From the Eastern Front to the Defense of the Homeland
In this action-packed memoir of aerial combat in World War II, Norbert Hannig remembers what it was like to fly with the German Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front: the high-altitude drama of closing in on a Soviet bomber, the thrill of watching his rounds hit home and burst the enemy into flames, the excitement of landing unscathed.
Thirty veterans of World War II from Pennsylvania recall their time of service in France, Italy, Burma, Guadalcanal, the Philippines, and the Pacific in this new volume based on Pennsylvania Cable Network's award-winning series "World War II - In Their Own Words".
In this gripping companion to his acclaimed "The Battalion", which told the story of the 2nd Ranger Battalion in World War-II, Robert W. Black turns his attention to the 1st, 3rd, and 4th Ranger Battalions, otherwise known as Darby's Rangers.
On December 16, 1944, when Hitler launched a surprise attack in the Ardennes to start the Battle of the Bulge, the green U.S. 394th Infantry Regiment of the 99th Infantry Division occupied a critical road junction at Losheimergraben, Belgium.
A Canadian in the German 7th Panzer Division, 1944-45
Six months before World War II erupted in 1939, young Bruno Friesen was sent to Germany by his father, a German-speaking Mennonite who came to Canada from Ukraine and believed the Third Reich offered a better life than Canada. Friesen was drafted into the Wehrmacht three years later and ended up in the 7th Panzer Division.
Most accounts of the Battle of the Bulge focus on the center, where the 101st Airborne held Bastogne, but the Germans' main thrust actually occurred to the north, where Sepp Dietrich's 6th SS Panzer Army stormed through the Losheim Gap on its way to Liege and Antwerp.
Destination Normandy follows the men of three American regiments on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Widely scattered, the 82nd Airborne Division's 507th Parachute Infantry halted the advance of an SS division. The untested 116th Infantry of the 29th Division landed on bloody Omaha Beach and took more casualties that day than any other regiment.
In the spirit of Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers and Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far, J. E. Kaufmann and H. W. Kaufmann weave together firsthand accounts of American soldiers to capture the complete experience of the individual GI in World War II, from stateside training to overseas combat.
From the foreword by acclaimed Eastern Front historian David Glantz: Hitler's Nemesis "fills a major gap in our understanding of the Red Army at war... By adding flesh and sinew to what had formerly seemed a gaunt skeleton, he has placed recognizable faces on that great gray mass of men whom the German Army fought against...