Books about Battalions from Amazon.com

The shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews..
Price: $8.53 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Six months after her husband's sudden death, Leonora Galloway sets off for a holiday in Paris with her daughter Penelope.  At last the time has come when secrets can be shared and explanations begin...

Their journey starts with an unscheduled stop at the imposing Thiepval Memorial to the dead of the Battle of the Somme near Amiens.  Amongst those commemorated is Leonora's father.  The date of his death is recorded and 30th  April, 1916.  But Leonora wasn't born until 14th March 1917.

Penelope at once supposes a simple wartime illegitimacy as the clue to her mother's unhappy childhood and the family's sundered connections with her aristocratic heritage, about which she has always known so little.

But nothing could have prepared her, or the reader, for the extraordinary story that is about to unfold.


From the Paperback edition..
Price: $7.18 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Minnesota's toughest farm boys take on Iraqi insurgents in one of the most irreverent and outrageous memoirs to come out of the war

Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 136th Infantry Regiment of the Minnesota National Guard, composed in large part of farm kids from the Midwest who could replace a tank track on the side of the road using nothing but a crescent wrench, Zippo lighter, and a two-by-four, fought alongside the Marine Corps in Anbar province through the deadliest period of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Bravo Company earned the nickname "Bristol's Bastards" after USMC Colonel George Bristol, commanding officer of the I MEF Headquarters Group, adopted this band of fierce warriors as one of his own. Specialist Nick Maurstad, a member of Bristol's Bastards, brings to life the experience of fighting in Iraq, kicking down doors, dodging IEDs, battling insurgents in the small towns surrounding Fallujah, and trying to help one another survive in the deadliest place on earth.

Maurstad lost three friends in Iraq, and a friendly demeanor belies his own frustrations. He has intense memories, such as disarming an insurgent who was raising a handgun to shoot while in bed with his wife and children. . . . His mental hurdle for now is visiting the graves of the friends he lost.

--St. Paul Pioneer Press,

October 28, 2007.
Price: $15.79 [Notify me when price goes down.]

For some, Hill 488 was just another landmark in the jungles of Vietnam For the eighteen men of Charlie Company, it was a last stand. This is the stirring combat memoir written by Ray Hildreth, one of the unit's survivors.

On June 13, 1966, men of the 1st Recon Battalion, 1st Marine Division were stationed on Hill 488. Before the week was over, they would fight the battle that would make them the most highly decorated small unit in the entire history of the U.S. military, winning a Congressional Medal of Honor, four Navy Crosses, thirteen Silver Stars, and eighteen Purple Hearts -- some of them posthumously.

During the early evening of June 15, a battalion of hardened North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong -- outnumbering the Americans 25-to-1 -- threw everything they had at the sixteen Marines and two Navy corpsmen for the rest of that terror-filled night. Every man who held the hill was either killed or wounded defending the ground with unbelievable courage and unflagging determination -- even as reinforcements were on the way.

All they had to do was make it until dawn.....
Price: $3.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Tiger and King Tiger tanks gained legendary status during World War II. Numerous tank commanders attained phenomenal tallies of kills and accomplished extraordinary feats during combat in these tanks, building the legend to near mythic proportions after the war.

During WWII, the Germans created eleven Army and three Waffen-SS heavy tank battalions. These heavy tank battalions were employed in nearly every part of Europe against almost every enemy of Germany. As vast in breadth and scope as the employment of Tiger battalions themselves, Sledgehammers provides historical examples and analysis of heavy tank battalions’ actions in North Africa, Normandy, Italy, the Ardennes Offensive, and numerous battles on the Eastern Front including Operation ZITADELLE/the Battle of Kursk, Operation BAGRATION, the battle of the Cherkassy Pocket, late war attacks to relieve Budapest, and many other more minor engagements.

Although a great deal has already been published about Tiger tanks’ technical details and some of the units which used them, until now, very little has been written concerning the organization and tactical employment of these tanks throughout the German armed forces and across the theaters in which they were employed. Sledgehammers provides an in-depth look at heavy tank battalions’ organizations and tactics, including the tactical doctrine by which these elite units were supposed to fight and how they were actually employed on the battlefield by their commanders and crews.

Even given the Tiger’s reputation, many readers will be amazed by the fearsome casualties inflicted by the crews of many of these behemoth armored vehicles. It is safe to say that no other armored vehicle of the war wreaked as much havoc among enemy formations as Tigers. Many will, however, also find it equally stunning to learn of the Tigers’ many technical and tactical vulnerabilities. Through the systematic use of extremely detailed primary source and other impeccably reliable research, Sledgehammers demolishes several major myths about Tigers in World War II.

Meticulously researched and written with the perspective and respect for Tigers' crews that only a professional tanker can bring to the subject, Sledgehammers synthesizes information to provide new and definitive insights into the strengths and flaws of World War II’s most feared and legendary tanks.

Prologue by famed Tiger ace Otto Carius. Epilogue by Tiger killers Viktor Iskrov and Ray Holt.

35 original maps. 42 photos..
Price: $12.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Originally formed in order to lend support to the FNLA and UNITA in the Angolan war, 32 Battalion quickly gained the reputation of being an unconventional, secretive, yet highly effective group. Written by a man who was intimately involved with the unit and served as its Regimental Sergeant Major for two years, the book aims to explode the myths surrounding the legendary 32 and set the record straight. It records how and why 32 Battalion was formed, explores its unique identity forged by the men who fought in it, details the many operations in which they participated, and concludes with its eventual disbandment at the dawn of a new South Africa.

What they did, and how they did it, would earn this controversial group official recognition as the best fighting unit in the South African Army since World War II. This book’s unembellished, factual reporting will fill a big gap in the highly popular military genre..
Price: $14.86 [Notify me when price goes down.]

They were proud and doomed, Irish rogue cannoneers under a green silk banner, fighting against their former comrades-in-arms to defend Catholic Mexico against the invading U.S. Army.

Their choices were to win, die in battle, or hang as deserters. To the Mexicans they were heroic saviors, but they were seen as despicable traitors by the West Point officers who faced their grapeshot and cannonballs on every major battlefield Matamoros to Mexico City.

Survivors of the Irish battalion's deadly gunnery would later lead armies against each other in Civil War, many of them - Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Braxton Bragg - ironically deemed the same sort of traitors. This astonishing true tale from an almost forgotten war is told through the eyes of two boys who know and admire the idealistic Irish leader John Riley: an Army camp errand boy who keeps a diary, and a Mexican military school cadet whose widowed mother becomes the Irishman's tragic lover..
Price: $9.53 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In the very dream of peace lurked a monstrous treachery

The galaxy is on the brink of disaster, the long-awaited truce torn apart by an unprovoked attack. The colony whose residents represented more than a hundred planets has been destroyed, and the new vision for unity in the universe is at risk.

Faced with a war that would mean destruction and chaos, one man has stepped forward to lead those fighting for their lives. Undeterred by insurmountable odds, his courage inspires a team—the Morcai Battalion—to battle for the cause of peace…and love.

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Price: $4.08 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In January 1969, one of the most promising young lieutenant colonels the U.S. Army had ever seen touched down in Vietnam for his second tour of duty, which would turn out to be his most daring and legendary David H. Hackworth had just completed the writing of a tactical handbook for the Pentagon, and now he had been ordered to put his counterguerilla-fighting theories into action. He was given the morale-drained 4/39th -- a battalion of poorly led draftees suffering the Army's highest casualty rate and considered its worst fighting battalion. Hackworth's hard-nosed, inventive and inspired leadership quickly turned the 4/39th into Vietnam's valiant and ferocious Hardcore Recondos.

Drawing on interviews with soldiers from the Hardcore Battalion conducted over the past decade by his partner and coauthor, Eilhys England, Hackworth takes readers along on their sniper missions, ambush actions, helicopter strikes and inside the quagmire of command politics. With Steel My Soldiers' Hearts, Hackworth places the brotherhood of the 4/39th into the pantheon of our nation's most heroic warriors..
Price: $4.55 [Notify me when price goes down.]