The Second World War is dominated by heroic tales of men defending their country against a formidable enemy but what about the women who also played their part in fighting for freedom? Eileen Younghusband (90) was just 18 when she joined the Womens Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). She quickly demonstrated her keen intellect and mathematical skills, playing a crucial role in Fighter Command's underground Filter Room. Working gruelling shifts under enormous pressure she and her companions worked ...

Women in the Second World War explores the experiences of women who served in the armed forces, or complimentary services. Using interviews, anecdotes, memoirs and/or accounts from the women (or, where appropriate, their children), the book tells the women's personal accounts of what their lives were like and what particular experiences they had while serving. They were all ordinary British women, and tell here in their own words their experiences on active service. Their accounts...

Set Europe ablaze.' The order came from Churchill himself. The result was the Special Operations Executive - the SOE. Established in 1941 with the aim of supplying Occupied France with a steady stram of highly trained resistance agents, this clandestine Second World War network grew to become a cricual part of the Allied arsenal. Ingeniously engineering acts of sabotage, resistance and terror in the face of the occupying Nazis, the SOE dealt devastating and fatal blows to the German war ef...

The thrilling and inspiring true story of Violette Szabo, the fearless British cloak-and-dagger agent who infiltrated Nazi occupied France.Switchboard operator and volunteer for the Women's Land Army, Violette Szabo was only twenty-two years old when her husband, Etienne, a captain in the French Foreign Legion, died at El Alamein. His death only made the resilient young widow more determined than ever to join England's war effort in World War II. To Violette's surp...

'I am a very ordinary woman to whom a chance was given to see human beings at their best and at their worst... I completely believe in the potential nobility of the human spirit.'During some of the darkest days of the Second World War, a young Frenchwoman living as a mother and housewife in England left her ordinary life to become a British agent, working covertly in France to aid the Resistance. Entering a murky and deadly world of espionage and double-dealing, she was betrayed to...

This WWII espionage biography brings "one of America's greatest spies back to life" in a "story of derring-do and white knuckles suspense" (Patrick O'Donnell, author of Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs)Virginia Hall left her comfortable Baltimore roots in 1931 with dreams of becoming a Foreign Service Officer, but her gender—and her wooden leg—kept her from pursuing politics. As Hitler advanced across Europe, she put her gift for languages to use with the B...

This is a short and Untold Stories of the Extraordinary World War II - Courage, Survival, Resistance and Rescue Mission.As a guide to understanding the enormity of the impact of the war, there were more than 16 million Americans who served in World War II. There were 60 other countries also involved in the war. There were about 70 million people killed in the war. This is about one-quarter of all the people on earth at that time.Many of the heroes were not ...

A first-hand account of World War I by a nineteen-year-old Englishman who led a platoon into the carnage of the Battle of the Somme.While researching his excellent earlier book: Veterans of World War I, author Richard Van Emden encountered a fascinating personality of that long-ago conflict. After witnessing German naval attacks on British civilians, Norman Collins enlisted in the Seaforth Highlanders of the 51st Highland Division, even though he was under ...

The story of Michel Thomas reads like a thriller in which adventure and heartbreak combine to produce a unique form of wisdom. Until his death in 2005, he taught languages to ghetto kids, heads of industry and movie stars in a matter of days, succeeding even with people who considered themselves hopeless linguists. To those who have been taught by him, he seemed to be a miracle worker with a magical gift for unlocking the secret powers of the mind. This unique understanding was gained unde...

DESCRIPTION“An excellent book to read at this time during the anniversary of the bombing of the German dams by what seemed impossible odds.” Review.**Guy Gibson: Legend of the Dam Busters tells the dramatic story of a renowned British flying legend and his leadership of the infamous raid on the Ruhr dams in May 1943, providing a fitting and timely tribute to a truly courageous aviator.This short i...

SADISTS?OF?THE?RISING?SUN focuses on the unique cruelty and capacity for slaughter displayed by Japan, from the beginning of the 1930s, with the origins of its atrocity-focused incursions into East Asia, until the devastation of its cities and incineration of its population by firestorms in 1945. During that period, Japan determinedly undertook the twentieth-century’s supreme mission of Imperially-sanctioned butchery, combining the bacteriological obliteration of entire cities with the c...

Chil Rajchman, a Polish Jew, was arrested with his younger sister in 1942 and sent to Treblinka, a death camp where more than 750,000 were murdered before it was abandoned by German soldiers. His sister was sent to the gas chambers, but Rajchman escaped execution, working for ten months under incessant threats and beatings as a barber, a clothes-sorter, a corpse-carrier, a puller of teeth from those same bodies. In August 1943, there was an uprising at the camp, and Rajchman was among the ...