A Soldier's Diary is the story of an ordinary soldier and his daily routine. The author kept a daily diary of his time in the Army. It is through this Journal and family correspondence that details of the life of a G.I.-- the training, the routine duties, the drama of war, the release provided by passes and leaves. The challenges of living with the threat of death are revealed. Through personal narrative, key moments of the War in Europe are presented: the Normandy Beachhead, the liberation of Paris and Brussels,Buzz Bombed in Liege and The horrors of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
“The 22nd is very much a part of my life and had it not been for your journal I would have had no idea of its destiny and its ending. I am very grateful to you for this experience.”—John Cheever Scores of combat incidents and fascinating insights are to be found in “A Soldier’s Journal.” Rothbart provides unusual details of the 4th Division’s, and especially the 22nd Regiment’s, achievements and obstacles in the Allied advance from Normandy to Germany; D-Day Normandy, the breakthrough at St. Lo, the liberation of Paris, the German counterattack in the Ardennes and the Battle of the Bulge, and the bloody Hurtgen Forest battle.—The Trenton Times (NJ) “Rothbart’s meticulously- kept journal is an ‘I was there’ record of World War II. It is a valuable piece of American history.”—The Huntsville Times (AL) “From the day he was drafted in 1942...Rothbart did what many people plan but rarely follow up. He kept a journal, tightly pencilled entries in little notebooks that somehow caught history roaring by, and in remarkably readable style.”—Pittsburgh Tribune Review (PA) “Compelling reading . . . made more so by the many ‘slice of life’ portraits. . . of his time in the U.S. Army.”—John Gresham, bestselling co-author (with Tom Clancy) of Submarine and Special Forces.
Harinder Baweja, an Editor with Hindustan Times has earned a reputation as a fearless, committed reporter through her prolonged coverage of conflict zones. Her experience of covering the Kashmir crisis gave her access to a wide range of sources, particularly among the army units that were sent to Kargil. She covered the sharp, short war for India Today magazine, using her enviable range of sources to compile a definite account of the Kargil war. She has also edited and authored chapters for 26/11 Mumbai Attacked.
As a soldier with the 42nd (Rainbow) Division in France in World War I, Elmer Sherwood was an observer with uncommonly good judgment. If his descriptions lacked perfection they partook of an attractive innocence that brought out the truth of such battles as the horrendous Meuse-Argonne offensive that took 26,000 lives.
An articulate and vivid artist, Randolph describes action in key areas of the eastern theater-northern Virginia, Charleston, and Richmond and its surrounds. His record of the Peninsula Campaign, the siege of Charleston, and finally the Bermuda Hundred and Petersburg Campaigns offers a rare look at the role which common soldiers played in master strategies. A former theology student and an unusually thoughful man, Randolph questions the military predation of civilian property and condemns the racial prejudices of his fellow soldiers. In addition to the immediacy of the diary, readers will appreciate the informative commentary and annotations supplied by Civil War historian, Stephen R. Wise.
#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A mesmerising story of love and war spanning three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the 1990s In this "overpowering and beautiful novel" (The New Yorker), the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land. Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient, crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love.
"As usual, the medic, Wiatr, hid himself, the doctor had a panic attack and I decided do go by myself to the next trench in spite of the hellish artillery and canon fire. In the trench was Corporal Gorgel, who helped the officer. The scene on the front line was terrible. Blood, pieces of flesh, heads, arms, legs and intestines all around -an awful sight." Almost 100 years have passed since the end of World War I, also known as "the Great War". At the time, it was the largest war to date. Over 16.5 million people were killed in the war; more than 6 million among them were civilians. During the Great War, a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army fought at the frontline trenches and wrote daily in his diary, documenting his experiences there. This man, Teofil Reiss, was an Austro-Hungarian patriot, a professional soldier, a charming ladies' man, and a proud Jew. His practical perspective, trustworthy innocence and open heartedness, merge the details of this diary into a fascinating human document - a rare testimony of a frontline soldier and a picture of an honest man in a senseless war (though, not senseless to him).Almost 100 years after the war, his grandson Tuvia (who was named after him) made the decision to translate and publish his handwritten German diary, adding photos and letters, as well as an epilogue that tells the remarkable story of Teofil Reiss's life during the Nazis' rise to power, and until his death in 1942.
A pattern has been given to the history of the events between 1914 and 1918 which is called the 'Great War'. To Henri Desagneaux and to thousands of others, there was no pattern to be seen from the trenches where he executed orders which ensured that dozens of men had to die attempting to achieve impossible objectives worked out at a headquarters in the rear. His diary, one of the classic French accounts of the conflict, gives a vivid insight into what it was like to execute those orders, and to live in the trenches with increasingly demoralized, unruly and mutinous men. In terse unflinching prose he records their experiences as they confronted the acute dangers of the front line. The appalling conditions in which they fought and the sheer intensity of the shellfire and the close-quarter combat have rarely been conveyed with such immediacy.
A grunt’s-eye report from the battlefield in the spirit of The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front—the only known account by a common soldier of the campaigns of Napoleon’s Grand Army between 1806 and 1813. When eighteen-year-old German stonemason Jakob Walter was conscripted into the Grand Army of Napoleon, he had no idea of the trials that lay ahead. The long, grueling marches in Prussia and Poland sacrificed countless men to Bonaparte’s grand designs. And the disastrous Russian campaign tested human endurance on an epic scale. Demoralized by defeat in a war few supported or understood, deprived of ammunition and leadership, driven past reason by starvation and bitter cold, men often turned on one another, killing fellow soldiers for bread or an able horse. Though there are numerous surviving accounts of the Napoleonic Wars written by officers, Walter’s is the only known memoir by a draftee, and as such is a unique and fascinating document—a compelling chronicle of a young soldier’s loss of innocence as well as an eloquent and moving portrait of the profound effects of war on the men who fight it. Professor Marc Raeff has added an Introduction to the memoirs as well as six letters home from the Russian front, previously unpublished in English, from German conscripts who served concurrently with Walter. The volume is illustrated with engravings and maps, contemporary with the manuscript, from the Russian/Soviet and East European collections of the New York Public Library. Honest, heartfelt, deeply personal yet objective, The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier is more than an informative and absorbing historical document—it is a timeless and unforgettable account of the horrors of war.
