Combining the pulsating drive of Showtime's Homeland with the fascinating historical detail of such of narrative nonfiction bestsellers as Double Cross and In the Garden of Beasts, Dark Invasion is Howard Blum's gritty, high-energy true-life tale of German espionage and terror on American soil during World War I, and the NYPD Inspector who helped uncover the plot--the basis for the film to be produced by and starring Bradley Cooper.
When a "neutral" United States becomes a trading partner for the Allies early in World War I, the Germans implement a secret plan to strike back. A team of saboteurs--including an expert on germ warfare, a Harvard professor, and a brilliant, debonair spymaster--devise a series of "mysterious accidents" using explosives and biological weapons, to bring down vital targets such as ships, factories, livestock, and even captains of industry like J. P. Morgan.
New York Police Inspector Tom Tunney, head of the department's Bomb Squad, is assigned the difficult mission of stopping them. Assembling a team of loyal operatives, the cunning Irish cop hunts for the conspirators among a population of more than eight million Germans. But the deeper he finds himself in this labyrinth of deception, the more Tunney realizes that the enemy's plan is far more complex and more dangerous than he suspected.
Full of drama and intensity, illustrated with eight pages of black and-white photos, Dark Invasion is riveting war thriller that chillingly echoes our own time.
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, it surprised a European population enjoying the most beautiful summer in memory. For nearly a century since, historians have debated the causes of the war. Some have cited the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; others have concluded it was unavoidable.
In Europe's Last Summer, David Fromkin provides a different answer: hostilities were commenced deliberately. In a riveting re-creation of the run-up to war, Fromkin shows how German generals, seeing war as inevitable, manipulated events to precipitate a conflict waged on their own terms. Moving deftly between diplomats, generals, and rulers across Europe, he makes the complex diplomatic negotiations accessible and immediate. Examining the actions of individuals amid larger historical forces, this is a gripping historical narrative and a dramatic reassessment of a key moment in the twentieth-century.
An intimate narrative history of World War I told through the stories of twenty men and women from around the globe--a powerful, illuminating, heart-rending picture of what the war was really like.
In this masterful book, renowned historian Peter Englund describes this epoch-defining event by weaving together accounts of the average man or woman who experienced it. Drawing on the diaries, journals, and letters of twenty individuals from Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Venezuela, and the United States, Englund's collection of these varied perspectives describes not a course of events but a world of feeling. Composed in short chapters that move between the home front and the front lines, The Beauty and Sorrow brings to life these twenty particular people and lets them speak for all who were shaped in some way by the War, but whose voices have remained unheard.
At seven o'clock in the morning on February 21, 1916, the ground in northern France began to shake. For the next ten hours, twelve hundred German guns showered shells on a salient in French lines. The massive weight of explosives collapsed dugouts, obliterated trenches, severed communication wires, and drove men mad. As the barrage lifted, German troops moved forward, darting from shell crater to shell crater. The battle of Verdun had begun. In Verdun, historian Paul Jankowski provides the definitive account of the iconic battle of World War I. A leading expert on the French past, Jankowski combines the best of traditional military history- its emphasis on leaders, plans, technology, and the contingency of combat-with the newer social and cultural approach, stressing the soldier's experience, the institutional structures of the military, and the impact of war on national memory. Unusually, this book draws on deep research in French and German archives; this mastery of sources in both languages gives Verdun unprecedented authority and scope. In many ways, Jankowski writes, the battle represents a conundrum. It has an almost unique status among the battles of the Great War; and yet, he argues, it was not decisive, sparked no political changes, and was not even the bloodiest episode of the conflict. It is said that Verdun made France, he writes; but the question should be, What did France make of Verdun? Over time, it proved to be the last great victory of French arms, standing on their own. And, for France and Germany, the battle would symbolize the terror of industrialized warfare, "a technocratic Moloch devouring its children," where no advance or retreat was possible, yet national resources poured in ceaselessly, perpetuating slaughter indefinitely.
In the turmoil of World War I, T.E. Lawrence and a Jewish agronomist from Palestine imagined new nations -Arab and Israeli - rising from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. Their arguments presaged the political battles of the Middle East today.
The 1st of July 1916, the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, was the blackest day in the history of the British Army. 60,000 men became casualties on that one day alone.
In a major new documentary film premiering on the Discovery Channel next year, Emmy Award winning film maker Bob Carrruthers returns to the battlefield on 1st July and retraces the events which unfolded on that disastrous day. Drawing extensively on rare film and photographs from both British and German sources, the spirit of the men who fought and died on that day is beautifully evoked by these powerful and haunting images from 1916. The film also reveals how the sacrifice of the men of the Somme is being honored today by the work of the historians and enthusiasts who strive to increase our understanding of the battle and to commemorate the memory of that terrible day. This is the companion book to the documentary film and is written by well-known author and film maker Bob Carruthers.
World War I was one of the greatest upheavals in history, involving upwards of 70 million combatants--9 million of whom lost their lives--and setting off shock waves that were felt worldwide long after the Armistice of 1918. In The Experience of World War I, J.M. Winter marshalls a comprehensive range of historical materials, hundreds of vivid illustrations, and numerous eye-witness accounts to provide an illuminating and gripping chronicle of this cataclysmic event and its aftermath.
How did the assassination of one man, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, trigger such vast devastation? What was combat like for the common soldier? Why did the generals persist in large-scale offensives after catastrophic losses early in the war? What was the impact of the war on European politics, the world economy, and the arts? To answer these and myriad other questions, Winter examines the war year by year, describing the conflict as it was experienced by politicians, generals, soldiers and civilians. Illustrated with hundreds of color and black-and-white photographs, the book uncovers many intriguing aspects of the war: it reveals that soldiers in fact spent only two weeks per month in the front trenches, describes how the father of tycoon Rupert Murdoch broke the story of the disaster at Gallipoli, and outlines the unprecedented logistics problems the military faced (it took 20 boxcars of food per day to feed 17,000 men--and there were 5 million men in the British army alone). There is also a wealth of fascinating sidebar material covering a wide variety of secondary topics, from women's war poetry to the sinking of the LusitaniaT. The book is further enhanced by numerous first-hand accounts of life during the war, drawn from diaries, memoirs and other writings of both men and women, from all countries and social groups, and it also includes a full chronology, many full-color maps, and tables of essential data.
Combining political, military, and social history, this evocative account captures the Great War in all its complexity, from the bloody battles of Verdun, the Somme, and Passchendaele, to the flood of post-war literary and artistic works, including All Quiet on the Western Front and Jean Renoir's film La Grande Illusion.
This important work describes how the Imperial German Navy, which had expanded to become one of the great maritime forces in the world, proved, with the exception of its submarines, to be largely ineffective throughout World War I. The inactivity of the great Imperial Navy caused deep frustration, particularly among the naval officers. Not only were they unable to see themselves as heroes, they were also ridiculed on the home front and felt profoundly humiliated. With the exception of the one sea battle at Jutland, their ships saw little or no action at sea. Morale collapsed to a point where, at the end of the war, the crews were in a state of mutiny. The order that forced the fleet to go to sea against the British in 1918 was driven by a sense of humiliation, but because the German sailors wanted no part in such madness it triggered a revolution.
Explores the contribution of the United States to WWI, focusing on the mobilization of five million troops and the effect this had on American society
