian controversies surrounding the wartime bomber offensive directed against Nazi Germany. While the focus is on feature films and television plays, reference is also made to documentaries, memorials, veterans' organizations, book titles, war comics, and other representations of the war fought by Bomber Command.

Download or read book The Veterans Tale written by Frances Houghton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a unique account of the ways in which British veterans of the Second World War remembered, understood, and recounted their experiences of battle throughout the post-war period. Focusing on themes of landscape, weaponry, the enemy, and comradeship, Frances Houghton examines the imagery and language used by war memoirists to reconstruct and review both their experiences of battle and their sense of wartime self. Houghton also identifies how veterans' memoirs became significant sites of contest as former servicemen sought to challenge what they saw as unsatisfactory official, scholarly, and cultural representations of the Second World War in Britain. Her findings show that these memoirs are equally important both for the new light they shed on the memory and meanings of wartime military experience among British veterans, and for what they tell us about the cultural identity of military life-writing in post-war British society.

Download or read book Flight to the Reich written by Charles Whiting and published by Sphere. This book was released on 1988 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Battle Over the Reich written by Alfred Price and published by New York : Scribner. This book was released on 1974 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Flypast written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book In the Way of the Reich written by Paula Astridge and published by Woodslane Press. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hermann Goering, one of the most senior members of the Third Reich, was one of those responsible for murdering millions. His brother Albert risked his own life to rescue hundreds of Jews from the nazi death machine. Ernst Udet won the Blue Max for his record number of kills. Captain Wilm Hosenfeld used his position in the Wehrmacht to save many persecuted Poles. This is the story of their intertwining lives - of two men who worked in the way of Reich and two men who stood in the way of the Reich. Theirs are stories of exemplary courage and sacrifice, of extreme cruelty and flagrant disregard of the lives of others - of good versus evil and of how it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish the two. Exhaustively researched, this novel takes a long hard look at the lives of these four men and asks the universal questions - were they really all bad, or all good?

Download or read book Defiance written by Nechama Tec and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-26 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust is one of helpless victims, but in fact many Jews struggled against the terrors of the Third Reich. In Defiance, Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944--the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II. Tec reveals that this extraordinary community included both men and women, some with weapons, but mostly unarmed, ranging from infants to the elderly. She reconstructs for the first time the amazing details of how these partisans and their families--hungry, exposed to the harsh winter weather--managed not only to survive, but to offer protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them. Arguing that this success would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski. Tec brings to light the untold story of Bielski's struggle as a partisan who lost his parents, wife, and two brothers to the Nazis, yet never wavered in his conviction that it was more important to save one Jew than to kill twenty Germans. She shows how, under Bielski's guidance, the partisans smuggled Jews out of heavily guarded ghettos, scouted the roads for fugitives, and led retaliatory raids against Belorussian peasants who collaborated with the Nazis. Herself a Holocaust survivor, Nechama Tec here draws on wide-ranging research and never before published interviews with surviving partisans--including Tuvia Bielski himself--to reconstruct here the poignant and unforgettable story of those who chose to fight.

Download or read book C S Lewis Mere Christianity written by Paul McCusker and published by Tyndale House. This book was released on 2014-06-20 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mere Christianity is one of the best books of Christian apologetics ever written. Arguably, no book other than the Bible itself has had as much influence for the cause of the gospel over the past 60 years. The story of how that message came to be created, during the rigors of World War II in England, is fascinating in and of itself. But it also addresses a very important question: How do we present the gospel effectively to a culture that has Christian foundations but has become largely secularized and ignorant of biblical truth? C. S. Lewis & Mere Christianity develops the circumstances of Lewis’s life and the inner workings of the BBC. It also goes into greater detail about life in the middle of war against Nazi Germany, and Lewis’s series of broadcasts that extended into 1944.

Download or read book Mission to Berlin written by Robert F. Dorr and published by Zenith Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Hell Hawks! author Bob Dorr, Mission to Berlin takes the reader on a World War II strategic bombing mission from an airfield in East Anglia, England, to Berlin and back. Told largely in the veterans’ own words, Mission to Berlin covers all aspects of a long-range bombing mission including pilots and other aircrew, groundcrew, and escort fighters that accompanied the heavy bombers on their perilous mission.

Download or read book Masters of the Air written by Donald L. Miller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-09-25 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masters of the Air is the deeply personal story of the American bomber boys in World War II who brought the war to Hitler's doorstep. With the narrative power of fiction, Donald Miller takes readers on a harrowing ride through the fire-filled skies over Berlin, Hanover, and Dresden and describes the terrible cost of bombing for the German people. Fighting at 25,000 feet in thin, freezing air that no warriors had ever encountered before, bomber crews battled new kinds of assaults on body and mind. Air combat was deadly but intermittent: periods of inactivity and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fire and fear. Unlike infantrymen, bomber boys slept on clean sheets, drank beer in local pubs, and danced to the swing music of Glenn Miller's Air Force band, which toured U.S. air bases in England. But they had a much greater chance of dying than ground soldiers. In 1943, an American bomber crewman stood only a one-in-five chance of surviving his tour of duty, twenty-five missions. The Eighth Air Force lost more men in the war than the U.S. Marine Corps. The bomber crews were an elite group of warriors who were a microcosm of America -- white America, anyway. (African-Americans could not serve in the Eighth Air Force except in a support capacity.) The actor Jimmy Stewart was a bomber boy, and so was the "King of Hollywood," Clark Gable. And the air war was filmed by Oscar-winning director William Wyler and covered by reporters like Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite, all of whom flew combat missions with the men. The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was the longest military campaign of World War II, a war within a war. Until Allied soldiers crossed into Germany in the final months of the war, it was the only battle fought inside the German homeland. Strategic bombing did not win the war, but the war could not have been won without it. American airpower destroyed the rail facilities and oil refineries that supplied the German war machine. The bombing campaign was a shared enterprise: the British flew under the cover of night while American bombers attacked by day, a technique that British commanders thought was suicidal. Masters of the Air is a story, as well, of life in wartime England and in the German prison camps, where tens of thousands of airmen spent part of the war. It ends with a vivid description of the grisly hunger marches captured airmen were forced to make near the end of the war through the country their bombs destroyed. Drawn from recent interviews, oral histories, and American, British, German, and other archives, Masters of the Air is an authoritative, deeply moving account of the world's first and only bomber war.

Download or read book Nazi Women of the Third Reich written by Paul Roland and published by Arcturus Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Four months pregnant, Vera Wohlauf, wife of a serving SS officer, took sadistic pleasure in rounding up victims for Treblinka. • Like creatures from a Grimms' fairytale, female members of a Nazi 'welfare' organization scoured the towns and villages of Poland and Slovenia, luring blond children out of hiding with bread and sweets. They were abducted to be raised as Germans by 'Aryan' families who told them their parents were dead. • Test pilot Hanna Reitsch flew on a suicide mission to rescue Hitler from his bunker. • Not even Hitler could resist the charms of Princess Stephanie, a femme fatale and Nazi agent who smoked cigars which she lit by striking a match on the heel of her shoes. The Nazis had no doubts about a woman's place in the Third Reich. Hermann Goering urged every woman to 'take a pot, a dustpan and brush, and marry a man.' Many women welcomed the arrival of Hitler's regime with childlike enthusiasm believing that the dictatorship would make Germany master of Europe, but as the war dragged on, their blind faith in Hitler was betrayed.

Download or read book Triumph of the Third Reich written by A. Edward Cooper and published by Agreka Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would have been the outcome of World War II if Germany had succeeded in developing their Vengeance Weapons earlier in the war and had been able to mass produce them? This novel provides the answer in an action-packed story. One that came uncomfortably close to actually occurring

Download or read book Fogg in the Cockpit written by Richard P. Fogg and published by Casemate. This book was released on 2011-07-28 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned for decades as the worldÕs foremost railroad artist, Howard FoggÕs career spanned half a century and some twelve hundred paintings. However, while his art has been welcomed for decades, few of his enthusiasts have been aware of his prior career, as a fighter pilot in the U.S. 8th Air Force during World War II. Fortunately Fogg left behind a detailed diary of his experiences, which illuminate this brief but exciting aspect of his life, as he engaged in direct combat with the Luftwaffe at the controls of a P-47 Thunderbolt and P-51 Mustangs. Articulate and insightful, his diary offers a frank and fascinating glimpse into the life of a fighter pilot, both in the sky and in wartime England. Written during 1943 and 1944 it offers a confidential perspective of life as a Òflyboy,Ó during which Howard flew 76 combat missions and was awarded the Air Medal with three clusters and the Distinguished Flying Cross with one cluster. Presented in its entirety, with supplementary material by Richard and Janet Fogg, and supporting illustrations from Fogg himself, including satirical cartoons, military and railroad artwork, Fogg in the Cockpit paints with a broad brush, from the smallest details of a pilotÕs day-to-day existence. to air combat, and the strategic and political decisions that influenced the course of the war. http://www.longmontweekly.com/longmont-arts-entertainment/ci_17803807 fogginthecockpit.blogspot.com

Download or read book Flying Is My Life written by hanna00 Reitsch and published by . This book was released on 2020-06-27 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: