One American soldier called it "a green hell on earth." Monsoon-soaked wilderness, debilitating heat, impassable mountains, torrential rivers, and disease-infested swamps-New Guinea was a battleground far more deadly than the most fanatical of enemy troops. Japanese forces numbering some 600,000 men began landing in January 1942, determined to seize the island as a cornerstone of the Empire's strategy to knock Australia out of the war. Allied commander-in-chief...

"John C. McManus, one of our most highly-acclaimed historians of World War II, takes readers from Pearl Harbor--a rude awakening for a ragtag militia woefully unprepared for war--to Makin, a sliver of coral reef where the Army was tested against the increasingly-desperate Japanese. In between were nearly two years of punishing combat as the Army transformed, at times unsteadily, from an undertrained garrison force into an unstoppable juggernaut, and...

An illustrated account chronicles in detail events ranging from Napoleon's escape from Elba through Waterloo's three major battlefield events. From the internationally bestselling author of the Sharpe novels and in the bicentenary year of the battle - this is the true story of Waterloo. On the 18th June, 1815 the armies of France, Britain and Prussia descended upon a quiet valley south of Brussels. In the previous three days the French army had beaten...

A stirring narrative of World War II's final major battle--the Pacific war's largest, bloodiest, most savagely fought campaign--the last of its kind. On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, more than 184,000 US troops began landing on the only Japanese home soil invaded during the Pacific war. Just 350 miles from mainland Japan, Okinawa was to serve as a forward base for Japan's invasion in the fall of 1945. Nearly 140,000 Japanese and auxiliary soldiers...

A definitive study of the climactic and pivotal battle of Antietam offers a vivid account of the two armies, the soldiers and officers, and the bitter, bloody campaign and analyzes the impact of Antietam on the Civil War as a whole.

From the corridors of power to the blood-stained battlefields of the Papua New Guinea highlands, Kokoda tells the story of the brutal World War II military campaign between Australia and Japan that changed the course of Australian history. Fought without mercy by foes with everything to lose, the ferocious battle for the Kokoda Track saw bravery and atrocity, noble and malicious intent on both sides. From day one of the Kokoda campaign, the fighting...

In 1941, Hitler ordered the German Army to invade Russia. The Nazis raced across Russia's heartland until they reached Leningrad - the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution. But the city did not fall quickly to Hitler's troops. Instead it resisted. The siege of Leningrad began on September 8, 1941 and ended on January 27, 1944. For 872 days the city was surrounded. Within, the inhabitants fell into despair, starvation and cannibalism. Well over a million...

Sharpe is back with three more edge-of-your-seat, feature-length episodes set during the Napoleonic wars of 19th century Spain.

"Pavlichenko was World War II's best-scoring sniper and had a varied wartime career that included trips to England and America. In June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, she left her university studies, ignored the offer of a position as a nurse, to become one of Soviet Russia's 2000 female snipers. Less than a year later she had 309 recorded kills, including 29 enemy sniper kills. She was withdrawn from active duty after being injured:...

On August 12, 1944, Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., heir to one of America's most glamorous fortunes, son of the disgraced former ambassador to Great Britain, and big brother to freshly minted PT-109 hero JFK, hoisted himself up into a highly modified B-24 Liberator bomber. The munitions he was carrying that day were fifty percent more powerful than TNT. Kennedy's mission was part of Operation Aphrodite/Project Anvil, a desperate American effort...