Download True Lives – War The man who broke into Auschwitz by Denis Avey

True Lives – War
The man who broke into Auschwitz by Denis Avey
This is the extraordinary true story of a British soldier who willingly marched into Buna-Monowitz, the
concentration camp known as Auschwitz III. Denis Avey was being held in a POW labour camp near
Auschwitz III. He had heard of the brutality meted out to the prisoners there and he was determined to
witness what he could. He hatched a plan to swap places with a Jewish inmate and smuggled himself into
the camp. He spent the night there on two occasions and experienced at first-hand the cruelty of a place
where slave workers had been sentenced to death through labour. Astonishingly, he survived. For decades,
he couldn’t bring himself to revisit the past that haunted his dreams, but now Denis Avey feels able to tell
the full story – a tale as gripping as it is moving – which offers a unique insight into the mind of an ordinary
man whose moral and physical courage are almost beyond belief.
Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden
Late in the afternoon of Sunday 3 October 1993, 140 elite US soldiers abseiled from helicopters into a
teeming market neighbourhood in the heart of the city of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct
two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take them about an hour.
Instead, they were pinned down through a long and terrible night in a hostile city, fighting for their lives
against thousands of heavily armed Somalis. When the unit was rescued the following morning, eighteen
American soldiers were dead and more than seventy badly injured. The Somali toll was far worse – more
than five hundred killed and over a thousand injured. Authoritative, gripping and insightful, Black Hawk
Down is a heart-stopping, minite-by-minute account of modern war and is destined to become a classic
war reporting.
Trautmann’s journey: from Hitler Youth to FA cup legend by Catrine Clay
Bert Trautmann is a football legend. He is famed as the Manchester City goalkeeper who broke his neck in
the 1956 FA Cup final and played on. But his early life was no less extraordinary. He grew up in Nazi
Germany, where he was indoctrinated by the Hitler Youth, before fighting in World War Two in France and
on the Eastern Front. In 1945 he was captured and sent to a British POW camp where, for the first time, he
understood there could be a better way of life. He embraced England as his new home and before long
became an English football hero.
Rifleman: a front-line life from Alemein and Dresden to the fall of the Berlin Wall by Victor Gregg
On his eighteenth birthday in 1937, Victor Gregg enlisted in the Rifle Brigade and began a life of adventure.
A soldier throughout the Second World War, he saw action across North Africa, was a driver for the Long
Range Desert Group and fought at the Battle of Alemein. Taken into captivity at the Battle of Alemein in
1944, he was sentenced to death for sabotaging a Dresden factory; he escaped only when the Allies’
infamous air raid blew apart his prison and very soon encountered the advancing Red Army. Gregg’s
fascinating tale does not end with the war: he also recounts his later adventures behind the Iron Curtain,
offering behind-the-scenes glimpses into the shadowy world of Cold War espionage. Rifleman is the
extraordinary story of an independent-minded and quick-witted survivor.
The junior officers’ reading club: killing time and fighting wars by Patrick Hennessey
Patrick Hennessey is pretty much like any other member of the MTV generation. He spent the first half of
the noughties reading books at university, going out, listening to music and watching war films. He also, as
an officer in the Grenadier Guards, fought in some of the most violent combat the British Army has seen in
decades. This is the story of how the modern soldier is made, from the testorerone-heavy breeding ground
of Sandhurst to the nightmare of Iraq and Afghanistan. Showing war in all its terror, boredom and
exhilaration, The Junior Officers’ Reading Club is already being hailed as a modern classic.
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
On a May afternoon in 1943, a US bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean. After an agonising delay, a young
lieutenant finally bobbed to the surface and struggled aboard a life raft. So began one of the most
extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War. The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. As a boy, he
had turned to petty crime until he discovered a remarkable talent for running, which took him to the Berlin
Olympics. But as war loomed, he joined up and was soon embroiled in the ferocious battle for the Pacific.
Now Zamperini faced a journey of a thousand miles of open ocean on a falling raft, dogged by sharks,
starvation and the enemy. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini’s fate, whether triumph or tragedy
would depend on the strength of his will.
Gentle Johnny Ramensky: the extraordinary true story of the safe blower who became a war hero by
Robert Jeffrey
Throughout an astonishing criminal career, Johnny Ramensky was the fore-most safe blower of his era. His
exploits and audacious escapes from maximum security prisons also helped make him a household name –
admired by some, notorious to others. But when the Second World War broke out, Ramnesky joined the
elite Commandos and his story became a legend. Peacetime had brought Johnny Ramensky a hard
upbringing in the Gorbals, a life of crime and long years in jail. War brought him the chance to serve his
country and a new use for his expertise in explosives. Time after time he would show exceptional bravery
as he was parachuted behind enemy lines to blow open the safes of Rommel, Goering and the German
High Command. His mission was to secure documents vital to the war effort and it brought him the danger
and the excitement he always craved.
Storm of steel by Ernst Junger
A memoir of astonishing power, savagery and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel depicts Ernst Junger’s
experience of combat in the German front line – leading raiding parties, defending trenches against
murderous British incursions, and simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart. One of the greatest
books to emerge from the catastrophe of the First World War, it illuminates like no other book, not only
the horrors but also the fascination of a war that made men keep fighting on for four long years.
Agent Zigzag by Ben McIntyre
One December night in 1942, a Nazi parachutist landed in a Cambridgeshire field. His mission: to sabotage
the British war effort. His name was Eddie Chapman, but he would shortly become MI5’s Agent Zigzag.
Dashing and louche, courageous and unpredictable, inside the traitor was a hero, inside the villain, a man
of conscience. The problem for Chapman was knowing where one ended and the other began. Ben
Macintyre weaves together diaries, letter, photographs, memories and top-secret MI5 files to create the
exhilarating account of Britain’s most sensational double agent.
Operation mincemeat by Ben McIntyre
One overcast April morning in 1943, a fisherman notices a corpse floating in the sea off the coast of Spain.
When the body is brought ashore, it is identified as a British soldier, Major William Martin of the Royal
Marines. A leather attaché case, secured to his belt, reveals an intelligence gold mine: top-secret Allied
invasion plans. But Major William Martin never existed. The body is that of a dead Welsh tramp and every
single document is fake. Operation Mincemeat is the true story of the most extraordinary deception ever
planned by Churchill’s spies – an outrageous lie that travelled from a Whitehall basement all the way to
Hitler’s desk.
Black Watch by Tom Renouf
Tom Renouf was still a schoolboy in Scotland when World War II began. He was pitched into the bloody
Battle of Normandy, a raw recruit in the legendary Black Watch, surviving serious wounds, hardship and
terror. He ended the war a promoted and decorated young soldier. From Normandy the regiment went on
to liberate Holland and fight in the Battle of the Bulge, to invade Germany and struggle through Reichswald
forest in the last great battle of the Western front. Its sweetest moment came just days after Hitler’s
suicide when they caught a heavily disguised Himmler. Black Watch is both the epic story of the 51st
Highland Division and the searing personal account of one man’s courage in the war.
Behind enemy lines by Sir Tommy Macpherson
Sir Tommy Macpherson is the most decorated living soldier of the British Army. Yet for 65 years the
Highlander’s story has remained untold. Few knew how, aged 21, he persuaded 23,000 SS soldiers of the
feared Das Reich tank column to surrender, or how Tommy almost single-handedly stopped Tito’s
Yugoslavia annexing the whole of north-east Italy. Twice captured, he escaped both times, marching
through hundreds of miles of German-held territory to get home. Still a schoolboy when war broke out,
Tommy quickly matured into a legendary commando, and his remarkable story features a dizzyingly
diverse cast of characters, including Winston Churchill, Field Marshall Montgomery and Charles De Gaulle.
Jarhead: a soldier’s story of modern war by Anthony Swofford
When Swofford went to the Gulf as a nine-teen-year-old scout-sniper in the Marines, he had been trained
to kill with a single shot. To kill would mean he was a good soldier. When he came back, he had lived
through weeks of fear and boredom in the desert, under enemy and friendly fire, surrounded by men
reduced to their basest instincts. The person he had come closest to killing was himself.
The forgotten highlander by Alistair Urquhart
Alistair Urquhart was barely twenty when he was shipped to Singapore with the Gordon Highlanders. In
1942 the Japanese invaded, and he was taken prisoner and sent to work on the notorious bridge over the
River Kwai. Urquhart survived starvation, cholera and the torture and the brutality of the Japanese Imperial
Army, only to be packed in the hold of a rusting hell-ship bound for Japan. Torpedoed by an American
submarine in the shark-infested waters of the South China Sea, he drifted close to death. When he was
eventually recaptured, Urquhart was transported to a prison camp only eleven miles from the fateful city
of Nagasaki, where he bore witness to one of the momentous and terrible events of human history.