Blitzkrieg: From the Ground Up

Using accounts previously unpublished in english, for example how a company commander led his tanks, military historian Niklas Zetterling explores how they operated, how a crew worked together inside a tank, and the role of the repair services. The conduct of german soldiers, particularly the lower-ranking men, on the battlefield was at the core of the concept and German victories rested upon the quality of the small combat units.

The successes of the german Blitzkrieg in 1939–41 were as surprising as they were swift. The author fits these narratives into a broader perspective to give the reader a better understanding of why the Germans were so successful in 1939–41. This book focuses on the experience of the enlisted men and junior officers in the Blitzkrieg operations in Poland, Norway, Western Europe and Russia.

The false conclusions drawn became myths about the Blitzkrieg that have lingered for decades. It has been argued that german victories in the early part of the war rested less upon newly developed tanks and aircraft and more on German military traditions: rather than creating a new way of war based on new technology, the Germans fitted the new weapons into their existing ideas on warfare.

These doctrines focused on independent action, flexibility, initiative, decentralized decision-making and mobility. Allied decision-makers wanted to discover the secret to German success quickly, even though only partial, incomplete information was available to them.


How Carriers Fought: Carrier Operations in WWII

How carriers fought questions these tactics, exploring which worked best in theory and in practice. The book concludes with a discussion of how carrier operations changed during the course of the war, as better technology and a better understanding of this new type of warfare allowed for quick advances in how operations were carried out.

. Dispersion became relevant, as the Japanese decided to divide their forces while the Americans concentrated theirs. A world of tactical dehydration, amphetamine pills, and illegal smoking is explored, as well as the measures pilots implemented to reduce their risk of death in the event of being hit. The major carrier battles of the war are considered, from Coral Sea to Leyte Gulf, with a focus on how the tools of carrier operations were employed.

With a focus on the conflict in the Pacific between the U. S. In november 1921 the first purpose-built aircraft carrier was launched by the Japanese, followed a year later by the launch of the British Hermes. Navy and the imperial japanese fleet, this title examines how aircraft carriers fought during World War II by first considering all the tools and building blocks of carrier operations, and then discussing the various battles that involved aircraft carriers to explore how carrier operations evolved during war.

Every aspect of carrier operations is covered; from the technology used on the carriers and in aircraft including for navigation and communication, to what life was really like in the cockpit for the pilots. At the battle of Midway the debate of concentration vs.


How to Lose a War at Sea: Foolish Plans and Great Naval Blunders How to Lose Series

An engrossing compendium of high-seas military disastersFrom the days of the Spanish Armada to the modern age of aircraft carriers, battles have been bungled just as badly on water as they have been on land. In glorious detail, here are thirty-three of history's worst maritime mishaps, including: the british royal navy's misguided attempts to play it safe during the american revolution the short life and death of the Imperial Japanese Navy The scuttling of the Graf Spee by a far inferior force The sinking of the Nazi megaship Bismarck "Remember the Maine!"—the lies that started the Spanish-American War Admiral Nelson losing track of Napoleon but redeeming himself at the Nile The ANZAC disaster at Gallipoli Germany's failed WWII campaign in the North Atlantic Kennedy's quarantine of CubaChock-full of amazing facts and hilarious trivia, How to Lose a War at Sea is the most complete volume of nautical failures ever assembled.

Some blunders were the result of insufficient planning, overinflated egos, espionage, or miscalculations; others were caused by ideas that didn't hold water in the first place.


First Kills: The Illustrated Biography of Fighter Pilot Władysław Gnyś

This event symbolized the prevailing friendly coexistence between Poland and Germany. Written by his son stefan and drawing from his logbooks, this highly illustrated biography of Władek Gnyś is the most in-depth account of the Polish hero’s life. Władek, evaded the pursuing stukas and went on to make the first Allied kills, who barely survived himself, while Neubert was credited with the first aerial kill of the war.

It tells władek's story from his childhood in rural Poland, through his time flying in three Allied air forces during World War II, to his reconciliation with Neubert and his commemoration as a national war hero in Poland. During the latter part of operation Overlord of June 1944, Władek was shot down over France and crash landed.

They reconciled their differences and remained friends until their deaths. Wounded, he was taken prisoner but then escaped, his life spared by the enemy on more than one occasion. Fifty years after the invasion of poland, Gnyś and Neubert met and shook hands, in the summer of 1989, making news around the world.

On this day, as gnyś' squadron took off near Kraków to intercept the German invaders, German Stuka pilot Frank Neubert attacked, killing the captain. Polish pilot władysław władek gnyś was credited with shooting down the first two German aircraft of World War II on September 1, 1939. An experienced fighter pilot, gnyś fought in the battle of Poland with the Polish Air Force, the Battle of France with the French Air Force and the Battle of Britain and beyond with the Royal Air Force.




To War with the 4th

Through firsthand interviews with veterans, and the expert analysis of the authors, across the decades, the role of one of America’s mainstay divisions in its modern conflicts is in these pages illuminated. They operated in the birthplace of the taliban along the Arghandab River Valley, west of Kandahar City, a place often ominously referred to as "The Heart of Darkness.

The 2nd battalion 12th Infantry Regiment saw heavy combat throughout. The 4th infantry division has always been there in America’s modern wars. They experienced a series of major engagements that would entail 33 consecutive days of vicious, close-quarters combat in the battle of Dak To in 1967. They would go over the top on uneven ground to be blown to pieces by German artillery and fall in their hundreds to the spitting of German machine guns, yet nevertheless win the day.

In world war ii on d-day they scrambled ashore across the sands of Utah beach and remained fighting in Europe until Hitler was dead and Germany had surrendered. In vietnam they would execute precarious “search and destroy” missions in dense jungles against a determined and resourceful enemy. From the normandy campaign to the hell of the hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge, no other American division suffered more casualties in the European theater than the 4th, and no other division accomplished as much.

For their actions in Indochina they would receive no less than 11 Medals of Honor. They fought in iraq to topple saddam hussein, and in may 2009, at the height of Operation Enduring Freedom, the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team deployed to Afghanistan for a 12-month combat mission.


The Kaiser's Pirates: Hunting Germany?s Raiding Cruisers in World War I

After war broke out on August 4 there was no hope that they could reach home. Under the leadership of a few brilliant, audacious men, they unleashed a series of raids that threatened Britain’s war effort and challenged the power and prestige of the Royal Navy. By1914 germany had ships and sailors scattered across the globe, protecting its overseas colonies and “showing the flag” of its new Imperial Navy.

Instead, they were ordered to attack Britain’s vital trade routes for as long as possible. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

. The next year saw a battle of wits which stretched across the globe, drawing in ships and men from six empires. By the end, the “kaiser’s Pirates” were no more, and Britain once again ruled the waves. Including vivid descriptions of the battles of coronel and the falklands and the actions of the Emden, the Indian Ocean, the Karsrühe and the Königsberg, The Kaiser’s Pirates tells a fascinating narrative that ranges across the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Goeben and the Breslau, and the Caribbean.

Skyhorse publishing, conspiracies, ancient rome, gladiators, the jfk assassination, medieval times, the Third Reich, the old West, Hitler and his henchmen, the American Revolution, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the American Civil War, Vikings, and much more.

The kaiser’s pirates is a dramatic and little-known story of World War I, when the actions of a few men shaped the fate of nations.


The Kaiser’s Battlefleet: German Capital Ships 1871–1918

As well as providing data not available in English-language books, these sources correct significant errors in the ‘standard’ English sources. This entirely fresh study will appeal to historians of WWI German naval developments as well as to enthusiasts and model makers. This new book fills an important gap in the literature of the period by covering these German capital ships in detail and studying the full span of battleship development during this period.

The book is arranged as a chronological narrative, construction schedules and ultimate fates tabulated throughout, with technical details, thus avoiding the sometimes disjointed structure that can result from a class-by-class approach. Heavily illustrated with line work and photographs, many from German sources, the book offers readers a fresh visual look at these ships, beyond the limited range of images available from UK sources.

A key objective of the book is to make available a full synthesis of the published fruits of archival research by German writers found in the pre-WW2 books of Koop & Schmolke, Großmer’s on the construction programme of the dreadnaught era, Forstmeier & Breyer on WW1 projects, and Schenk & Nottelmann’s papers in Warship International.

. The battleships of the third reich have been written about exhaustively, but there is little in English devoted to their predecessors of the Second Reich.


Special Forces Berlin: Clandestine Cold War Operations of the US Army's Elite, 1956–1990

In reality it was an ambitious and extremely dangerous mission, even suicidal. Army special forces detachments were stationed far behind the Iron Curtain in West Berlin. They were skilled in clandestine operations, sabotage, intelligence tradecraft and able to act if necessary as independent operators, blending into the local population and working unseen in a city awash with spies looking for information on their every move.

Special forces berlin was a one of a kind unit that had no parallel. The existence and missions of the two detachments were highly classified secrets. The massive armies of the soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies posed a huge threat to the nations of Western Europe. Us military planners decided they needed a plan to slow the juggernaut they expected when and if a war began.

Highly trained and fluent in German, each man was allocated a specific area. It left a legacy of a new type of soldier expert in unconventional warfare, one that was sought after for other deployments including the attempted rescue of American hostages from Tehran in 1979. It is a little-known fact that during the Cold War, two U.

S. The first 40 men who came to berlin in mid-1956 were soon reinforced by 60 more and these 100 soldiers and their successors would stand ready to go to war at only two hours’ notice, in a hostile area occupied by nearly one million Warsaw Pact forces, until 1990


The Blitzkrieg Myth: How Hitler and the Allies Misread the Strategic Realities of World War II

Fuller for armoured warfare, and the Italian Emilio Drouhet for airpower. Mosier shows how the polish campaign in fall 1939 and the fall of France in spring 1940 were not the blitzkrieg victories as proclaimed. The military myths of world war ii were based on the assumption that the new technology of the airplane and the tank would cause rapid and massive breakthroughs on the battlefield, or demoralization of the enemy by intensive bombing resulting in destruction, or surrender in a matter of weeks.

The two apostles for these new theories were the Englishman J. C. F. All of these actions saw the clash of the breakthrough theories with the realities of conventional military tactics, and the military leaders on both sides, and Mosier's novel analysis of these campaigns, the failure of airpower, is a challenging reassessment of the military history of World War II.

Hitler, rommel, von manstein, Montgomery and Patton were all seduced by the breakthrough myth or blitzkrieg as the decisive way to victory. A bold reinterpretation of some of the most decisive battles of World War II, showing that the outcomes had less to do with popular new technology than old–fashioned, on–the–ground warfare.

The book includes maps and photos. He also reinterprets rommel's north african campaigns, d–day and the normandy campaign, Patton's attempted breakthrough into the Saar and Germany, Montgomery's flawed breakthrough at Arnhem, and Hitler's last desperate breakthrough effort to Antwerp in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944.

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The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic

Has inspired reverence and awe. No general since has matched Hannibal’s most unexpected, innovative, and brutal military victory. Now robert L. Piecing together decayed shreds of ancient reportage, from Hannibal—resolutely sane and uncannily strategic—to Scipio Africanus, the author paints powerful portraits of the leading players, the self-promoting Roman military tribune.

Finally, o’connell reveals how cannae’s legend has inspired and haunted military leaders ever since, and the lessons it teaches for our own wars. National bestsellerfor millennia, carthage’s triumph over Rome at Cannae in 216 B. C. O’connell, one of the most admired names in military history, tells the whole story of Cannae for the first time, giving us a stirring account of this apocalyptic battle, its causes and consequences.

O’connell brilliantly conveys how rome amassed a giant army to punish Carthage’s masterful commander, how Hannibal outwitted enemies that outnumbered him, and how this disastrous pivot point in Rome’s history ultimately led to the republic’s resurgence and the creation of its empire.


Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command

He wrote over thirty books about warfare. L. Marshall asked this simple question in the aftermath of the Second World War and found some remarkable results. Through countless interviews studies he found that fewer than a quarter of American soldiers actually fired weapons in any given action. Men against fire: the problem of Battle Command is a systematic analysis of this problem and how the U.

S. Complex systems fall by the wayside. Military could overcome this through training, discipline, and above all, communication. This book was incredibly well received by generals, military historians and analysts:“Finally, it is the volume of fire that counts. Parade ground formations disappear. This is one of the great volumes on fighting published since World War II and should be required reading for every staff officer as well as every combat officer of the arms which fight on the ground.

Things have to be that simple. A penetrating analysis of behavior and leadership of men in active combat. Foreign affairs“a criticism of the present methods of infantry training is the author's challenge to the inadequacies of orientation courses, of present preparation for conditions on the field of combat, both physical and psychological.

Kirkus ReviewsS. The good men which we had at the beginning are gone.