Ivan's War

Author: Catherine Merridale
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429900709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 674

Book Description
Unmasking the Untold Story of World War II Of the thirty million who fought in the eastern front of World War II, eight million died, driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the men and women of the Red Army, a ragtag mass of soldiers who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. Sixty years have passed since their epic triumph, but the heart and mind of Ivan–as the ordinary Russian soldier was called–remain a mystery. We know something about how the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought. Sourced from previously inaccessible military archives, personal diaries, and intimate veterans' narratives, author Catherine Merridale unveils the untold journey of these soldiers from their first encounter with the German offensive to their hard-earned victory in Stalingrad–a place where survival was measured in mere hours. Accompany these brave hearts into the morose streets of Berlin, as they face their anger, fear, and finally, a bitter homecoming, denied of the new life for which they sacrificed everything. Discover this unique fusion of patriotism, courage, and human spirit that drove these undernourished, poorly led troops to overthrow the Nazi menace. Ivan's War emphatically places these invisible millions at the core of their deserved historical context, accounting for their major role in shaping a new era.

Hitler's War

Author: Harry Turtledove
Publisher: Del Rey
ISBN: 034551565X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 513

Book Description
A stroke of the pen and history is changed. In 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, determined to avoid war, signed the Munich Accord, ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. But the following spring, Hitler snatched the rest of that country, and England, after a fatal act of appeasement, was fighting a war for which it was not prepared. Now, in this thrilling alternate history, another scenario is played out: What if Chamberlain had not signed the accord? In this action-packed chronicle of the war that might have been, Harry Turtledove uses dozens of points of view to tell the story: from American marines serving in Japanese-occupied China and ragtag volunteers fighting in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain to an American woman desperately trying to escape Nazi-occupied territory—and witnessing the war from within the belly of the beast. A tale of powerful leaders and ordinary people, at once brilliantly imaginative and hugely entertaining, Hitler’s War captures the beginning of a very different World War II—with a very different fate for our world today. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Harry Turtledove's The War that Came Early: West and East.

War of the Rats

Author: David L. Robbins
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0307575373
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Book Description
For six months in 1942, Stalingrad is the center of a titanic struggle between the Russian and German armies—the bloodiest campaign in mankind's long history of warfare. The outcome is pivotal. If Hitler's forces are not stopped, Russia will fall. And with it, the world.... German soldiers call the battle Rattenkrieg, War of the Rats. The combat is horrific, as soldiers die in the smoking cellars and trenches of a ruined city. Through this twisted carnage stalk two men—one Russian, one German—each the top sniper in his respective army. These two marksmen are equally matched in both skill and tenacity. Each man has his own mission: to find his counterpart—and kill him. But an American woman trapped in Russia complicates this extraordinary duel. Joining the Russian sniper's cadre, she soon becomes one of his most talented assassins—and perhaps his greatest weakness. Based on a true story, this is the harrowing tale of two adversaries enmeshed in their own private war—and whose fortunes will help decide the fate of the world.

Ivan's War

Author: Catherine Merridale
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571218080
Category : Soldiers
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
Catherine Merridale's book is the first to put the experience of the ordinary Russian soldier at the heart of a narrative of the war on the Eastern Front, displacing the dictators and their generals who have dominated books on the subject for the past sixty years. Ivan, the archetypal Russian infantryman, emerges at last as a human figure. Merridale has explored letters, diaries, military records, the documents of the secret police and the testimonies of hundreds of surviving witnesses in an attempt to let us hear the voices of those who lived through the worst war in history. She found reports on morale by the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, medical surveys of illness and wounds (and denial of the reality of shell shock), and confiscated letters that said unguarded things about Stalin and sent their authors to punishment battalions.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374534684
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
For the centenary of the Russian Revolution, a new edition of the Russian Nobel Prize-winning author's most accessible novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an undisputed classic of contemporary literature. First published (in censored form) in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, it is the story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov as he struggles to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. On every page of this graphic depiction of Ivan Denisovich's struggles, the pain of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's own decade-long experience in the gulag is apparent—which makes its ultimate tribute to one man's will to triumph over relentless dehumanization all the more moving. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced-work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary works to have emerged from the Soviet Union. The first of Solzhenitsyn's novels to be published, it forced both the Soviet Union and the West to confront the Soviet's human rights record, and the novel was specifically mentioned in the presentation speech when Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Above all, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich establishes Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy" (Harrison Salisbury, The New York Times). This unexpurgated, widely acclaimed translation by H. T. Willetts is the only translation authorized by Solzhenitsyn himself.

Ivan's War

Author: Catherine Merridale
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571265901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 757

Book Description
'Essential reading, not just for those interested in the Eastern Front, but for anyone who wants to understand Russia.' Antony Beevor, Sunday Times They died in their millions, shattered by German shells and tanks, freezing behind the wire of prison camps, driven forward in suicidal charges by the secret police. Yet in all the books about the Second World War on the eastern front, there is very little about how the Russian soldier lived, dreamed and died. Catherine Merridale's discovery of archives of letters, diaries and police reports have allowed her to write a major history of a figure too often treated as part of a vast mechanical horde. Here are moving and terrible stories of men and women in appalling conditions, many not far from death. They allow us to understand the strange mixture of courage, patriotism, anger and fear that made it possible for these badly fed, dreadfully governed soldiers to defeat the Nazi army that would otherwise have enslaved the whole of Europe. The experience of the soldiers is set against a masterly narrative of the war in Russia. Merridale also shows how the veterans were treated with chilling ingratitude and brutality by Stalin, and later exploited as icons of the Great Patriotic War before being sidelined once more in Putin's new capitalist Russia.

Walking Wounded (Vietnam #5)

Author: Chris Lynch
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 0545640172
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Book Description
"The best Vietnam War novels yet for this age range." -- Kirkus Reviews Morris, Rudi, Ivan, and Beck were best friends. So when one of them was drafted into the Vietnam War, the others signed up, too. They promised to watch out for one another. They pledged to come home together.Now, that pledge has been broken. One of the four has been killed in action. And the remaining three are the only men alive who know the awful truth about their friend's death.Each is left to deal with their secret in his own way. One of them will accompany his friend's body home to Boston. One of them will defy orders in an act of protest. And one of them will decide it's up to him to single-handedly win the war.In the end, Vietnam may claim more than their lives. As the war grinds on, their very souls are at stake. And their shattered friendship will prove either their salvation... or their ruin.

Iron Curtain

Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385536437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 803

Book Description
In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

World War II Letters

Author: Bill Adler
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312304317
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
A collection of letters from the Allied soldiers who fought and won World War II reveals the horror, humor, and boredom of this great conflict.

Ivan the Terrible

Author: Charles J. Halperin
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822987228
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
Ivan the Terrible is infamous as a sadistic despot responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, particularly during the years of the oprichnina, his state-within-a-state. Ivan was the first ruler in Russian history to use mass terror as a political instrument. However, Ivan’s actions cannot be dismissed by attributing the behavior to insanity. Ivan interacted with Muscovite society as both he and Muscovy changed. This interaction needs to be understood in order properly to analyze his motives, achievements, and failures. Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish provides an up-to-date comprehensive analysis of all aspects of Ivan’s reign. It presents a new interpretation not only of Ivan’s behavior and ideology, but also of Muscovite social and economic history. Charles Halperin shatters the myths surrounding Ivan and reveals a complex ruler who had much in common with his European contemporaries, including Henry the Eighth.