It is 1915 and the Great War has been raging for a year, when Edward Rowbotham, a coal miner from the Midlands, volunteers for Kitchener's Army. Drafted into the newly-formed Machine Gun Corps, he is sent to fight in places whose names will forever be associated with mud and blood and sacrifice: Ypres, the Somme, and Passchendaele. He is one of the 'lucky' ones, winning the Military Medal for bravery and surviving more than two-and-a-half years of the terrible slaughter th...

Before it became a standard military tactic, and immortalised in film, the science of sniping was both untrusted and often regarded as unsportsmanlike by the military.To nostalgic British generals ardent for the cavalry charge and volley fire, the use of a crack marksman, working alone to pick off unsuspecting enemy, was just ‘not cricket’.But the Germans were not so short-sighted.By the end of 1915, the German sniper dominated the battlefield, inflicting countless ...

In writing his `one and only' book, George Elder, a proud Geordie, detailed many of his experiences endured whilst serving in the British Army during World War 1. Many of his tales would not have been appreciated by his peers, but they actually happened and would have been recognised by the common soldier. From Geordie Land to No Mans land was written to inform his family, friends and anyone buying his book of the real life events that occurred. How an ordinary man survived 4 years in the ...

The personal memoir of a Nazi soldier, from joining the German Army in 1941 through his time as a Panzer on the Eastern Front.Originally written only for his daughter, Armin Schedierbauer's Adventures in My Youth chronicles his time as a solider during World War II. As an infantry officer with the 252nd Infantry Division, German Army, Schedierbauer saw four years of combat on the Eastern Front.After joining his unit during the winter of 1942, he wa...

A gripping memoir of a Soviet sniper who fought against the Nazis during the siege of Leningrad and throughout World War II.Joseph Pilyushin, a top Red Army sniper in the ruthless fight against the Germans on the Eastern Front, was an exceptional soldier. His first-hand account of his wartime service gives a graphic insight into his lethal skill with a rifle and into the desperate fight put up by Soviet forces to defend Leningrad.Pilyushin, who lived in Lenin...

The early battles of the First World War during the autumn and winter of 1914 were open, mobile affairs of the kind long familiar to professional soldiers. By early 1915, however, a new type of war had emerged - trench warfare.Modern artillery and machine-guns had been employed in the Boer War only a decade or so previously, but the perfection of their use led to the creation of a static front: the Western Front. Attempts to circumvent this Front, notably at Gallipoli in 1915, only...

A rare, first-hand account from a Swedish Waffen-SS soldier who fought against the Red Army on the Eastern Front during World War II.Few new personal accounts by Waffen-SS soldiers appear in English; even fewer originate from the multitude of non-German European volunteers who formed such an important proportion of this service's manpower. Twilight of the Gods was originally written in Swedish, and published in Buenos Aires shortly after the end of WWII. It...

Includes the First World War Illustrations Pack – 73 battle plans and diagrams and 198 photosThe classic account of sniping on the Western Front."Herbert Wesley McBride was a Captain in the Twenty-first Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, during the First World War. He was a sniper and commander of a machine gun unit known as the "Emma Gees." He was also the author of two books on the war: "A Rifleman Went To War" (1933) and "The Emma Gees" (1918)...When the war started,...

The story of the German submarine U-505 and its dramatic capture by the US Navy during WWII—told by one of its crewmen.Hans Goebeler is known as the man who "pulled the plug" on U-505 in 1944 to keep his beloved U-boat out of Allied hands. Steel Boat, Iron Hearts is his no-holds-barred account of service aboard a combat U-boat. It is the only full-length memoir of its kind, and Goebeler was aboard for every one of U-505's war patrols.Using his own ex...

One of the best first-hand accounts of air combat in World War I, by an American “ace of aces.” Eddie Rickenbacker had an extraordinary career: inventor, race car driver, fighter ace, Medal of Honor winner, and finally president of Eastern Air Lines. In this book he recounts how he achieved 26 confirmed kills in less than a year of combat on the Western Front, rising from the ranks to lead the famed “Hat-in-the-Ring” squadron. Early pilots had to contend with primitive engines, unreliable ...

"A fantastic read . . . Whether your interest is armour or history I would highly recommend this book" ( Military Modelling).The tank destroyer was a bold—though some would say flawed—answer to the challenge posed by the seemingly unstoppable German Blitzkrieg. The TD was conceived to be light and fast enough to outmaneuver panzer forces and go where tanks could not. At the same time, the TD would wield the firepower needed to kill any German tank on the b...

Condemned to death for the bloodbaths of World War II, they served their sentence—on the killing fields of Vietnam. The fascinating, true story of the French Foreign Legion’s Nazi battalionWHAT THEY DID IN WORLD WAS II WAS HITORY’S BLOODIEST NIGHTMARE.The ashes of World War II were still cooling when France went to war in the jungles of Southeast Asia. In that struggle, its frontline troops were the misfits, criminals, and mercenaries of the French Foreign ...