History

In this powerful history, Philip Morgan tells the dramatic story of Mussolini's fall from power in July 1943, illuminating both the causes and the consequences of this momentous event.
Morgan recounts how King Emanuel first ousted Mussolini and how Germany then succeeded in putting him back in place, this time as a puppet of the Nazis. The resulting chaos included fighting by anti-fascist rebel groups, retributions on all sides, and mini civil wars throughout the country. When Germany finally surrendered, Italy was in complete disarray. The book shines light on how common people responded to and coped with the extraordinary pressures of wartime living and with the invasion, occupation, and division of their country by warring foreign powers. Morgan's descriptions of little known events from Italy's war, as well as vivid eye-witness reports from people who hid Jews, fought in the resistance, and killed collaborators, clearly show how much the country suffered during this time. And it proves how crucial the experience of this period was in shaping Italy's post-war sense of nationhood and its transition to democracy.

This book is a collection of nine essays examining the impact of World War II on the American people. The contributions range from macro studies (the ways corporations sought to recruit women into the work force) to micro studies (the impact of the war on working conditions in Indiana) to biography (the Congressional career of Margaret Chase Smith). Focusing as it does on the domestic scene, this study offers a comprehensive selection of the impact of the war on Americans, and the way it influenced concepts of gender, race, class, and ethnicity.

A comprehensive history of the Nazi persecution and murder of European Jews, paying detailed attention to an unrivalled range sources.Focusing clearly on the perpetrators and exploring closely the process of decision making, Longerich argues that anti-Semitism was not a mere by-product of the Nazis' political mobilization or an attempt to deflect the attention of the masses, but that anti-Jewish policy was a central tenet of the Nazi movement's attempts to implement, disseminate, and secure National Socialist rule - and one which crucially shaped Nazi policy decisions, from their earliest days in power through to the invasionof the Soviet Union and the Final Solution.As Longerich shows, the 'disappearance' of Jews was designed as a first step towards a racially homogeneous society - first within the 'Reich', later in the whole of a German-dominated Europe.

A concise account of the war - including the war in Asia and the Pacific as well as the European arena. Covers the formation of the victorious Grand Alliance and to the problems that beset it, and to Nazi Germany's relations with its allies.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD   AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST   Now in paperback, War Without Mercy has been hailed by The New York Times as "one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States." In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War--race--while writing what John Toland has called "a landmark book . . . a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan."   Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers "a lesson that the postwar generations need most . . . with eloquence, crushing detail, and power."

Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of VE Day, The Oxford Companion to the Second World War is the most wide-ranging and balanced work on the Second World War, the ultimate reference on the subject. Its 1,750 alphabetically-arranged entries vary from brief definitions and one-linesignposts to major pieces of description and analysis of several thousand words. They cover every aspect of the Second World War, from strategy, politics, tactics, and weaponry to logistics, political and military leaders, economics, and the effects on society.The Second World War often divides the views of historians today almost as much as it divided combatants at the time. To reflect the diversity of views about the war the Companion has been written by an international team of more than 140 distinguished contributors, and includes Japanese, German,and Italian perspectives. The huge volume of information is supported by a wealth of illustrative and weaponry to logistics, political and military leaders, economics, and the effects on society.The Second World War often divides the views of historians today almost as much as it divided combatants at the time. To reflect the diversity of views about the war the Companion has been written by an international team of more than 140 distinguished contributors, and includes Japanese, German,and Italian perspectives. The huge volume of information is supported by a wealth of illustrative material including stunningly evocative black and white photographs, numerous explanatory diagrams and tables, and detailed maps.A truly international team of contributors including: John Gooch, Wilhelm Deist, Norman Davies, Robert O'Neill, David Kennedy, Martin Gilbert, Robert Dallek, Michael Howard, Richard Overy, Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, Yogi Akashi, Robert Service, Peter Calvocoressi, Anthony Farrar-Hockley, Judith Brown,Lucio Ceva, Sumio Hatano, Ben-Ami Shillony, Earl Ziemke, Klaus A. Maier, Ali Gheissari, Giorgio Rochat

In the course of the twentieth century, no war looms as profoundly transformative or as destructive as World War II. Its global scope and human toll reveal the true face of modern, industrialized warfare. Now, for the first time, we have a comprehensive, single-volume account of how and why this global conflict evolved as it did. A War To Be Won is a unique and powerful operational history of the Second World War that tells the full story of battle on land, on sea, and in the air. Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett analyze the operations and tactics that defined the conduct of the war in both the European and Pacific Theaters. Moving between the war room and the battlefield, we see how strategies were crafted and revised, and how the multitudes of combat troops struggled to discharge their orders. The authors present incisive portraits of the military leaders, on both sides of the struggle, demonstrating the ambiguities they faced, the opportunities they took, and those they missed. Throughout, we see the relationship between the actual operations of the war and their political and moral implications. A War To Be Won is the culmination of decades of research by two of America's premier military historians. It avoids a celebratory view of the war but preserves a profound respect for the problems the Allies faced and overcame as well as a realistic assessment of the Axis accomplishments and failures. It is the essential military history of World War II--from the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 to the surrender of Japan in 1945--for students, scholars, and general readers alike.

In a new edition featuring a new preface, A World of Arms remains a classic of global history. Widely hailed as a masterpiece, this volume remains the first history of World War II to provide a truly global account of the war that encompassed six continents. Starting with the changes that restructured Europe and its colonies following the First World War, Gerhard Weinberg sheds new light on every aspect of World War II. Actions of the Axis, the Allies, and the Neutrals are covered in every theater of the war. More importantly, the global nature of the war is examined, with new insights into how events in one corner of the world helped affect events in often distant areas.

Tracing the rise of racist and eugenic ideologies, Henry Friedlander explores in chilling detail how the Nazi program of secretly exterminating the handicapped and disabled evolved into the systematic destruction of Jews and Gypsies. He describes how the so-called euthanasia of the handicapped provided a practical model for the later mass murder, thereby initiating the Holocaust. The Nazi regime pursued the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped based on a belief in the biological, and thus absolute, inferiority of those groups. To document the connection between the assault on the handicapped and the Final Solution, Friedlander shows how the legal restrictions and exclusionary policies of the 1930s, including mass sterilization, led to mass murder during the war. He also makes clear that the killing centers where the handicapped were gassed and cremated served as the models for the extermination camps. Based on extensive archival research, the book also analyzes the involvement of the German bureaucracy and judiciary, the participation of physicians and scientists, and the nature of popular opposition.

The US decision to drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 remains one of the most controversial events of the twentieth century. However, the controversy over the rights and wrongs of dropping the bomb has tended to obscure a number of fundamental and sobering truths about the development of this fearsome weapon.The principle of killing thousands of enemy civilians from the air was already well established by 1945 and had been practised on numerous occasions by both sides during the Second World War. Moreover, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was conceived and built by an international community of scientists, not just by the Americans. Other nations (including Japan and Germany) were also developing atomic bombs in the first half of the 1940s, albeit hapharzardly. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine anycombatant nation foregoing the use of the bomb during the war had it been able to obtain one. The international team of scientists organized by the Americans just got there first.As this fascinating new history shows, the bomb dropped by a US pilot that hot August morning in 1945 was in many ways the world's offspring, in both a technological and a moral sense. And it was the world that would have to face its consequences, strategically, diplomatically, and culturally, in the years ahead.

'We request an immediate favour of you, to build a shelter for us women and small children, because we have absolutely no place to take refuge and we are terrified!' This French mother's petition sent to her mayor on the eve of Germany's 1940 invasion of France reveals civilians' security concerns unleashed by Second World War Blitzkrieg fighting tactics. Unprepared for air warfare's assault on civilian psyches, French planners were among the first in history to respond to civilian security challenges posed by aerial bombardment. France Under Fire offers a social, political and military examination of the origins of the French refugee crisis of 1940, a mass displacement of eight million civilians fleeing German combatants. Scattered throughout a divided France, refugees turned to German Occupation officials and Vichy administrators for relief and repatriation. Their solutions raised questions about occupying powers' obligations to civilians and elicited new definitions of refugees' rights.

Christina Morina's book examines the history of the Eastern Front war and its impact on German politics and society throughout the postwar period. She argues that the memory of the Eastern Front war was one of the most crucial and contested themes in each part of the divided Germany. Although the Holocaust gained the most prominent position in West German memory, official memory in East Germany centered on the war against the USSR. The book analyzes the ways in which these memories emerged in postwar German political culture during and after the Cold War, and how views of these events played a role in contemporary political debates. The analysis pays close attention to the biographies of the protagonists both during the war and after, drawing distinctions between the accepted, public memory of events and individual encounters with the war.

This study provides an account of women's experience of the French occupation and liberation during World War II. It considers the political choices they had to make and the pressures and constraints they were under.