James Lucas Bücher

James Lucas was an acclaimed military historian who worked for many years at the Imperial War Museum. He is the author of numerous bestselling books about the Second World War.

Machine gun bullets could not harm the tiger, now arrogantly destroying the British vehicles as it cruised along the column... In the market square personnel carriers were driven into side streets to clear the area. On the road the vehicles were halted awaiting futher orders. Just below the crest of point 213 commanders were making frantic efforts to bring their vehicles out of the confusion all round them and to get them into action. Wittmann saw them and appreciated the threat which they might pose. He decided to switch targets...

Without these secret agents paving the way, Germany would have found it far more difficult to invade Czechoslovakia and Poland. Kommando details the stunning achievement of Nazi operatives in naval warfare, including suicide pilots, human torpedoes, and the young people of the Werewolf, trained in partisan warfare.

"By the summer of 1944, Germany was in a crisis. The Allied landings had forced another battle arena upon an army already fighting on the vast Eastern Front. The July bomb plot attempt on Hitler's life made the dictator even more paranoid and suspicious of his own military commanders. In this absorbing study, James Lucas examines the changing structure of the army throughout this final year of war, and reveals the often surprising measures taken to confront a situation Hitler had never contemplated, and never really accepted. From D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge and on to the Fall of Berlin, the author explores the last battles fought by the German army - which had by no means given up its struggle - as the Allies swept across Europe, charting the very unique experiences of a military force moving from dominance to defeat." --

The daring, courage and skill of the highly-trained men who spearheaded German assaults in the blitzkrieg of 1940, dropping from the air to seize and overwhelm key invasion points, showed to an alarmed world that a new dimension had been added to the science of warfare. The German paratroopers' most spectacular success was the invasion and capture of Crete in May 1941. For the rest of the war the parachute troops were used almost exclusively in a ground role, but they remained an elite, justifying again and again their great reputation for courage and hard fighting in Russia, North Africa and Italy. James Lucas, well-known as a military historian, has researched deep into Allied and German archives and interviewed many of the leading members of the Fallschirmjaeger units and formations who survived the war. This resulting book is a fascinating and dramatic account of the elite German airborne forces of the Second World War.

Blood, fire and iron: An unforgettable portrait of the most feared soldiers of World War Two In the closing years of the 1930s, German agent-provocateurs worked in secrecy. These crack units of elite soldiers paved the way for the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland, the spark that would ignite a war across Europe. In time, they would go on to shape the conflict with terrifying ferocity and skill. The mysteries of German special forces are revealed here, with incisive analysis of naval, military and aerial operations, and vivid descriptions of suicide pilots, human torpedoes and explosive motor boats. James Lucas delivers one of the fullest and most accessible ever accounts of the elite troops known as Kommandos, across both their achievements and failures to stave off impending military defeat. This is war at its toughest, most harrowing and most extreme.

When the Third Reich collapsed, 70 million Germans were left bewildered and terrified, their leaders dead or incarcerated; the victors saw fully for the first time the unbearable legacy of death, atrocity, and destruction left by the Nazis. Here is the view from Hitler's bunker, where news came of his troops surrendering on every front. An extraordinary story of ruin, retribution, sometimes courage and occasional suicide...and the ultimate rise from these ashes of a powerful, democratic republic.

Studie detailně charakterizuje postavení Hitlerovy gardy "Leibstandarte SS" v politické a vojenské struktuře Třetí říše. Lucas především sleduje vojensko-politické postavení speciálních führerových jednotek "Leibstandarte SS" v komplexu ozbrojených sil wehrmachtu. Odhlédneme-li od dosti nestravitelného, avšak v podobných knihách často užívaného "oslavného stylu" (zdůrazňovaná disciplína, odvaha, houževnatost, kamarádské vztahy), jde o četbu pro náročnější zájemce s určitými znalostmi problematiky.