Download or read book Hell s Folly written by William Moody and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HELL'S FOLLY, this is my story. There will be many "old soldiers" that will remember the incidents differently than I do. There will be many "Military Historians" that will disagree with me in accordance to OFFICIAL RECORDS (including the Government of the United States Archives). This is unfortunately what happens in any war. It is the "nature of the beast". PART ONE The story begins in Camp Howze outside of Gainesville, Texas circa July 1944. Private Moody had just been Court-Martialed for "Sleeping on Guard" in a Mustard Gas Training Area adjacent to Camp Howze. Because it was so late in the day when Private Moody was released to the Provost Marshal, he was allowed to sleep in the troop area for that one night so the proper paper work could be processed early the next morning. "Six months confinement at hard labor, forfeiture of 2/3rds of the soldier's monthly pay for six months and reduction to Private from Private First Class", were the exact words the President of the court droned. Little did I realize how much it would change my life and my outlook on life itself. In the Post Stockade, Moody schemed with his cellmate to escape to Canada but when the 103rd Infantry Division was alerted for the European Theatre, he was offered the option of freedom and combat or escape and being hunted for the rest of his life, he chose the former and was released the next day. Out of the Stockade, "it was pack this, pack that, "throw that away, you won't need it where we're going" by his platoon sergeant, Sergeant Denny. We were soon headed to New York on a train where Moody played poker for four straight days and nights and won nearly seven thousand dollars. He went from a poverty stricken prisoner to a rich, free soldier. In New York he began to make errors in judgment mostly caused by money, a need for sex before going to Europe and just plain youthful stupidity regarding Army regulations ...... Further in the book... Acting Corporal Hell had many feelings that he had never intimated in our days back in Camp Howze, Texas. We were good friends but we never discussed the fact that he was German or what that might mean to him, or to me for that matter. When we started south toward Austria I thought the trip would be a lark, some fun times, maybe a German girl or two? But there was something different in Clarence Hell's mind. Dachau! To me "Dachau" meant nothing at that time. It was just a German word that I didn't understand. But to millions of Europeans and German immigrants in the United States it was synonyms for "Death, Torture and Human Misery". The first night we tried to get an hour or two of sleep along side of the Autobahn hidden by some brush but it was miserable. The second day out we headed west. That, in itself meant nothing to me. It was the first day of May 1945, and Hell had directed the Jeep driver straight into Dachau, Germany. I was flabbergasted. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Hell had no authority to do this. He was in direct disobedience of orders. We rode around the compound for around 30 minutes finding nothing. No German Guards, no prisoners. It was as if the whole garrison had packed up and migrated somewhere? I was just breathing a sigh of relief when the Jeep driver Private Feinartz spotted prisoners in one of the outer compounds. Hell ordered Feinartz to stop. We dismounted the jeep and walked toward the gate. The situation was spooky and smelly. The inmates looked like Ghosts in striped pajamas. We were 50 feet away from them but they stunk to the high heavens and they started toward us. Unfortunately, Hell had already used his grease gun to shoot the chain off the wrought iron gate. We were about to be hugged and kissed by these, poor, pitiful, people... PART TWO Others have contributed to my story (Part II). Their words have been relate
Download or read book Hell s Folly 1941 1945 written by William B. Moody and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Folly of War written by Donald E. Schmidt and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Folly of War is a hard-hitting, critical analysis of American wars in the 20th century that set a pattern for the early 21st century. Drawing on a wide rage of sources and rigorously marshaling the facts, the book concludes that these wars have been futile, unnecessary and foolish. Rejecting the Left's contention that American foreign policy has been driven by greedy corporate interests, the author starts from the premise that average Americans have supported these wars out of a will to do good" but have failed in that aim, and in the process done much harm. This is a disturbing book that raises questions about how we go to war, how we fight wars, and how we eventually lose wars. Many Americans viewed the military defeat in Vietnam as an aberration, interrupting a string of foreign military successes. This book sees that tragedy as part of a line of politically reckless engagements. Driven by a proud self assurance that is often termed American exceptionalism, the nation arms itself to the teeth and intrudes into every region, pacing on a treadmill of perpetual war to achieve perpetual peace. Writing Chapter 13, "The War on Terror - The Contrived War" in 2003, just as the Bush administration was making its fateful decision to invade Iraq, Schmidt concluded at that time that the discussion among the principals (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, etc.) was stacked with faulty information and the decision was made on an emotional level rather than a rational one. Further, he predicted that nothing good would come of the Iraq venture -- unfortunately that assessment was correct. One of the officials in the Bush White House who participated in the pre-war discussions, admitted the attack was irrational: "The only reason we went into Iraq is we were looking for somebody's ass to kick ... Afghanistan was too easy." (Days of Fire - Bush and Cheney in the White House, by Peter Baker, p 191, Doubleday, 2013). At the end of seven major wars and after one million American soldiers have been killed, we are no closer to the perfect security we seek.
Download or read book Hedy s Folly written by Richard Rhodes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes delivers a remarkable story of science history: how a ravishing film star and an avant-garde composer invented spread-spectrum radio, the technology that made wireless phones, GPS systems, and many other devices possible. Beginning at a Hollywood dinner table, Hedy's Folly tells a wild story of innovation that culminates in U.S. patent number 2,292,387 for a "secret communication system." Along the way Rhodes weaves together Hollywood’s golden era, the history of Vienna, 1920s Paris, weapons design, music, a tutorial on patent law and a brief treatise on transmission technology. Narrated with the rigor and charisma we've come to expect of Rhodes, it is a remarkable narrative adventure about spread-spectrum radio's genesis and unlikely amateur inventors collaborating to change the world.
Download or read book Alfred Bester written by Carolyn Wendell and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 1982-01-01 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chronology, study, annotated bibliography of Bester's works, both within and outside of the science fiction genre.
Download or read book Folly Beach written by Stratton Lawrence and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2013 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the history of Folly Beach and how it transformed over the years from Coffin Island to a popular vacation destination. Folly Beach was not named for its carefree inhabitants' lifestyles, but it is a fitting moniker nonetheless. Originally dubbed Folly for its dense foliage and forests just across the marsh from James Island and Charleston, the six-mile sliver of land has served as an outpost for Civil War soldiers, an inspiration to George Gershwin, and a place of fond memories for thousands of residents, vacationers, and day-trippers seeking time to relax in the sea and sand. Long before Folly became a place for respite and relaxation, however, it served as a quarantine island for sick sailors, forebodingly referred to as Coffin Island. By the 1950s, Folly's dark history was sufficiently replaced with an amusement park, bowling alley, and moonlight dances out on the pier.
Download or read book The Eastern Front Day by Day 1941 45 written by Steve Crawford and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2006-10 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The warriors, the weapons, and the furious battles
Download or read book Japan s Radio War on Australia 1941 1945 written by Lucy D. Meo and published by Melbourne University. This book was released on 1968 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Political Hell Raiser written by Marc C. Johnson and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Burton K. Wheeler (1882–1975) may have been the most powerful politician Montana ever produced, and he was one of the most influential—and controversial—members of the United States Senate during three of the most eventful decades in American history. A New Deal Democrat and lifelong opponent of concentrated power—whether economic, military, or executive—he consistently acted with a righteous personal and political independence that has all but disappeared from the public sphere. Political Hell-Raiser is the first book to tell the full story of Wheeler, a genuine maverick whose successes and failures were woven into the political fabric of twentieth-century America. Wheeler came of political age amid antiwar and labor unrest in Butte, Montana, during World War I. As a crusading United States attorney, he battled Montana’s powerful economic interests, championed farmers and miners, and won election to the U.S. Senate in 1922. There he made his name as one of the “Montana scandalmongers,” uncovering corruption in the Harding and Coolidge administrations. Drawing on extensive research and new archival sources, Marc C. Johnson follows Wheeler from his early backing of Franklin D. Roosevelt and ardent support of the New Deal to his forceful opposition to Roosevelt’s plan to expand the Supreme Court and, in a move widely viewed as political suicide, his emergence as the most prominent spokesman against U.S. involvement in World War II right up to three days before Pearl Harbor. Johnson provides the most thorough telling of Wheeler’s entire career, including all its accomplishments and contradictions, as well as the political storms that the senator both encouraged and endured. The book convincingly establishes the place and importance of this principled hell-raiser in American political history.
Download or read book Soldiers of Barbarossa written by Craig W.H. Luther and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-11-15 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scope and scale of Operation Barbarossa—the German invasion of the Soviet Union—make it one of the pivotal events of the Second World War. Yet our understanding of both the military campaign as well as the “war of annihilation” conducted throughout the occupied territories depends overwhelmingly on “top-down” studies. The three million German soldiers who crossed the Soviet border and experienced this war are seldom the focus and are often entirely ignored. Who were these men and how did they see these events? Luther and Stahel, two of the leading experts on Operation Barbarossa, have reconstructed the 1941 campaign entirely through the letters (as well as a few diaries) of more than 200 German soldiers across all areas of the Eastern Front. It is an original perspective on the campaign, one of constant combat, desperate fear, bitter loss, and endless exertions. One learns the importance of comradeship and military training, but also reads the frightening racial and ideological justifications for the war and its violence, which at times lead to unrelenting cruelty and even mass murder. Soldiers of Barbarossa is a unique and sobering account of 1941, which includes hundreds of endnotes by Luther and Stahel providing critical context, corrections, and commentary.
Download or read book The Eastern Front written by Leon Degrelle and published by Institute for Historical Review. This book was released on 2014-08 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping first-person memoir of soldierly sacrifice, heroism and fierce combat against numerically superior Soviet forces during World War II, by a charismatic Belgian writer and politician turned Waffen SS front-line infantryman. In a laudatory review appearing in an official US Army Department magazine, US Army Brigadier General John C. Bahnsen wrote: "The pace of the writing is fast; the action is graphic, and a warrior can learn things from reading this book. I recommend its reading by students of the art of war. It is well worth the price." Here is the epic story of the Walloon Legion, a volunteer Belgian unit of the World War II pan-European SS force, as told by the legendary figure whose unmatched frontline combat experience and literary talent made him the premier spokesman for his fallen comrades. Captures the grit, the terror and the glory of Europe's crusade against Communism in absorbing prose. Includes fascinating first-person descriptions of Hitler, Himmler and other Third Reich personalities. Degrelle vividly describes how he and his comrades endured danger, privation and torrents of shot and shell -- on the sun-baked steppes of Ukraine, at the foothills of the Caucasus, in the depths of bone-chilling winter, through the stinking mud and the flaming hell of Cherkassy, and across the rolling plains of Estonia and the Pomeranian lake country. You'll learn what moved the 35-year-old Degrelle -- a brilliant intellectual and his country's most colorful political leader -- to enlist as a private in the volun-teer legion he himself organized to join with Third Reich Germany and its allies in their titanic fight against the Bolshevik enemy."
Download or read book The Conquerors written by Michael R. Beschloss and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2002-11-04 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller, The Conquerors reveals how Franklin Roosevelt's and Harry Truman's private struggles with their aides and Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin affected the unfolding of the Holocaust and the fate of vanquished Nazi Germany. With monumental fairness and balance, The Conquerors shows how Roosevelt privately refused desperate pleas to speak out directly against the Holocaust, to save Jewish refugees, and to explore the possible bombing of Auschwitz to stop the killing. The book also shows FDR's fierce will to ensure that Germany would never threaten the world again. Near the end of World War II, he abruptly endorsed the secret plan of his friend, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, to reduce the Germans to a primitive existence—despite Churchill's fear that crushing postwar Germany would let the Soviets conquer the continent. The book finally shows how, after FDR's death, President Truman rebelled against Roosevelt's tough approach and adopted the Marshall Plan and other more conciliatory policies that culminated in today's democratic, united Europe. As Presidents Roosevelt and Truman led the United States in World War II in Europe, they dealt with the question of what kind of government should be imposed on Nazi Germany to ensure that Germany could never again drag the world into war. The Conquerors tells the story with much intimate detail and color of how FDR and Truman privately struggled in their own minds and with titanic allies like Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin, through summits and secret messages, to answer that question.
Download or read book Hell s Angels written by Hunter S. Thompson and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gonzo journalist and literary roustabout Hunter S. Thompson flies with the angels—Hell’s Angels, that is—in this short work of nonfiction. “California, Labor Day weekend . . . early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur. . . The Menace is loose again.” Thus begins Hunter S. Thompson’s vivid account of his experiences with California’s most notorious motorcycle gang, the Hell’s Angels. In the mid-1960s, Thompson spent almost two years living with the controversial Angels, cycling up and down the coast, reveling in the anarchic spirit of their clan, and, as befits their name, raising hell. His book successfully captures a singular moment in American history, when the biker lifestyle was first defined, and when such countercultural movements were electrifying and horrifying America. Thompson, the creator of Gonzo journalism, writes with his usual bravado, energy, and brutal honesty, and with a nuanced and incisive eye; as The New Yorker pointed out, “For all its uninhibited and sardonic humor, Thompson’s book is a thoughtful piece of work.” As illuminating now as when originally published in 1967, Hell’s Angels is a gripping portrait, and the best account we have of the truth behind an American legend.
Download or read book The Stalin and Molotov Lines written by Neil Short and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years following the Civil War, plans were drawn up to build a major set of fortifications along the Russian western border. Work began in 1926, leading to a front that stretched over 2,000km from the Baltic to the Black Sea. By the time of the outbreak of World War II, the defences of the Stalin Line, as it was known, were largely complete – but were also now too far behind the new Soviet border to be of any use in potential offensives. Stalin took steps to create a new defensive line inside Poland, which came to be known by the name of the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov. This book details the development of these lines, and the fighting that took place around them in 1941.
Download or read book The Rise of the G I Army 1940 1941 written by Paul Dickson and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A must-read book that explores a vital pre-war effort [with] deep research and gripping writing.” —Washington Times In The rise of the G.I. Army, 1940–1941, Paul Dickson tells the dramatic story of how the American Army was mobilized from scattered outposts two years before Pearl Harbor into the disciplined and mobile fighting force that helped win World War II. In September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and initiated World War II, America had strong isolationist leanings. The US Army stood at fewer than 200,000 men—unprepared to defend the country, much less carry the fight to Europe and the Far East. And yet, less than a year after Pearl Harbor, the American army led the Allied invasion of North Africa, beginning the campaign that would defeat Germany, and the Navy and Marines were fully engaged with Japan in the Pacific. Dickson chronicles this transformation from Franklin Roosevelt’s selection of George C. Marshall to be Army Chief of Staff to the remarkable peace-time draft of 1940 and the massive and unprecedented mock battles in Tennessee, Louisiana, and the Carolinas by which the skill and spirit of the Army were forged and out of which iconic leaders like Eisenhower, Bradley, and Clark emerged. The narrative unfolds against a backdrop of political and cultural isolationist resistance and racial tension at home, and the increasingly perceived threat of attack from both Germany and Japan.
Download or read book Within Our Gates written by Alan Gevinson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 1588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[These volumes] are endlessly absorbing as an excursion into cultural history and national memory."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Download or read book From the Ballroom to Hell written by Elizabeth Aldrich and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1800s, dance and etiquette manuals provided ordinary men and women with the keys to becoming gentlemen and ladies--and thus advancing in society. Why dance? To the insecure and status-oriented upper middle class, the ballroom embodied the perfect setting in which to demonstrate one's fitness for membership in genteel society. From the Ballroom to Hell collects over 100 little-known excerpts from dance, etiquette, beauty, and fashion manuals from the nineteenth century. Included are instructions for performing various dances, as well as musical scores, costume patterns, and the proper way to hold one's posture, fork, gloves, and fan. While of particular interest to dancers, dance historians, and choreographers, anyone fascinated by the ways and mores of the period will find From the Ballroom to Hell an endearing and informative glimpse of America's past.