Pen Sword Books: 303 books
Hitler's Olympics
The Story of the 1936 Nazi Games
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2006
This “startlingly good and vividly illuminating book” sheds new light on the Fascist sports spectacle that transfixed the world (The Spectator).
For two weeks in August 1936, Nazi Germany achieved an astonishing propaganda coup when it staged the Olympic Games in Berlin. Hiding their anti-Semitism...
German Soldiers in the Great War
Letters and Eyewitness Accounts
Language: English
Release Date: September 20, 2012
The first English translation of writings that capture the lives and thoughts of German soldiers fighting in the trenches and on the battlefields of WWI.
German Soldiers in the Great War is a vivid selection of firsthand accounts and other wartime documents that shed new light on the experiences...
by Paul Strong, Sanders Marble
Language: English
Release Date: May 18, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: May 18, 2011
A year-by-year examination of key WWI battles and how the ongoing advances in artillery shaped strategy, tactics, and oprations; includes battlefield maps!
World War I is often said to have been an artillery war, yet the decisive role artillery played in shaping military decisions—and therefor...
Warsaw 1944
An Insurgent's Journal of the Uprising
Language: English
Release Date: January 19, 2013
“Built around a journal written in the months just after the Warsaw uprising by . . . a teenage fighter in the Polish underground . . . a compelling account.” —HistoryOfWar.org
This remarkable journal, written shortly after the event, describes not only the author’s own experiences...
Poland Betrayed
The Nazi-Soviet Invasions of 1939
Language: English
Release Date: September 20, 2012
An in-depth history of the attack that began World War II, and one country’s courageous fight against two unstoppable forces.
Hitler’s military offensive against Poland on September 1, 1939 was the brutal act that triggered the start of World War II, wreaking six years of death and bloodshed...
The First Blitz
The German Air Campaign Against Britain 1917–1918
Language: English
Release Date: May 22, 2009
“An interesting account of the German air raids of the First World War, with a better focus on the human face of the raids.” —HistoryOfWar.org
In 1917, the Germans launched a major air campaign against the British mainland, which shocked the whole nation and terrorized the southeast of England.
These...
Gentleman Jim
The Wartime Story of a Founder of the SAS & Special Forces
Language: English
Release Date: February 23, 2011
The remarkable story of Jim Almonds, his WWII experiences, and his formative role in the birth of the SAS.
Set in wartime England, the western desert, Italy, and France, this book captures the spirit of the young soldiers in the newly emerging Special Air Service, against a dramatic background...
Aetius
Attila's Nemesis
Language: English
Release Date: July 19, 2012
“The history of Aetius’ life and his dealings with Attila . . . [and] of the (western) Roman Empire throughout the pivotal fifth century.” —Ancient Warfare Magazine
In AD 453, Attila—with a huge force composed of Huns, allies, and vassals drawn from his already-vast empire—was rampaging...
by Simon MacDowall
Language: English
Release Date: July 31, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: July 31, 2016
An up-close look at the Germanic people who sacked Rome in the fifth century AD.
On 31 December AD 406, a group of German tribes crossed the Rhine, pierced the Roman defensive lines, and began a rampage across Roman Gaul, sacking cities such as Metz, Arras, and Strasbourg. Foremost amongst them...
'Sink the French!'
At War with Our Ally—1940
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2007
A history-defining moment in World War II, when the allied nations of England and France stood on the precipice of betrayal—and war with each other.
After the forces of Nazi Germany launched their Blitzkrieg assault on Holland, Belgium, and Northern France, the tentative relationship between...
A Woman Living in the Shadow of the Second World War
Helena Hall's Journal from the Home Front
Language: English
Release Date: November 30, 2014
“These previously unpublished diaries of an English woman surviving the war at home provide a fascinating insight into society and life” (Firetrench).
Helena Hall’s daily diary of the war years, from 1940 to 1945, is one of the most vivid, detailed and evocative personal records of the Second...
by Stanley Wort
Language: English
Release Date: September 19, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: September 19, 2009
A memoir of serving in prewar Hong Kong, being held prisoner by the Japanese, and surviving slave labor.
This is the story of a young man thrust into the Royal Navy in distant Hong Kong. With both drama and humor, he relates some of the situations in which he found himself—and provides a...
Germanicus
The Magnificent Life and Mysterious Death of Rome's Most Popular General
Language: English
Release Date: September 25, 2013
“The story of a Roman Emperor that might have been” (Fighting Times).
Germanicus was regarded by many Romans as a hero in the mold of Alexander the Great. His untimely death, in suspicious circumstances, ended the possibility of a return to a more open republic. This, the first modern biography...
Children in the Second World War
Memories from the Home Front
Language: English
Release Date: April 30, 2017
“Stunning photographs” and firsthand accounts propel a book that “brings together the memories of more than 200 child survivors of the Blitz” (Daily Mail).
It was not just the upheaval caused by evacuation and the blitzes that changed a generation’s childhood, it was how war pervaded...