Little Known and Forgotten Stories From World War II (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798996560523)

Some of history's most remarkable stories have never been told. Others have simply been forgotten.

The Second World War produced more acts of courage, ingenuity, sacrifice, and sheer human stubbornness than any conflict in history. The famous battles are well known. The famous generals have their biographies. But history moves fast, and the stories that don't make the textbooks - the ones that happened in the margins, in the dark, in the ruins of cities and the corridors of governments - those are the ones that disappear.

This book is about those stories.

Inside you'll find the Polish mathematician who volunteered to be arrested and sent to Auschwitz. The Spanish chicken farmer who invented a fictional spy network and single-handedly kept Hitler's Panzer reserves at Calais for six weeks after D-Day. The Finnish farmer who lay motionless in snow for hours at a time and became the most lethal sniper in recorded history. The American messman who had never fired a weapon and manned a machine gun under fire when his ship was burning around him.

You'll find the crossword puzzle that nearly exposed the D-Day invasion. The schoolteacher interrogated by MI5. The diplomat who invented a country to save 50,000 lives. The eighteen-year-old Marine who walked into the dark alone and talked 1,500 enemy soldiers into surrendering.

These are the stories history almost forgot.

Little Known and Forgotten Stories from World War II collects more than one hundred of them - each one complete, each one true, each one a reminder that the war was not won by generals and governments alone. It was won by people making decisions in the worst possible circumstances, doing things that had no precedent, for reasons that were sometimes heroic and sometimes simply human.

They deserve to be remembered.