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On 8 February 1945, over 50,000 British and Canadian soldiers moved forward to attack German defensive positions centred on the vast Reichswald Forest, in what proved to be one of the last and bloodiest battles of the whole of the Second World War in Europe. The Reichswald (German Imperial Forest) on the Rhineland borders of the Netherlands and Germany became the location of an epic struggle that eventually sucked in over 200,000 British and Canadian service personnel.The campaign, sandwiched between better-known clashes such as 1944's Battle of the Bulge and the crossing of the Rhine in 1945, was brutal. The Allies suffered nearly 16,000 casualties, the Germans an estimated 44,000. Drawing on a wealth of sources from British, Canadian and European museums and archives, the authors provide a new and timely account - on the 80th anniversary - of this epic British and Canadian struggle against the Wehrmacht, fought out on the north-eastern borders of Germany during the dying days of the war in Europe.
During winter 1944/45 few German officers believed that the Allies would attack the wooded Reichswald Plug on the narrow neck of land between the rivers Rhine and Maas. Consequently, relying on the natural defenses of the forest, the vaunted Siegfried Line had been allowed to peter out. The 84th Infantry Division held field defenses that had been worked on all autumn, but the defenders were thinly spread, and most German soldiers now faced the certainty of defeat. Originally hoping to use the frozen winter ground for a speedy assault, days before Operation VERITABLE began a thaw set in and the Allies faced attacking in the worst possible ground conditions. On the morning of 8 February, after...
Jonathan Fennell captures for the first time the true wartime experience of the ordinary soldiers from across the empire who made up the British and Commonwealth armies. He analyses why the great battles were won and lost and how the men that fought went on to change the world.
In early 1945 Allied Armies attempted to enter Germany by seizing the west bank of the Rhine. The Germans opened the Roer dams and the ensuing battle was characterized by amphibious attacks, frontal assaults on the much vaunted Siegfried Line and grim fighting for the Reichswald Forest.
In the final days of World War II in Europe, Georgians serving in the Wehrmacht on Texel island off the Dutch coast rose up and slaughtered their German masters. Hitler ordered the island to be retaken and fighting continued for weeks, well after the war's end. The uprising had it origins in the bloody history of Georgia in the twentieth century, a history that saw the country move from German occupation, to three short years of independence, to Soviet rule after it was conquered by the Red Army in 1921. A bloody rebellion against the Soviets took place in 1924, but it remained under Russian Soviet rule. Thousands of Georgians served in the Soviet forces during World War II and among those w...
Japan and the United States became close political allies so quickly after the end of World War II, that it seemed as though the two countries had easily forgotten the war they had fought. Here Yoshikuni Igarashi offers a provocative look at how Japanese postwar society struggled to understand its war loss and the resulting national trauma, even as forces within the society sought to suppress these memories. Igarashi argues that Japan's nationhood survived the war's destruction in part through a popular culture that expressed memories of loss and devastation more readily than political discourse ever could. He shows how the desire to represent the past motivated Japan's cultural productions ...
Some will be shocked to find out that the United States and Ho Chi Minh, our nemesis for much of the Vietnam War, were once allies. Indeed, during the last year of World War II, American spies in Indochina found themselves working closely with Ho Chi Minh and other anti-colonial factions-compelled by circumstances to fight together against the Japanese. Dixee Bartholomew-Feis reveals how this relationship emerged and operated and how it impacted Vietnam's struggle for independence. The men of General William Donovan's newly-formed Office of Strategic Services closely collaborated with communist groups in both Europe and Asia against the Axis enemies. In Vietnam, this meant that OSS officers ...