[AnemicOak]

Some more Osprey military history titles that are currently $1.99 each. Links are for Amazon, but probably available at Kobo & elsewhere too...

The Boys of '67: Charlie Company's War in Vietnam by Andrew Wiest

‘compelling… a fine blend of military and social history, sympathetic, well-written but analytically rigorous’
(Professor Gary Sheffield, BBC History Magazine Best Books of the Year 2012)

When the 160 men of Charlie Company (4th Battalion/47th Infantry/9th ID) were drafted by the US Army in May 1966, they were part of the wave of conscription that would swell the American military to 80,000 combat troops in theater by the height of the war in 1968. In the spring of 1966, the war was still popular and the draftees of Charlie Company saw their service as a rite of passage. But by December 1967, when the company rotated home, only 30 men were not casualties—and they were among the first vets of the war to be spit on and harassed by war protestors as they arrived back the U.S.

In his new book, The Boys of ’67, Andy Wiest, the award-winning author of Vietnam’s Forgotten Army and The Vietnam War 1956-1975, examines the experiences of a company from the only division in the Vietnam era to train and deploy together in similar fashion to WWII’s famous 101st Airborne Division.

Wiest interviewed more than 50 officers and enlisted men who served with Charlie Company, including the surviving platoon leaders and both of the company’s commanders. (One of the platoon leaders, Lt Jack Benedick, lost both of his legs, but went on to become a champion skier.) In addition, he interviewed 15 family members of Charlie Company veterans, including wives, children, parents, and siblings. Wiest also had access to personal papers, collections of letters, a diary, an abundance of newspaper clippings, training notebooks, field manuals, condolence letters, and photographs from before, during, and after the conflict.

As Wiest shows, the fighting that Charlie Company saw in 1967 was nearly as bloody as many of the better publicized battles, including the infamous ‘Ia Drang’ and ‘Hamburger Hill.’ As a result, many of the surviving members of Charlie Company came home with what the military now recognizes as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder—a diagnosis that was not recognized until the late 1970s and was not widely treated until the 1980s. Only recently, after more than 40 years, have many members of Charlie Company achieved any real and sustained relief from their suffering.

Samurai - The World of the Warrior by Stephen Turnbull

The world of the samurai - the legendary elite warrior cult of old Japan - has for too long been associated solely with military history and has remained a mystery to the general reader. In this exciting new book, Stephen Turnbull, the world's leading authority on the samurai, goes beyond the battlefield to paint a picture of the samurai as they really were. Familiar topics such as the cult of suicide, ritualised revenge and the lore of the samurai sword are seen in the context of an all-encompassing warrior culture that was expressed through art and poetry as much as through violence. Using themed chapters, the book studies the samurai through their historical development and their relationship to the world around them - relationships that are shown to persist in Japan even today.

Don't Hurry Me Down to Hades: The Civil War in the Words of Those Who Lived It by Susannah Ural

Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades is the story of families enduring the whirlwind of the Civil War, told through the words of famous and ordinary citizens and ranging from the battlefield to the home front, from presidential councils to frontier revivals. The book reveals how Americans on both sides of the Mason and Dixon line withstood four years of brutal, unrelenting conflict. Of the hundreds of thousands of books published on the American Civil War, this is one of the few to approach the nation’s defining conflict from this powerful perspective.

Grounded in rare family letters and diaries, Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hadescaptures Americans’ wide-ranging reactions to the war and their astonishing perseverance. Some of the accounts are entirely unknown to readers, while better-known events are told from unusual perspectives. Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, for example, is shared from the viewpoint of Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée (and stepsister) Clara Harris, while Lewis Powell’s attempt on Secretary of State William Seward’s life is seen through the terrified eyes Fanny Seward, who was seated next to her father when Powell burst into the room. Madison and Lizzie Bowler help readers understand how the war brought a Minnesota couple together in marriage and then nearly drove them apart when Madison insisted that his first duty was to his nation while Lizzie believed it was to her and their newborn daughter. A thousand miles to the south, two Texas families also suffered through their soldiers’ absence and tried to explain to their young children why father had “gone to war” with “Santaclause.” And to the north in Kentucky, a runaway slave won freedom for himself and his family by joining the Union Army only to face prejudice as brutal and destructive as the life he’d left behind.

Readers are carried alongside these families, sharing their dreams that the fighting might end this year and suffering with them when the Reaper comes calling. Through these and other stories, Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades invites readers to set aside previous assumptions to learn about the divisions and range of opinions on both sides from ordinary and famous men and women, black and white, slave and free. Esteemed Civil War historian Susannah J. Ural brings fresh insight into the war by delving into historical archives and private family papers to peal back the passage of time. Her consummate narrative weaves together a textured, powerful portrait of a nation at war with itself.

Rolling Thunder in a Gentle Land: The Vietnam War Revisited by Andrew Wiest

From the Introduction
In the end, then, the Vietnam War was a conflict of myriad complexities. It was a colonial war and a regional war. It was a total war and a limited war. It was a civil war, an insurgency and a conventional war - and indeed it varied from one form to another at different times and in different places. It was a war in mountains, jungles or open rice paddies depending on the location of the battlefield. It was a war of high technology and no technology. It was a war of airpower and a war of footpower. It was a helicopter war and a brown-water war. It was a war won on the battlefield and lost on the homefront. One thing that the Vietnam War was not was simply an American War. It was a war of varying and mutable contexts - a chameleon of constant change. The greatest American failure in the conflict was a failure to understand context. For far too many important American planners the Vietnam War had but one context - the black and white context of the Cold War; a context that begged an inexorable singular military logic and solution. A military solution that was so overly simple that it proved to be no solution at all.

The present study takes as its main goal to place the Vietnam War into its proper contexts. Though Rolling Thunder in a Gentle Land cannot pretend to answer all of the nagging questions that still surround the conflict, it can at least begin to pose new questions that have too often been left unasked or ignored. Through the work of a unique collection of historians, journalists, and war participants Rolling Thunder in a Gentle Land also seeks to spark historical debate and research by searching for new contextual answers to questions that many historians had thought long since answered - sometimes calling for a needed revision of the historical orthodoxy of the conflict. Thus the present study proposes to take fresh looks at several of the most important aspects of the Vietnam War and hopes to demonstrate that the field remains one of the most vibrant and important fields available to future historical inquiry of all types by scholars and laymen alike who seek an opportunity to help define a war of unending complexity.

CHAPTER HEADS An American war? The French experience. The North Vietnamese experience. The Ho Chi Minh Trail. The war outside Vietnam: Cambodia and Laos. The South Vietnamese experience. The civilian experience. Vietnam ANZACs. US doctrinal critique. The US experience. The river war. The air war. Vietnam tactics. Vietnam in the media. The legacy of war.

Battlefield Angels: Saving Lives Under Enemy Fire From Valley Forge to Afghanistan by Scott Mcgaugh

In Battlefield Angels historian Scott McGaugh pays homage to the thousands of medics, hospital corpsmen, and battlefield nurses, doctors, surgeons who have provided succor and healing to the more than 40 million warriors who have served in America’s armed forces since the nation’s founding.

McGaugh tells the story of Jonathan Letterman, a Union surgeon during the Civil War who is considered the father of American combat medicine. Letterman designed the first battlefield evacuation system after an unprepared medical corps at Bull Run left thousands of soldiers to die in the place where they were wounded. We also learn about Wheeler Lipes, a young navy corpsman and submariner with minimal medical training who on September 11, 1942, conducted the first-ever appendectomy at sea. And, we hear the story of Pfc. Monica Brown, the young army medic who was awarded the Silver Star for rescuing fellow soldiers from a disabled Humvee during an ambush in the Paktika province of Eastern Afghanistan in 2007. Brown is only the second woman in sixty years to receive the prestigious award. Through these stories and many others, McGaugh traces the captivating evolution of battlefield care, from the Revolutionary War to today's battles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Battlefield Angels captures "in-the-trenches moments" during which medics and corpsmen fought to save the lives of their comrades. Along the way, readers will learn the fascinating history of battlefield medicine and how it has benefited both military and civilian medical practice throughout American history. McGaugh also looks ahead to the future, where telemedicine and robotic surgery promise to transform the battlefield once again. In the end, Battlefield Angels both chronicles and pays homage to the men and women in arms who fight every day to save the lives of their fellow soldiers, sailors, and marines.

Helmand: Diaries of Front-line Soldiers by Simon Weston

A glimpse into life on the front line in Afghanistan told through the diaries of the British Marines

During their tour of Afghanistan in 2008, a number of soldiers kept personal diaries of their experiences, and now, for the first time, Osprey Publishing has collected them together to provide a gripping first-hand account of life in the front line in modern warfare. Although these soldiers were on the same tour, they all encountered different experiences, and so while the time frame is the same, their perspectives are inevitably different. Included here are the diaries of Lt John Thornton, who sadly lost his life just two weeks before the end of the tour, a Padre, a CO, a 2IC, and a member of Lt Thornton's section. The diary of Lt Thornton's brother, Ian, who returned from Helmand in 2012, provides an example of the war four years later and provides further context to the original tour diaries.


With an introduction that pulls the diaries together and puts them in context, this book provides a chance to look at what changes when the men and women come home, and what they learned from the tour.

US Marine Corps Fighter Squadrons of World War II by Barrett Tillman

The classic 1951 movie Flying Leathernecks starring John Wayne immortalized the USMC pilots who had fought in the skies over Guadalcanal and the Solomons.

The US Marine Corps has a long and proud heritage of aviation excellence, celebrating its centenary in 2012. While "flying leathernecks" made their mark in both world wars, Korea, Vietnam and more recently throughout the global war on terrorism, it was during World War II that they captured the hearts and minds of the public with their daring exploits. This is the first book to detail the legendary actions of famous fighter aces such as Medal of Honor winner John L Smith, Greg "Pappy" Boyinton, Marion Carl, Joe Foss, and many more. Barrett Tillman combines expert research into the history and organization of the Marine Fighter Squadrons with dramatic accounts of deadly dogfights.

Letters from the Front: From the First World War to the Present Day by Andrew Roberts

Similar to Letters From Iwo Jima and All Quiet On The Western Front, this book tells the story of young men from many nations thrown into the crucible of war, fighting not just to survive, but to understand what was happening to them and their comrades. It tells it in the words of the soldiers themselves, in their letters home.

A legacy of an empire and a nation at war, Love, Tommy, is a collection of letters housed at Imperial War Museums sent by British and Commonwealth troops from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa from the front line of war to their loved ones at home. Poignant expressions of love, hope and fear sit alongside amusing anecdotes, grumbles about rations and thoughtful reflections, eloquently revealing how, despite the passage of time, many experiences of the fighting man are shared in countless wars and battles.
From the muddy trenches of the Somme to frozen ground of the Falklands to the heat and dust of Iraq, these letters are the ordinary soldier's testament to life on the front line.

Hitler's Elite: The SS 1939-45 by Chris McNab

The Third Reich's Waffen-SS defended Nazi Germany's Eastern & Western Fronts, and the Allgemeine-SS ran Holocaust concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald.

The SS has become the most infamous military formation in history. From its diminutive origins in the 1920s as Hitler's personal bodyguard, by the late war years it grew to a sprawling organization of hundreds of thousands of men, with a field army (the Waffen-SS-Armed-SS) numbering nearly 40 divisions and huge corporate, racial, and political power in the Allgemeine-SS (General-SS). The activities of the SS ranged from the heroic to the horrific; from fighting extraordinary defensive battles on the Eastern and Western Fronts, to running the concentration and extermination camp systems, and providing personnel for the Einsatzgruppen murder squads in Eastern Europe.
Hitler's Elite: The SS 1939-45 tells the complete story of the SS at individual, unit, and organizational levels. Following an explanation of the SS' complex political and social origins, and its growth within the Nazi empire, it goes on to look at both its war record and its wider role in Heinrich Himmler's implementation of Hitler's vision for the Third Reich. As well as providing a combat history of the Waffen-SS from 1939 to 1945, it also explores themes such as ideology, recruitment, foreign SS personnel, training, and equipment. The textual history is brought to life with more than 200 contemporary photographs and colour artworks from Osprey's series titles. As a companion volume to Hitler's Armies and Hitler's Eagles, this book gives a detailed and highly visual insight into one of Hitler's most powerful instruments of policy.

Between Giants: The Battle for the Baltics in World War II by Prit Buttar

With the exception of Poland, no region or territory suffered more greatly during World War II than the Baltic States. Caught between the giants of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia became pawns in the desperate battle for control of Eastern Europe throughout the course of World War II. This is a story of conquest and exploitation, of death and deportation and the fight for survival both by countries and individuals. The three states were repeatedly occupied -- by the Soviet Union in 1939, by Germany in 1941, and again by the Soviet Union in 1944-45. In each case, local government organizations and individuals were forced to choose between supporting the occupying forces or forming partisan units. Many would be caught up in the bitter fighting in the region and, in particular, in the huge battles for the Courland bridgehead during Operation Bagration when hundreds of thousands of soldiers would fight and die in the last year of the war. Over 300,000 Soviet troops would be lost during the repeated assaults on the 'Courland Cauldron' before 146,000 German and Latvia troops were finally forced to surrender. No mercy was shown and all Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians who fought for Germany were executed. By the end of the war, death and deportation had cost the Baltic States over 20 percent of their total population and the iron curtain would descend on the region for over four decades. Using numerous first-hand accounts and detailed archival research, Prit Buttar weaves a magisterial account of the bitter fighting on the Eastern Front and the three small states whose fates were determined by the fortunes and misfortunes of war.

Operation Barbarossa: The German Invasion of Soviet Russia by Robert Kirchubel

In the first 6 months of Hitler's World War II Nazi invasion, over 5 million of Stalin's Russian troops were killed, wounded, or captured defending their Motherland.

Germany's surprise assault on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Operation Barbarossa, aimed at nothing less than the destruction of the Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler saw this as the last vital step in the establishing of 'Lebensraum' for the German people in the East.
Three German Army Groups, supported by numerous European allies, poured across the Soviet border crushing all before them in a lightning campaign that threatened to eliminate all Soviet resistance and secure an easy victory. However, the vast resources and size of Soviet Russia caused the German armoured spearheads to slow and the advance finally ground to a halt within sight of Moscow itself, and with it Hitler's dreams of a quick victory.
This book combines Osprey's three Campaign titles on the Barbarossa campaign, along with new material specifically created, in order to tell the story of one of definitive campaigns of World War II.