The Last Day Of The War

Yael Weiss, eighteen years old and looking for adventure, finds it in the library one day when she discovers a packet of guns meant for Erinyes, an Armenian organization set on avenging their people’s massacre by the Turks in 1915. While the weapons make her nervous, Dub Hagopian, the young Armenian-American soldier sent to retrieve them, excites her in a completely different way.Smitten, Yael impulsively follows Dub to France by volunteering with the YMCA, reinventing herself along the way as twenty-five-year-old Methodist Yale White. When she and Dub cross paths again, Yael gets caught up in a crowd bursting with both the passionate ideals and the devil-may-care energy of youth–with consequences neither of them could ever foresee.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In the second volume of his epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy In An Army at Dawn—winner of the Pulitzer Prize—Rick Atkinson provided a dramatic and authoritative history of the Allied triumph in North Africa. Now, in The Day of Battle, he follows the strengthening American and British armies as they invade Sicily in July 1943 and then, mile by bloody mile, fight their way north toward Rome. The Italian campaign's outcome was never certain; in fact, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military advisers engaged in heated debate about whether an invasion of the so-called soft underbelly of Europe was even a good idea. But once under way, the commitment to liberate Italy from the Nazis never wavered, despite the agonizingly high price. The battles at Salerno, Anzio, and Monte Cassino were particularly difficult and lethal, yet as the months passed, the Allied forces continued to drive the Germans up the Italian peninsula. Led by Lieutenant General Mark Clark, one of the war's most complex and controversial commanders, American officers and soldiers became increasingly determined and proficient. And with the liberation of Rome in June 1944, ultimate victory at last began to seem inevitable. Drawing on a wide array of primary source material, written with great drama and flair, this is narrative history of the first rank. With The Day of Battle, Atkinson has once again given us the definitive account of one of history's most compelling military campaigns.

On 11 November 1918, the last day of the Great War, the Canadian Corps, led by Sir Arthur Currie, liberated Mons after four years of German occupation. The push to Mons in the last days and weeks of the war had cost many lives. Long after the war, Currie was blamed by many for needlessly wasting those lives. When the Port Hope Evening Guide published an editorial in 1927 repeating this charge, Currie was incensed. Against the advice of his friends, he decided to sue for libel and retained W.N. Tilley, Q.C., the leading lawyer of the day, to plead his case. First published in 1988, The Last Day, the Last Hour reconstructs the events - military and legal - that led to the trial and the trial itself, one of the most sensational courtroom battles in Canadian history, involving many prominent legal, military and political figures of the 1920s. Now back in print with a new preface by the author, judge and legal scholar Robert J. Sharpe, The Last Day, the Last Hour remains the definitive account of a landmark legal case.

One of Britain's most acclaimed historians presents the experiences and ramifications of the last day of World War II in Europe May 8, 1945, 23:30 hours: With war still raging in the Pacific, peace comes at last to Europe as the German High Command in Berlin signs the final instrument of surrender. After five years and eight months, the war in Europe is officially over. This is the story of that single day and of the days leading up to it. Hour by hour, place by place, this masterly history recounts the final spasms of a continent in turmoil. Here are the stories of combat soldiers and ordinary civilians, collaborators and resistance fighters, statesmen and war criminals, all recounted in vivid, dramatic detail. But this is more than a moment-by-moment account, for Sir Martin Gilbert uses every event as a point of departure, linking each to its long-term consequences over the following half century. In our attempts to understand the world we inherited in 1945, there is no better starting point than The Day the War Ended.

From the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life and As Bright as Heaven comes a novel about a German American teenager whose life changes forever when her immigrant family is sent to an internment camp during World War II. In 1943, Elise Sontag is a typical American teenager from Iowa—aware of the war but distanced from its reach. Then her father, a legal U.S. resident for nearly two decades, is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer. The family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where, behind the armed guards and barbed wire, Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar, including her own identity. The only thing that makes the camp bearable is meeting fellow internee Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American teen from Los Angeles, whose friendship empowers Elise to believe the life she knew before the war will again be hers. Together in the desert wilderness, Elise and Mariko hold tight the dream of being young American women with a future beyond the fences. But when the Sontag family is exchanged for American prisoners behind enemy lines in Germany, Elise will face head-on the person the war desires to make of her. In that devastating crucible she must discover if she has the will to rise above prejudice and hatred and re-claim her own destiny, or disappear into the image others have cast upon her. The Last Year of the War tells a little-known story of World War II with great resonance for our own times and challenges the very notion of who we are when who we’ve always been is called into question.

It is estimated that around 50,000 Brigade Lads served in the First World War, during which many honors and distinctions were awarded. The Brigade contributed two Service Battalions of the King's Royal Rifle Corps whose members were comprised entirely of past and present members of the Church Lads' Brigade. These were known as ‘Pals’ Battalions. The story of the battalion centers around the experiences of eight men who served and some who died in the Battles of The Somme, Arras and The Lys. In the latter half of the nineteenth century influential Christians were worried about the poor spiritual and physical development of young people. It was at that time that ‘Brigade’ groups began to spring up all over the UK. Walter Mallock Gee, who was Secretary of the Junior Branch of the Church of England Temperance Society and a ‘Volunteer’ Army Officer, founded the Church Lads’ Brigade in 1891. By 1908 the membership of the brigade stood at about 70,000 in 1,300 companies. When the ‘Call to Arms’ came from Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener in 1914, thousands of Britain’s youth flocked to join the armed forces. Members of the Church Lads’ Brigade joined up in their droves at recruiting stations all over Great Britain. Two Battalions were formed entirely from serving and ex-members of the Church Lad’s Brigade. The 16th (Service) Battalion and later the 19th (Service) Battalion, both sponsored by the Church Lads’ Brigade, became known as ‘The Churchmen’s Battalion’. In 1914 no one could have imagined the horrendous stories that would unfold from the bloody massacre at so many notorious battles across Belgium and the fields of Flanders. Ypres, Passchendale, Somme, Arras, Lys, and the brutal decimation of the battalion during the hell of the fighting at High Wood. No one could have imagined the discomfort and disease brought on by living in a trench full of water for days on end, or ‘over the top’ through acres of knee-high mud. More than 24 of the Church Lads’ Brigade were awarded a Victoria Cross for their bravery, but by 1918 many of those gallant young Lads would not return home. This is their story. The Author and the Publishers acknowledge that some material in this title has been taken from the website www.1914-1918.net without permission or acknowledgement and are grateful to the copyright holder, Chris Baker, for granting this permission retrospectively.

Soldiers to the Last Day: Rhineland- Westphalian 6th Infantry Division, 1935-1945 recounts the history of the German 6th Infantry Division from its formation in 1935 to its destruction at Babruysk in July 1944; then its resurrection and continued fighting until the end of the war. Among the first divisions established by the Wehrmacht, the 6th Infantry Division had one of the longest and bloodiest records of continuous combat of any division-Allied or Axis. Engaging in combat within weeks of the outbreak of WWII, the division fought to the last hour of the war. Based primarily on German sources, in particular the rare divisional and regimental histories and war diaries, and on personal accounts and letters of its soldiers, Soldiers to the Last Day presents the German view of the war from inside divisional headquarters and down to the individual Landser as the division marches across France in 1940, advances to the Volga during Operation Barbarossa, fights the brutal battles of Rzhev, Kursk, Babruysk; and makes last desperate attempts to defend the homeland in 1945. It is a tale of courage, determination, suffering, and in the end-betrayal.

Yael Weiss, eighteen years old and looking for adventure, finds it in the library one day when she discovers a packet of guns meant for Erinyes, an Armenian organization set on avenging their people’s massacre by the Turks in 1915. While the weapons make her nervous, Dub Hagopian, the young Armenian-American soldier sent to retrieve them, excites her in a completely different way.Smitten, Yael impulsively follows Dub to France by volunteering with the YMCA, reinventing herself along the way as twenty-five-year-old Methodist Yale White. When she and Dub cross paths again, Yael gets caught up in a crowd bursting with both the passionate ideals and the devil-may-care energy of youth–with consequences neither of them could ever foresee.