Virtual Lobby Display: World War II

The author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake delivers an intimate chronicle of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz - an inspiring portrait of courage and leadership in a time of unprecedented crisis.

On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane's bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.

Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, days after delivering the components of the atomic bomb in the most highly classified naval mission of the war, USS Indianapolis is struck by two Japanese torpedoes. The ship is instantly transformed into a fiery cauldron and sinks within minutes. Some 300 men go down with the ship. Nearly 900 make it into the water alive. For the next five nights and four days, almost three hundred miles from the nearest land, the men battle injuries, sharks, dehydration, insanity, and eventually each other.

World War II was the most lethal conflict in human history. Never before had a war been fought on so many diverse landscapes and in so many different ways, from rocket attacks in London to jungle fighting in Burma to armor strikes in Libya. The Second World Wars examines how combat unfolded in the air, at sea, and on land to show how distinct conflicts among disparate combatants coalesced into one interconnected global war.

In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks that we face in the twenty-first. Based on new sources from eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors, Black Earth recounts the mass murder of the Jews as an event that is still close to us, more comprehensible than we would like to think, and thus all the more terrifying.

For Americans on the home front, the twelve months following the attack on Pearl Harbor comprised the darkest year of World War II. Despite government attempts to disguise the magnitude of American losses, it was clear the nation had suffered a nearly unbroken string of military setbacks in the Pacific; by autumn, officials were openly acknowledging the possibility that the U.S. might lose the war. The Darkest Year focuses on Americans' state of mind not only through what they said, but in the day-to-day details of their behavior.

On June 22, 1941, Germany launched the greatest land assault in history on the Soviet Union, an attack that Adolf Hitler deemed crucial to ensure German economic and political survival. As the key theater of the war for the Germans, the eastern front consumed enormous levels of resources and accounted for 75 percent of all German casualties. Despite the significance of this campaign to Germany and to the war as a whole, few English-language publications of the last thirty-five years have addressed these pivotal events.

This rollicking history of Casablanca during the Second World War sheds light on the city as a place where spies, soldiers, and political agents vied for control. Casablanca became a military target after France's surrender to Germany. Jewish refugees from Europe poured in. Nazi agents infiltrated the city. Shopkeepers, celebrities, former French Foreign Legionnaires, and disgruntled bureaucrats formed a network of Allied spies. Once in American hands, Casablanca became a crucial logistical hub in the fight against Germany.

The first group of African-American pilots in the history of the U.S. military, the Tuskegee Airmen had to battle discrimination at home before they could join the fight abroad. They overcame racial bias during World War II as the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of the Army Air Corps. Based on extensive interviews with members of the Tuskegee Airmen, this inspiring book offers insights into the prejudices the Red Tails had to overcome and recaptures the drama of wartime service.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father.

In 1940, Varian Fry traveled to Marseille carrying three thousand dollars and a list of imperiled artists and writers he hoped to help escape within a few weeks. Instead, he stayed more than a year, working to procure false documents, amass emergency funds, and arrange journeys across Spain and Portugal. His many clients included Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall. The race against time to save them is a tale of forbidden love, high-stakes adventure, and unimaginable courage.

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Occupied Paris, 1942. Just before he dies, a man being chased by the Gestapo hands off a strange-looking document to the unsuspecting novelist Paul Ricard. It looks like a blueprint of a part for a military weapon. Ricard realizes he must try to get the diagram into the hands of members of the resistance network.

The Death of My Brother Abel zigzags across the middle of the twentieth century. At the center of the book is the unnamed narrator, holed up in a Paris hotel and writing a kind of novel. In Cain, that narrator is revealed as Aristide Subics, or so it appears, since his identity is as unstable as the times he lived through. Primarily set in the bombed-out, rubble- strewn Hamburg of the years just after the war, the dark confusion and deadly confrontation and of Cain and Abel, inseparable brothers, goes on.

In March 1940, the Nazis sweep Paris and immediately take up residence in one of the city's most iconic sites - The Hotel Ritz. But two residents of the Ritz refuse to be defeated - its director, Claude Auzello, and his beautiful American actress wife, Blanche. They not only oversee the smooth workings of the hotel, but both Blanche and Claude throw themselves fearlessly into the dangerous and clandestine workings of the French Resistance.

A battle-haunted English journalist and a Russian female bomber pilot join forces to track the Huntress, a Nazi war criminal gone to ground in America. In the aftermath of war, the hunter becomes the hunted...

Set in London during the years of 1939–1942, when citizens had slim hope of survival, much less victory; and on the strategic island of Malta, which was daily devastated by the Axis barrage, Everyone Brave is Forgiven features little-known history and a perfect wartime love story inspired by the real-life love letters between Chris Cleave’s grandparents. This novel dares us to understand that, against the great theater of world events, it is the intimate losses, the small battles, the daily human triumphs that change us most.

The contemporary classic depicting the struggles of a U.S. airman attempting to survive the lunacy and depravity of a World War II base.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Herman Wouk's boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining novel of life - and mutiny - on a Navy warship in the Pacific theater was immediately embraced, upon its original publication in 1951, as one of the first serious works of American fiction to grapple with the moral complexities and the human consequences of World War II.

Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber's son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee.

These are the stories of some 400 men and women, who, though they experienced the war in wildly different ways, were all profoundly affected by it. Some stories tug at the heart, some foster the shock of surprise, still others reflect the long-held pride in the American war effort at home and abroad. From the first dark stirrings of war through its dusty aftermath, Never Will We Forget captures how Americans lived, felt, and believed during the twentieth century's most brutal conflict.

This groundbreaking history tells the story of how, in one of our country's darkest hours, Japanese Americans fought to defend their faith and preserve religious freedom. In this path-breaking account, Duncan Ryūken Williams reveals how, even as they were stripped of their homes and imprisoned in camps, Japanese American Buddhists launched one of the most inspiring defenses of religious freedom in our nation's history, insisting that they could be both Buddhist and American.

Long Night of the Tankers presents a fresh account of a lesser-known but critical component of the Atlantic naval theatre during World War II. Using war diaries, after-action reports, and first-hand accounts, authors Bercuson and Herwig examine the story behind Operation Neuland, the German plan to interrupt vital oil supplies from reaching the United States and the United Kingdom by preventing Allied oil tankers from leaving refineries in the Caribbean.

During the Second World War, Australia maintained a super-secret organisation, the Diplomatic (or 'D') Special Section, dedicated to breaking Japanese diplomatic codes. The Section has remained officially secret. This book recounts the history of the Special Section and describes its code-breaking activities.

This history reclaims the Second World War as a global fight 'from below'. The vast majority of historical accounts have focused on the regular armies of the allied powers, however, the often-neglected people's militias were crucial not only to the defeat of fascism, but also colonialism, imperialism and even capitalism.Looking at militias in Yugoslavia, Greece, Poland and Latvia, as well as the Warsaw Uprising and anti-fascist movements in Germany, it presents a different battle, fought on different terms.

Steven Trent Smith grapples boldly with several big subjects: the Japanese occupation of the Philippines; the capture of Japan's 'Z Plan' (the decisive-battle strategy for destroying the U.S. Pacific Fleet); the rescue by submarine of forty Americans stranded in the Philippines; the climactic Battle of the Philippine Sea. Meticulously researched and well written, The Rescue ties these elements together into an epic that is emotionally engaging from start to rousing finish.--Martin Russ, author of Breakout and The Last Parallel

How well did civilian morale stand up to the pressure of total war and what factors were important to it? Rejecting contentions that morale fell short of the favourable picture presented during World War II and since, this work shows how government policies for maintaining morale were put in place.

This book presents an unforgettably honest account of the effects of World War II and the ensuing American occupation in Japan's Oita prefecture, from the perspective of the Japanese citizens who experienced it. Through harrowing firsthand accounts from more than forty Japanese men and women who lived in the region, we get a strikingly detailed picture of the dreadful experiences of wartime life in Japan.

A new take on D-Day, showing that the successful deception of Operation Fortitude has received more than its fair share of credit for the Normandy invasions, obscuring not just the real invasion plans, but German weaknesses that contributed to Allied victory.

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. As this fascinating new history shows, the bomb dropped by a U.S. pilot that hot August morning in 1945 was in many ways the world's offspring, in both a technological and a moral sense.