Military Audiobooks | History

Pershing: Great Generals Series Audiobook

In this persuasive biography, Jim Lacey sheds light on General Pershing's legacy as the nation's first modern combat commander, setting the standard for today's four-star officers. When the U.S. entered into WWI in 1917, they did so with inadequate forces. In just over a year, Pershing built and hurled a one-million-man army against forty battle-hardened German divisions, defending the hellish Meuse-Argonne and turning the tide of the war. With focus and clarity, Lacey traces Pershing’s development from Indian fighter to guerrilla warrior against the Philippines insurgency to victorious commander in WWI. “A first-rate life of a great American general who is all too often overlooked or underestimated today.”—Michael Korda, author of Ulysses S. Grant and Ike

Jim Lacey, Wesley K. Clark (Author), Tom Weiner (Narrator)

Audiobook

Patton: Great Generals Series

George S. Patton was a general who achieved greatness in his field by contradicting his own nature. A cavalryman steeped in romantic military tradition, he nevertheless pulled a reluctant American military into the most advanced realms of highly mobile armored warfare. An autocratic snob, Patton created unparalleled rapport and loyalty with the lowliest private in his command. An outspoken racist, he led the only racially integrated U.S. military unit in World War II. A profoundly insecure individual, he made his Third Army the most self-confident and consistently victorious fighting force in the European theater. An exuberantly profane man, he prayed daily and believed God had destined him for military greatness. Alan Axelrod delivers a fascinating account of Patton's extraordinary life and legacy. “Axelrod has captured Patton’s checkered legacy in a balanced biography.”—Publishers Weekly

Alan Axelrod (Author), Brian Emerson, Brian Emerson (Narrator)

Audiobook

Stonewall Jackson: A Biography

Deemed “irreplaceable” by Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson assumed his nickname during the Battle of Bull Run in the Civil War. It is said that the Army of Northern Virginia never fully recovered from the loss of Jackson’s leadership when he was accidentally shot by one of his own men and died in 1863. Davis highlights Stonewall Jackson as a general who emphasized the importance of reliable information and early preparedness, who so believed in information that he had a personal mapmaker with him at all times, and he details Jackson’s many lessons in strategy and leadership.

Donald A. Davis (Author), Stefan Rudnicki (Narrator)

Audiobook

LeMay: A Biography

Packed with breathtaking air battles and ground tactics, this new addition to the Great Generals Series features the controversial command and strategies of the former Air Force Chief of Staff. Curtis LeMay was a terrifying, complex, and brilliant general. In World War II, he ordered the firebombing of Tokyo and was in charge when atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. He was responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths, a fact he liked to celebrate by smoking Cuban cigars. But LeMay was also the man who single-handedly transformed the American Air Force from poorly trained and badly equipped pilots into one of the fiercest weapons of the war. Over the last decades, most US military missions were carried out entirely through use of the Air Force. This is LeMay's legacy.

Barrett Tillman (Author), Tom Weiner (Narrator)

Audiobook

Eisenhower

This new addition to Wesley Clark's Great Generals Series features the principal architect of the Allied invasion of Europe during World War II and his relevance today. World War II expert John Wukovits explores Dwight D. Eisenhower's contributions to American warfare. American general and thirty-fourth president of the United States, Eisenhower led the assault on the French coast at Normandy and held together the Allied units through the European campaign that followed. The book reveals Eisenhower's advocacy in the pre-war years of the tank, his friendships with George Patton and Fox Conner, his service in the Philippines with Douglas MacArthur, and his culminating role as supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe. Wukovits skillfully demonstrates how Eisenhower's evolution as a commander, his military doctrine, and his diplomatic skills are of extreme importance in understanding modern warfare.

John Wukovits (Author), Brian Emerson (Narrator)

Audiobook

Ship of Ghosts

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'Son, we're going to Hell.' The navigator of the USS Houston confided these prophetic words to a young officer as he and his captain charted a course into U.S. naval legend. Renowned as FDR's favorite warship, the cruiser USS Houston was a prize target trapped in the far Pacific after Pearl Harbor. Without hope of reinforcement, her crew faced a superior Japanese force ruthlessly committed to total conquest. It wasn't a fair fight, but the men of the Houston would wage it to the death. Hornfischer brings to life the awesome terror of nighttime naval battles that turned decks into strobe-lit slaughterhouses, the deadly rain of fire from Japanese bombers, and the almost superhuman effort of the crew as they miraculously escaped disaster again and again-until their luck ran out during a daring action in Sunda Strait. There, hopelessly outnumbered, the Houston was finally sunk and its survivors taken prisoner. For more than three years their fate would be a mystery to families waiting at home. In the brutal privation of jungle POW camps dubiously immortalized in such films as The Bridge on the River Kwai, the war continued for the men of the Houston-a life-and-death struggle to survive forced labor, starvation, disease, and psychological torture. Here is the gritty, unvarnished story of the infamous Burma-Thailand Death Railway glamorized by Hollywood, but which in reality mercilessly reduced men to little more than animals, who fought back against their dehumanization with dignity, ingenuity, sabotage, will-power-and the undying faith that their country would prevail. Using journals and letters, rare historical documents, including testimony from postwar Japanese war crimes tribunals, and the eyewitness accounts of Houston's survivors, James Hornfischer has crafted an account of human valor so riveting and awe-inspiring, it's easy to forget that every single word is true.

James D. Hornfischer (Author), Marc Cashman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Ship of Ghosts: The Story of the USS Houston, FDR's Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of her

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'Son, we're going to Hell.' The navigator of the USS Houston confided these prophetic words to a young officer as he and his captain charted a course into U.S. naval legend. Renowned as FDR's favorite warship, the cruiser USS Houston was a prize target trapped in the far Pacific after Pearl Harbor. Without hope of reinforcement, her crew faced a superior Japanese force ruthlessly committed to total conquest. It wasn't a fair fight, but the men of the Houston would wage it to the death. Hornfischer brings to life the awesome terror of nighttime naval battles that turned decks into strobe-lit slaughterhouses, the deadly rain of fire from Japanese bombers, and the almost superhuman effort of the crew as they miraculously escaped disaster again and again-until their luck ran out during a daring action in Sunda Strait. There, hopelessly outnumbered, the Houston was finally sunk and its survivors taken prisoner. For more than three years their fate would be a mystery to families waiting at home. In the brutal privation of jungle POW camps dubiously immortalized in such films as The Bridge on the River Kwai, the war continued for the men of the Houston-a life-and-death struggle to survive forced labor, starvation, disease, and psychological torture. Here is the gritty, unvarnished story of the infamous Burma-Thailand Death Railway glamorized by Hollywood, but which in reality mercilessly reduced men to little more than animals, who fought back against their dehumanization with dignity, ingenuity, sabotage, will-power-and the undying faith that their country would prevail. Using journals and letters, rare historical documents, including testimony from postwar Japanese war crimes tribunals, and the eyewitness accounts of Houston's survivors, James Hornfischer has crafted an account of human valor so riveting and awe-inspiring, it's easy to forget that every single word is true.

James D. Hornfischer (Author), Robertson Dean (Narrator)

Audiobook

Blood and Thunder

In the fall of 1846 the venerable Navajo warrior Narbona, greatest of his people's chieftains, looked down upon the small town of Santa Fe, the stronghold of the Mexican settlers he had been fighting his whole long life. He had come to see if the rumors were true-if an army of blue-suited soldiers had swept in from the East and utterly defeated his ancestral enemies. As Narbona gazed down on the battlements and cannons of a mighty fort the invaders had built, he realized his foes had been vanquished-but what did the arrival of these "New Men" portend for the Navajo? Narbona could not have known that "The Army of the West," in the midst of the longest march in American military history, was merely the vanguard of an inexorable tide fueled by a self-righteous ideology now known as "Manifest Destiny." For twenty years the Navajo, elusive lords of a huge swath of mountainous desert and pasturelands, would ferociously resist the flood of soldiers and settlers who wished to change their ancient way of life or destroy them. Hampton Sides's extraordinary book brings the history of the American conquest of the West to ringing life. It is a tale with many heroes and villains, but as is found in the best history, the same person might be both. At the center of it all stands the remarkable figure of Kit Carson-the legendary trapper, scout, and soldier who embodies all the contradictions and ambiguities of the American experience in the West. Brave and clever, beloved by his contemporaries, Carson was an illiterate mountain man who twice married Indian women and understood and respected the tribes better than any other American alive. Yet he was also a cold-blooded killer who willingly followed orders tantamount to massacre. Carson's almost unimaginable exploits made him a household name when they were written up in pulp novels known as "blood-and-thunders," but now that name is a bitter curse for contemporary Navajo, who cannot forget his role in the travails of their ancestors.

Hampton Sides (Author), Don Leslie (Narrator)

Audiobook

Soldier

Over the course of a lifetime of service to his country, Colin Powell became a national hero, a beacon of wise leadership and, according to polls, “the most trusted man in America.” From his humble origins as the son of Jamaican immigrants to the highest levels of government in four administrations, he helped guide the nation through some of its most heart-wrenching hours. Now, in the first full biography of one of the most admired men of our time, award-winning Washington Post journalist Karen DeYoung takes us from Powell’s Bronx childhood and meteoric rise through the military ranks to his formative roles in Washington’s corridors of power and his controversial tenure as secretary of state. With dramatic new information about the inner workings of an administration locked in ideological combat, DeYoung makes clearer than ever before the decision-making process that took the nation to war and addresses the still-unanswered questions about Powell’s departure from his post shortly after the 2004 election. Drawing on interviews with U.S. and foreign sources as well as with Powell himself, and with unprecedented access to his personal and professional papers, Soldier is a revelatory portrait of an American icon: a man at once heroic and all-too-humanly fallible.

Karen DeYoung (Author), Roscoe Orman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell

Karen DeYoung (Author), Coleen Marlo (Narrator)

Audiobook

My American Journey

"A GREAT AMERICAN SUCCESS STORY . . . AN ENDEARING AND WELL-WRITTEN BOOK." --The New York Times Book Review Colin Powell is the embodiment of the American dream. He was born in Harlem to immigrant parents from Jamaica. He knew the rough life of the streets. He overcame a barely average start at school. Then he joined the Army. The rest is history--Vietnam, the Pentagon, Panama, Desert Storm--but a history that until now has been known only on the surface. Here, for the first time, Colin Powell himself tells us how it happened, in a memoir distinguished by a heartfelt love of country and family, warm good humor, and a soldier's directness. MY AMERICAN JOURNEY is the powerful story of a life well lived and well told. It is also a view from the mountaintop of the political landscape of America. At a time when Americans feel disenchanted with their leaders, General Powell's passionate views on family, personal responsibility, and, in his own words, "the greatness of America and the opportunities it offers" inspire hope and present a blueprint for the future. An utterly absorbing account, it is history with a vision. "The stirring, only-in-America story of one determined man's journey from the South Bronx to directing the mightiest of military forces . . . Fascinating."--The Washington Post Book World "Eloquent." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "PROFOUND AND MOVING . . . . Must reading for anyone who wants to reaffirm his faith in the promise of America." --Jack Kemp The Wall Street Journal "A book that is much like its subject--articulate, confident, impressive, but unpretentious and witty. . . . Whether you are a political junkie, a military buff, or just interested in a good story, MY AMERICAN JOURNEY is a book well worth reading." --San Diego Union Tribune "Colin Powell's candid, introspective autobiography is a joy for all with an appetite for well-written political and social commentary." --The Detroit News From the Paperback edition.

Colin L. Powell, Colin Powell, Joseph E. Persico (Author), Colin L. Powell, Colin Powell (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Soldier's Promise

After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, First Sergeant Daniel Hendrex was dispatched along with his unit, Dragon Company, to Husaybah, a small town bordering Syria in the Sunni-dominated Al Anbar province of Iraq. It was at this checkpoint, amidst relentless attacks, that Daniel and his men found the most effective ally of the war effort in the most unlikely of sources. In December 2003, a skinny Iraqi kid, about fourteen years old approached one of the soldiers at the border and said simply, "Arrest me." Jamil, as he was called, claimed to have valuable information about the insurgency, but First Sergeant Hendrex was skeptical -- especially when the boy announced that the man he wanted to turn in was his own father. The story that unfolds is one of heartbreaking tragedy, remarkable courage, and unprecedented resiliency, as this child risks everything he knows for a chance at freedom. And after the boy saves countless lives, First Sergeant Hendrex makes it his personal mission to return the boy to safety. A Soldier's Promise is the astonishing tale of two countries and two very different kinds of people joining together against terror and tyranny, and of the young man who, against all odds, gave Dragon Company what they desperately needed -- hope.

First Sergeant Daniel Hendrex, First Sgt. Daniel Hendrex (Author), Lee Sellars, Wes Smith (Narrator)

Audiobook

Military Audiobooks in History