Download Rising '44 PDF

Rising '44

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Publisher : Pan Macmillan
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ISBN : 0330475746
Pages : pages
Rating : 4.7/5 (475 Download)

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Download Free Rising '44 PDF by Norman Davies Full Book and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rising '44 is a brilliant narrative account of one of the most dramatic episodes in 20th century history, drawing on Davies' unique understanding of the issues and characters involved. In August 1944 Warsaw offered the Wehrmacht the last line of defence against the Red Army's march from Moscow to Berlin. When the Red Army reached the river Vistula, the people of Warsaw believed that liberation had come. The Resistance took to the streets in celebration, but the Soviets remained where they were, allowing the Wehrmacht time to regroup and Hitler to order that the city of Warsaw be razed to the ground. For 63 days the Resistance fought on in the cellars and the sewers. Defenceless citizens were slaughtered in their tens of thousands. One by one the City's monuments were reduced to rubble, watched by Soviet troops on the other bank of the river. The Allies expressed regret but decided that there was nothing to be done, Poland would not be allowed to be governed by Poles. The sacrifice was in vain and the Soviet tanks rolled in to the flattened city. It is a hugely dramatic story, vividly and authoritatively told by one of our greatest historians.

Download A Military History of the Cold War, 1944–1962 PDF

A Military History of the Cold War, 1944–1962

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Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
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ISBN : 0806146907
Pages : 560 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (146 Download)

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Download Free A Military History of the Cold War, 1944–1962 PDF by Jonathan M. House Full Book and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-04-28 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cold War did not culminate in World War III as so many in the 1950s and 1960s feared, yet it spawned a host of military engagements that affected millions of lives. This book is the first comprehensive, multinational overview of military affairs during the early Cold War, beginning with conflicts during World War II in Warsaw, Athens, and Saigon and ending with the Cuban Missile Crisis. A major theme of this account is the relationship between government policy and military preparedness and strategy. Author Jonathan M. House tells of generals engaging in policy confrontations with their governments’ political leaders—among them Anthony Eden, Nikita Khrushchev, and John F. Kennedy—many of whom made military decisions that hamstrung their own political goals. In the pressure-cooker atmosphere of atomic preparedness, politicians as well as soldiers seemed instinctively to prefer military solutions to political problems. And national security policies had military implications that took on a life of their own. The invasion of South Korea convinced European policy makers that effective deterrence and containment required building up and maintaining credible forces. Desire to strengthen the North Atlantic alliance militarily accelerated the rearmament of West Germany and the drive for its sovereignty. In addition to examining the major confrontations, nuclear and conventional, between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing—including the crises over Berlin and Formosa—House traces often overlooked military operations against the insurgencies of the era, such as French efforts in Indochina and Algeria and British struggles in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden. Now, more than fifty years after the events House describes, understanding the origins and trajectory of the Cold War is as important as ever. By the late 1950s, the United States had sent forces to Vietnam and the Middle East, setting the stage for future conflicts in both regions. House’s account of the complex relationship between diplomacy and military action directly relates to the insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, and confrontations that now occupy our attention across the globe.

Download Beyond the Uprising PDF

Beyond the Uprising

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Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
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ISBN : 1469103699
Pages : 187 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (13 Download)

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Download Free Beyond the Uprising PDF by Cynthia Grant Bowman Full Book and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2008-03-12 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cynthia Grant Bowman is a professor of law at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York. She met the subject of this biography, Maria Chudzinski, while teaching at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, where Maria worked in the international section of the law library. Maria was born in Poland before the German invasion and the Second World War and joined the underground resistance, or Home Army, as a teenager. She fought during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and was taken prisoner by the Germans when the city fell. In 1945 Maria moved to England, where she was a member of the Polish Air Force, ultimately settling in Chicago in 1952. She has been very active in the Polish-American community in Chicago since that time. Intrigued by Marias past, Professor Bowman asked her to tell her story. This book is the result.

Download Secret Service in the Cold War PDF

Secret Service in the Cold War

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Publisher : Pen and Sword
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ISBN : 1526740915
Pages : 288 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (74 Download)

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Download Free Secret Service in the Cold War PDF by John B. Sanderson Full Book and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2020-04-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second World War had been won, but relationships between the Western allies and the Soviet Union were becoming increasingly strained, as the nuclear arms race made world peace precarious. It was vital that Britain knew the Soviets’ intentions and military capabilities, both offensive and defensive. As a Military Attaché in Sofia, and Commandant of an Intelligence Centre in the Balkans, it was SIS officer Lieutenant Colonel John Sanderson’s job to find out.Sanderson handled agents who operated secretly behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War and organised hidden arms depots for stay-behind agents in case of a Red Army invasion. Based on Sanderson’s letters and personal accounts of his time with MI4 and MI6, we learn how he was sent to observe sessions of the Paris UNO Security Council in 1948 and to recruit émigrés for infiltration behind the Iron Curtain, into Communist Bulgaria. Fluent in French and Bulgarian, in 1949 Captain Sanderson was posted to Sofia as a Press Attaché with diplomatic immunity, reporting on the Communist show trials. Lieutenant Colonel Sanderson returned there twelve years later as the Military, Naval and Air Attaché. In 1961, having been tasked by London with photographing the latest MIG fighter, he was driven at night to Sofia airport’s perimeter by a CIA colleague. Closely followed by the Bulgarian secret police, he parachute-rolled, unobserved, out of the car with his camera. Arrested at daylight, he escaped to the border and drove across Europe, still pursued by the ruthless Bulgarian Security Services.John Sanderson’s early service life was equally challenging, from helping defend Britain’s coastline in 1940, picking up shot-down pilots around Dover on a motorbike during the Battle of Britain, to fighting the Japanese in the Burmese and Indian jungles, before returning to London to join the Secret Intelligence Services. In parallel with Sanderson’s SIS career, living with Russian émigrés in Paris, posted to SIS headquarters in the Berlin Olympic stadium, and later working together in the Intelligence Division of NATO headquarters Paris during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was his SIS friend RAF Squadron Leader John Aldwinckle, a veteran of SOE wartime operations in Halifax bombers. All Aldwinckle’s agents were betrayed by the traitor George Blake, as were all Sanderson’s by Kim Philby.In John Sanderson’s biography we get the detailed inside story of the Berlin Air Lift, the Suez Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. We see the results of Philby and Blake’s treachery and the effects which the courageous actions of the two ‘Olegs’, the Russian Colonels Penkovsky and Gordievsky, had on the international politics of Khrushchev, Kennedy, Gorbachev, Thatcher and Reagan – and the consequences their decisions had for the course of world history.For over thirty years, John Sanderson worked for the British Secret Services – with his last mission, aged 74, as exciting as his first, being helicoptered into Sarajevo with an SAS team at the height of the Balkan War.

Download Hitler's Soldiers PDF

Hitler's Soldiers

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Publisher : Yale University Press
Release Date :
ISBN : 0300219520
Pages : 304 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (219 Download)

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Download Free Hitler's Soldiers PDF by Ben H. Shepherd Full Book and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades after 1945, it was generally believed that the German army, professional and morally decent, had largely stood apart from the SS, Gestapo, and other corps of the Nazi machine. Ben Shepherd draws on a wealth of primary sources and recent scholarship to convey a much darker, more complex picture. For the first time, the German army is examined throughout the Second World War, across all combat theaters and occupied regions, and from multiple perspectives: its battle performance, social composition, relationship with the Nazi state, and involvement in war crimes and military occupation. This was a true people’s army, drawn from across German society and reflecting that society as it existed under the Nazis. Without the army and its conquests abroad, Shepherd explains, the Nazi regime could not have perpetrated its crimes against Jews, prisoners of war, and civilians in occupied countries. The author examines how the army was complicit in these crimes and why some soldiers, units, and higher commands were more complicit than others. Shepherd also reveals the reasons for the army’s early battlefield successes and its mounting defeats up to 1945, the latter due not only to Allied superiority and Hitler’s mismanagement as commander-in-chief, but also to the failings—moral, political, economic, strategic, and operational—of the army’s own leadership.

Download A History of the Laws of War: Volume 2 PDF

A History of the Laws of War: Volume 2

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date :
ISBN : 1847318622
Pages : 324 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (318 Download)

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Download Free A History of the Laws of War: Volume 2 PDF by Alexander Gillespie Full Book and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10-07 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique new work of reference traces the origins of the modern laws of warfare from the earliest times to the present day. Relying on written records from as far back as 2400 BCE, and using sources ranging from the Bible to Security Council Resolutions, the author pieces together the history of a subject which is almost as old as civilisation itself. The author shows that as long as humanity has been waging wars it has also been trying to find ways of legitimising different forms of combatants and ascribing rules to them, protecting civilians who are either inadvertently or intentionally caught up between them, and controlling the use of particular classes of weapons that may be used in times of conflict. Thus it is that this work is divided into three substantial parts: Volume 1 on the laws affecting combatants and captives; Volume 2 on civilians; and Volume 3 on the law of arms control. This second book on civilians examines four different topics. The first topic deals with the targetting of civilians in times of war. This discussion is one which has been largely governed by the developments of technologies which have allowed projectiles to be discharged over ever greater areas, and attempts to prevent their indiscriminate utilisation have struggled to keep pace. The second topic concerns the destruction of the natural environment, with particular regard to the utilisation of starvation as a method of warfare, and unlike the first topic, this one has rarely changed over thousands of years, although contemporary practices are beginning to represent a clear break from tradition. The third topic is concerned with the long-standing problems of civilians under the occupation of opposing military forces, where the practices of genocide, collective punishments and/or reprisals, and rape have occurred. The final topic in this volume is about the theft or destruction of the property of the enemy, in terms of either pillage or the intentional devastation of the cultural property of the opposition. As a work of reference this set of three books is unrivalled, and will be of immense benefit to scholars and practitioners researching and advising on the laws of warfare. It also tells a story which throws fascinating new light on the history of international law and on the history of warfare itself.

Download Stalin's Wars PDF

Stalin's Wars

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Publisher : Yale University Press
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ISBN : 9780300112047
Pages : 524 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (41 Download)

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Download Free Stalin's Wars PDF by Geoffrey Roberts Full Book and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This breakthrough book provides a detailed reconstruction of Stalin’s leadership from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 to his death in 1953. Making use of a wealth of new material from Russian archives, Geoffrey Roberts challenges a long list of standard perceptions of Stalin: his qualities as a leader; his relationships with his own generals and with other great world leaders; his foreign policy; and his role in instigating the Cold War. While frankly exploring the full extent of Stalin’s brutalities and their impact on the Soviet people, Roberts also uncovers evidence leading to the stunning conclusion that Stalin was both the greatest military leader of the twentieth century and a remarkable politician who sought to avoid the Cold War and establish a long-term detente with the capitalist world. By means of an integrated military, political, and diplomatic narrative, the author draws a sustained and compelling personal portrait of the Soviet leader. The resulting picture is fascinating and contradictory, and it will inevitably change the way we understand Stalin and his place in history. Roberts depicts a despot who helped save the world for democracy, a personal charmer who disciplined mercilessly, a utopian ideologue who could be a practical realist, and a warlord who undertook the role of architect of post-war peace.

Download Hidden Armies of the Second World War: World War II Resistance Movements PDF

Hidden Armies of the Second World War: World War II Resistance Movements

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Publisher : ABC-CLIO
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ISBN : 1440833044
Pages : 262 pages
Rating : 4.3/5 (833 Download)

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Download Free Hidden Armies of the Second World War: World War II Resistance Movements PDF by Patrick G. Zander Full Book and published by ABC-CLIO. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and compelling history of the resistance movements that operated in every German-occupied nation between 1939 and 1941. • Provides descriptions of all the national movements in one volume • Features organizational overviews, personal studies of resistance figures, and descriptions of key resistance operations • Considers little-known, smaller resistance movements, primarily Jewish and Communist efforts • Reveals stories of resistance among Germany's allies—Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Finland • Covers the controversial issue of German occupation and resistance in France as well as how this story has been covered historically

Download Churchill and Company PDF

Churchill and Company

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
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ISBN : 0857721615
Pages : 336 pages
Rating : 4.2/5 (721 Download)

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Download Free Churchill and Company PDF by David Dilks Full Book and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winston Churchill, the great wartime leader and peacetime Prime Minister, is one of the dominating figures of the 20th century. In this stimulating and original book, David Dilks - the eminent historian of modern Britain and a leading Churchill scholar - provides a fascinating source of new discoveries and insights. He shows Churchill, not only as a war leader and international statesman, but also as a private person - with a rich variety of interests, enthusiasms, friendships and rivalries. Churchill's relations with other leading politicians and statesmen of the age - both within Britain and internationally - illuminate his handling of friends and enemies. Sometimes these categories were not easily separated; for a long while, Churchill thought of Stalin as a friend or at least a comrade in arms, and only with extreme reluctance did he come to look upon him ultimately as an enemy. He regarded Roosevelt with admiration and gratitude, yet the balance of evidence suggests that the President felt less warmly towards him, especially after 1943. Dilks casts new and penetrating light on Churchill during World War II, including his dramatic and troubled relationship with Charles de Gaulle - where political problems were softened by Churchill's love of France. The aftermath of World War II, relations with Stalin, the Soviet Union and the Cold War all dominated Churchill's subsequent career. The last chapter draws attention to the influence of 'history' on statesmen and others, not least because no public man of the last century - with the possible exception of de Gaulle - has influenced on Churchill's scale, or with his effectiveness, the writing and the making of history. Whether in or out of office, Churchill's influence has been felt in all areas of British politics and national life. David Dilks brings Churchill to life for all those interested modern British and international history whether student, specialist or general reader.

Download Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front PDF

Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front

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Publisher : Penguin UK
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ISBN : 0241404576
Pages : 368 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (44 Download)

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Download Free Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front PDF by Serhii Plokhy Full Book and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Many books claim to tell an "unknown" story of the Second World War. Few of them actually do. Forgotten Bastards is a rare exception . . . This is gripping history' Duncan Weldon, Prospect A riveting story of World War II from the author of Chernobyl, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction In November 1943, with the outcome of the Second World War hanging in the balance, the Allies needed a new plan. The Americans' audacious suggestion to the Soviets was to open a second air front, with the US Air Force establishing bases in Soviet-controlled territory. Despite Stalin's obvious reservations about the presence of foreign troops in Russia, he was persuaded. Operation Baseball and then Frantic were initiated in early 1944 as B-17 Superfortresses were flown from bases in Italy to the Poltova region in today's Ukraine. Award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy tells the gripping, little-known story of this encounter between American and Soviet soldiers and how their collaboration quickly fell apart, mirroring the transition from the Grand Alliance to the Cold War. Soviet secret policemen watched over the Americans, shadowing their every move. A catastrophic air raid by the Germans revealed the limitations of Soviet air defences. As their initial enthusiasm turned into disappointment, the American soldiers started calling themselves the Forgotten Bastards of Ukraine. Ultimately, no common purpose could overcome their cultural and political differences. Drawing on newly opened Russian archives as well as CIA records, Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front offers a riveting bottom-up history of one of the Second World War's most unlikely alliances.

Download Memories and Representations of War PDF

Memories and Representations of War

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Publisher : BRILL
Release Date :
ISBN : 9042026294
Pages : 351 pages
Rating : 4.2/5 (26 Download)

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Download Free Memories and Representations of War PDF by Full Book and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to the present volume approach World War I and World War II as complex and intertwined crossroads leading to the definition of the new European (and world) reality, and deeply pervading the making of the twentieth century. These scholars belong to different yet complementary areas of research – history, literature, cinema, art history; they come from various national realities and discuss questions related to Italy, Britain, Germany, Poland, Spain, at times introducing a comparison between European and North American memories of the two World War experiences. These scholars are all guided by the same principle: to encourage the establishment of an interdisciplinary and trans-national dialogue in order to work out new approaches capable of integrating and acknowledging different or even opposing ways to perceive and interpret the same historical phenomenon. While assessing the way the memories of the two World Wars have been readjusted each time in relation to the evolving international historical setting and through various mediators of memory (cinema, literature, art and monuments), the various essays contribute to unveil a cultural panorama inhabited by contrasting memories and by divided memories not to emphasise divisions, but to acknowledge the ethical need for a truly shared act of reconciliation.

Download Russian Studies, Political Science, and the Philosophy of Technology PDF

Russian Studies, Political Science, and the Philosophy of Technology

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Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
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ISBN : 1666906360
Pages : 483 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (96 Download)

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Download Free Russian Studies, Political Science, and the Philosophy of Technology PDF by Guoli Liu Full Book and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-04-18 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents state-of-the-art creative scholarship in political science and area studies. The contributors examine governance issues in Russia in comparative perspective and examine key theoretical issues, such as incorporating the philosophies of science and technology into political studies.

Download Stalin's Curse PDF

Stalin's Curse

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Publisher : Vintage
Release Date :
ISBN : 0307962350
Pages : 496 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (962 Download)

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Download Free Stalin's Curse PDF by Robert Gellately Full Book and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin’s true motives—and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire—during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Joseph Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader, whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and power politics, and not communist ideology. Now, using recently uncovered documents, Robert Gellately conclusively shows that, in fact, the dictator was biding his time, determined to establish Communist regimes across Europe and beyond. His actions during those years—and the poorly calculated responses to them from the West—set in motion what would eventually become the Cold War. Exciting, deeply engaging, and shrewdly perceptive, Stalin’s Curse is an unprecedented revelation of the sinister machinations of Stalin’s Kremlin.

Download Isaac's Army PDF

Isaac's Army

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Publisher : Random House
Release Date :
ISBN : 0679645306
Pages : 496 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (645 Download)

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Download Free Isaac's Army PDF by Matthew Brzezinski Full Book and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting as early as 1939, disparate Jewish underground movements coalesced around the shared goal of liberating Poland from Nazi occupation. For the next six years, separately and in concert, they waged a heroic war of resistance against Hitler’s war machine that culminated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Isaac’s Army, Matthew Brzezinski delivers the first-ever comprehensive narrative account of that struggle, following a group of dedicated young Jews—some barely out of their teens—whose individual acts of defiance helped rewrite the ending of World War II. Based on first-person accounts from diaries, interviews, and surviving relatives, Isaac’s Army chronicles the extraordinary triumphs and devastating setbacks that befell the Jewish underground from its earliest acts of defiance in 1939 to the exodus to Palestine in 1946. This is the remarkable true story of the Jewish resistance from the perspective of those who led it: Isaac Zuckerman, the confident and charismatic twenty-four-year-old founder of the Jewish Fighting Organization; Simha Ratheiser, Isaac’s fifteen-year-old bodyguard, whose boyish good looks and seeming immunity to danger made him an ideal courier; and Zivia Lubetkin, the warrior queen of the underground who, upon hearing the first intimations of the Holocaust, declared: “We are going to defend ourselves.” Joined by allies on the left and right, they survived Gestapo torture chambers, smuggled arms, ran covert printing presses, opened illegal schools, robbed banks, executed collaborators, and fought in the two largest rebellions of the war. Hunted by the Germans and bedeviled by the “Greasers”—roving bands of blackmailers who routinely turned in resistance fighters for profit—the movement was chronically short on firepower but long on ingenuity. Its members hatched plots in dank basements, never more than a door knock away from summary execution, and slogged through fetid sewers to escape the burning Ghetto to the forests surrounding the city. And after the initial uprising was ruthlessly put down by the SS, they gambled everything on a bold plan for a citywide revolt—of both Jews and Gentiles—that could end only in victory or total destruction. The money they raised helped thousands hide when the Ghetto was liquidated. The documents they forged offered lifelines to families desperate to escape the horror of the Holocaust. And when the war was over, they helped found the state of Israel. A story of secret alliances, internal rivalries, and undying commitment to a cause, Isaac’s Army is history at its most heart-wrenching. Driven by an unforgettable cast of characters, it’s a true-life tale with the pulse of a great novel, and a celebration of the indomitable spirit of resistance. Advance praise for Isaac’s Army “Told with care and compassion, Matthew Brzezinski’s Isaac’s Army is a riveting account of the Jewish resistance in wartime Poland. This is an intense story that transcends the horror of the time and finds real inspiration in the bravery of those who fought back—some of whom lived to tell their stories. Highly recommended.”—Alan Furst, author of Mission to Paris

Download A History of the Laws of War: Volume 1 PDF

A History of the Laws of War: Volume 1

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date :
ISBN : 1847318614
Pages : 278 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (318 Download)

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Download Free A History of the Laws of War: Volume 1 PDF by Alexander Gillespie Full Book and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique new work of reference traces the origins of the modern laws of warfare from the earliest times to the present day. Relying on written records from as far back as 2400 BCE, and using sources ranging from the Bible to Security Council Resolutions, the author pieces together the history of a subject which is almost as old as civilisation itself. The author shows that as long as humanity has been waging wars it has also been trying to find ways of legitimising different forms of combatants and regulating the treatment of captives. This first book on warfare deals with the broad question of whether the patterns of dealing with combatants and captives have changed over the last 5,000 years, and if so, how? In terms of context, the first part of the book is about combatants and those who can 'lawfully' take part in combat. In many regards, this part of the first volume is a series of 'less than ideal' pathways. This is because in an ideal world there would be no combatants because there would be no fighting. Yet as a species we do not live in such a place or even anywhere near it, either historically or in contemporary times. This being so, a second-best alternative has been to attempt to control the size of military forces and, therefore, the bloodshed. This is also not the case by which humanity has worked over the previous centuries. Rather, the clear assumption for thousands of years has been that authorities are allowed to build the size of their armed forces as large as they wish. The restraints that have been applied are in terms of the quality and methods by which combatants are taken. The considerations pertain to questions of biology such as age and sex, geographical considerations such as nationality, and the multiple nuances of informal or formal combatants. These questions have also overlapped with ones of compulsion and whether citizens within a country can be compelled to fight without their consent. Accordingly, for the previous 3,000 years, the question has not been whether there should be a limit on the number of soldiers, but rather who is or is not a lawful combatant. It has rarely been a question of numbers. It has been, and remains, one of type. The second part of this book is about people, typically combatants, captured in battle. It is about what happens to their status as prisoners, about the possibilities of torture, assistance if they are wounded and what happens to their remains should they be killed and their bodies fall into enemy hands. The theme that ties all of these considerations together is that all of the acts befall those who are, to one degree or another, captives of their enemies. As such, they are no longer masters of their own fate. As a work of reference this first volume, as part of a set of three, is unrivalled, and will be of immense benefit to scholars and practitioners researching and advising on the laws of warfare. It also tells a story which throws fascinating new light on the history of international law and on the history of warfare itself.

Download Museums of Communism PDF

Museums of Communism

Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Release Date :
ISBN : 0253052343
Pages : 442 pages
Rating : 4.5/5 (52 Download)

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Download Free Museums of Communism PDF by Stephen M. Norris Full Book and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did communities come to terms with the collapse of communism? In order to guide the wider narrative, many former communist countries constructed museums dedicated to chronicling their experiences. Museums of Communism explores the complicated intersection of history, commemoration, and victimization made evident in these museums constructed after 1991. While contributors from a diverse range of fields explore various museums and include nearly 90 photographs, a common denominator emerges: rather than focusing on artifacts and historical documents, these museums often privilege memories and stories. In doing so, the museums shift attention from experiences of guilt or collaboration to narratives of shared victimization under communist rule. As editor Stephen M. Norris demonstrates, these museums are often problematic at best and revisionist at worst. From occupation museums in the Baltic States to memorial museums in Ukraine, former secret police prisons in Romania, and nostalgic museums of everyday life in Russia, the sites considered offer new ways of understanding the challenges of separating memory and myth.

Download Thunder in the East PDF

Thunder in the East

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
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ISBN : 1472510089
Pages : 512 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (51 Download)

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Download Free Thunder in the East PDF by Evan Mawdsley Full Book and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thunder in the East, originally published in 2005, is widely regarded as the best short history of the entire Nazi-Soviet military conflict. It tells the story from the pre-war expectations of Hitler and Stalin, through the pivotal battles deep in Russia in 1942-43, and on to the huge Soviet offensives across Eastern Europe in 1944-45. This final 'march of liberation' destroyed the Third Reich and set Europe's history for the next 45 years. The book provides penetrating answers to vital questions: Why did the war in the East develop as it did? Why did Hitler's Wehrmacht lose? Why did the Red Army win, and why did the people of Soviet Russia pay such a high price for victory? The first edition took advantage of the flood of new sources that followed the end of the Soviet era. This second edition takes account of what has been written over the last decade; the Nazi-Soviet war, in all its aspects, has continued to be the subject of extensive and innovative research and heated controversy.