Perilous Commitments

A guide to the Grecian conflict in World War II, outlining a comprehensive appraisal of events, this text is concerned with the British military intervention in Greece and the subsequent defence of, and evacuation from, Crete.

A deft, lively, and highly readable history of the demise of the German way of war. As the allies found an antidote to the "shock and awe" approach of the Wehrmacht, the once mighty German army underwent an epic fall from remarkable operational victories to crushing operational defeats, forced to take on a defensive stance in a war it could never win.

Helene was a strong-willed princess, raised in France but closely connected with the court of Queen Victoria. After the premature end to a romance with Victoria's grandson, she married into the royal family of Italy. However, Helene began extended adventuresome trips into Africa where she became a big-game hunter, explorer and travel writer, escaping from an unhappy marriage and the boredom of court life. Her travels took her around the world, but her sense of royal duty brought her back to nurse aboard a hospital ship in Libyan waters, then to an important role as head of the Italian Red Cross nurses during the First World War while her husband headed Italy's Third Army, and her two sons served in the artillery and the navy. Afterwards, her strong Italian nationalism made her an ally to Gabriele d'Annunzio and Benito Mussolini, but the disastrous Second World War saw her grandchildren interned in Austria and her older son die as a British prisoner-of-war while she continued her charitable work in Naples. When the country voted to become a republic in 1946, Helene was the only member of the royal family allowed to remain in Italy with her second 'secret' husband.

Is radical discipleship really possible today? With all the competing demands we face, can the church empower us to fully respond to God's call? Can the church rise far enough above the demands of institutional survival to live out a radical gospel? Intimacy and Mission invites readers into Christian communities working at answering such questions. The author offers a carefully researched yet accessible study of five religious communities--Church of the Messiah, Koinania Partners, Patchwork Central, Sojourners, and Voice of Calvary. He shows how the experience of these communities can help local congregations discern possibilities for radical discipleship. By revealing not only the strengths of intentional community but also the struggles experienced by each of the five communities, Smith has also created a fascinating human-interest narrative.

On 20 May 1941, Generaloberst Kurt Student’s Luftwaffe XI Fliegerkorps conducted the first operational airborne invasion in history to seize Crete. Major-General Bernard Cyril Freyberg VC, 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force, commanded the British forces defending the island. Freyberg, forewarned of the details of the invasion, possessed numerical superiority over the enemy, but was defeated within twelve days. Freyberg, later blamed for the defeat due to his perceived faulty defensive dispositions, was dealt a losing hand from the start. His troops consisted of those that could be rescued from the failed Greek Campaign and lacked sufficient weapons, communications, and transport to conduct the defense. Despite the best efforts of the Royal Navy, overwhelming Luftwaffe air superiority in the absence of the Royal Air Force isolated Crete and the relentless drive of the attacking German forces captured it. Poor tactical leadership by Freyberg’s subordinate commanders and their failure to prosecute his operational plan led to defeat by the barest margin. While a tactical loss, Freyberg’s destruction of the 7th Flieger Division resulted in Hitler never considering an operational airborne assault again. Freyberg, although accepting responsibility for the defeat, should not be held entirely culpable for the loss of Crete.

This book is about WAR--not the causes and results, not the planning and the campaigns, not the artillery and the bombs. It is about the heinous crimes committed by the combatants, the horrifying experiences of civilians, the devastation of cities and villages, the killing and the dying, the glory leading to revulsion and guilt, and the assimilation of suffering that either ends in death or in the triumph of the soul. It looks at the struggle of the church to remain faithful and the servants of the church who seek to bring sense and solace to the victims. It discusses antisemitism, racism, and war itself from biblical perspectives. It reveals the unjustifiable reasons for engaging in war and how this brings catastrophic results for all peoples--the mental instability of the survivors and the loss and grief of those on the home front. In war, how can men and women carry out the actions that they do? As Viktor Frankl writes: "After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips."

In this book, acclaimed history David Brewer investigates explores 1940s Greece -- one of the most tumultuous decades in Greece's modern history. Beginning in 1941, the occupation of Greece by Germany was intensely brutal: children starved on the streets of Athens; the Jewish population was decimated in the Holocaust; heroic acts of resistance were met with vicious reprisals. When Greece was finally freed from Nazi rule in 1944, the fractured and embittered nation became engulfed in civil war, as conflict flared between the British and American-sponsored government and communist-led rebels. In Greece, The Decade of War, Brewer expertly analyses these events and in doing so provides a compelling military and political history.

James Crossland's work traces the history of the International Committee of the Red Cross' struggle to bring humanitarianism to the Second World War, by focusing on its tumultuous relationship with one of the conflict's key belligerents and masters of the blockade of the Third Reich, Great Britain.