The title of this book is made up of three words, with the middle one being a connector and the other two being opposites. A quilt is a thing of warmth and comfort. War is a thing of fear, devastation, and death. So, what is the common "thread"? Normally, a quilt is a series of blocks (each made up of many pieces) that, when sewn together, creates a visual story. A war, on the other hand, is the tearing down of nations, cultures, and people. Yet, this is where they come together. The teari...

December 20, 1943. Two Canadian infantry battalions and a tank regiment stand poised on the outskirts of a small Italian port town. They expect to take Ortona quickly. But the German 1st Parachute Division has other ideas. For reasons unknown, Hitler has ordered Ortona held to the last man. Houses, churches and other buildings are dynamited, clogging the streets with rubble. Germans with machine guns lie in ambush. Snipers slip from one rooftop to another. The Canadians seem to have walked...

The Germans could not believe their eyes. The English infantry were advancing at walking pace in four upright ranks, a yard or so apart from each other. They were sitting ducks. As the German machine guns rattled into life, the English died in their hundreds. On the first day of the battle, those parade-ground advances caused the greatest number of casualties of any single day in the history of the British Army.Read about the first Battle of the Somme, a battle that went on to beco...

Under cover of the bombardment, the Germans blew gaps in the wire and cleared paths through the minefield. By the following morning, they had established a hole through the outer defences a mile and a half wide and taken more than 100 prisoners. Their charismatic leader, the dynamic Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, was the most highly respected German general of World War II.Read about the daring exploits of General Erwin Rommel during World Wars I and II in this tale of True Combat. ...

In the heat and dust of the North African desert, British and Australian troops led by General Montgomery were waiting for an attack by Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The defences they had prepared required the Germans to run the gauntlet between six pounder anti-tank guns and dug-in tanks. Montgomery urged his men to victory with the words: “Everyone must be imbued with the desire to kill Germans...”Read about the battle at El Alamein, a turning point for the British in World War II, in t...

August 1, 1914, Berlin: Kaiser Wilhelm II cancels the German invasion of Belgium over the objections of his generals, sending his armies East against Russia instead of West to France, and sets off a chain of events that will radically change the course of modern history.Gray Tide in the East is the best-selling counterfactual history of the First World War, if the Germans had not invaded Belgium in 1914 and thereby brought Great Britain and, eventually, the United States into the w...

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour.Midnight, Tuesday 6 June 1944: the beginning of D-Day, the operation to invade Nazi-occupied Western Europe and initiate the final phase of World War II. A vast undertaking, it involved 12,000 aircraft and an amphibious assault of almost 7,000 vessels. 160,000 troops would cross the English Channel during Operation Overlord, paving the way for more than three million allied troops to enter France by the end of August 1944.

On the ghastly battlefields of the First World War, Jimmie Johnston drove teams or pack horses carrying ammunition and hauling guns to the front lines. One night, Johnston was hauling guns back from the front line. Suddenly, in the darkness and pouring rain, he, his team, the wagon, and the guns pitched into an old trench. After disentangling the horses from their harness, Johnston found a trenching tool, dug away the side of the trench, and led the horses out of what had become a sea of m...

The First World War seems to have touched almost every family in Britain. Most people will have had a relative in their family tree that served in the armed forces between 1914 and 1918. Unfortunately this is no longer living memory but has slipped into recorded history. There is now resurgence in interest as the centenary is commemorated and many people realize they know so little about the war that was supposed to end all wars. How did it start? Why was Britain involved? Who were our all...

The epic story of how the Second World War was won.On 4 January 1945, General 'Blood and Guts' Patton confided gloomily to his diary, 'We can still lose the war.' The Nazis were attacking in Eastern France, Luxembourg and Belgium. General Eisenhower's allied armies had lost over 300,000 men in battle (with a similar number of non-battle casualties) and they were still in the same positions they had first captured three months before.Would the German will to resist never be ...

With the centenary of the outbreak of the The Great War coming in 2014, 'World War One, A Very Peculiar History' commemorates the events of the time by looking at some of the incredible lengths, no matter how risky or bizarre, people went to to defend their country. From Front pigs to hairy beasts, author Jim Pipe looks at the nicknames coined at the time, while providing mind-boggling lists and figures about the battles, the equipment used and the harsh conditions the troops faced. Laced ...

What age was the youngest soldier to receive the Victoria Cross during WWI? What role did tanks play in the conflict? How much were Germany ordered to pay in reparations after the war? All these questions are answered in this fascinating book containing over one hundred facts about the Great War. Whether you are looking for information to include in a project or article, or you are just interested in finding out more about this tragic period in modern history, this is a perfect addition to...