Blood On German Snow

Emiel Owens served his country in the 777th Field Artillery, involved in actions from Omaha Beach to the occupation army in the Philippines. Like the rest of the U.S. Army at the time, the 777th was a segregated unit. Remarkably few memoirs by African Americans have been published from the World War II era, making Owens's account especially valuable. Because he situates his military experience in the larger context of his life and the society in which he lived, his story also reveals much about the changing racial climate of the last several decades. A native Texan, Owens recounts his early experiences in a small, rural school outside Austin during the hard times of the Depression. In 1943, he was drafted into the army, landing in England in August 1944. Ten days later he was on Omaha Beach. By November 3 Owens and his unit were supporting the 30th Infantry Division as it attacked German towns and cities leading into the Ruhr Pocket and the Huertgen Forest. Owens starkly portrays the horror of the Kohlscheid Penetration. He was awarded a certificate of merit for his actions in that theater. With help from the G.I. bill, Owens returned to college and then to graduate school at Ohio State University, since universities in his home state were still closed to African Americans. He earned a Ph.D. in economics, which led to a productive academic and consulting career. This is a uniquely captivating story of an African American man's journey from a segregated Texas town to the battlefields of Europe and on to postwar success in a world changed forever by the war Americans--black and white--had fought.

Günter Koschorrek wrote his illicit diary on any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on, storing them with his mother on infrequent trips home on leave. The diary went missing, and it was not until he was reunited with his daughter in America some forty years later that it came to light and became Blood Red Snow. The author’s excitement at the first encounter with the enemy in the Russian Steppe is obvious. Later, the horror and confusion of fighting in the streets of Stalingrad are brought to life by his descriptions of the others in his unit – their differing manners and techniques for dealing with the squalor and death. He is also posted to Romania and Italy, assignments he remembers fondly compared to his time on the Eastern Front. This book stands as a memorial to the huge numbers on both sides who did not survive and is, some six decades later, the fulfilment of a responsibility the author feels to honour the memory of those who perished.

Emiel Owens served his country in the 777th Field Artillery, involved in actions from Omaha Beach to the occupation army in the Philippines. Like the rest of the U.S. Army at the time, the 777th was a segregated unit. Remarkably few memoirs by African Americans have been published from the World War II era, making Owens’s account especially valuable. Because he situates his military experience in the larger context of his life and the society in which he lived, his story also reveals much about the changing racial climate of the last several decades. A native Texan, Owens recounts his early experiences in a small, rural school outside Austin during the hard times of the Depression. In 1943, he was drafted into the army, landing in England in August 1944. Ten days later he was on Omaha Beach. By November 3 Owens and his unit were supporting the 30th Infantry Division as it attacked German towns and cities leading into the Ruhr Pocket and the Huertgen Forest. Owens starkly portrays the horror of the Kohlscheid Penetration. He was awarded a certificate of merit for his actions in that theater. With help from the G.I. bill, Owens returned to college and then to graduate school at Ohio State University, since universities in his home state were still closed to African Americans. He earned a Ph.D. in economics, which led to a productive academic and consulting career. This is a uniquely captivating story of an African American man’s journey from a segregated Texas town to the battlefields of Europe and on to postwar success in a world changed forever by the war Americans—black and white—had fought.

The Carpathian campaign of 1915, described by some as the "Stalingrad of the First World War," engaged the million-man armies of Austria-Hungary and Russia in fierce winter combat that drove them to the brink of annihilation. Habsburg forces fought to rescue 130,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers trapped by Russian troops in Fortress Przemysl, but the campaign was waged under such adverse circumstances that it produced six times as many casualties as the number besieged. It remains one of the least understood and most devastating chapters of the war-a horrific episode only glimpsed previously but now vividly restored to the annals of history by Graydon Tunstall. The campaign, consisting of three separate and ultimately doomed offensives, was the first example of "total war" conducted in a mountainous terrain, and it prepared the way for the great battle of Gorlice-Tarnow. Habsburg troops under Conrad von Htzendorf faced those of General Nikolai Ivanov, which together totaled more than two million soldiers. None of the participants were psychologically or materially prepared to engage in prolonged winter mountain warfare, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered from frostbite or succumbed to the "White Death." Tunstall reconstructs the brutal environment-heavy snow, ice, dense fog, frigid winds-to depict fighting in which a man lasted on average between five to six weeks before he was killed, wounded, captured, or committed suicide. Meanwhile, soldiers warmed rifles over fires to make them operable and slaughtered thousands of horses just to ward off starvation. This riveting depiction of the Carpathian Winter War is the first book-length account of that vicious campaign, as well as the first English-language account of Eastern Front military operations in World War I in more than thirty years. Based on exhaustive research in Vienna's and Budapest's War Archives, Tunstall's gripping narrative incorporates material drawn from eyewitness accounts, personal diaries, army logbooks, and correspondence among members of the high command. As Tunstall shows, the roots of the Habsburg collapse in Russia in 1916 lay squarely in the winter campaign of 1915. Packed with insights from previously unexploited primary sources, his book provides an engrossing read-and the definitive account of the Carpathian Winter War.

D-Day, 6 June 1944; a day that has gone down in history as one of the most crucial steps towards Allied victory of the Second World War. But what is known of the thousands of young Frenchmen and women who were formed into small, untrained armies and used as bait by the Allied powers to distract the German forces from the invasion beaches? These civilians were scattered through the French forests and hill country, and they believed that Allied forces would arrive to help them drive the hated Nazi occupiers out of France; but this support never arrived. Instead they were abandoned, to be hunted down by collaborationist French paramilitaries, Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS troops. Those that were lucky died quickly; the unlucky ones survived – they were brutally raped and tortured before being shot, or were deported to death camps in Germany. With rare, striking and often harrowing photographs of the people, places and events of this period, Boyd reveals the startling truth of the prologue to the D-Day landings, highlighting atrocities that should never be forgotten.

Emiel Owens served his country in the 777th Field Artillery, involved in actions from Omaha Beach to the occupation army in the Philippines. Like the rest of the U.S. Army at the time, the 777th was a segregated unit. Remarkably few memoirs by African Americans have been published from the World War II era, making Owens’s account especially valuable. Because he situates his military experience in the larger context of his life and the society in which he lived, his story also reveals much about the changing racial climate of the last several decades. A native Texan, Owens recounts his early experiences in a small, rural school outside Austin during the hard times of the Depression. In 1943, he was drafted into the army, landing in England in August 1944. Ten days later he was on Omaha Beach. By November 3 Owens and his unit were supporting the 30th Infantry Division as it attacked German towns and cities leading into the Ruhr Pocket and the Huertgen Forest. Owens starkly portrays the horror of the Kohlscheid Penetration. He was awarded a certificate of merit for his actions in that theater. With help from the G.I. bill, Owens returned to college and then to graduate school at Ohio State University, since universities in his home state were still closed to African Americans. He earned a Ph.D. in economics, which led to a productive academic and consulting career. This is a uniquely captivating story of an African American man’s journey from a segregated Texas town to the battlefields of Europe and on to postwar success in a world changed forever by the war Americans—black and white—had fought.

During World War II, the Waffen-SS officer who set Vietnam on fire in Devil's Guard - The Real Story, began his startling military career in the Russian slaughterhouse of the Eastern Front. It is February 1943 in the snowy wastes around Kharkov. Stalingrad has fallen and a resurgent Soviet army is pushing the German forces back. The newly commissioned officer takes up his posting with Deutschland Regiment, SS Division Das Reich, part of von Manstein's Army Group South. Attacked by Russian Sturmovik fighters on his journey, he joins his platoon to be sent behind Russian lines to capture prisoners before a major counter-offensive. He soon displays his formidable military talents in a series of brutal, hard fought battles, but his enemies do not all wear Russian uniform. Away from the front, he finds that the SD and Gestapo are as deadly at the front as they are inside the Third Reich. Forced to tread a tightrope between the Soviets and the Gestapo, his initiation into the Waffen-SS is anything but straightforward. An epic and thrilling account of the war in Russia based on actual events.

From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.

A chilling story of the Allies' narrow escape from defeat at the hands of Nazi submarines in the North Atlantic.

Red Blood/White Snow moves the reader through a troubled marriage, religious differences, vulnerable children, and Stalin's failed treaty with Hitler. Ivan (Vanya) Markarov's ordinary family life is catapulted into catastrophic events beyond his wildest imagination. Orders arrive from the Leningrad Soviet: The engineer Vanya will relocate to the Kirov Works in Leningrad. Delighted with his good fortune--and happy to leave Anya's Jewish parents-- Ivan Alexandrovich moves the family from Sevastopol to the city of Peter the Great. Within months, the first German bombs plunge the Markarovs into a fight for the survival of their marriage, their children, and their country.