War Diaries

As Assistant Private Secretary to four monarchs, 'Tommy' Lascelles had a ringside seat from which to observe the workings of the royal household and Downing Street during the first half of the 20th century. These fascinating diaries begin with Edward VIII's abdication and end with George VI's death and his daughter Elizabeth's Coronation. In between we see George VI at work and play, a portrait more intimate than any other previously published.

Nina Siegal, an accomplished journalist and novelist, weaves together excerpts from the daily journals of collaborators, resistors, and the persecuted—a Dutch Nazi police detective, a Jewish journalist imprisoned at Westerbork transit camp, a grocery store owner who saved dozens of lives—into a braided nonfictional narrative of the Nazi occupation and the Dutch Holocaust, as individuals experienced it day by day.

A born storyteller, Charlie May's vivid eye for detail and warm good humour brings his experience in the trenches to life for a 21st-century audience. A journalist before the war and a born storyteller, May's diaries give a vivid picture of battalion life in and behind the trenches during the build-up to the greatest battle fought by a British army and are filled with the friendships and tensions, the home-sickness, frustrations, the fog of ignorance, the combination of boredom and terror to which every man that has ever fought could testify.

Jane Sagan: Soldier. Killer. Lover. Dreamer. In John Scalzi's best-selling Old Man's War series of science-fiction novels, we see this warrior woman as the other characters see her - silent and strong, from the outside. But now The Sagan Diary shows us Sagan from another point of view: her own, as she prepares to leave military life and join her new husband and adopted daughter on a colony world.

Gunter K. Koschorrek was a machine-gunner on the Russian front in WWII. He wrote his illicit diary on any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on. As keeping a diary was strictly forbidden, he sewed the pages into the lining of his thick winter coat and deposited them with his mother on infrequent trips home on leave. The diary went missing, and it was when he was reunited with his daughter in America some 40 years later that it came to light and became Blood Red Snow.

Diary of a War Crime is the first book in the DI Ruth Hunter crime prequel series. If you like chilling police procedurals, true-to-life characters and psychological twists, then you’ll love Simon McCleave’s addictive thrill ride. London, 1997. A series of baffling murders. A web of political corruption. DC Ruth Hunter thinks she has the brutal killer in her sights, but there's one problem. He’s a Serbian War criminal who died five years earlier and lies buried in Bosnia.

In 1939, 17-year-old Mary found herself in an extraordinary position at an extraordinary time: it was the outbreak of the Second World War and her father, Winston Churchill, had been appointed first lord of the admiralty; within months he would be prime minister. The young Mary Churchill was uniquely placed to observe this remarkable historical moment and her diaries - most of which have never been published - provide a front-row view of the great events of war, as well as exchanges and intimate moments with her father.

In 1854, a quarter of a million British soldiers headed east to fight in the Crimean War. Together with their French and Turkish allies, the goal was to free the important port city of Sevastopol from the clutches of Russia, thus keeping them from the seizing control of the Red Sea and thence Mediterranean. This they did, but not without considerable hardship, suffering and loss of life - over 21,000 British men fell to enemy fire, accidents and disease.

"War Diary: The Diary of Mike Rogers" is a poignant historical record that chronicles the experiences of a young boy, Mike Rogers, during World War II. The diary begins in 1939, capturing the tense atmosphere as Britain enters the war. It provides detailed daily entries that cover the significant and mundane aspects of wartime life, from the fear of air raids and the impact of rationing to personal reflections and observations of everyday occurrences.

In 1943, Kathleen, then thirty, was a nurse-in-training at the Blackburn Royal Infirmary. For the next three years, she kept a meticulous diary of her day-to-day existence, leaving behind a vivid record of the real-time concerns of a busy, thoughtful woman on the frontline of the war at home. Kathleen’s days were never the same. She writes in clear and lively prose about life in the hospital: of her fellow nurses, her patients, about death and dying, and the progress of the war as wounded soldiers returned from Normandy in the summer of 1944.

The war on the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1945 was the bloodiest combat theater in the bloodiest war in history. Oberleutnant Friedrich Wilhelm Sander experienced this bloodshed firsthand when serving with the 11th Panzer-Regiment. This regiment made up the core of the 6th Panzer-Division, one of Hitler's top armored formations, which was involved in most of the major campaigns on the Eastern Front; campaigns such as Operation Barbarossa and Operation Winter Storm.

This is the Marathi translation of The Diary of a Young Girl - a compilation of diary writings of Anne Frank, a girl who had to resort to hiding along with her family because of the Nazi occupation. This book has received widespread publicity and is one of the most famous literatures of the Nazi era. This book has been translated in more than 60 languages and has received critical acclamation. Anne Frank died of typhus in a concentration camp and her diary was successfully retrieved by Miep Gies, who handed it to Anne’s father, the lone survivor from the family.

Anne Frank, it has been said, gave a face and a name to the horror of the Holocaust. This is her story. It relates how Anne, her family, and their friends hid in secret rooms - "the Annex" - in an Amsterdam warehouse for 25 months. Anne, just 13 when the family moved in and only 15 when the Gestapo at last broke down the doors of her secret world, found hope where there was only fear and the first blush of love when outside and all around there washed a sea of hate.

Germany, 1945. As the ground shakes and the air raid sirens wail, Katja holds her tiny baby to her chest. She pictures Karl’s handsome face and kind blue eyes, her breath catching at the thought of him heading back to the front. She must never tell anyone about the letters she delivered for him or the other secret she is hiding....

By the acclaimed journalist and New York Times best-selling author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, this day-by-day eyewitness account of the momentous events leading up to World War II in Europe is the private, personal, utterly revealing journal of a great foreign correspondent.

In April 1938, a man calling himself Josef Hofmann arrives at a boarding house in Hamm, Germany, and lets a room from the widow who owns it. Fifty years later, Walter Gersdorff, the widow's son, who was 11 years old in the spring of 1938, discovers the carefully hidden diary the boarder had kept during his stay, even though he should never have written any of its contents down. What Walter finds is a scathing chronicle of one the most tumultuous years in German history, narrated by a secret agent on a deadly mission.

A radio broadcaster and journalist for Edward R. Murrow at CBS, William L. Shirer was new to the world of broadcast journalism when he began keeping a diary while on assignment in Europe during the 1930s. Shirer’s Berlin Diary, which is considered the first full record of what was happening in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, appeared in 1941. Shirer returned to the European front in 1944 to cover the end of the war. End of a Berlin Diary chronicles this year-long study of Germany after Hitler.

The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness. Dr. Hachiya's compelling diary was originally published by the UNC Press in 1955, with the help of Dr. Warner Wells of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Test for Alistair: 1) How can I stop Mum and Dad discovering that I am the thickest one in the family? a) Cheat at all my exams? b) Change my family? c) Make big brother and sister fail their exams too? 2) Why does big sister Mel need total silence while she's revising? a) So she can sleep? b) So she can hear phone ring when boyfriend no. 103,244 calls? c) Because she's training to be a nun? 3) Should Mum shave the beard off a goat before she cooks it for her latest TV chef project?

This Diary of the Second World War has been able to cover all facets of the conflict and is a fundamentally empirical work, which narrates events as they occurred, rejecting value judgments, and therein lies its value: It is an insurmountable encyclopedia published now as an audiobook. This World War II Diary represents a milestone in this field.