Download or read book Great World War II Battles in the Arctic written by Mark L. Evans and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1999-06-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the compelling story of the most exciting and decisive battles fought under harsh Arctic conditions during the Second World War. Each battle is described in detail, with discussions of the various weapons and strategies that led to victory or defeat, and an analysis of how the battle affected the overall course of the war. The failure of early attempts to supply the Soviets with vital mat^D'eriel would eventually give rise to tensions among the Allies that would continue long after the end of the war, and would ultimately lead to the Cold War. Despite the fears of many men on both sides that they were being sacrificed for political expediency, their brave and heroic actions became an integral part of the war effort for each coalition. The Arctic was a difficult and costly theater where battle was often characterized by massive convoys and lurking U-Boats. Some of the worst weather in history hit the Arctic in the midst of the war, making the elements as tough an opponent as any human enemy. The enormous scope of the war, combined with political and economic limitations to restrict the available resources of both sides. Evans's access to recently declassified documents and his use of the personal accounts and reflections of the men who fought there sheds an entirely new light on this often-neglected theater.
Download or read book Forgotten Sacrifice written by Michael G. Walling and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-20 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning historian Mike Walling captures the essence of the Arctic Convoys of World War II. In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the largest offensive operation ever undertaken. Operation Barbarossa saw defeat after defeat heaped on the Soviet army. With Russia's forces left staggering under the strain and in desperate need of supplies, Britain and the United States launched an ambitious operation to resupply the Soviet Union using convoys sent through the Arctic. Their journey was punctuated by torpedo attacks in freezing conditions, Stuka dive bombers, naval gun fire, and weeks of total darkness in the Arctic winter, with ships disappearing below the waves weighed down by the ice and snow on their decks. Drawing on hundreds of oral histories from eyewitnesses and veterans of the convoys, plus original research into the Russian Navy archives at Murmansk, historian Michael G. Walling offers a fresh retelling of one of World War II's pivotal yet largely overlooked campaigns.
Download or read book Battle in the Arctic Seas written by Theodore Taylor and published by Sterling Publishing Company. This book was released on 2007 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1942, America’s most crucial mission was to provide arms and supplies to our English and Russian allies. Theodore Taylor, who served in the merchant marines in World War II, tells the tragic tale of a convoy of 33 ships that sailed from Iceland to Russia in an effort to bring the Soviets needed tanks, trucks, airplanes, and ammunition. In vivid detail, Taylor follows one of the ships through the frigid waters of the Arctic as it battles Nazi bombers and submarines--and as its crew helplessly watches many of their companion ships perish in the mad dash to safe port.
Download or read book The Storm on Our Shores written by Mark Obmascik and published by Atria Books. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “engrossing” (The Wall Street Journal) national bestseller and true “heartbreaking tale of tragedy and redemption” (Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers) reveals how a discovered diary—found during a brutal World War II battle—changed our war-torn society’s perceptions of Japan. May 1943. The Battle of Attu—called “The Forgotten Battle” by World War II veterans—was raging on the Aleutian island with an Arctic cold, impenetrable fog, and rocketing winds that combined to create some of the worst weather on Earth. Both American and Japanese forces tirelessly fought in a yearlong campaign, with both sides suffering thousands of casualties. Included in this number was a Japanese medic whose war diary would lead a Silver Star–winning American soldier to find solace for his own tortured soul. The doctor’s name was Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi, a Hiroshima native who had graduated from college and medical school in California. He loved America, but was called to enlist in the Imperial Army of his native Japan. Heartsick, wary of war, yet devoted to Japan, Tatsuguchi performed his duties and kept a diary of events as they unfolded—never knowing that it would be found by an American soldier named Dick Laird. Laird, a hardy, resilient underground coal miner, enlisted in the US Army to escape the crushing poverty of his native Appalachia. In a devastating mountainside attack in Alaska, Laird was forced to make a fateful decision, one that saved him and his comrades, but haunted him for years. Tatsuguchi’s diary was later translated and distributed among US soldiers. It showed the common humanity on both sides of the battle. But it also ignited fierce controversy that is still debated today. After forty years, Laird was determined to return it to the family and find peace with Tatsuguchi’s daughter, Laura Tatsuguchi Davis. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mark Obmascik “writes with tremendous grace about a forgotten part of our history, telling the same story from two opposing points of view—perhaps the only way warfare can truly be understood” (Helen Thorpe, author of Soldier Girls).
Download or read book World War II in the Arctic written by Charles River Charles River Editors and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes soldiers' accounts of the fighting *Includes a bibliography for further reading In the warm predawn darkness of June 22, 1941, 3 million men waited along a front hundreds of miles long, stretching from the Baltic coast of Poland to the Balkans. Ahead of them in the darkness lay the Soviet Union, its border guarded by millions of Red Army troops echeloned deep throughout the huge spaces of Russia. This massive gathering of Wehrmacht soldiers from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and his allied states - notably Hungary and Romania - stood poised to carry out Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's surprise attack against the country of his putative ally, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Today, everyone remembers the most famous consequences of Hitler's choice, particularly the fighting at Leningrad and Stalingrad, but the invasion was so comprehensive that it also involved fighting in the barren lands near the Arctic Circle, bringing fierce combat to the taiga and tundra. In fact, Arctic combat occurred in both the Pacific and European theaters of the war, and in both cases the operations were related in some measure to external lines of supply to the USSR. Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht and the Red Army also met in the boreal pine forests, bogs, and tundra of Lapland and far northern Russia during the Barbarossa campaign of 1941. Fighting separately from the other Army Groups of the Third Reich, elite German Gebirgs (mountain) division soldiers and tough, resourceful Finns clashed with relatively determined and experienced Red Army soldiers in the forbidding terrain east of Finland's border. This campaign bore the elegant operational tile of Silberfuchs, or "Silver Fox." Aiming for Murmansk, a key Soviet port, or at least to sever the rail lines connecting it to points south and east, the Germans found themselves contending with the rugged, unfamiliar landscape, tough Soviet resistance, and as all too frequently occurred, the half-baked strategic meddling of Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer of the Third Reich. Fought over bitterly cold flecks of rock and tundra scattered across the remote waters marking the boundary between the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean, the Aleutian Islands campaign represented one of the strangest encounters of World War II. Curving southwestward from the southwest coast of Alaska like the tail of a stingray, the rugged, volcanic Aleutians belong to both the United States and Russia. The westernmost island, Attu, lies much closer to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula than to Alaska; the distance to Anchorage, Alaska measures approximately 2,000 miles. For the Japanese, the secondary operation to the Aleutian Islands proved more successful than the main thrust at Midway Island. In a triumph of cryptanalytic skill and poker-player daring, codebreaker Joseph Rochefort and his team at "Hypo" cracked Japanese messages proving the main effort aimed at Midway. The U.S. Navy intercepted Yamamoto's fleet at Midway and smashed its carriers in one of the most decisive actions of the Pacific Theater on June 3rd to 7th, 1942. The Aleutians invasion, on the other hand, gave Japan a foothold on American territory that required almost a year to dislodge. In the end, however, by one of the ironies of war, the Japanese attempt to prevent land-based bombers from striking at Japan from the Aleutians backfired. Once the U.S. Army finally evicted the IJA from the islands, the Americans built considerably larger airfields there, from which regular sorties struck the Japanese-held Kurile Islands and shipping along the northern Japanese coast. World War II in the Arctic: The History of the Aleutian Islands Campaign and Nazi Germany's Arctic Invasion of the Soviet Union chronicles two of the most unique campaigns of World War II. Along with pictures of important people and places, you will learn about the Aleutian Islands Campaign and Operation Silver Fox like never before.
Download or read book Finland in World War II written by Tiina Kinnunen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-11-25 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on innovative scholarship on Finland in World War II, this volume offers a comprehensive narrative of politics and combat, well-argued analyses of the ideological, social and cultural aspects of a society at war, and novel interpretations of the memory of war.
Download or read book The Ghost Ships of Archangel written by William Geroux and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extraordinary story of survival and alliance during World War II: the icy journey of four Allied ships crossing the Arctic to deliver much needed supplies to the Soviet war effort. On the fourth of July, 1942, four Allied ships traversing the Arctic separated from their decimated convoy to head further north into the ice field of the North Pole, seeking safety from Nazi bombers and U-boats in the perilous white maze of ice floes, growlers, and giant bergs. Despite the risks, they had a better chance of survival than the rest of Convoy PQ-17, a fleet of thirty-five cargo ships carrying $1 billion worth of war supplies to the Soviet port of Archangel--the limited help Roosevelt and Churchill extended to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to maintain their fragile alliance, even as they avoided joining the fight in Europe while the Eastern Front raged. The high-level politics that put Convoy PQ-17 in the path of the Nazis were far from the minds of the diverse crews aboard their ships. U.S. Navy Ensign Howard Carraway, aboard the SS Troubadour, was a farm boy from South Carolina and one of the many Americans for whom the convoy was to be a first taste of war; aboard the SS Ironclad, Ensign William Carter of the U.S. Navy Reserve had passed up a chance at Harvard Business School to join the Navy Armed Guard; from the Royal Navy Reserve, Lt. Leo Gradwell was given command of the HMT Ayrshire, a fishing trawler that had been converted into an antisubmarine vessel. All the while, The Ghost Ships of Archangel turns its focus on Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, playing diplomatic games that put their ships in peril. The twenty-four-hour Arctic daylight in midsummer gave no respite from bombers, and the Germans wielded the terrifying battleship Tirpitz, nicknamed The Big Bad Wolf. Icebergs were as dangerous as Nazis. As a newly forged alliance was close to dissolving and the remnants of Convoy PQ-17 tried to slip through the Arctic in one piece, the fate of the world hung in the balance.
Download or read book The Greatest Battles of World War II written by Alexander L Sheppard and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Harrowing stories of Auschwitz, Pearl Harbor, and D-Day continue to live on, but this unbridled look at The Greatest Battles of World War II explores the lesser-known monstrosities unlike other World War II books."--Amazon.
Download or read book Frozen in Time written by Mitchell Zuckoff and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A gripping true story of survival, bravery, and honor in the vast Arctic wilderness during World War II, from Mitchell Zuckoff, the author of New York Times bestseller Lost in Shangri-La On November 5, 1942, a US cargo plane slammed into the Greenland Ice Cap. Four days later, the B-17 assigned to the search-and-rescue mission became lost in a blinding storm and also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on board survived, and the US military launched a daring rescue operation. But after picking up one man, the Grumman Duck amphibious plane flew into a severe storm and vanished. Frozen in Time tells the story of these crashes and the fate of the survivors, bringing vividly to life their battle to endure 148 days of the brutal Arctic winter, until an expedition headed by famed Arctic explorer Bernt Balchen brought them to safety. Mitchell Zuckoff takes the reader deep into the most hostile environment on earth, through hurricane-force winds, vicious blizzards, and subzero temperatures. Moving forward to today, he recounts the efforts of the Coast Guard and North South Polar Inc.—led by indefatigable dreamer Lou Sapienza—who worked for years to solve the mystery of the Duck’s last flight and recover the remains of its crew. A breathtaking blend of mystery and adventure Mitchell Zuckoff's Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II is also a poignant reminder of the sacrifices of our military personnel and a tribute to the everyday heroism of the US Coast Guard.
Download or read book Hitler s Arctic War written by Chris Mann and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2016-11-30 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past the German General Staff had taken no interest in the military history of wars in the north and east of Europe. Nobody had ever taken into account the possibility that some day German divisions would have to fight and to winter in northern Karelia and on the Murmansk coast. (Lieutenant-General Waldemar Erfurth, German Army). Despite this statement, the German Armys first campaign in the far north was a great success: between April and June 1940 German forces totaling less than 20,000 men seized Norway, a state of three million people, for minimal losses. Hitlers Arctic War is a study of the campaign waged by the Germans on the northern periphery of Europe between 1940 and 1945.As Hitlers Arctic War makes clear, the emphasis was on small-unit actions, with soldiers carrying everything they needed food, ammunition and medical supplies on their backs. The terrain placed limitations on the use of tanks and heavy artillery, while lack of airfields restricted the employment of aircraft.Hitlers Arctic War also includes a chapter on the campaign fought by Luftwaffe aircraft and Kriegsmarine ships and submarines against the Allied convoys supplying the Soviet Union with aid. However, Wehrmacht resources committed to Norway and Finland were ultimately an unnecessary drain on the German war effort. Hitlers Arctic War is a groundbreaking study of how war was waged in the far north and its effects on German strategy.
Download or read book Naval Warfare 1919 45 written by Malcolm H. Murfett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-11-04 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naval Warfare 1919–45 is a comprehensive history of the war at sea from the end of the Great War to the end of World War Two. Showing the bewildering nature and complexity of the war facing those charged with fighting it around the world, this book ranges far and wide: sweeping across all naval theatres and those powers performing major, as well as minor, roles within them. Armed with the latest material from an extensive set of sources, Malcolm H. Murfett has written an absorbing as well as a comprehensive reference work. He demonstrates that superior equipment and the best intelligence, ominous power and systematic planning, vast finance and suitable training are often simply not enough in themselves to guarantee the successful outcome of a particular encounter at sea. Sometimes the narrow difference between victory and defeat hinges on those infinite variables: the individual’s performance under acute pressure and sheer luck. Naval Warfare 1919–45 is an analytical and interpretive study which is an accessible and fascinating read both for students and for interested members of the general public.
Download or read book Arctic Convoys 1941 1945 written by Richard Woodman and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Allied merchant ships and crews who braved the frigid far north to extend a lifeline to Russia, filled with “sheer heroism and brazen drama” (Literary Review). During the last four years of the Second World War, the Western Allies secured Russian defenses against Germany by supplying vital food and arms. The plight of those in Murmansk and Archangel who benefited is now well known, but few are aware of the courage, determination, and sacrifice of Allied merchant ships, which withstood unremitting U-boat attacks and aerial bombardment to maintain the lifeline to Russia. In the storms, fog, and numbing cold of the Arctic, where the sinking of a ten thousand–ton freighter was equal to a land battle in terms of destruction, the losses sustained were huge. Told from the perspective of their crews, this is the inspiring story of the long-suffering merchant ships without which Russia would almost certainly have fallen to Nazi Germany.
Download or read book North Atlantic Civilization at War written by Patrick Lloyd Hatcher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book recounts the World War II journeys of a soldier, a ship, and a bottle of spirits through, and around, five great turning-point battles. Those battles were influenced more by geography and climate than by generals and admirals. Properly titled they would be known as the Battles of the Sky (Britain), the Sand (El Alemein), the Snow (Stalingrad), the Sea (North Atlantic), and the Shore (Normandy). Slogging their way through this quintet are an eighteen-year-old G.I. from Missouri (as seen through his letters home), an "ugly duckling" of a Liberty ship (as seen through its Armed Guard reports), and a bottle of rum (as traced by those who, after the war, made money in selling war souvenirs). It is the history of the North Atlantic sea basin and its extensions at war: the story of the lulls between battles, when America's teenage warriors often watched war movies (Humphrey Bogart made and Warner Brothers released seven during the war), sang or listened to popular tunes by songsmiths like Irving Berlin, and drank rum-and-Coke (while listening to Dick Haymes sing the hit "Rum & Coca-Cola"). While accessible and vastly entertaining, this is a serious work of history. By treating World War II in Europe much as Fernand Braudel treated the origins of Western civilization in his masterpiece The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Hatcher brings Braudelian detachment to his narrative.
Download or read book Operation Silver Fox written by Charles River Editors and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-09-21 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes soldiers' accounts of the fighting *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading In the warm predawn darkness of June 22, 1941, 3 million men waited along a front hundreds of miles long, stretching from the Baltic coast of Poland to the Balkans. Ahead of them in the darkness lay the Soviet Union, its border guarded by millions of Red Army troops echeloned deep throughout the huge spaces of Russia. This massive gathering of Wehrmacht soldiers from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and his allied states - notably Hungary and Romania - stood poised to carry out Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's surprise attack against the country of his putative ally, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Today, everyone remembers the most famous consequences of Hitler's choice, particularly the fighting at Leningrad and Stalingrad, but the invasion was so comprehensive that it also involved fighting in the barren lands near the Arctic Circle, bringing fierce combat to the taiga and tundra. In fact, Arctic combat occurred in both the Pacific and European theaters of the war, and in both cases the operations were related in some measure to external lines of supply to the USSR. In the Pacific Theater, the Americans and Japanese met in the little-known but savagely contested Aleutian Islands Campaign. During this campaign IJA troops invaded North American territory for the only time in the war, setting off a months-long struggle on the remote island chain and in the frigid seas around it, culminating in a desperate tundra banzai charge in the harsh subarctic landscape of the distant north. Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht and the Red Army also met in the boreal pine forests, bogs, and tundra of Lapland and far northern Russia during the Barbarossa campaign of 1941. Fighting separately from the other Army Groups of the Third Reich, elite German Gebirgs (mountain) division soldiers and tough, resourceful Finns clashed with relatively determined and experienced Red Army soldiers in the forbidding terrain east of Finland's border. This campaign bore the elegant operational tile of Silberfuchs, or "Silver Fox." Aiming for Murmansk, a key Soviet port, or at least to sever the rail lines connecting it to points south and east, the Germans found themselves contending with the rugged, unfamiliar landscape, tough Soviet resistance, and as all too frequently occurred, the half-baked strategic meddling of Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer of the Third Reich. The Finns, for their part, had joined the Third Reich as military but not political allies to counterbalance the looming threat of the Soviet Union. The Soviets had already attacked Finland in late 1939 to early 1940, wresting the province of Karelia from their Scandinavian neighbor. Only the dauntless martial skill of the heavily outnumbered but indomitable Finns, coupled with Stalin's shift to securing his conquests in Poland, dissuaded the Soviets from attempting a full conquest of Finland. The Finns participated in Operation Silver Fox, albeit as a separate, independent command. The menace of the Soviets still loomed on Finland's eastern border, and the Finnish people wanted to win Karelia back in any case. Accordingly, Finn and German fought side by side, though their divergent goals contributed to Silver Fox's failure, and the Finns later turned on the Nazis near the end of the war to help bolster their territorial claims ahead of V-E Day.. Operation Silver Fox: The History of Nazi Germany's Arctic Invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II chronicles one of the most unheralded aspects of Nazi Germany's invasion of the USSR. Along with pictures of important people and places, you will learn about Operation Silver Fox like never before.
Download or read book Soviet Night Operations in World War II written by Claude R. Sasso and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1982 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Great Battles of World War II written by John MacDonald and published by Smithmark Publishers. This book was released on 1997-07 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The greatest battles of the Second World War are re-created, from the European to the Pacific theaters. Contains a four-page, full-color gatefold depicting the U.S. Forces landing at Normandy. Graphics, maps, and photos throughout.
Download or read book Fighting Admirals of the Second World War written by David W. Wragg and published by US Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Seapower was a crucial element in the outcome of the Second World War. The U-Boat campaign almost brought Britain to her knees; the Arctic convoys were crucial to keeping Russia in the War; Pearl Harbor brought America into the conflict with massive repercussions; allied naval supremacy made the D-Day landings possible. This book examines in detail the key naval commanders of both sides including five British (Pound, Cunningham, Ramsay, Horton, Somerville) and five US admirals (King, Nimitz, Spruance, Halsey, Fletcher), three German (Raeder, Doenitz, Lutjens) three Japanese (Yamamato, Nagumo, Koga) and two French (Darlan, de la Borde), the latterjustified by the problems faced by Vichy France, including the courageous decision to scuttle the fleet rather than let it fall into German hands in late 1942. In selecting the list, the author has made their decisive role in the war the only criterion."--Publisher's information.
