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On September 17, 1944, in broad daylight, the Allies launched the largest airborne operation ever conducted. The objective: to secure a road in Nazi-occupied Holland and a bridge across the Rhine for ground troops to advance into Germany . . . and to end the war by Christmas. For the 101st Airborne, charged with seizing key bridges, that road became known as Hells Highway, and it saw what may have been the most savagely fought single action in the divisions history.
This book tells the story of that battle at its most desperate, and the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne at their most courageous. A concise, authoritative account of the bold but ultimately unsuccessful push across the Rhine, this book recounts some of the most dramatic combat of World War II. Published in conjunction with Gearbox Softwares Brothers in Arms: Hells Highway, it also features selected screen shots from the game, reenactor action, and a wealth of maps and period archival photographs that bring Hells Highway to harrowing life. ...
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“With sharp insights into history, combat, and human nature, this enthralling novel can stand beside even the best chronicles of that fabled ‘band of brothers.’ ”
–Ralph Peters, author of Wars of Blood and Faith
It’s 1944, and the German war machine is on its heels but still lethal, while the Allies pry the Netherlands from the Nazis’ grasp. Operation Market Garden will be spearheaded by the 101st Airborne Screaming Eagles. But if you’re one man in one corner of this battle, it’s a plunge into chaos–at a place called “Hell’s Highway.”
Sergeant Matt Baker is a recon leader from the 101st, in charge of a team of Brits, Americans, and Dutch resistance fighters sent on a desperate reconnaissance mission. For Baker, every step behind enemy lines means dozens of critical choices, firefights that explode out of nowhere, and facing down one ruthless German who knows his war is lost– and who is as fierce as he is brilliant. To both men, it’s a battle to get out of hell alive.
From the struggles of the men and women of the Dutch resistance to a pitched fight for one critical bridge, Hell’s Highway is the suspense-packed, surprise-filled version of the bestselling video game–and an intense epic journey into the true nature of war....
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CITY FIGHTS
Selected Histories of Urban Combat from World War II to Vietnam
Edited by Colonel John Antal and Maj. Bradley Gericke
“Urban terrain will likely be the predominant battlefield of future wars.”
As September 11 and Somalia proved, hostile forces are now engaging America differently, avoiding open combat with our enormous military, striking at our civic centers or dragging us into theirs. But urban warfare isn’t new; it is as old as the battle of Jericho. Now an incomparable collection written by esteemed military veterans—some currently serving, others civilian analysts—re-creates the last century’s most astonishing examples
of this kind of fighting . . . and offers important lessons for our future.
Here are fourteen riveting histories that are both invaluable teaching tools for security leaders and engrossing accounts for any reader. They include
• William M. Waddell’s “Tai-Erh-Chuang, 1938: The Japanese Juggernaut Smashed”—How China defeated the Japanese in battle for the first time in three hundred and forty years, by using a city only as a pivot area and attacking the exposed flank and rear ranks of its unprepared enemy.
• Eric M. Walters’s “Stalingrad, 1942: With Will, a Weapon, and a Watch”—The largest and longest-running urban fight of the twentieth century, in which the Red Army became the tortoise to the Germans’ hare, out-lasting its stronger foe.
• Norm Cooling’s “Hue City, 1968: Winning a Battle While Losing a War”—The six-day fight for the cultural center of Vietnam revealed how the American military’s distrust of the media made it fail to expose the enemy’s mass executions and lose the all-important information war.
From the 1944 Warsaw uprising that almost caused the complete destruction of Poland’s capital to the crucial, near-forgotten fight for Manila in 1945 . . . from snipers and shoulder-launched missiles to tunnels and tanks . . . all aspects of the most important urban conflicts are revealed in stunning detail. Compelling and cautionary, City Fights powerfully reminds us that, in our ever more urbanized and vulnerable world, “if a state loses its cities, it loses the war.”...
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