[Guns4Hire]

The Fall of Berlin - Antony Beevor - Ebook available

By December 1944, many of the 3 million citizens of Berlin had stopped giving the Nazi salute, and jokes circulated that the most practical Christmas gift of the season was a coffin. And for good reason, military historian Antony Beevor writes in this richly detailed reconstruction of events in the final days of Adolf Hitler's Berlin. Following savage years of campaigns in Russia, the Nazi regime had not only failed to crush Bolshevism, it had brought the Soviet army to the very gates of the capital. That army, ill-fed and hungry for vengeance, unloosed its fury on Berlin just a month later in a long siege that would cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides. But as Beevor recounts, the siege was also marked by remarkable acts of courage and even compassion. Drawing on unexplored Soviet and German archives and dozens of eyewitness accounts, Beevor brings us a harrowing portrait of the battle and its terrible aftermath, which would color world history for years to follow.

Hitler's Panzers - Dennis Showalter - Ebook available

A leading World War II historian provocatively analyzes Germany’s armored forces, the most influential branch of the Wehrmacht on modern warfare. He exposes the roots of the panzers, pointing out that Heinz Guderian was only one of a number of highly innovative commanders who created the panzers and then led them into the highly successful opening battles of the war. The early panzer victories made Hitler a passionate panzer advocate, and that in turn affected the status of the armored forces within the Wehrmacht and their loyalties to Hitler and the Nazi regime in general. Showalter has, as usual, researched thoroughly and written well but furnishes less background than non-scholarly readers will want.

The Forgotten 500 - Gregory A. Freeman - Ebook available

Bombing of the Ploiesti, Romania, oil refineries, a key German resource, started in 1942. Allied pilots sustaining damage frequently bailed out over Serbia in German-occupied Yugoslavia, where the resistance and others hid them. By 1944, more than 500 were stranded and slowly starving. The OSS concocted the daring Operation Halyard to airlift them, but they had to construct a landing strip without tools and without alerting the Germans or endangering local villagers, and then the rescuers had to avoid being shot down themselves. The operation's story is an exciting tale, but it was kept from general knowledge for decades; the resistance leader most responsible was a rival to Tito. Nazi-baited by a Stalinist mole in British intelligence, he was executed in 1946 with the consent of Britain and America, which thereafter refused to acknowledge having been snookered (the State Department kept many details classified more than 50 years). Evoking the rescuees' successive desperation, wild hope, and joy, and their gratitude to the Serbians who risked their lives to help, Freeman produces a breathtaking popular account.