This book was one of the most pleasant surprises I have had in a while. I won this book and another entitled God and Uncle Sam: Religion and America’s Armed Forces in World War II, (which I will be reviewing this summer) in a contest I had forgot I had even entered! Being a History nut,…
Category: Book Reviews
World War Two Books Worth A Damn: Church of Spies
“There’s a man who leads a life of danger To everyone he meets he stays a stranger With every move he makes another chance he takes Odds are he won’t live to see tomorrow Secret agent man, secret agent man” So said Johnny Rivers in the theme to the ’60s show Secret Agent. Mark Riebling…
Holocaust History: Ravensbruck, The Often Forgotten Nazi Death Camp for Women
In ‘If This Is a Woman,’ Sarah Helm goes inside Germany’s Ravensbrück, where up to 90,000 women perished during the Holocaust. LONDON — Lying 50 miles north of Berlin, Ravensbrück was the only concentration camp the Nazis built with the sole intention to house female political prisoners. Opening up its gates in May 1939, just…
Historical Non-Fiction Book-of-the-Month Review
This is a book review from Michael Kriegers website. I wanted to post it because it contains a TON of good information on the subject. I will be posting my own personal review of this book this summer. -SF The Devils Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and The Rise of America’s Secret Government Allen Dulles,…
Cold War Files: Some Obscure Cold War History (In Comics)
The World’s Highest War … in Comics ‘Siachen: The Cold War’ depicts a pointless conflict In 1984, India and Pakistan went to war over the Siachen Glacier. A 2003 ceasefire halted most of the fighting, but troops from both sides are still facing off and losing more soldiers every year to the climate, altitude and…
Military History: “Stalingrad on the Yangtze”, The Battle of Shanghai 1937
Today Shanghai is a hub of international trade and culture and one of the world’s great cities. But in 1937, it was a battlefield. Imperial Japanese troops fought the Chinese Nationalist army in the seaside metropolis in one of history’s most terrible battles. Westerners watched from their neighborhoods as two ancient rivals fought a new…
WW2 Book Review Combo
Today I will be reviewing two books that deal with “Behind-the-Lines” Operations during World War Two. I have been doing quite a bit of research lately on the OSS and SOE Operations throughout the War, and both of these book are rich with material. It is amazing to me that even after 60+ years after…
World War Two Non-Fiction Book Review: The Winter Fortress by Neil Bascomb
As both a student of World War Two and of the SOE and OSS, this book marks one of the high points of the SOE’s plan to “Set Europe Ablaze”. There was no other operation as important as this one in stopping Hiters War Machine from getting The Atomic Bomb in the early years of…
Cold War Non-Fiction Book Review: Special Tasks – The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – A Soviet Spymaster
Published in 1994 by Little Brown and Co.; 509 pp My Administration for Special Tasks,” Sudoplatov begins, “was responsible for sabotage, kidnapping and assassination of our enemies beyond the country’s borders.” The administration to which he refers was one of the key divisions in Stalin’s security police, an agency he headed from the summer of…
Espionage Non-Fiction Book Review: The Rice Paddy Navy
Osprey Publishing; November 2012; 316 pp. Before Navy SEALs stormed mansions in Pakistan, the notion of sailors waging war on land sounded ludicrous to many. So when Gen. George C. Marshall learned that Navy captain Milton Miles intended to train an army of Chinese guerillas to disrupt Japanese army operations in China and create a…