Download or read book The Second World War Through Soldiers Eyes written by James Goulty and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2016-07-31 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'What was it really like to serve in the British Army during the Second World War?Discover a soldier's view of life in the British Army from recruitment and training to the brutal realities of combat. Using first-hand sources, James Goulty reconstructs the experiences of the men and women who made up the 'citizen's army'. Find out about the weapons and equipment they used; the uniforms they wore; how they adjusted to army discipline and faced the challenges of active service overseas.What happened when things went wrong? What were your chances of survival if you were injured in combat or taken prisoner? While they didn't go into combat, thousands of women also served in the British Army with the ATS or as nurses. What were their wartime lives like? And, when the war had finally ended, how did newly demobilised soldiers and servicewomen cope with returning home?The British Army that emerged victorious in 1945 was vastly different from the poorly funded force of 865,000 men who heard Neville Chamberlain declare war in 1939. With an influx of civilian volunteers and conscripts, the army became a citizens force and its character and size were transformed. By D-Day Britain had a well-equipped, disciplined army of over three million men and women and during the war they served in a diverse range of places across the world. This book uncovers some of their stories and gives a fascinating insight into the realities of army life in wartime.
Download or read book The Second World War Through Soldiers Eyes written by James Goulty and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Eyes of the War written by Nat Hyman and published by . This book was released on 1945 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Frontsoldaten written by Stephen G. Fritz and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2010-09-12 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alois Dwenger, writing from the front in May of 1942, complained that people forgot "the actions of simple soldiers.I believe that true heroism lies in bearing this dreadful everyday life." In exploring the reality of the Landser, the average German soldier in World War II, through letters, diaries, memoirs, and oral histories, Stephen G. Fritz provides the definitive account of the everyday war of the German front soldier. The personal documents of these soldiers, most from the Russian front, where the majority of German infantrymen saw service, paint a richly textured portrait of the Landser that illustrates the complexity and paradox of his daily life. Although clinging to a self-image as a decent fellow, the German soldier nonetheless committed terrible crimes in the name of National Socialism. When the war was finally over, and his country lay in ruins, the Landser faced a bitter truth: all his exertions and sacrifices had been in the name of a deplorable regime that had committed unprecedented crimes. With chapters on training, images of combat, living conditions, combat stress, the personal sensations of war, the bonds of comradeship, and ideology and motivation, Fritz offers a sense of immediacy and intimacy, revealing war through the eyes of these self-styled "little men." A fascinating look at the day-to-day life of German soldiers, this is a book not about war but about men. It will be vitally important for anyone interested in World War II, German history, or the experiences of common soldiers throughout the world.
Download or read book Sheer Misery written by Mary Louise Roberts and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The senses -- The dirty body -- The foot -- The wound -- The corpse.
Download or read book Japanese Eyes American Hearts written by Hawaii Nikkei History Editorial Board and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese Eyes... American Heart is a rare and powerful collection of personal thoughts written by the soldiers themselves, reflections of the men's thoughts as recorded in diaries and letters sent home to family members and friends, and other expressions about an episode that marked a turning point in the lives of many.
Download or read book A Patriot s Memoirs of World War Ii written by Luciano Louis Charles Graziano and published by LifeRich Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-23 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was January 1943 when twenty-year-old Louis Graziano received a letter from Uncle Sam ordering him to report to Fort Niagara, New York, for a physical. Although he knew the United States was at war, he had no idea what was ahead of him. After making a promise to dutifully defend his country, Louis never realized how much his military experience would change the course of his life. In a memoir that reveals the good, bad, and ugly of war and beyond, Louis leads others through his life experiences via personal stories and historical photographs that provide a candid glimpse into what it was like to be a young soldier before, during, and after World War II. While revealing his experiences and thoughts, Louis demonstrates how he exhibited courage amid heartbreaking loss, trusted God to protect him, and found love with a beautiful fellow soldier. Among his documented experiences were landing with the third wave on D-Day on Omaha Beach, fighting the Battle of the Bulge, and witnessing the signing of the Instrument of Surrender at the Little Red Schoolhouse. Included are personal letters and commendations as well as interesting historical facts. A Patriot’s Memoirs of World War II shares a veteran’s personal story and photographs that document his experiences during the biggest and deadliest war in history.
Download or read book The Ghost Army of World War II written by Rick Beyer and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A riveting tale told through personal accounts and sketches along the way—ultimately, a story of success against great odds. I enjoyed it enormously.” —Tom Brokaw The first book to tell the full story of how a traveling road show of artists wielding imagination, paint, and bravado saved thousands of American lives—now updated with new material. In the summer of 1944, a handpicked group of young GIs—artists, designers, architects, and sound engineers, including such future luminaries as Bill Blass, Ellsworth Kelly, Arthur Singer, Victor Dowd, Art Kane, and Jack Masey—landed in France to conduct a secret mission. From Normandy to the Rhine, the 1,100 men of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, known as the Ghost Army, conjured up phony convoys, phantom divisions, and make-believe headquarters to fool the enemy about the strength and location of American units. Every move they made was top secret, and their story was hushed up for decades after the war's end. Hundreds of color and black-and-white photographs, along with maps, official memos, and letters, accompany Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles’s meticulous research and interviews with many of the soldiers, weaving a compelling narrative of how an unlikely team carried out amazing battlefield deceptions that saved thousands of American lives and helped open the way for the final drive to Germany. The stunning art created between missions also offers a glimpse of life behind the lines during World War II. This updated edition includes: A new afterword by co-author Rick Beyer Never-before-seen additional images The successful campaign to have the unit awarded a Congressional Gold Medal History and WWII enthusiasts will find The Ghost Army of World War II an essential addition to their library.
Download or read book What Soldiers Do written by Mary Louise Roberts and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-05-17 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways. That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty. While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.
Download or read book Children of War written by Susan Goodman and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Were you a child, toddler or teenager during the War? If so, please share your memories and anecdotes: the blackout, bombing, evacuation, shortages, absent fathers...and the fun. Need Your help. It's important, for those of us still around - and for the future.' This was the wording of a boxed ad Susan Goodman placed in a number of local newspapers - and the response was colossal: she had touched a dormant nerve. And this remarkable book is the result - a rich tapestry of the dramatic, amusing, poignant and everyday during the 20th century's greatest conflict, through a child's eyes. Its compelling first-hand stories reflect not only British life in the towns, suburbs and countryside, but also the experience of those who arrived as refugees. It has heartwarming and harrowing accounts of both sides of the evacuee experience.
Download or read book Taking Leave Taking Liberties written by Aaron Hiltner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American soldiers overseas during World War II were famously said to be “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” But the assaults, rapes, and other brutal acts didn’t only happen elsewhere, far away from a home front depicted as safe and unscathed by the “good war.” To the contrary, millions of American and Allied troops regularly poured into ports like New York and Los Angeles while on leave. Euphemistically called “friendly invasions,” these crowds of men then forced civilians to contend with the same kinds of crime and sexual assault unfolding in places like Britain, France, and Australia. With unsettling clarity, Aaron Hiltner reveals what American troops really did on the home front. While GIs are imagined to have spent much of the war in Europe or the Pacific, before the run-up to D-Day in the spring of 1944 as many as 75% of soldiers were stationed in US port cities, including more than three million who moved through New York City. In these cities, largely uncontrolled soldiers sought and found alcohol and sex, and the civilians living there—women in particular—were not safe from the violence fomented by these de facto occupying armies. Troops brought their pocketbooks and demand for “dangerous fun” to both red-light districts and city centers, creating a new geography of vice that challenged local police, politicians, and civilians. Military authorities, focused above all else on the war effort, invoked written and unwritten legal codes to grant troops near immunity to civil policing and prosecution. The dangerous reality of life on the home front was well known at the time—even if it has subsequently been buried beneath nostalgia for the “greatest generation.” Drawing on previously unseen military archival records, Hiltner recovers a mostly forgotten chapter of World War II history, demonstrating that the war’s ill effects were felt all over—including by those supposedly safe back home.
Download or read book Second World War Lives written by James Goulty and published by Pen and Sword Family History. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second World War was a momentous event in twentieth-century history and it is a fascinating period for family historians to explore. Numerous records are available to researchers whose relatives served in the war, and James Goulty's book is an accessible guide on how to locate and understand these sources - and get the most out of them. Using evidence gleaned from a range of sources - archives, official records, books, libraries, oral history and the internet - he reconstructs the wartime records of a revealing and representative group of ordinary men and women: a signaler, an infantryman, a doctor, an artillery officer, a woman serving with anti aircraft units, a commando, a Royal Navy bomb disposal officer, RAF fighter and bomber pilots, and others. He describes their wartime careers and experiences and demonstrates how they fitted into contemporary military organizations and operations. He looks at their backgrounds, their wartime training and duties, their front line service, and the conditions they endured. In each case he shows how the research was conducted and explains how the lives of such individuals can be explored - highlighting methods that can be used and sources that can be consulted. James Goulty's informative book will be essential reading and reference for anyone who wants to find out about the Second World War and is keen to understand the part an ancestor played in it.
Download or read book The Soldier s War written by Richard van Emden and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: November 2008 sees the 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War, 'the war to end all wars' that still haunts and fascinates in equal measure. Richard van Emden's new book tells that story as never before through the words and pictures of the men who were there. The Soldier's War includes incredible never-published-before letters and photographs to reveal the true stories of a lost generation. The Soldier's War traces the war chronologically, taking stories from each year of the fighting and following the British Tommy through devastating battles and trench warfare to the armistice in 1918. The book also reflects on other lesser-known and more personal aspects of the war, such as the work of stretcher-bearers, army chaplains, and burial parties. Each chapter will begin with an exploration of the soldiers' post-war attitudes to an emotive and controversial aspects of the conflict. What were their attitudes towards the enemy? What did the troops at the front line really think about their generals? Did they remember their time in the war with any fondness? Central to The Soldier's War are the original and as-yet-unseen photographs that punctuate the narrative. Many soldiers carried lightweight VPK cameras (Vest Pocket Kodaks) and used them (illegally) to photograph the war as it unfolded. Between seventy-five and a hundred remarkable images will for the first time show trench-warfare as it really happened.
Download or read book Through Our Soldiers Eyes written by Montana High School Students in Ronan and published by Trafford on Demand Pub. This book was released on 2006 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through our Soldiers' Eyes is a collection of oral histories, sharing the military experiences of 30 veterans. The stories were collected and written by high school students in Ronan, Montana.
Download or read book Eyes of the War written by Nat Hyman and published by . This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a new release of the original 1945 edition.
Download or read book The GI s War written by Edwin Palmer Hoyt and published by McGraw-Hill Companies. This book was released on 1988 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first oral history to tell the whole story of the European war through the eyes of the field soldiers who actually fought in it--the "dogfaces," the pawns on the chessboard.
Download or read book WWII written by Monika Danhof and published by Fulton Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2024-03-28 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The following are true stories from children growing up in a strange and bizarre world under the notorious Nazi Regime during WWII, authentically telling them in their own words and as seen through the "eyes of a child." They constantly feared and wondered about some horrible things they had seen and heard--people being forcefully dragged out of their homes, dreadful screams from someone being beaten to death, lifeless bodies hanging from trees, friends and people they knew disappearing overnight--and were desperate to find out the truth in their own courageous ways as their many curious questions were harshly brushed away with the words "Hush, hush! You have not seen anything, and you do not tell anyone!" Bravely, they endured earth-shattering air raids in dark freezing-cold bunkers and shared the exhilarating joy expressed by every surviving soul. Amazingly, in the middle of chaos, they played happily in the rubble of war. Read about the children's own ingenious humanitarian aid campaigns they created and how their accomplishments were able to bring much-needed relief to many elderly and sick citizens of their small town. Lastly, learn about the children's curious and heart-warming relationships they formed with the soldiers of the Ninetieth Infantry Division of the United States Army in Germany in April 1945. This book is written for the children of "today and tomorrow" to remember the children of "yesterday." Monika Danhof
