World War II

Sample

K.D. Richardson

"Upon hearing that the Empire of Japan had launched a surprise attack on American bases in Hawaii, the people of the United States knew instantly that the nation was at war. So devastating was the news to a country still largely in the throes of a depression that survivors can still recall some six decades later where they were, who gave them the news, the clothes they were wearing, and the confusion and eventual hardships that such a development brought. This collection of memories, told in participants' own words, gathers accounts from both military and civilians, children and adults, people of many ethnic backgrounds, from all over the United States. Together, these ordinary Americans paint a portrait of a nation stunned, but determined to rise again."--Jacket.

Sample

Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Riess

The title refers to a caption in the scrapbook of Kurt Franz, the commandant of the Treblinka concentration camp. Underneath the heading "Those Were the Days," and reproduced here, are pictures of smiling officers at a site where some 700,000 people were exterminated in the gas chambers. To refute revisionist historians who negate the testimony of Holocaust survivors, and to disprove those Germans who said they were coerced into murdering Jews, the German authors--Klee is a journalist, Dressen a lawyer and Riess a historian--present the damning and harrowing diaries, letters, photo albums and official reports of Germans who willingly participated in the Final Solution. A member of a unit that killed 33,771 Jews in the Ukranian Babi Yar ravine boasts: "It's almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work down there." Of the annihilation of thousands of Jews in White Russia, a commander says, "The action rid me of unneccessary mouths to feed." And wagging its tail for the camera is Franz's dog, which on numerous occasions was set upon Jews to bite off their genitals.

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(by) Jack Higgins

In November of 1943, an elite team of Nazi paratroopers descends on British soil with a diabolical goal: to abduct Winston Churchill and cripple the Allied war effort. The mission, ordered by Hitler himself and planned by Heinrich Himmler, is led by ace agent Kurt Steiner and aided on the ground by IRA gunman Liam Devlin

Sample

Harry Turtledove

Turtledove presents a starkly realistic view of what might have been had the Japanese followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor with a land invasion and occupied Hawaii. U.S. airman Fletch Armitage, held in a POW camp under horrifying conditions (the Japanese never signed the Geneva Convention), keeps hope alive even as he slowly starves. His ex-wife, Jane, keeps her head down in occupied Wahiawa, tending her assigned garden plot and hoping she won't be raped.