11 novembre 1918. La victoire inachevée… La France croit avoir gagné la guerre, elle n’a gagné qu’une paix précaire. Ce constat dramatique est le point de départ d’un long chemin de croix qui va mener inexorablement le pays, vers le dénouement de juin 1940. Au fil des stations de ce chemin de croix, la France, en totale contradiction entre sa politique étrangère et sa politique de défense, va aller de désillusions en démissions, sans jamais prendre conscience qu’elle n’avait pas ou ne s’est pas donné les moyens de ses ambitions. La déception du Traité de Versailles, l’arrogance des années d’occupation en Rhénanie, l’illusion du pacte de Locarno, le choix de la défensive alors qu’elle a accordé sa garantie à de nombreux pays avec lesquels elle n’a aucune frontière commune, la passivité face à la montée en puissance allemande, le manque de réaction suite à la neutralité belge, la démission de Munich, tout cela ne pouvait que conduire à une entrée en guerre mal préparée et mal gérée. Lorsque le 10 mai 1940, l’Allemagne donne le coup d’envoi des opérations à l’ouest, l’armée française va accumuler les maladresses, amplifiant malgré elle les succès allemands. Pris dans le tourbillon de la fulgurante percée allemande, le commandement n’aura à aucun moment la possibilité d’inverser le cours des événements et les nouvelles calamiteuses vont s’enchaîner telle une tragédie grecque. Après quarante-cinq jours de combat au cours desquels l’héroïsme le dispute à la lâcheté, le courage aux défaillances, la France arrive au terme de son calvaire. Ce sont les causes de cette inexorable défaite, des plus évidentes aux plus insoupçonnées, que ce livre se propose d’analyser point par point.

Starting with the basic core of 117 men who made up the Stabswache in 1933, the Leibstandarte, Hitler’s personal bodyguard, became an elite motorised unit, then a brigade then a division. It distinguished itself in Poland, in the West and obtained its first military notoriety in the Balkans where Kurt Meyer distinguished himself in particular. Then it was the fighting on the Eastern Front, at the forefront of the victories. Then after 1943, it continued to distinguish itself in the big battles, at Kharkov and at Kursk. It then disarmed the Italian Army, fought in Normandy, in the Ardennes and took part in the ultimate fighting in Hungary, or even in Berlin for some of its elements. This military history is accompanied by a lot of portraits of officers who became famous, but also photographs of material. It’s a fabulous book, a milestone, a limited edition which should be put into any serious library.

Starting with the basic core of 117 men who made up the Stabswache in 1933, the Leibstandarte, Hitler’s personal bodyguard, became an elite motorised unit, then a brigade then a division. It distinguished itself in Poland, in the West and obtained its first military notoriety in the Balkans where Kurt Meyer distinguished himself in particular. Then it was the fighting on the Eastern Front, at the forefront of the victories. Then after 1943, it continued to distinguish itself in the big battles, at Kharkov and at Kursk. It then disarmed the Italian Army, fought in Normandy, in the Ardennes and took part in the ultimate fighting in Hungary, or even in Berlin for some of its elements. This military history is accompanied by a lot of portraits of officers who became famous, but also photographs of material. It’s a fabulous book, a milestone, a limited edition which should be put into any serious library.

The Civil War was a long and bloody affair that claimed the life of some 750,000 men. When it ended, former opponents worked to rebuild their common country - America - and move into the future together. Most modern Americans might find that hard to believe, especially in an era witnessing the tearing down or movement of Confederate monuments and desecration of cemeteries. In the unique and timely Patriots Twice: Former Confederates and the Building of America after the Civil War, award-winning author Stephen M. Hood identifies more than 200 former Confederate soldiers, sailors, and government officials who reintegrated into American society and attained positions of authority and influence in the Federal government, United States military, academia, science, commerce, and industry. Their contributions had a long-lasting and positive influence on the country we have today. Many of the facts and stories in Patriots Twice will come as a surprise to modern Americans. For example, ten postwar presidents appointed former Confederates to serve the reunited nation as Supreme Court justices, secretaries of the US Navy, attorneys general, and a secretary of the interior. Dozens of former Southern soldiers were named US ambassadors and consuls. Eight were appointed generals who commanded US Army troops during the Spanish-American War. Former Confederates were elected mayors of such unlikely cities as Los Angeles, CA, Minneapolis, MN, Ogden, UT, and Santa Fe, NM, and served as governors of the non-Confederate states and territories of Colorado, West Virginia, Missouri, Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Alaska, and the Panama Canal Zone. Former Confederates became presidents of national professional societies, including the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, the American Gynecological and Obstetrical Society, the American Neurological Association, the American Surgical Association, and the American Public Health Association. In science and engineering, former Confederates led the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Geological Society of America. One former Confederate co-founded the environmental and preservation advocacy group Sierra Club, and another intellectual and scholar was president of the Society for Classical Studies (at that time named the American Philological Association). Many former Confederates founded or co-founded many our nation’s colleges and universities, some exclusively for women and newly freed African-Americans. Other former rebels served as presidents of prominent institutions including the University of California, Berkeley. Others taught at universities, not just in the American South but at Harvard, Yale, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Johns Hopkins, the University of San Francisco, and Amherst College. Many others served on the governing boards of the United States Military Academy at West Point and the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. Today’s United States benefitted greatly from the post-Civil War reconciliation that accepted the contributions of former Confederates. The men who fought the South forgave them and moved on together. It’s an important lesson everyone today should learn.

“West Virginia was the child of the storm,” concluded early Mountaineer historian and Civil War veteran, Maj. Theodore F. Lang. The northwestern third of the Commonwealth of Virginia finally broke away in 1863 to form the Union’s 35th state. In Seceding from Secession: The Civil War, Politics, and the Creation of West Virginia, authors Eric J. Wittenberg, Edmund A. Sargus, and Penny L. Barrick chronicle those events in an unprecedented study of the social, legal, military, and political factors that converged to bring about the birth of the West Virginia.President Abraham Lincoln, an astute lawyer in his own right, played a critical role in birthing the new state. The constitutionality of the mechanism by which the new state would be created concerned the president, and he polled every member of his entire cabinet before signing the bill. Seceding from Secession includes a detailed discussion of the 1871 U.S. Supreme Court decision Virginia v. West Virginia, in which former Lincoln cabinet member Salmon Chase presided as chief justice over the court that decided the constitutionality of the momentous event.Seceding from Secession is grounded in a wide variety of sources and persuasively presented. Add in a brilliant Foreword by Frank J. Williams, former Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and Chairman Emeritus of the Lincoln Forum, and it is an indispensable source for everyone interested in understanding the convergence of military, political, social, and legal events that brought about the birth of the state of West Virginia.

The Red Air Force versus the Luftwaffe in the skies over Eastern Europe. June 1941: Having conquered most of Western Europe, Adolf Hitler turned his attention to the vast Soviet Union. Disregarding his Non-Aggression Pact with Joseph Stalin, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, a full-scale invasion of the Soviet homeland. .. aimed squarely at Moscow. In the skies over Russia, the battle-hardened airmen of the Luftwaffe made short work of the Red Air Force during opening days of Barbarossa. To make matters worse, Stalin had executed many of his best pilots during the perennial "purges" of the 1930s. Thus, much of the Red Air Force was destroyed on the ground before meeting the Luftwaffe in the skies. By 1944, however, the Soviet airmen had regained the initiative and fervently wrested air superiority from the now-ailing Axis Powers.

Fifteen elite mountain divisions and a multitude of small units fought for the Wehrmacht during World War II. They fought on all fronts, operating in hostile environments ranging from the far north to Libya, the Atlantic to the Caucasus - serving in all the “hot spots.” This book, the culmination of some four decades of research and the support of many veterans and collectors, describes the life, operations and equipment of these specialist units.

Bagration was the code word that the Soviet Army gave for their summer offensive in 1944. This massive offensive led to the destruction of the German Army Group Center and was the greatest military defeat ever experienced by the German Army during World War Two. This book provides an absorbing insight into the German defeat and the Russian offensive using a wide variety of rare and previously unpublished photographs. With detailed captions and text together with 20 artist profiles and maps, the book shows the compelling story of how German Army Group Center tried to counter the overwhelming might of the Soviet Army as it poured thousands of men, weapons and armor across the German lines, smashing its way through. What ensued was a swift and bloody battle of attrition as the German Army tried to contain the might of its unstoppable enemy. In the days and weeks that followed German units fought and gradually retreated under the constant hammer blows of Russian ground and aerial bombardments, and endless armored and infantry attacks. Many German units fighting to the grim death were duty-bound not to withdraw, and what followed was a disaster of a colossal magnitude. As the Soviet might punched a massive hole in the German lines it sent huge shock waves through Army Group Center forcing them to retreat or face total annihilation. However, the Russian offensive was so quick that many of the German units with their precious panzer and infantry divisions quickly became encircled and destroyed - its remnants retreating west in order to save itself. By the end of the battle this cataclysm was bigger than that experienced at Stalingrad. It saw the German Army being pushed out of Russia towards Poland with the loss of over 300,000 men and most of its weaponry lost. The story of the destruction of Army Group Center during the summer of 1944 has been completely overshadowed by the D-Day campaign in Normandy three weeks earlier. Yet, the battle in which the German forces endured on the Eastern Front that fateful summer was more catastrophic than that experienced by the Allies on the Western Front, but little is known of the operation. This book reveals the lesser-known battle in the East and shows how the German forces fought and lost against overwhelming odds.

"What is unique about this book is the perspective. To a modern-day reader, specialops conjure images of highly trained and exotically equipped soldiers leaping out ofhelicopters and Zodiac boats to wipe out terrorists. .

In November 1945, two French officers secretly entered the Führerbunker, the air raid shelter near the Chancellery in Berlin. The bunker was the last home of Adolf Hitler, the background of the last months of his life, and the war, where he married Eva Braun on April 29, 1945, and where he killed himself less than two days later. In the middle of a heap of furniture and broken objects, the two officers found hundreds of documents littering the ground. Among the documents that they retrieved were a dozen telegrams of historic importance that allow us to understand the spirit of the last leaders of the Third Reich as well as the events that took place between April 23 and 26, 1945. These and other documents are presented for the first time in this book, presented in their proper context and with an expert commentary.

The L 2 H 43 and L 2 H 143 better known by its nick name given to it by the troops that used it ”The Krupp-Protze" (Krupp Boxer) was a specialized, multipurpose, six-wheeled 6x4 (six wheel 4 wheel drive) German light off-road truck and artillery tractor. It was fitted with the Krupp M-304 flat four engine, a 4-cylinder horizontally opposed petrol engine that originally delivered 55hp but was upgraded to deliver 60hp in 1936. It was this flat engine the allowed the fitting of the slopping engine bonnet that gave rise to the vehicles nickname. The Krupp Boxer saw extensive service on all of the operational fronts where the German army was engaged.This publication covers the Krupp-Protze in great photographic detail focusing on the trucks and their crews as they dealt with the conditions and circumstances they found themselves in. It is illustrated with the author’s own collection of photographs, all taken by the average German soldier and not official army cameramen whose photos are already well known.

“Despite everything I felt very lucky to have flown Corsairs, they were the best you know even though it took me sometime to realise this when so many friends died flying them.” (Colin Facer, Corsair pilot, HMS Illustrious) The Vought-Sikorsky Corsair was one of the most potent fighters of the Second World War. It was also one of the most flawed. Conceived by Rex Beisel, Vought’s Chief Designer during 1938, the US Navy condemned it as being too dangerous for carrier operations and refused to certify it safe for use at sea. With the British Aero Industry unable to build fighters with sufficient range and potentcy for carrier use the Admirtalty sought alternatives. With the Lend Lease programme, created by President Roosevelt, in place they could acquire weapons from American factories. In practice, this meant standing in line behind the US Navy, Marines and Army for service, but it still opened up new opportunities to be exploited. So, with newly built Corsairs being stockpiled and the promise of an improved version on the way, the RN saw a opening worthy of development and exploited it. By the end of the war the Fleet Air Arm had acquired more than 2,000 Corsairs to equip its squadrons. But the risks identified by the USN were largely ignored by the Royal Navy and far too many men and aircraft were lost in accidents as a result. Yet in the hands of experienced carrier pilots its virtues were only too apparent and, in due course, they achieved great things. Eventually, the US Navy noted this “success” and certified the Corsair for use on their carriers too, but the aircraft never entirely lost its reputation as a “widow maker.” This book describes the Corsair’s development and tells the sad, but inspiring story of the young men who struggled and suffered to make the Corsair a going concern in the most vicious unforgiving war one can imagine. To do this the author met and corresponded with ninety or more veterans from America, Britain, New Zealand and Canada. Their recollections made this book possible and through their vivid memories we can experience what it felt like to be barely of age, a civilian called to arms and a fighter pilot.

Nazi Dreamtime is the ground-breaking story of extreme-right, ultra-nationalist thought and practice in Australia in the period immediately before and during the Second World War. It focuses on those native-born Australians who were attracted to the ideology of Nazism in Germany from 1933. Their belief was that the achievements and tenets of the Nazi regime were applicable to Australian political and cultural life to some extent. These Nazi enthusiasts and their fellow-travellers differed markedly over the extent of that applicability, but all agreed that Australians ought to learn from and follow the European experiment of the ‘German revolution’. The appeal of Nazism was marked in the immediate post-Depression years amongst those Australians who rejected democracy but were uncomfortable with alternatives on the conservative Right and on the Left. The aggressive foreign policy followed by Berlin in the late-thirties failed to shake the faith of these ideologues and even the duress of war would not dislodge the faith of some in Hitlerism. This group was charitably described as ‘well-meaning dreamers’ by one renegade amongst them and their ranks included tourists, appeasers, political agitators, propagandists, writers, poets, mystics, aesthetes, academics, soldiers and outright cranks. Some were obscure figures; others enjoyed a high public profile and were well-known. Many thought that aboriginal concepts of dreaming could be merged with a local variant of national-socialism to form a white dreaming – a Nazi Dreamtime under the Southern Cross. Only the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 terminated the prospects of what had turned from dream to nightmare, although the idea lingered.

The word ‘Anzac’ has been the subject of a century of legal regulation in Australia and internationally. In Anzac: The Landing, The Legend, The Law, Catherine Bond interrogates the legal history of one of Australia and New Zealand’s most revered words and the restrictions on the acronym that still exist today. This book examines how, in 1916, control of ‘Anzac’ was introduced initially for businesses then extended, without precedent, to more private spheres, including prohibiting the use of the word as the name of a home. It documents the effect that these laws had on the Australian home front and the devastating impact on soldiers and families. Yet, such use and regulation was not limited to Australia, with New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States authorities also grappling with how to respond to the increased adoption of ‘Anzac’ within their borders. Bond explores these issues and how this legal history can be used to inform the restrictions on ‘Anzac’ that remain in force in Australia to this day.

1918 was a year of triumph for the Australian Corps in France yet today this is seldom recognised by most Australians. Our perceptions have been clouded by legends, built up over the past century, that have trivialised their achievement. Here an ex-soldier, Pat Beale DSO MC, uses his military background to help re-discover why and how the Corps was so successful and also the reasons their triumph has been ignored. This concise and knowledgeable account will not sit comfortably with everyone. As the author admits, he slaps a number of ‘sacred cows’ on the rump and challenges some deeply held perceptions, but he hopes it will encourage a better understanding of the great victory of those men and how they achieved it.

Born in the Philippines to an American father and a Filipina mother, George Cooper is one of the few surviving veteran pilots who saw action over such fearsome targets as Rabaul and Wewak. Not just another flag-waving story of air combat, Jayhawk describes the war as it really was - a conflict with far-reaching tentacles that gripped and tore at not only the combatants, but also their families, friends and the way they lived their lives. Stout examines the story of Cooper’s growing up in gentle and idyllic pre-war Manila and how he grew to be the man he is. At 100 years old, few men are left alive who can share similar experiences. Stout reviews Cooper’s journey to the United States and his unlikely entry into the United States Army Air Forces. Trained as a B-25 pilot, Cooper was assigned to the iconic 345th Bomb Group and flew strafing missions that shredded the enemy, but likewise put himself and his comrades in grave danger. A husband and father, Cooper was pulled two ways by the pull of duty and his obligation to his wife and daughter. And always on his mind was the family he left behind in the Philippines who were under the Japanese thrall.