Download or read book The Last Mission of the Wham Bam Boys written by Gregory A. Freeman and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the famed Nuremberg Tribunal, there was Rüsselsheim, a small German town, where ordinary civilians were tried in the first War Crimes Trial of World War II. As the tide of World War II turned, a hitherto unknown incident set a precedent for how we would bring wartime crimes to justice: In August 1944, the 9- man crew of an American bomber was forced to bail out over Germany. As their captors marched them into Rüsselsheim, a small town recently bombed to smithereens by Allies, they were attacked by an angry mob of civilians--farmers, shopkeepers, railroad workers, women, and children. With a local Nazi chief at the helm, they assaulted the young Americans with stones, bricks, and wooden clubs. They beat them viciously and left them for dead at the nearby cemetery. It could have been another forgotten tragedy of the war. But when the lynching was briefly mentioned in a London paper a few months later, it caught the eye of two Army majors, Luke Rogers and Leon Jaworski. Their investigation uncovered the real human cost of the war: the parents and a newlywed wife who agonized over the fate of the men, and the devastating effect of modern warfare on civilian populations. Rogers and Jaworski put the city of Rüsselsheim on trial, insisting on the rule of law even amidst the horrors of war. Drawing from trial records, government archives, interviews with family members, and personal letters, highly-acclaimed military historian Gregory A. Freeman brings to life for the first time the dramatic story. Taking the reader to the scene of the crime and into the homes of the crew, he exposes the stark realities of war to show how ordinary citizens could be drawn to commit horrific acts of wartime atrocities, and the far-reaching effects on generations.

Download or read book The Last Mission of the Wham Bam Boys written by Gregory A. Freeman and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the famed Nuremberg Tribunal, there was Rüsselsheim, a small German town, where ordinary civilians were tried in the first War Crimes Trial of World War II. As the tide of World War II turned, a hitherto unknown incident set a precedent for how we would bring wartime crimes to justice: In August 1944, the 9- man crew of an American bomber was forced to bail out over Germany. As their captors marched them into Rüsselsheim, a small town recently bombed to smithereens by Allies, they were attacked by an angry mob of civilians--farmers, shopkeepers, railroad workers, women, and children. With a local Nazi chief at the helm, they assaulted the young Americans with stones, bricks, and wooden clubs. They beat them viciously and left them for dead at the nearby cemetery. It could have been another forgotten tragedy of the war. But when the lynching was briefly mentioned in a London paper a few months later, it caught the eye of two Army majors, Luke Rogers and Leon Jaworski. Their investigation uncovered the real human cost of the war: the parents and a newlywed wife who agonized over the fate of the men, and the devastating effect of modern warfare on civilian populations. Rogers and Jaworski put the city of Rüsselsheim on trial, insisting on the rule of law even amidst the horrors of war. Drawing from trial records, government archives, interviews with family members, and personal letters, highly-acclaimed military historian Gregory A. Freeman brings to life for the first time the dramatic story. Taking the reader to the scene of the crime and into the homes of the crew, he exposes the stark realities of war to show how ordinary citizens could be drawn to commit horrific acts of wartime atrocities, and the far-reaching effects on generations.

Download or read book The Forgotten 500 written by Gregory A. Freeman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The astonishing, never before told story of the greatest rescue mission of World War II—when the OSS set out to recover more than 500 airmen trapped behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia... During a bombing campaign over Romanian oil fields, hundreds of American airmen were shot down in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. Local Serbian farmers and peasants risked their own lives to give refuge to the soldiers while they waited for rescue, and in 1944, Operation Halyard was born. The risks were incredible. The starving Americans in Yugoslavia had to construct a landing strip large enough for C-47 cargo planes—without tools, without alerting the Germans, and without endangering the villagers. And the cargo planes had to make it through enemy airspace and back—without getting shot down themselves. Classified for over half a century for political reasons, the full account of this unforgettable story of loyalty, self-sacrifice, and bravery is now being told for the first time ever. The Forgotten 500 is the gripping, behind-the-scenes look at the greatest escape of World War II. “Amazing [and] riveting.”—James Bradley, New York Times bestselling author of Flags of Our Fathers

Download or read book The Gathering Wind written by Gregory A. Freeman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: October 2012. A replica of the famous HMS Bounty, an eighteenth-century tall sailing ship, set a collision course with a storm that became the largest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic—a clash that proved to be one of the most unforgettable stories of Superstorm Sandy. The Bounty, crewed by an eclectic team of seafarers and led by highly respected captain Robin Walbridge, departed from Connecticut as Sandy raced north. Walbridge, whose decisions decided the fate of his ship and crew, attempted to outmaneuver the storm by heading southeast. As violent gusts tossed the wooden vessel, the crew fought to save their ship—and themselves. When the storm finally overtook the ship, the crew was tossed into the churning sea. The men and women of a Coast Guard station in North Carolina courageously flew into hundred-mile-per-hour winds to rescue the survivors of the Bounty. After hours of white-knuckle flying, they accomplished one of their most memorable rescues ever. Based on interviews with Bounty survivors and unfettered access to Coast Guard rescue team members, The Gathering Wind is the most complete account of this heartbreaking, thrilling, and inspirational story. INCLUDES PHOTOS

Download or read book Troubled Water written by Gregory A. Freeman and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gripping account of the riot aboard the USS Kitty Hawk—and the first mutiny in U.S. Naval history In 1972, the United States was embroiled in an unpopular war in Vietnam, and the USS Kitty Hawk was headed to her station in the Gulf of Tonkin. Its five thousand men, cooped up for the longest at-sea tour of the war, rioted--or, as Troubled Water suggests, mutinied. Disturbingly, the lines were drawn racially, black against white. By the time order was restored, careers were in tatters. Although the incident became a turning point for race relations in the Navy, this story remained buried within U.S. Navy archives for decades. With action pulled straight from a high-seas thriller, Gregory A. Freeman uses eyewitness accounts and a careful and unprecedented examination of the navy's records to refute the official story of the incident, make a convincing case for the U.S. navy's first mutiny, and shed new light on this seminal event in American history.

Download or read book Professional Journal of the United States Army written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Military Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Lay this Body Down written by Gregory A. Freeman and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As this true story unfolds, each detail seems more shocking: a young man forced to methodically kill his friends; his calm, unresisting compliance; men chained together, two by two, weighted down with rocks, and slowly driven to the bridges where they would be thrown over, alive and terrified; men ordered to dig their own graves."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Sailors to the End written by Gregory A. Freeman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Riveting. . . . A compassionate account of a dramatic incident in modern naval history, told with cinematic immediacy and narrative skill.” —Kirkus Reviews The aircraft carrier USS Forrestal was preparing to launch attacks into North Vietnam when one of its jets accidentally fired a rocket into an aircraft occupied by pilot John McCain. A huge fire ensued, and McCain barely escaped before a 1,000-pound bomb on his plane exploded, causing a chain reaction with other bombs on surrounding planes. The crew struggled for days to extinguish the fires, but, in the end, the tragedy took the lives of 134 men. For thirty-five years, the terrible loss of life has been blamed on the sailors themselves, but this meticulously documented history shows that they were truly the victims and heroes. “[A] thorough, absorbing account.” —Library Journal

Download or read book I Will Tell No War Stories written by Howard Mansfield and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-04-16 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Howard Mansfield grew up, World War II was omnipresent and hidden. This was also true of his father’s time in the Air Force. Like most of his generation, it was a rule not to talk about what he’d experienced in war. “You’re not getting any war stories from me,” he’d say. Cleaning up the old family house the year before his father's death, Mansfield was surprised to find a short diary of the bombing missions he had flown. Some of the missions were harrowing. Mansfield began to fill in the details, and to be surprised again, this time by a history he thought he knew. I Will Tell No War Stories is about undoing the forgetting in a family and in a society that has hidden the horrors and cataclysm of a world at war. Some part of that forgetting was necessary for the veterans, otherwise how could they come home, how could they find peace? I Will Tell No War Stories is also about learning to live with history, a theme Mansfield explored in earlier books like In the Memory House, which The New York Times called “a wise and beautiful book” and The Same Ax,Twice, said by the Times to be “filled with insight and eloquence … a brilliant book.”

Download or read book Bombing Hitler s Hometown written by Michael P. Croissant and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 2024-03-26 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant, groundbreaking slice of military history, this riveting story of white-knuckled action over one of Europe’s most heavily defended targets in the waning days of World War II also tells of the aftermath of the Linz, Austria, bombing—the heart-wrenching tales of survival and recovery, and the toll of warfare on both sides. In April 1945, Linz was one of Nazi Germany’s most vital assets. It was a crucial transportation hub and communications center, with railyards brimming with war materiel destined for the front lines. Linz was also the town Hitler claimed as home and had long intended to remake as the cultural capital of Europe, filling its planned Fuehrermuseum with world-famous art stolen from his conquered territories. Inevitably, Linz was also one of the most heavily defended targets remaining in Europe. The airmen of the Fifteenth Air Force were a mix of seasoned veterans and newcomers. As their mission was unveiled in the predawn hours of April 25th, audible groans and muffled expletives passed many lips. The reality of that mission would prove more brutal than any imagined. In the unheated, unpressurized B‑24 Liberator and B‑17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers, young men battled elements as dangerous as anything the Germans could throw at them. When batteries of German anti‑aircraft guns opened fire, the men flew into a man‑made hell of exploding shrapnel. Aircraft and men fell from the sky as Austrian civilians on the ground also struggled to survive beneath the bombs during the deadly climax of Hitler’s war. Drawing on interviews with dozens of America’s last surviving World War II veterans, as well as previously unpublished sources, Mike Croissant compellingly relates one of the war’s last truly untold stories—a gripping chronicle of warfare, the death of Nazi Germany, and the beginning of the Cold War. It is also a timeless tale of courage and terror, loss and redemption, humanity and savagery.

Download or read book Terror Flyers written by Kevin T Hall and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terror Flyers examines the "lynch justice" (Lynchjustiz) committed against American airmen in Nazi Germany during World War II. Using engaging first-person accounts of downed pilots, as well as previously unused primary sources, Terror Flyers challenges the notion that such lynchings were exclusively the domain of Nazi party officials and soldiers. New evidence reveals ordinary German people executed Lynchjustiz as well. Initially occurring as a spontaneous reaction to the devastation of the Allied air campaign against the cities of the Third Reich, Lynchjustiz offered the Nazi regime a unique propaganda opportunity to harness the outrage of the German population. Fueled by inspiration from America's own history of the lynching of African Americans, Nazi propaganda exploited the very same imagery found in US publications to escalate the anger of the German people. Drawing heavily on the accounts of the downed airmen themselves, testimonies from the "flyer trials" held in Dachau during 1945–48, and rarely seen Nazi propaganda, Terror Flyers offers a new narrative of this previously overlooked aspect of the Allied campaign in Europe and suggests that at least 3,000 cases of lynch justice likely occurred between 1943 and 1945.

Download or read book Four Hours of Fury written by James M. Fenelon and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Compellingly chronicles one of the least studied great episodes of World War II with power and authority…A riveting read” (Donald L. Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Masters of the Air) about World War II’s largest airborne operation—one that dropped 17,000 Allied paratroopers deep into the heart of Nazi Germany. On the morning of March 24, 1945, more than two thousand Allied aircraft droned through a cloudless sky toward Germany. Escorted by swarms of darting fighters, the armada of transport planes carried 17,000 troops to be dropped, via parachute and glider, on the far banks of the Rhine River. Four hours later, after what was the war’s largest airdrop, all major objectives had been seized. The invasion smashed Germany’s last line of defense and gutted Hitler’s war machine; the war in Europe ended less than two months later. Four Hours of Fury follows the 17th Airborne Division as they prepare for Operation Varsity, a campaign that would rival Normandy in scale and become one of the most successful and important of the war. Even as the Third Reich began to implode, it was vital for Allied troops to have direct access into Germany to guarantee victory—the 17th Airborne secured that bridgehead over the River Rhine. And yet their story has until now been relegated to history’s footnotes. In this viscerally exciting account, paratrooper-turned-historian James Fenelon “details every aspect of the American 17th Airborne Division’s role in Operation Varsity...inspired” (The Wall Street Journal). Reminiscent of A Bridge Too Far and Masters of the Air, Four Hours of Fury does for the 17th Airborne what Band of Brothers did for the 101st. It is a captivating, action-packed tale of heroism and triumph spotlighting one of World War II’s most under-chronicled and dangerous operations.

Download or read book Here Is Where written by Andrew Carroll and published by Crown. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here Is Where chronicles Andrew Carroll’s eye-opening – and at times hilarious -- journey across America to find and explore unmarked historic sites where extraordinary moments occurred and remarkable individuals once lived. Sparking the idea for this book was Carroll’s visit to the spot where Abraham Lincoln’s son was saved by the brother of Lincoln’s assassin. Carroll wondered, How many other unmarked places are there where intriguing events have unfolded and that we walk past every day, not realizing their significance? To answer that question, Carroll ultimately trekked to every region of the country -- by car, train, plane, helicopter, bus, bike, and kayak and on foot. Among the things he learned: *Where in North America the oldest sample of human DNA was discovered * Where America’s deadliest maritime disaster took place, a calamity worse than the fate of the Titanic *Which virtually unknown American scientist saved hundreds of millions of lives *Which famous Prohibition agent was the brother of a notorious gangster *How a 14-year-old farm boy’s brainstorm led to the creation of television Featured prominently in Here Is Where are an abundance of firsts (from the first use of modern anesthesia to the first cremation to the first murder conviction based on forensic evidence); outrages (from riots to massacres to forced sterilizations); and breakthroughs (from the invention, inside a prison, of a revolutionary weapon; to the recovery, deep in the Alaskan tundra, of a super-virus; to the building of the rocket that made possible space travel). Here Is Where is thoroughly entertaining, but it’s also a profound reminder that the places we pass by often harbor amazing secrets and that there are countless other astonishing stories still out there, waiting to be found. Look for Andrew's new book, My Fellow Soldiers.

Download or read book The 12th Man written by Astrid Karlsen Scott and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning story of heroism and survival during World War II. The book that inspired the international film of the same name. “A must-read …. Intrigue, suspense, and adventure."—The Norwegian American "I remember reading We Die Alone in 1970 and I could never forget it. Then when we went to Norway to do a docudrama, people told us again and again that certain parts were pure fiction. Since I was a Norwegian that was not good enough; I had to find the truth. I sincerely believe we did,” writes author Astrid Karlsen Scott. The 12th Man is the true story of Jan Baalsrud, whose struggle to escape the Gestapo and survive in Nazi-occupied Norway has inspired the international film of the same name. In late March 1943, in the midst of WWII, four Norwegian saboteurs arrived in northern Norway on a fishing cutter and set anchor in Toftefjord to establish a base for their operations. However, they were betrayed, and a German boat attacked the cutter, creating a battlefield and spiraling Jan Baalsrud into the adventure of his life. The only survivor and wounded, Baalsrud begins a perilous journey to freedom, swimming icy fjords, climbing snow-covered peaks, enduring snowstorms, and getting caught in a monstrous avalanche. Suffering from snow blindness and frostbite, more than sixty people of the Troms District risk their lives to help Baalsrud to freedom. Meticulously researched for more than five years, Karlsen Scott and Haug bring forth the truth behind this captivating, edge-of-your-seat, real-life survival story.

Download or read book When Men Fell from the Sky written by Claire Andrieu and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1940 and 1945, more than 100,000 airmen were shot down over Europe, a few thousand of whom survived and avoided being arrested. When Men Fell from the Sky is a comparative history of the treatment of these airmen by civilians in France, Germany and Britain. By studying the situation on the ground, Claire Andrieu shows how these encounters reshaped societies at a local level. She reveals how the fall of France in 1940 may have concealed an insurrection nipped in the bud, that the 'People's War' in Britain was not merely a myth, and that in Germany, the 'racial community of the people' had in fact become a social reality with Allied airmen increasingly subjected to lynching from 1943 onwards. By considering why the treatment of these airmen contrasted so strongly in these countries, Andrieu sheds new light on how civilians reacted when confronted with the war 'at home'.

Download or read book The Wooden Horse written by Eric Williams and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2013-10-02 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is over fifty years since the critics of the day acclaimed The Wooden Horse as a superbly told story of the most ingenious and daring escape of the Second World War. Millions of readers agreed, and the book became a modern classic. This revised and expanded edition tells the tale. The escape itself was conceived on classical lines. The Greeks built a wooden horse and by means of it got into the city of Troy; in 1943 two British officers built a wooden horse and by means of it got out of a German prison camp. Together with a third companion, they were the only British prisoners ever to escape and reach England from this camp, though many tried. It was Stalag Luft III, designed especially to hold the Germans' most prized captives – Allied aircrew – and considered to be escape-proof. The break from the camp itself is only part of the story. Once outside the wire the escapers were still faced with the problem of getting out of Germany. Fugitives in the midst of a watchful enemy population, they had many close shaves when disaster threatened to overwhelm them – adventures which the reader shares to the full. The fantastic nature of this enterprise, the patience, determination and endurance, above all the steel nerve it demanded from an undernourished physique, are rendered the more impressive by the manner of the telling. The characters are so surely drawn that they could not but be real. Throughout the book runs a vein of humour which alone made those days bearable. The warmth of human companionship born of privation, fear and a common purpose is vividly portrayed.