Indiana University Press blog

IU Press authors and editors put Holocaust Remembrance Day in a new light

January 27th marks a worldwide observation of Holocaust Remembrance Day, and IU Press authors and editors are uncovering more about one of the world's great tragedies every day.

Geoffrey Megargee, the editor and project leader for the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, has helped uncover new information about the extent to which Jews and other minorities were persecuted over the course of World War II.

In 2009, Megargee's researchers at the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial published the first volume of the Encyclopedia, following that up with a second volume in 2012.

In 2013 the team spoke with the New York Times about the scope of the Nazi persecution effort. The project had revealed more than 42,000 camps and ghettos, more than eight times what was originally believed to be the total. The Times wrote:

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

The research work continues, and the third volume of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos is due out this year.

Meanwhile, historian Jeremy Black is also expanding the world's understanding of the Holocaust. His new book The Holocaust: History and Memory, explores the larger impact of the Holocaust in world culture, cautioning in an interview with Exeter University that the event's impact must not be diminished through baseless comparisons:

He says the “diminishment” of the word holocaust is unlike holocaust denial but is “in certain respects more insidious” because it “downplays the holocaust by comparison.”
The Exeter University Professor who has studied the holocaust for several decades and published two books on the subject, says it is wrong to compare the organised killing of 6 million Jews during the Nazi period with the Anglo-American bombings of Germany.

Attempts by far-right and mainstream German commentators to characterise the German experience in 1943-45 of heavy Anglo-American bombing and being driven from Eastern Europe as a holocaust where millions of people were killed in concentration camps is “absurd, not least because no genocide was attempted.” Such a comparison “strikes many non-Germans as ahistorical, ludicrous and offensive.

Black's book was released in August 2016 and is available from IU Press today. 

Bicentennial book giveaway: Enter to win a new WWII book by a Hoosier resident

This month's bicentennial giveaway is for a photo book that isn't about Indiana, but has a strong connection to the state through its author, Malcolm Fleming. A native of Oregon, Fleming came to Indiana University in 1949 to get a master's degree and then a doctorate in education.

“I hung around for another 20 years or so and taught. Something about Bloomington keeps people here," said the 97-year-old Indiana resident, who has now lived in the state for nearly seven decades.

Fleming's photography first came to our attention through Bradley Cook, curator of photographs at the IU Archives. A few years ago, Cook was driving to his home in Bloomington when he saw a handmade sign advertising photographs for sale at a nearby assisted living center. Cook followed the sign to Fleming's apartment and discovered a treasure trove of photographs. Initially Cook was interested in Fleming's photography from his time at IU as a fellow in the Audio-Visual Center, but then Fleming pulled out a shoebox of photos he had shot during World War II when he was as an Official Army Photographer.

"These photographs were indeed a surprise and without a doubt the hidden gem of his collection," said Cook.

Shortly after their initial meeting, Fleming decided to donate his entire photo collection, including the World War II photos, to the IU Archives. We worked closely with Fleming and the IU Archives to produce a new book based upon Fleming's World War II photos, From War to Peace in 1945 Germany: A GI's Experience.

Now you have a chance to win a copy of this special World War II book with a Hoosier connection! Fill out the form below by June 27, 2016, to enter our book giveaway. And be sure to check out all of Fleming's World War II photography on the IU Archives website.

Reading selections for Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. To commemorate this occasion, we offer the following reading selections from our books and journals to help further your understanding of antisemitism and the Holocaust:

Available this September
Girl
My Childhood and the Second World War
Alona Frankel

"An extraordinary voice and view of a hidden-child in Poland during the Holocaust and of her daring return to life afterward." —Berel Lang, author of Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life

When Germany invaded Poland, Alona Frankel was just two years old. Isolated from her parents and living among pigs, horses, mice, and lice, Alona taught herself to read and drew on scraps of paper. Girl is the story of a young girl’s self-preservation through a horrible war and its aftermath. Frankel, now a world renowned children’s author and illustrator, reveals a little girl full of life in a terrible, evil world.

Read excerpt

Watch the author discuss her book in this video clip from the documentary Culture Hero

Now in paperback
The Case for Auschwitz
Evidence from the Irving Trial
Robert Jan van Pelt

"The bulk of the book is the methodical and chilling presentation of materials presented at the trial . . . interwoven with Irving's testimony and defense. Van Pelt has arranged an enormous amount of complex material succinctly and to great effect. Read as a whole, the book is a stunning courtroom drama and a vital document of historical evidence. This is an important addition to Holocaust literature and 20th-century history." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Read excerpt

Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews
A Photographic Album, Paris, 1940-1944
Sarah Gensburger
Translated by Jonathan Hensher with the collaboration of Elisabeth Fourmont

From 1942 onwards, ordinary Parisian Jews—mostly poor families and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe—were robbed, not of sculptures or paintings, but of toys, saucepans, furniture, and sheets. Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews tells how this vast enterprise of plunder was implemented in the streets of Paris by analyzing images from an album of photographs found in the Federal Archives of Koblenz.

See photos

Reframing Holocaust Testimony
Noah Shenker

Noah Shenker calls attention to the ways that audiovisual testimonies of the Holocaust have been mediated by the institutional histories and practices of their respective archives. He analyzes the ways in which interview questions, the framing of the camera, and curatorial and programming preferences impact how Holocaust testimony is molded, distributed, and received.

Read excerpt

Deciphering the New Antisemitism
Edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld

"This volume, rich in information . . . is recommended as a valuable compilation of research and analysis that will help concerned readers track the evolution of anti-Semitism and determine which trends are most worrisome." —Publishers Weekly

Read excerpt

European Muslim Antisemitism
Why Young Urban Males Say They Don't Like Jews
Günther Jikeli

Antisemitism from Muslims has become a serious issue in Western Europe, although not often acknowledged as such. This study addresses those issues and is rich in qualitative data that will mark a significant step along the path toward a better understanding of contemporary antisemitism in Europe.

Read excerpt

Separate Suffering, Shared Archives: Jewish and Romani Histories of Nazi Persecution
Ari Joskowicz
History and Memory
Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016), pp. 110-140

Bridging Holocaust history and memory studies, this article explores the multiple and asymmetrical entanglements of Jewish and Romani (or “Gypsy”) accounts of Nazi genocide. These entanglements exist in large part due to the fact that testimonies of the Romani Holocaust are commonly filtered through the lens of Jewish survivors or stored in archives dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust. Modern Jewish-Romani relations thus represent a rare—and arguably unique—case in which one minority controls such a significant portion of the public memories of another.

Read the article (free access until May 18, 2016)

Healing by Haunting: Jewish Ghosts in Contemporary Polish Literature
Magdalena Waligórska
Prooftexts
Vol. 34, No. 2 (Spring 2014), pp. 207-231

This article looks at how the fantasy of the Jewish return can be seen as a response to current historical debates about the Polish implication in anti-Jewish violence and the dispossession of Jews during and after the Holocaust. The new, experimental language of loss developed in this contemporary Polish writing, labeled here as traumatic surrealism, is considered both in its aesthetic and moral context as a vehicle to express the transgenerational impact that the Holocaust has had on Poles and a therapeutic medium which, by providing a fantasy of avenging or repairing the past harm, allows an imaginary rapprochement of the victims and those who inhabit the spaces of their death.

Read the article (free access until May 18, 2016)

Margaret Bourke-White: Trailblazer for Female Photojournalists

Happy Women's History Month! Today on our blog, we feature a guest post from author Alex Lichtenstein, who discusses Margaret Bourke-White and how she broke barriers for female photojournalists.

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By Alex Lichtenstein

My favorite moment while researching the book Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid came when I stumbled across correspondence between Bourke-White and her then husband, writer Erskine Caldwell. Margaret and “Skinny” Caldwell fell in love in 1936 while driving the back roads of Georgia and Alabama for their collective portrait of the rural poor, You Have Seen Their Faces. Four years later, Margaret was in Europe, photographing the war for Life Magazine. Caldwell sent her plaintive letters, begging her to return home and settle down with him. She refused, reminding him that covering the war, not playing house, was her priority. When she returned, they soon divorced.

Although the book Rick Halpern and I have produced about Bourke-White focuses on her experiences documenting South African apartheid in 1950, her story is shot through with many such fierce assertions of female independence in an era in which such behavior was not expected, even of highly accomplished women like Bourke-White. To be sure, she was part of a generation of important female photojournalists and documentarians, including Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Berenice Abbot, Lee Miller, and Gerda Taro. Yet her willingness to take risks, to refuse to bend to what was seen as a “woman’s place,” and to thus find herself at the right place at the right time, continue to stand out. No doubt it was such persistence and daring that convinced Henry Luce to hire her as one of the first four staff photographers (and the only woman among them) for Life.

Although she made a living during the early years of the Great Depression working for advertising agencies, Bourke-White’s first passion was industrial photography. Her ability to capture the majesty and beauty of industrial production was not merely an aesthetic triumph. Early on in her career she had to exercise boldness, persuasion, and diplomacy all at once to gain entry to work sites that rarely allowed access to women—steel mills, coal mines, and metal-casting plants, for example. This experience stood her in good stead when she spent time in South Africa in 1950. Remarkably, she persuaded the owners of the Robinson deep gold mine to allow her to descend two miles underground into the mine, as well as to photograph inside the all-male barracks to which African workers were confined when they were not at work. She also prevailed on a prison warden to allow her to photograph inside a convict camp—just as she had when she had travelled with Caldwell in the US South.

South African gold miners

Another area in which Bourke-White pioneered was aerial photography. Her first commissions were from commercial airlines like TWA, but when war came, Bourke-White was able to parlay this unusual skill into a truly unique assignment for a female photographer. She served as what today we would call an “embedded” photojournalist with the US Air Force, thus breaking a major barrier as the first female accredited combat photographer in the United States. Despite having her boat torpedoed on a journey to North Africa, she accompanied Allied flyers on numerous bombing raids, which she photographed from the air.

Caldwell should not have been surprised by her independent streak. Such adventures seem typical of this intrepid woman’s career. Over the course of little more than a decade, her many journeys took her from Soviet Russia during the first five-year plan, to Czechoslovakia on the eve of annexation by Hitler, to Moscow during the initial Nazi bombardment in 1941, to combat on the Italian peninsula during the 1943 campaign, and finally, to the liberated concentration camps of the Third Reich in May 1945. Nor did such engagement with the most dramatic moments in world history end with the war. In 1947 and 1948 she was in India, where she witnessed the brutal violence of partition, and met with M.K. Gandhi only hours before his assassination.

In her 1963 autobiography, Bourke-White described her “insatiable desire to be on the scene while history is being made.” This drive, Rick and I argue, made Bourke-White an expert witness to the unfolding tragedy of postwar South Africa. But it also made her capable of breaking many barriers that had kept female photojournalists on the sidelines for too long.

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Alex Lichtenstein is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is author of Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South. His new book with Rick Halpern, Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid, will be released next month.

6 IUP books named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2015

Every year, Choice magazine selects the most prestigious scholarly books for its Outstanding Academic Titles award. We are pleased to announce that six IU Press titles were chosen out of 7,000 that were reviewed in 2015 by the magazine's editors! IUP winners include:

Geographies of the Holocaust edited by Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano with Erik B. Steiner, explores the geographies of the Holocaust from various human experiences. Through six cases studies, geographers and historians come together to research the places and spaces of the genocide.

Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema by Ruth Ben-Ghiat looks at the study of documentary and feature films produced under Mussolini’s fascist regime. Films by experienced and novice filmmakers alike, these pictures reinforced Fascist racial and labor policies, corruption and war. Ben-Ghiat restores these films and their history and opens our eyes to the cinema of dictatorship.

Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic edited by Akinwumi Ogundiran and Paula Saunders, is a compilation of essays focusing on  everyday rituals of African-descended communities in the Atlantic world. The book gives insight into the material of rituals and ritualistic acts associated with birth, death, healing and protection and how these rituals have been transformed by African communities through cultural formation, commerce, enslavement and colonialism.

New Voices in Arab Cinema by Roy Armes gives a historical overview and critical analysis of Arab filmmaking since the 1980s, and gives special consideration to films from the Middle East and North Africa since the Arab Spring and the Syrian crisis. While also looking at the longer history of Arab cinema, Armes touches on themes of production, the role of the state and private film industry, key filmmakers, and how current notions like globalization, immigration and exile play into film as well. 

 Nollywood Stars by Noah A. Tsika explores how the industry’s top on-screen talents have catapulted Nollywood beyond West Africa and into the diaspora to become one of the most diverse media producers in the world. As on-screen talents and working agents, this book follows Nollywood stars from Lagos to London, from New York to Los Angeles all while they hope to integrate Nollywood into various entertainment cultures while maintaining their African roots.

The Subject of Holocaust Fiction by Emily Miller Budick examines the subjective experiences of fantasy, projections and repression cultivated in Holocaust fiction and the reader’s encounter with it. Budick claims that fictional representations of horrific events run the risk of undercutting efforts to verify historical knowledge and may heighten our ability to respond ethically to human experiences of devastation. Investigating works by Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, Aharon Appelfeld, Michael Chabon, and others, Budick discusses how the reader makes sense of these fictional representations of memory, trauma, victims and victimizers.

6 reading selections for International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. To commemorate this occasion, we offer the following reading selections from our books and journals to help further your understanding of antisemitism and the Holocaust:

Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews
A Photographic Album, Paris, 1940-1944
Sarah Gensburger
Translated by Jonathan Hensher with the collaboration of Elisabeth Fourmont

From 1942 onwards, ordinary Parisian Jews—mostly poor families and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe—were robbed, not of sculptures or paintings, but of toys, saucepans, furniture, and sheets. Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews tells how this vast enterprise of plunder was implemented in the streets of Paris by analyzing images from an album of photographs found in the Federal Archives of Koblenz.

See photos

Reframing Holocaust Testimony
Noah Shenker

Noah Shenker calls attention to the ways that audiovisual testimonies of the Holocaust have been mediated by the institutional histories and practices of their respective archives. He analyzes the ways in which interview questions, the framing of the camera, and curatorial and programming preferences impact how Holocaust testimony is molded, distributed, and received.

Read excerpt

Deciphering the New Antisemitism
Edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld

"This volume, rich in information . . . is recommended as a valuable compilation of research and analysis that will help concerned readers track the evolution of anti-Semitism and determine which trends are most worrisome." —Publishers Weekly

Read excerpt

European Muslim Antisemitism
Why Young Urban Males Say They Don't Like Jews
Günther Jikeli

Antisemitism from Muslims has become a serious issue in Western Europe, although not often acknowledged as such. This study addresses those issues and is rich in qualitative data that will mark a significant step along the path toward a better understanding of contemporary antisemitism in Europe.

Read excerpt

Alfred Kinsey and the Remaking of Jewish Sexuality in the Wake of the Holocaust
Rachel Gordan
Jewish Social Studies
Vol. 20, No. 3 (Spring/Summer 2014), pp. 72-99

Until the work of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, which explored the science of the individual's sexual response, Alfred Kinsey's work on sexual behavior in males and females, which described population behavior, was not only the landmark reference on sexology but also the source of tremendous and varied reaction among moral leaders in America. In spite of the common moral ground implied by the newly popular “Judeo-Christian tradition,” Jewish and Christian responses to Kinsey revealed fundamental differences in attitude. Christians felt generally threatened, whereas some Jews found much that affirmed their traditions. Substituting Nazi ideology's stereotypes of the carnal Jew (a stereotype with an ancient tradition) with an image of the sexually inhibited Jewish male, Kinsey's portrayal of the Jewish approach to sex was almost as damning as what it replaced. Yet rather than attack Kinsey, a few Modern Orthodox voices used the occasion of his popularity as an opportunity to champion a Jewish approach to sex that spoke as much to Cold War heteronormativity as it did to post-Holocaust desires for a vital Orthodox Judaism.

Read the article (free access until March 1, 2016)

The Past That Does Not Pass: Israelis and Holocaust Memory
Dalia Ofer
Israel Studies
Vol. 14, No. 1, Israelis and the Holocaust: Scars Cry out for Healing (Spring, 2009), pp. 1-35

Dalia Ofer raises issues that relate to the centrality of the Holocaust in the lives and imagination of many Israelis, and as a pivotal event that shapes their Jewish-Israeli identity. She examines the positions held by Israelis on the meaning of the Holocaust and the shaping of its memory, and asks whether the presence of the Holocaust in our lives represents an honest, unwavering effort to understand the Holocaust and its place in our world as human beings, Jews, and Israelis, or is a result of manipulating forces that use and abuse the memory of the Holocaust to advance unrelated political or social causes. The article presents a profusion of voices in Holocaust discourse and asks whether these are complementary or conflicting messages. It discusses the groups for whom the Holocaust was a personal experience, their offspring, who experienced the Holocaust as a family memory, and others whose memory of the Holocaust was shaped by survivors' testimonies, social processes, and the internalization of cultural messages. It focuses on the contribution of these groups in Holocaust research and artistic representation centering on literature, film, and music.

Read the article (free access until March 1, 2016)

Jewish Book Month reading on World War II and the Holocaust

Today concludes our week-long feature on readings for Jewish Book Month. We hope these books have helped increase your knowledge and awareness of important topics in Jewish studies. Our final set of reading selections covers historical, personal, and fictional perspectives of the impact of World War II and the Holocaust on the Jewish people:

Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews
A Photographic Album, Paris, 1940-1944
Sarah Gensburger
Translated by Jonathan Hensher with the collaboration of Elisabeth Fourmont

From 1942 onwards, ordinary Parisian Jews—mostly poor families and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe—were robbed, not of sculptures or paintings, but of toys, saucepans, furniture, and sheets. Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews tells how this vast enterprise of plunder was implemented in the streets of Paris by analyzing images from an album of photographs found in the Federal Archives of Koblenz.

See photos

When Europe Was a Prison Camp
Father and Son Memoirs, 1940-1941
Otto Schrag and Peter Schrag

In a compelling approach to storytelling, When Europe Was a Prison Camp weaves together two accounts of a Jewish family’s eventual escape from Occupied Europe, avoiding the fate of many other Jews who were sent to concentration camps. One, a memoir written by the father in 1941; the other, begun by the son in the 1980s, fills in the story of himself and his mother, supplemented by historical research. The result is both personal and provocative, involving as it does issues of history and memory, fiction and “truth,” courage and resignation.

Read excerpt and listen to a podcast with Peter Schrag

To the Gates of Jerusalem
The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1945-1947
James G. McDonald
Edited by Norman J. W. Goda, Barbara McDonald Stewart, Severin Hochberg, and Richard Breitman

This volume, the third in a series of James G. McDonald’s edited diaries and papers, covers his work from 1945, with the formation of the Anglo-American Committee, through 1947, with the United Nations' decision to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs. McDonald was instrumental in the recommendation that 100,000 Jewish refugees enter Palestine and won President Truman’s trust in order to counter attempts to nullify the report’s recommendations.

Read excerpt and listen to a podcast with Barbara McDonald Stewart

Reframing Holocaust Testimony
Noah Shenker

Noah Shenker calls attention to the ways that audiovisual testimonies of the Holocaust have been mediated by the institutional histories and practices of their respective archives. Shenker argues that testimonies are shaped not only by the encounter between interviewer and interviewee, but also by technical practices and the testimony process.

Read excerpt

The Subject of Holocaust Fiction
Emily Miller Budick

Fictional representations of horrific events run the risk of undercutting efforts to verify historical knowledge and may heighten our ability to respond intellectually and ethically to human experiences of devastation. In this captivating study of the epistemological, psychological, and ethical issues underlying Holocaust fiction, Emily Miller Budick examines the subjective experiences of fantasy, projection, and repression manifested in Holocaust fiction and in the reader’s encounter with it.

Read excerpt

Remembering World War II 70 years later

As an Official Army Photographer, “Mac” Fleming’s assignment was to take motion pictures of significant wartime events for the US Army. In the pouch intended to carry his first-aid kit on his belt, he instead carried a small personal camera, which he used to take pictures of the people and places that interested him, capturing in his field notes details of the life he observed. From these records, Fleming has assembled From War to Peace in 1945 Germany: A GI's Experience, to be published next May.

Ruins at the feet of the iron figure of Kaiser Wilhelm. Nurnberg, Germany, July 9, 1945.

Assigned to the European Theater in February 1945, he filmed the action from the battle for the Remagen Bridge across the Rhine, to the fighting in the Hartz Mountains, on to the linkup with the Russian forces at the Elbe River. After the armistice, Fleming helped document how the Allied Expeditionary Force established a military government in Germany to cope with masses of POWs, establish control of the country, deal with the atrocities committed by the German army, and help thousands of newly released slave laborers return home to Poland, France, and Russia. He also recorded how the army provided rest, recreation, and rehabilitation to the remaining US soldiers and sent them home by truck, train, and ship. Awaiting shipment home, Fleming explored postwar German town and country life and toured some famous castles and historic spots.

On this Veterans Day, we honor Fleming's contribution to documenting the war and remember all of those who have served.

Polish children hungrily munch an afternoon snack of rations that were once in the Red Cross PW Packages. Wetzlar, Germany, June 14, 1945.

Traveling War: Memory Practices in Motion

History & Memory: Traveling War, Memory Practices in Motion

The fall/winter 2015 issue of History & Memory takes as its focus "Traveling War: Memory Practices in Motion." Published by Indiana University Press, this special issue is coedited by Geoffrey M. White and Eveline Buchheim. White is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Buchheim is a researcher at NIOD, Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. 

While the spatial and architectural fixities of war memory have long attracted scholarly attention in research on memorials, monuments, battlegrounds and their commemorative practices, memory studies increasingly turn their attention to the social and performative practices that make past experiences “real” or relevant in the present. Scholars who focus on the constructions of history emerging in and around memorial sites now reject models that assume singular or fixed significance for those sites, choosing rather to see them as sites of dialogue or performative enactments of history. It is in this context that the authors collected here trace the paths of people moving through spaces of remembrance, crossing border zones where relevant identities gain heightened significance.

World War II reading selections

Seventy years ago today, World War II ended when Japan formally surrendered to the Allies. We commemorate this occasion by offering the following World War II reading selections:

General Jacob Devers
World War II's Forgotten Four Star
John A. Adams

Of the leaders of the American Army in World War II, Jacob Devers is undoubtedly the “forgotten four star.” In spring 1943, Devers replaced Dwight Eisenhower as commander of the European Theater of Operations, then was given command of the 6th Army Group that invaded the south of France and fought its way through France and Germany to the Austrian border. In the European campaign to defeat Hitler, Eisenhower had three subordinate army group commanders—British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, Omar S. Bradley, and Jacob Devers. The first two are well-known—here the third receives the attention he properly deserves.

Read excerpt

The Battle of Leyte Gulf
The Last Fleet Action
H. P. Willmott

The Battle of Leyte Gulf was the greatest naval engagement in history. The battle was four separate actions, none of which were fought in the Gulf itself, and the result was the destruction of Japanese naval power in the Pacific. Using Japanese material never previously noted in western accounts, H. P. Willmott provides new perspectives on the unfolding of the battle and very deliberately seeks to give readers a proper understanding of the importance of this battle for American naval operations in the following month.

Read excerpt

Battle of Surigao Strait
Anthony P. Tully

Surigao Strait in the Philippine Islands was the scene of a major battleship duel during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Because the battle was fought at night and had few survivors on the Japanese side, the events of that naval engagement have been passed down in garbled accounts. Anthony P. Tully pulls together all of the existing documentary material, including newly discovered accounts and a careful analysis of U.S. Navy action reports, to create a new and more detailed description of the action. In several respects, Tully's narrative differs radically from the received versions and represents an important historical corrective.

Read excerpt

Tank Driver
With the 11th Armored from the Battle of the Bulge to VE Day
J. Ted Hartman

Ted Hartman was a teenager when he was sent overseas to drive a Sherman tank into combat to face the desperate German counterattack known as the Battle of the Bulge. Hartman gives a riveting account of the shifting tides of battle and the final Allied breakout. He tells about the concentration camps, the spectacle of the defeated Germans, and the dramatic encounter with Russian soldiers in Austria that marked combat’s end. This is a vivid, personal account of some of the most dramatic fighting of World War II.

Read excerpt

Forthcoming Spring 2016
New Georgia
The Second Battle for the Solomons
Ronnie Day

In 1942, the Solomon Islands formed the stepping stones toward Rabaul, the main base of Japanese operations in the South Pacific, and the Allies primary objective. The stunning defeat of Japanese forces at the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in November marked the turning point in the war against Japan and the start of an offensive in the Central Solomons aimed at New Georgia. This book tells the story of the land, sea, and air battles fought there from March through October 1943. Making careful and copious use of both Japanese and Allied sources, Ronnie Day masterfully weaves the intricate threads of these battles into a well-crafted narrative of this pivotal period in the war.

More information on our website

Forthcoming Spring 2016
From War to Peace in 1945 Germany
A GI's Experience
Malcolm L. Fleming
Foreword by James H. Madison

As an Official Army Photographer, “Mac” Fleming’s assignment was to take motion pictures of significant wartime events for the U.S. Army. In the pouch intended to carry his first-aid kit on his belt, he instead carried a small personal camera, which he used to take pictures of the people and places that interested him, capturing in his field notes details of the life he observed. From these records, Fleming has assembled this absorbing private chronicle of war and peace.

More information on our website