Making Sense of Normandy

Making Sense of Normandy PDF

Author: E. Carver McGriff

Publisher:

Published: 2007-09-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781592993048

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Carver McGriff was 19 years old when he left Indiana and his innocence behind to join in the battle for freedom on one of the most important and bloodiest battlefields of World War II. In this book, McGriff gives a veteran's rare, first-hand account of the harsh realities of WWII combat-- not only the struggle for physical survival, but for emotional and spiritual survival as well.

If You Survive

If You Survive PDF

Author: George Wilson

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2010-11-10

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0307775259

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"If you survive your first day, I'll promote you." So promised George Wilson's World War II commanding officer in the hedgerows of Normandy -- and it was to be a promise dramatically fulfilled. From July, 1944, to the closing days of the war, from the first penetration of the Siegfried Line to the Nazis' last desperate charge in the Battle of the Bulge, Wilson fought in the thickest of the action, helping take the small towns of northern France and Belgium building by building. Of all the men and officers who started out in Company F of the 4th Infantry Division with him, Wilson was the only one who finished. In the end, he felt not like a conqueror or a victor, but an exhausted survivor, left with nothing but his life -- and his emotions. If You Survive One of the great first-person accounts of the making of a combat veteran, in the last, most violent months of World War II.

Normandy

Normandy PDF

Author: Wayne Vansant

Publisher: Zenith Press

Published: 2012-09-15

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 0760343926

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Normandy depicts the planning and execution of Operation Overlord in 96 full-color pages. The initial paratrooper assault is shown, as well as the storming of the five D-Day beaches: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. But the story does not end there. Once the Allies got ashore, they had to stay ashore. The Germans made every effort to push them back into the sea. This book depicts the such key events in the Allied liberation of Europe as: 1. Construction of the Mulberry Harbors, two giant artificial harbors built in England and floated across the English Channel so that troops, vehicles, and supplies could be offloaded across the invasion beaches.2. The Capture of Cherbourg, the nearest French port, against a labyrinth of Gennan pillboxes.3. The American fight through the heavy bocage (hedgerow country) to take the vital town of Saint-Lô.4. The British-Canadian struggle for the city of Caen against the “Hitler Youth Division,” made up of 23,000 seventeen- and eighteen-year-old Nazi fanatics.5. The breakout of General Patton’s Third Army and the desperate US 30th Division’s defense of Mortaine.6. The Falaise Pocket, known as the “Killing Ground, ” where the remnants of two German armies were trapped and bombed and shelled into submission. The slaughter was so great that 5,000 Germans were buried in one mass grave. 7. The Liberation of Paris, led by the 2nd Free French Armored Division, which had been fighting for four long years with this goal in mind.

Bailout Over Normandy

Bailout Over Normandy PDF

Author: Ted Fahrenwald

Publisher:

Published: 2023-06

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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A suspenseful WWII page-turner and an enormously witty tale of camaraderie and collusion, Ted Fahrenwald's memoir takes you behind the scenes to offer unique insights into the daily courage and intrigues of the French Resistance and various Allies as they battled the vicious German occupiers-and suffered the violent retribution that was often the result. At 22, Ted was a daredevil pilot on his 100th mission when he bailed out of his burning Mustang two days after D-Day. Parachuting into the Nazi-infested farmland of Normandy, he was immediately picked up by the Maquis, the rural guerrilla arm of the Resistance. His wily and gregarious personality, high-school French, and backwoods skills helped him forge deep and lifelong friendships with these heroic patriots. Ted joined them on their night-time raids and relished their frequent parties fueled by home-brewed Calvados brandy. But he was determined to rejoin his squadron in England, so he left his helpers to hike north through heavily occupied forests toward the Channel Coast and the advancing Allied liberation armies. Captured by the Wehrmacht, interrogated as a spy, and interned in a POW camp, he made a daring escape just before his scheduled deportation to Germany. Being drafted by the unruly Maquis and captured by the German army didn't diminish Ted's talent for spotting the ironic humor in even the most aggravating situations-nor his penchant for extracting his own improvised and sometimes hilarious version of justice.

The Germans in Normandy

The Germans in Normandy PDF

Author: Richard Hargreaves

Publisher: Grub Street Publishers

Published: 2006-11-06

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 1781594708

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This account of the D-Day invasion—from the German point of view—includes maps and photos. The Allied invasion of Northern France was the greatest combined operation in the history of warfare. Up until now, it has been recorded from the attackers’ point of view—whereas the defenders’ angle has been largely ignored. While the Germans knew an invasion was inevitable, no one knew where or when it would fall. Those manning Hitler’s mighty Atlantic Wall may have felt secure in their bunkers, but they had no conception of the fury and fire that was about to break. After the initial assaults of June established an Allied bridgehead, a state of stalemate prevailed. The Germans fought with great courage—hindered by lack of supplies and overwhelming Allied control of the air. This book describes the catastrophe that followed, in a unique look at the war from the losing side.

The Last of the 357th Infantry

The Last of the 357th Infantry PDF

Author: Mark Hager

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1684512859

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For those who loved Stephen E. Ambrose's Band of Brothers and E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed. Drawing on toughness and skills forged in hardscrabble Depression-era North Carolina, Bronze Star recipient and expert B.A.R. rifleman Harold Frank invades Normandy, fights Germans, and endures a grueling stint in a German POW camp where he witnesses the fire-bombing of Dresden. From D-Day to Dresden with a Crack Shot B.A.R. Rifleman D-Day 1944: twenty-year-old PFC Harold Frank had moved as one with his battalion onto the shores of Utah Beach, pushing into France to cut off and blockade the pivotal Nazi-occupied deep-water port of Cherbourg. As a recognized crack shot with WW II's iconic American automatic rifle, Frank fought bravely across the bloody hedgerows of the Cotentin Peninsula. During the most intense fighting, Frank was ambushed and wounded in a deadly, nine-hour firefight with Germans. Taken prisoner and with a bullet lodged under one arm, Frank found himself dumped first in a brutal Nazi POW concentration camp, then shipped to a grueling work camp on the outskirts of Dresden, Germany, where the young PFC was exposed to the vengeance of a crumbling Nazi regime, the menace of a rapidly advancing Russian military—and the danger of thousands of Allied bombers screaming overhead during the firebombing of Dresden. Historian Mark Hager builds on hundreds of hours of interviews with Harold Frank, sharing the intimate and heart-pounding account of Frank’s journey as a child of the Great Depression to the bloody shores of the D-Day invasion, into the bowels of Nazi Germany, and back to the U.S. where as a young man Harold would spend years resolutely dealing with the lingering effects of starvation rations while determinedly building a new life—a life always mindful of the legacy of his POW experience and his faithful service in America’s hard-fought war against Nazi aggression.

D-Day Through French Eyes

D-Day Through French Eyes PDF

Author: Mary Louise Roberts

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-05-16

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 022613704X

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“A moving examination of how French civilians experienced the fighting” at Normandy during WWII from the acclaimed author of What Soldiers Do (Telegraph, UK). “Like big black umbrellas, they rain down on the fields across the way, and then disappear behind the black line of the hedges.” Silent parachutes dotting the night sky—that’s how one Normandy woman learned that the D-Day invasion was under way in June of 1944. Though they yearned for liberation, the French had to steel themselves for war, knowing that their homes, lands, and fellow citizens would have to bear the brunt of the attack. With D-Day through French Eyes, Mary Louise Roberts turns the conventional narrative of D-Day on its head, taking readers across the Channel to view the invasion anew. Roberts builds her history from an impressive range of gripping first-person accounts by French citizens throughout the region. A farm family notices that cabbage is missing from their garden—then discovers that the guilty culprits are American paratroopers hiding in the cowshed. Fishermen rescue pilots from the wreck of their B-17, then search for clothes big enough to disguise them as civilians. A young man learns to determine whether a bomb is whistling overhead or silently plummeting toward them. When the allied infantry arrived, French citizens guided them to hidden paths and little-known bridges, giving them crucial advantages over the German occupiers. As she did in her acclaimed account of GIs in postwar France, What Soldiers Do, Roberts here sheds vital new light on a story we thought we knew. "In the great tradition of Studs Terkel and Is Paris Burning?, Mary Louise Roberts uses the diaries and memoirs of French civilians to narrate a history of the French at D-Day that has for too long been occluded by the mythology of the allied landing.”—Alice Kaplan, author of Dreaming in French

Normandy '44

Normandy '44 PDF

Author: James Holland

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 2020-05-19

Total Pages: 721

ISBN-13: 9780802148964

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On the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a new history of the momentous Normandy campaign with fresh insights from award-winning historian James Holland D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the seventy-six days of bitter fighting in Normandy that followed the Allied landing, have become the defining episode of World War II in the west--the object of books, films, television series, and documentaries. Yet as familiar as it is, as James Holland makes clear in his definitive history, many parts of the OVERLORD campaign, as it was known, are still shrouded in myth and assumed knowledge. Drawing freshly on widespread archives and on the testimonies of eye-witnesses, Holland relates the extraordinary planning that made Allied victory in France possible; indeed, the story of how hundreds of thousands of men, and mountains of materiel, were transported across the English Channel, is as dramatic a human achievement as any battlefield exploit. The brutal landings on the five beaches and subsequent battles across the plains and through the lanes and hedgerows of Normandy--a campaign that, in terms of daily casualties, was worse than any in World War I--come vividly to life in conferences where the strategic decisions of Eisenhower, Rommel, Montgomery, and other commanders were made, and through the memories of paratrooper Lieutenant Dick Winters of Easy Company, British corporal and tanker Reg Spittles, Thunderbolt pilot Archie Maltbie, German ordnance officer Hans Heinze, French resistance leader Robert Leblanc, and many others. For both sides, the challenges were enormous. The Allies confronted a disciplined German army stretched to its limit, which nonetheless caused tactics to be adjusted on the fly. Ultimately ingenuity, determination, and immense materiel strength--delivered with operational brilliance--made the difference. A stirring narrative by a pre-eminent historian, Normandy '44 offers important new perspective on one of history's most dramatic military engagements and is an invaluable addition to the literature of war.

Surrender Invites Death

Surrender Invites Death PDF

Author: John A. English

Publisher: Stackpole Books

Published: 2011-02-09

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780811744379

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What it was like to fight Hitler's ideological troops in Normandy starting on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

D-Day Repulsed

D-Day Repulsed PDF

Author: Claude Stahl

Publisher: Medialuck Publishing Ltd.

Published: 2019-02-08

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13:

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It is the spring of 1944 and the outcome of World War II hangs in the balance, everything now hinges on an imminent Allied Invasion into France, D-Day. If the invasion is successful the Allies win, if it fails Germany will be the victor. Field Marshal Rommel is convinced a change in strategy and new weapons will stop the Allies, all he has to do is to convince the Fuhrer and The German High Command before it is too late. Meanwhile, two brothers stand on the opposite side of the channel, each one dedicate to his own particular band of brothers. In occupied France a young German soldier stands alongside his fellow troops, despite his apprehension at what lies ahead he knows he must do everything to fulfil his duties and maintain his honour in the oncoming hell that will be the battle for the beaches. In England an ambitious young GI has completed his training and impatiently awaits the order to embark on the boats heading for the Normandy beaches, knowing that when he disembarks he will be facing the guns and might of the German Army, and haunted by the thought that his own brother is somewhere in occupied Europe. In this exciting historical fantasy novel that explains Rommel’s alternative strategy and explores what could have been the outcome if he had won his struggle with his own high command, we experience the daily life and preparations of ordinary soldiers as invasion nears, and through explicit battle scenes, explore the bloody horror of the D-Day invasion through the eyes of two brothers whom fate has cast on opposing sides. Volume 1 D-Day The Battle for Normandy: Small Arms Decide the Fate in Normandy Volume 2 D-Day The Soldier's Story