"On August 30, 1942-- Zero Night-- 40 Allied officers staged the most audacious mass escape of World War II. Months of meticulous planning and secret training hung in the balance during three minutes of mayhem as the officers boldly stormed the huge double fences at Oflag Prison. Employing wooden ladders and bridges previously disguised as bookshelves, the highly coordinated effort succeeded and set 36 men free into the German countryside. Later known...
"This is a love story like no other. Elinor Powell was an African American nurse in the U.S. military during World War II; Frederick Albert was a soldier in Hitler's army, captured by the Allies and shipped to a prisoner-of-war camp in the Arizona desert. Like most other black nurses, Elinor pulled a second-class assignment, in a dusty, sun-baked--and segregated--Western town. The army figured that the risk of fraternization between black nurses and...
Peter Tunstall's memoir of his days in the British Royal Air Force and as one of the most celebrated British POWs of World War II. Tunstall was an infamous tormentor of his German captors. Dubbed the "cooler king" on account of his long spells in solitary, he once dropped a water "bomb" directly in the lap of a high-ranking German officer. He also devised an ingenious method for smuggling coded messages back to London. But above all he was a highly...
The first complete account of the fiercely guarded secrets of London's clandestine interrogation center, operated by the British Secret Service from 1940 to 1948 Behind the locked doors of three mansions in London's exclusive Kensington Palace Gardens neighborhood, the British Secret Service established a highly secret prison in 1940: the London Cage. Here recalcitrant German prisoners of war were subjected to "special intelligence treatment." The...
Though initially recorded by British intelligence with the intention of gaining information that might be useful for the Allied war effort, the matters discussed in these conversations ultimately proved to be limited in that regard. But they would supply a unique and profoundly important window into the mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy, and the military in general, almost all of whom had insisted on their...
"Harvey Solomon tells the vivid story of the roundup, captivity, and eventual repatriation of Axis diplomats and their families who were stranded in the nation's capital after the bombing of Pearl Harbor"--
On November 30, 1916, a freighter left Kiel, Germany harbor and would not touch land for fifteen months. It was the beginning of an astounding 64,000-mile voyage that would take the ship around the world, leaving a trail of destruction and devastation. This was no ordinary freighter, this was the Wolf, a disguised German warship. In this account of an audacious, lethal World War I expedition, Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen depict the Wolf 's assignment:...
Jan Baalsrud's escape from Nazi-occupied arctic Norway is one of the most exciting escape narratives to emerge from the challenges and miseries of World War II chronicles . In March 1943, a team of expatriate Norwegian commandos sailed from northern England for Nazi-occupied arctic Norway to organize and supply the Norwegian resistance. But they were betrayed and the Nazis ambushed them. Only one man survived - Jan Baalsrud. This is the incredible...