NCW Libraries

How decisions during World War II were made at the highest level, and how these decision affected every facet of the war To understand the end result of World War II is to understand the leaders organizing the action from behind the scenes; from the main figureheads to the silent chiefs of staff, this history shows how the Allies planned World War II, covering everything from the troop deployments and offensives to the locating of post-war boundaries...

Reviews ten decisions made by six major leaders between May 1940 and December 1941 that reshaped human destiny, from Churchill's war cabinet's choice to continue fighting after the German blitzkrieg defeat of France to Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union.

"Neiberg marshals letters, diaries, and memoirs of ordinary citizens across Europe to show that the onset of war was experienced as a sudden, unexpected event. As they watched a minor diplomatic crisis erupt into a continental bloodbath, they expressed shock, revulsion, and fear. But when bargains between belligerent governments began to crumble under the weight of conflict, public disillusionment soon followed. Yet it was only after the fighting...

"When the Nazi Blitzkrieg subjugated Europe in World War II, London became the safe haven for the leaders of seven occupied countries--France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Czechoslovakia and Poland--who fled there to avoid imprisonment and set up governments in exile to commandeer their resistance efforts. The lone hold-out against Hitler's offensive, Britain became a beacon of hope to the rest of Europe, as prominent European leaders like...

John Quincy and Louisa Adams's unexpected journey that changed everything. American Phoenix is the sweeping, riveting tale of a grand historic adventure across forbidding oceans and frozen tundra-from the bustling ports and towering birches of Boston to the remote reaches of pre-Soviet Russia, from an exile in arctic St. Petersburg to resurrection and reunion among the gardens of Paris. Upon these varied landscapes this Adams and his Eve must find...

"In 1973, the Vietnam War ended in a cease-fire and a U.S. withdrawal that included promises by President Nixon to assist the South in the event of invasion by the North. But in early 1975, when North Vietnamese forces began to attack, Congress refused to send arms or aid. By April 5, the South was on the brink of defeat, spelling execution or years in a concentration camp for the untold number of South Vietnamese who had supported the government...

"In late November 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his Joint Chiefs of Staff secretly boarded the battleship USS Iowa to attend a conference in Tehran with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin, where the Allies would come to an agreement on a war plan to defeat Germany. Although Roosevelt's preparation at sea established the groundwork for the American position on D-Day, it was in the heated and...

"From the acclaimed author of The King's Mother and Bosworth 1485 -- a fascinating look at ten days that changed the course of history.... With the world at war, ten days can feel like a lifetime.... On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin. But victory over the Nazi regime was not celebrated in western Europe until May 8, and in Russia a day later, on the ninth. Why did a peace agreement take so much time? How did this...

The terror and purges of Stalin's Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary, never before published in English, grippingly documents Britain's drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations...