Military Audiobooks | History

As never before, the American public is fascinated by how the United States government gathers intelligence. And there is no one better than Admiral Stansfield Turner, CIA Director under President Carter, to reveal the politics and personal issues that can interfere with how the President of the United States deals with the Intelligence Community and the CIA Director in particular. In never before told anecdotes, Admiral Turner takes the reader inside the White House, into closed door meetings and tense discussions, showing the workings of the US government with a kind of understanding that comes from being an intimate of many high-level government officials, including ex-Presidents. Admiral Stansfield Turner served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1977-1981. As such, he headed both the Intelligence Community (composed of all of the foreign intelligence agencies of the United States) and the Central Intelligence Agency. He was responsible for developing new procedures for closer oversight of the Intelligence Community by Congress and the White House, led the Intelligence Community in adapting to a new era of real-time photographic satellites and instituted major management reform at the CIA. Previously as an Admiral in the U.S. Navy he served as commander of the U.s. Second Fleet and NATO Striking Fleet Atlantic, and as the commander-in-chief ofNA TO's Southern Flank. This is his fifth book.

Admiral Stansfield Turner (Author), Michael Prichard (Narrator)

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The Jedburghs

The first full history of the pioneering Special Forces units of World War II-dropped behind German lines into France to assist with the D-Day landings-told by a former U.S. Special Forces colonel with unique access to surviving veterans The story of the Special Forces in World War II has never fully been told before. Information about them began to be declassified only in the 1980s. Known as the Jedburghs, these Special Forces were selected from members of the British, American, and Free French armies to be dropped in teams of three deep behind German lines. There, in preparation for D-Day, they carried out what we now know as unconventional warfare: supporting the French Resistance in guerrilla attacks, supply-route disruption, and the harassment and obstruction of German reinforcements. Always, they operated against extraordinary odds. They had to be prepared to survive pitched battles with German troops and Gestapo manhunts for weeks and months while awaiting the arrival of Allied ground forces. They were, in short, heroes. The Jedburghs finally tells their story and offers a new perspective on D-Day itself. Will Irwin has selected seven of the Jedburgh teams and told their stories as gripping personal narratives. He has gathered archival documents, diaries and correspondence, and interviewed Jed veterans and family members in order to present this portrait of their crucial role-a role recognized by Churchill and Eisenhower-in the struggle to liberate Europe in 1944-45. This is narrative history at its most compelling; a vivid drama of the battle for France from deep behind enemy lines.

Will Irwin (Author), Patrick Lawlor (Narrator)

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My Detachment

My Detachment is a war story like none you have ever read before, an unromanticized portrait of a young man coming of age in the controversial war that defined a generation. In an astonishingly honest, comic, and moving account of his tour of duty in Vietnam, master storyteller Tracy Kidder writes for the first time about himself. This extraordinary memoir is destined to become a classic. Kidder was an ROTC intelligence officer, just months out of college and expecting a stateside assignment, when his orders arrived for Vietnam. There, lovesick, anxious, and melancholic, he tried to assume command of his detachment, a ragtag band of eight more-or-less ungovernable men charged with reporting on enemy radio locations. He eventually learned not only to lead them but to laugh and drink with them as they shared the boredom, pointlessness, and fear of war. Together, they sought a ghostly enemy, homing in on radio transmissions and funneling intelligence gathered by others. Kidder realized that he would spend his time in Vietnam listening in on battle but never actually experiencing it. With remarkable clarity and with great detachment, Kidder looks back at himself from across three and a half decades, confessing how, as a young lieutenant, he sought to borrow from the tragedy around him and to imagine himself a romantic hero. Unrelentingly honest, rueful, and revealing, My Detachment gives us war without heroism, while preserving those rare moments of redeeming grace in the midst of lunacy and danger. The officers and men of My Detachment are not the sort of people who appear in war movies-they are the ones who appear only in war, and they are unforgettable.

Tracy Kidder (Author), Tracy Kidder (Narrator)

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Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

The classic New York Times bestselling story of heroism and sacrifice--by the author of Flags of Our Fathers, The Imperial Cruise, and The China Mirage. This acclaimed bestseller brilliantly illuminates a hidden piece of World War II history as it tells the harrowing true story of nine American airmen shot down in the Pacific. One of them, George H. W. Bush, was miraculously rescued. What happened to the other eight remained a secret for almost 60 years. After the war, the American and Japanese governments conspired to cover up the shocking truth, and not even the families of the airmen were informed of what happened to their sons. Their fate remained a mystery--until now. FLYBOYS is a tale of courage and daring, of war and death, of men and hope. It will make you proud and it will break your heart.

James Bradley (Author), James Bradley (Narrator)

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The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq

The only book about the war in Iraq by a soldier on the ground-destined to become a classic of war literature. John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college tuition-it had seemed a small sacrifice to give up one weekend a month and two weeks a year in exchange for a free education. But one semester short of graduating, and newly married, he was called to active duty-to serve in Kuwait, then on the front lines of the invasion of Iraq, and ultimately in Baghdad. While serving in Iraq, Crawford began writing short nonfiction stories, his account of what he and his fellow soldiers experienced in the war. At the urging of a journalist embedded with his unit, he began sending his pieces out of the country via an anonymous Internet e-mail account. In a voice at once raw and immediate, Crawford's work vividly chronicles the daily life of a young soldier in Iraq-the excitement, the horror, the anger, the tedium, the fear, the camaraderie. All together, the stories slowly uncover something more: the transformation of a group of young college students-innocents-into something entirely different. In the tradition of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, this haunting and powerful, brutal but compellingly honest book promises to become the lasting, personal literary account of the United States' involvement in Iraq.

John R. Crawford (Author), Patrick Girard Lawlor (Narrator)

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The Boys of Pointe Du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion

Acclaimed historian and New York Times bestselling author of Tour of Duty Douglas Brinkley brings the riveting account of the brave U.S. Army Rangers who stormed the coast of Normandy on D-Day and the President, forty years later, who paid them homage. U.S. and British warships poised in the English Channel had eighteen targets on their bombardment list for D-Day morning. The 100-foot promontory known as Pointe du Hoc -- where six big German guns were ensconced -- was number one. Under the bulldoggish command of Colonel James E. Rudder of Texas, these elite forces -- "Rudder's Rangers" -- took control of the fortified cliff. The liberation of Europe was under way. Based upon recently released documents, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc is the first in-depth, anecdotal remembrance of these fearless Army Rangers. With brilliant deftness, Brinkley moves between two events four decades apart to tell the dual story of the making of Reagan's two uplifting 1984 speeches, considered by many to be among the best orations the Great Communicator ever gave.

Douglas Brinkley (Author), Douglas Brinkley (Narrator)

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Hope and Honor

Major General Sid Shachnow was ten years old when he escaped the notorious Kovno concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. He made his way across Europe where he made a living by smuggling contraband for the U. S. military. He eventually came to America and enlisted in the U. S. Army, volunteering for U.S. Special Forces, where he served for thirty-two years. After serving in Vietnam and earning two Silver Stars and three Bronze Stars with V for Valor, he rose to the status of major general in charge of all U. S. Special Forces. Since his retirement in 1991 he has traveled widely, consulting for the Pentagon on special operations in the world's trouble spots, notably North Korea. He is a much sought after public speaker and instructs from time to time at military institutions such as the U. S Army Command General Staff College and the U. S. Army War College.

General Sid Shachnow, Jann Robbins, Major General Sid Shachnow (Author), Brian Emerson, Brian Emerson (Narrator)

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Into The Rising Sun

O'Donnell uncovers the hidden history of World War II through interviews with its most elite troops. By at last telling their stories, these men present an unvarnished look at the war on the ground, a final gift from aging warriors who have already given so much. "Those seeking the uncensored truth and a dose of military history will not be disappointed." -AudioFile

Patrick K. O'Donnell (Author), Jeff Riggenbach (Narrator)

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The Fighting Pattons

Brian Sobel's The Fighting Pattons is an extraordinary history of one American family's love of war. It includes the exploits of Hugh Mercer, a famous Revolutionary War general who married in the Patton line, and Colonel Waller Tazewell Patton, who was mortally wounded at Gettysburg while taking part in Pickett's Charge. But the focus is on the careers of the twentieth-century Pattons, World War II legend General George S. Patton, Jr., and his lesser-known namesake and son, Major General George S. Patton, who fought in Korea and Vietnam and now lives quietly on the family farm in Hamilton, Massachusetts. "I fought in World War II under General Patton, and young George fought under my command in Vietnam. Thus I knew them both in peace and in battle. Your book describes them well." -General William Westmoreland

Brian M. Sobel (Author), Adams Morgan (Narrator)

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To Hell and Back

In his classic WWII memoir, Audie Murphy depicts the harrowing events of the war, relating the fear, courage, and death that followed the men he knew into battle. In the two years that he fought in Italy, France, and Germany, he killed at least 240 Germans, single-handedly destroyed a German tank in one battle and held off six tanks in another, and became the most decorated soldier in American history.

Audie Murphy (Author), Tom Parker (Narrator)

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Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out against John Kerry

Jerome R. Corsi, Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., John E. O'Neill (Author), Jeff Riggenbach (Narrator)

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Magnolia Grove

In 1898, when the Spanish- American War was not going well for the United States, Richmond Pearson Hobson survived a "suicide mission" in a failed attempt to block Santiago Harbor in Cuba and was instantly a hero. But unlike a stereotypical hero, he was a complicated man with controversial political beliefs, and he attracted as much criticism as praise.

Harvey Rosenfeld (Author), John Lescault, Patrick Cullen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Military Audiobooks in History