Peter Caddick-Adams Knihy

6 June 1944, 4 a.m. Hundreds of boats assemble off the coast of France. By nightfall, thousands of the men they carry will be dead. This was D-Day, the most important day of the twentieth century. In Sand and Steel, one of Britain's leading military historians offers a panoramic new account of the Allied invasion of France. Drawing on a decade of new research, Peter Caddick-Adams masterfully recreates what it was like to wade out onto the carnage of Omaha Beach, or parachute behind enemy lines in Normandy. He explores the year-long preparations that went into the invasion, overturning decades-old assumptions about Allied strategy. And he pays tribute to the remarkable individuals who made D-Day possible - not just soldiers on the beaches, but also paratroopers, sailors, aircrews, and women on the Home Front. The result is a compulsively readable account of the greatest battle of the Second World War. It will be the definitive work on D-Day for years to come.

Snow and Steel will be a huge reassessment of Hitler's last great throw of the dice: 'The Battle of the Bulge', the battle for the Ardennes 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945.

March 1945. Allied troops are poised to cross the Rhine and sweep on into Germany. Victory is finally within their grasp. But if they believe this victory can be easily won, they face swift disillusionment. The final 100 days of the Second World War will prove to be bitterly and bloodily fought, village by village, town by town. In Victory in the West 1945 acclaimed military historian Peter Caddick-Adams brings this closing stage of the Allies' fight against Nazi Germany brilliantly to life. He explores the immense challenges they faced in crossing the Rhine on a 300-mile front. He tells stories of individual acts of resolve and heroism, of often exhausted troops pressing forward attacks in the face of ferocious resistance. He recounts their shocked first encounters with the barbarities of Hitler's regime as they reached the gates of Buchenwald, Belsen and Dachau. And he goes behind the front line to analyse the strategic decisions made at Allied headquarters and to offer pin-sharp portraits of the military leaders. Throughout he draws on a vast range of memoirs and personal interviews with survivors to give a vivid sense of what it was like to encounter enemy combatants and civilians face to face. Compulsively readable, this will be the standard work on the closing days of the Second World War for a generation.

The five-month Monte Cassino campaign in central Italy is one of the best- known European land battles of World War Two, alongside D-Day and Stalingrad. číst celé