THE ZONE 9 • BODY COUNTThe Russians have dropped two hundred of their crack Spetznaz commando troops in to Frankfurt. They attack communications centres, power plants and anything that will disrupt the city and bring it to its knees. Major Revells’ Special Combat Force joins the hunt for them, and a gruesome body count is maintained.SYNOPSISA giant Russian transport aircraft evades Frankfurts anti-aircraft defences and drops two hundred paratroopers in to the city. They are Spetsnaz, the elite Russian commandos’. Falling behind the NATO frontline, catching the cities defenders by surprise, they attack communication centres, power stations and any target that will bring the city to its knees. Major Revells’ Special Combat Force has to throw itself into the effort to eliminate the deadly enemy. One by one they have to account for them, employing any tactics, any methods they can improvise. Hampered by the civilians who remain in the city the S.C.F. go after the Russian, hunting them down in a long and lethal game of hide and seek across the city. And all the time a count has to be kept, a body count.PUBLISHEDFirst NEL Paperback Edition August 1990First IMPRINT Publication E-Book Edition May 2005First Revision IMPRINT Publications E-Book Edition April 2007* * *Major Revell and his Special Combat Company, a new breed of super-warriors waging the war of the future in a land wasted by nuclear destruction, must reclaim the blood-soaked city of Frankfurt, but they find themselves outgunned by an insidious new force from inside the Zone.

Stalingrad, November 1942.

Lieutenant Breuer dreams of returning home for Christmas. Since August, the Germans have been fighting the Soviets for control of the city on the Volga. Next spring, when battle resumes, the struggle will surely be decided in Germany’s favour. Between 19 and 23 November, however, a Soviet counterattack encircles the Sixth Army. Some 300,000 German troops will endure a hellish winter on the freezing steppe, decimated by Soviet incursions, disease and starvation. When Field Marshal Paulus surrenders on 2 February 1943, just 91,000 German soldiers remain alive.

A remarkable portrayal of the horrors of war, Breakout at Stalingrad also has an extraordinary story behind it. Its author, Heinrich Gerlach, fought at Stalingrad and was imprisoned by the Soviets. In captivity, he wrote a novel based on his experiences, which the Soviets confiscated before releasing him. Gerlach resorted to hypnosis to remember his narrative, and in 1957 it was published as The Forsaken Army. Fifty-five years later Carsten Gansel, an academic, came across the original manuscript of Gerlach’s novel in a Moscow archive. This first translation into English of Breakout at Stalingrad includes the story of Gansel’s sensational discovery.

Written when the battle was fresh in its author’s mind, Breakout at Stalingrad offers a raw and unvarnished portrayal of humanity in extremis, allied to a sympathetic depiction of soldierly comradeship. After seventy years, a classic of twentieth-century war literature can at last be enjoyed in its original version.

The second book in the Red Gambit Series. Starting on the 13th August 1945, ‘Breakthrough’ follows the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of both sides in the struggle for supremacy in Europe. From Irish waters to the freezing Barents Sea, a hotel in Spain to a school house in Germany, a gutter fight in Eggenthal to true horror on the banks of the Veerse River, and from Mongolia to Nova Scotia, and into the Parliament of the United Kingdom, ‘Breakthrough’ will continue the journey through the events that became known as World War Three. [The ‘Red Gambit Series’ novels are works of fiction, and deal with fictional events. Most of the characters therein are a figment of the author’s imagination. Without exception, those characters that are historical figures of fact or based upon historical figures of fact are used fictitiously, and their actions, demeanour, conversations, and characters are similarly all figments of the author’s imagination.]

“A near-miraculous, brilliant debut.”

—George Saunders, Man Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo

“In one exquisitely crafted story after the next, Will Mackin maps the surreal psychological terrain of soldiers in a perpetual war.”

—Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment

The eleven stories in Will Mackin’s mesmerizing debut collection draw from his many deployments with a special operations task force in Iraq and Afghanistan. They began as notes he jotted on the inside of his forearm in grease pencil and, later, as bullet points on the torn-off flap of an MRE kit. Whenever possible he incorporated those notes into his journals. Years later, he used those journals to write this book.

Together, the stories in Bring Out the Dog offer a remarkable portrait of the absurdity and poetry that define life in the most elite, clandestine circles of modern warfare. It is a world of intense bonds, ancient credos, and surprising compassion—of success, failure, and their elusive definitions. Moving between settings at home and abroad, in vivid language that reflects the wonder and discontent of war, Mackin draws the reader into a series of surreal, unsettling, and deeply human episodes: In “Crossing the River No Name,” a close call suggests that miracles do exist, even if they are in brutally short supply; in “Great Circle Route Westward Through Perpetual Night,” the death of the team’s beloved dog plunges them into a different kind of grief; in “Kattekoppen,” a man struggles to reconcile his commitments as a father and his commitments as a soldier; and in “Baker’s Strong Point,” a man whose job it is to pull things together struggles with a loss of control.

Told without a trace of false bravado and with a keen, Barry Hannah-like sense of the absurd, Bring Out the Dog manages to capture the tragedy and heroism, the degradation and exultation, in the smallest details of war.

Burial in the Clouds is the first English language translation of Hiroyuki Agawa's classic novel of World War II, Kumo No Bohyo.A powerful novel, it takes the form of the war-time diary of a young Japanese college student inducted into the Imperial Navy at the height of World War II. Trained as a combat pilot, he is transferred to one of the new "special attack" or "kamikaze" units when the tide of the war turns against Japan.Like many young men of his generation, Jiro Yoshino, once a scholar of the humanities immersed in the study of poetry and philosophy, will offer everything he has to his country—his body, mind, and soul. By the age of twenty-five, Yoshino understands that his life, and those of his friends, will almost certainly be forfeit to the machinery of war.This wonderful translation brings to life the harsh realities of war as it explores the personal stories of these young soldiers.

Brutal battles in the icy wastes of the Eastern Front are lit at night by burning magnesium flares. This gripping novel of war, and the timeless ethos of the warrior, follows Arno Greif, a Swedish volunteer in the German Army. Come with him, from the heady advances of 1941 through to the bitter fighting in the ruins of the Reich in 1945.

Burning Magnesium has clear echoes not just of Junger’s Storm of Steel but also of Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914. Author Lennart Svensson plunges his readers deep into both the operational details of World War Two combat and the mind of the fighting man.

By several near miraculous quirks of Fate, Arno survives the war, but the psychological and spiritual impact stays with him in the years that follow. Vivid flashbacks and a myriad of well-researched details repeatedly hurl both Arno and the reader back into his wartime world of attack and counter-attack, clattering tanks, the chink of empty brass cases, bloodstained snow and the screams of dying men.

Written without sentimentality or judgement, Burning Magnesium gives a long-overdue human dimension to the men who fought for Germany in the most brutal and decisive theatre of the Second World War.

Заглавие этой книги очень хорошо отражает ее содержание — это действительно фронтовые воспоминания без приукрас. Тяжелые воспоминания. Автор книги Евстахий Загачевський два с половиной года, прежде чем он перешел в 14–ю дивизию Войск СС «Галиция», постоянно находился на Восточном фронте, на передовой, в составе 3–й танковой дивизии СС «Тотенкопф».Тяжелые фронтовые будни и военный быт, непрерывные бои, ранения, смерть боевых друзей, — все это ярко обрисовано в правдивых показаниях очевидца и участника событий трагической эпохи Второй мировой войны.Автор отбыл настоящую фронтовую одиссею, на это указывают уже сами заголовки разделов: «В лесах под Невелем», «Великие Луки», «Десять дней под Ельней», «Ярцево». Несколько раз был ранен в боях.Как только началось активное формирование дивизии Войск СС «Галиция», он просил о переводе туда. Но это произошло не так быстро, как хотелось: лишь во второй половине 1944 года, а именно, во время переформирования дивизии после Бродской катастрофы. Как фронтовой ветеран, Загачевський вскоре был откомандирован на 3–месячную сержантскую учебу.Вместе с Дивизией «Галичина» автор отбыл вторую часть фронтовой одиссеи: борьба с партизанами в Словакии и в Словении, последние тяжелые бои в Австрии с Красной армией, передкапитуляционное отступление с фронта на запад, и наконец, «Три полных года неволи» (1945–48) в английском плену.

From the award-winning Serbian author David Albahari comes a devastating and Kafkaesque war fable about an army unit sent to guard a military checkpoint with no idea where they are or who the enemy might be.

Atop a hill, deep in the forest, an army unit is dropped off to guard a checkpoint. The commander doesn’t know where they are, what border they’re protecting, or why. Their map is useless. The radio crackles with a language no one can recognize. A soldier is found dead in a latrine and the unit vows vengeance—but the killer, like the enemy, is unknown. Amid orgies and massacres, the commander struggles to maintain order and keep his soldiers alive, but he can’t be sure whether they’re fighting a war or caught in some bizarre military experiment.

Equal parts Waiting for Godot and Catch-22, David Albahari’s Checkpoint is a haunting and hysterical confrontation with the absurdity of war.

Germany, 1985.The Reich Council has fallen and the Reich is sundered in two, but the uneasy peace will not last long. To the east, Karl Holliston – now styling himself the Fuhrer of the Greater German Reich – is planning the conquest of Berlin and the destruction of the rebels, while to the west Germany’s former satellites are planning a bid for independence and the North Atlantic Alliance is uneasily considering just what will happen to the Reich’s vast arsenal of nuclear weapons.As the civil war begins, as the Panzers begin their advance on Berlin, the rebels are forced to fight to save their revolution……Or watch helplessly as a jackboot stamps down on Germany, forever.[Like my other self-published Kindle books, Chosen of the Valkyries is DRM-free. You may reformat it as you choose. There is a large sample of the text – and my other books – on my site: chrishanger.net. Try before you buy.]

Imagine your home is bombed one Sunday afternoon by a horde of enemy planes. Imagine your family has gone and you are left behind. This is the fate of five-year-old Peter and two teenagers Yuri and Tanya.Imagine being ordered to leave school to fight the terrifying Nazis in WWII. Imagine you are right in the middle of a battle; it’s you or them – you have no choice. This is the fate of Vlad and his three classmates.The battlefield is the city of Stalingrad, the pride of Russia. Germany’s Adolf Hitler wants the city badly, but Josef Stalin refuses to let go.Nobody has managed to stop the triumphant Nazi invasion across Europe. It all depends on one city – Stalingrad – her citizens, her soldiers and her children.

From the critically acclaimed author of The 25th Hour, a captivating novel about war, courage, survival — and a remarkable friendship that ripples across a lifetime.During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful Soviet colonel to use in his daughter’s wedding cake. In a city cut off from all supplies and suffering unbelievable deprivation, Lev and Kolya embark on a hunt through the dire lawlessness of Leningrad and behind enemy lines to find the impossible.By turns insightful and funny, thrilling and terrifying, City of Thieves is a gripping, cinematic World War II adventure and an intimate coming-of-age story with an utterly contemporary feel for how boys become men.

THE ZONE 8 • CIVILIAN SLAUGHTERThe Special Combat force is hardened to horror but during a truce they find a KGB battalion has exceeded anything they’ve seen. In a fury, despite the truce, despite threats from their own commanders, they decide to extract a revenge. They set out to wipe them out the KGB battalion to the last man.SYNOPSISThe men of the Special Combat Force have become hardened to atrocities performed by the Warsaw Pact armies. Or they thought they had. During a shaky truce, when those highly trained and experienced fighters are given mundane jobs, they discover mass graves and evidence of the grossest atrocities being performed on civilians. The evidence is that the horrors are perpetrated by a KGB battalion opposite their position. Driven to fury by what they have witnessed the Special Combat Force decide to take matters into their own hands when their reports are ignored and they are even threatened with disbandment if they don’t drop the accusations. Extracting revenge and putting a stop to further violations makes them enemies on both sides but nothing stops them, and they won’t stop until the job is done.PUBLISHEDFirst NEL Paperback Edition April 1989First IMPRINT Publication E-Book Edition May 2005First Revision IMPRINT Publications E-Book Edition April 2007* * *A shaky truce has been called, and Major Revell’s Special Combat Company has been assigned mundane duties. But when evidence turns up of civilians being slaughtered by a KGB battalion, Revell and his men take matters into their own hands, waging merciless war on the vicious Reds.

Following the events Jerry Mitchell encountered in Dangerous Ground, the pilot-turned-submarine officer is now a department head, the navigator, aboard USS Seawolf. Now on a mission deep in the Barents Sea, north of Russia, Seawolf explores the sea floor, part of a sophisticated reconnaissance plan that will watch the Russian navy as it trains for battle. Although well outside Russia’s territorial waters, Seawolf is ambushed by Russia’s newest submarine, Severodvinsk. Although it doesn’t fire any weapons, its aggressive new captain, Alexi Petrov, harasses the intruder with dangerously fast, insanely close passes by the American boat.The two subs collide, with the Russian boat crippled and trapped on the bottom. Only Seawolf knows where she is, and the rest of the Russian fleet is too angry to listen. Mitchell and his shipmates have to keep their own damaged boat afloat, figure out a way to make the Russians listen, and keep the trapped Russian submariners alive until they can be saved — if that is even possible.

Günter Grass has been wrestling with Germany's past for decades now. In this new novel Grass [examines a subject that has long been taboo — the suffering of Germans during World War II.It is the story of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, J a former cruise ship turned refugee carrier, by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people, most of them women and children fleeing from the advancing Red Army, went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time.Grass's narrator is one of the few survivors, a middle-aged journalist who lives in Berlin. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke tries to piece together the tragic events. While his mother Tulla sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been more normal, less touched by the past. For his teenage son Konrad, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corner of the internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime agony.

«Дневник Z» — история о том, как человек, шокированный сообщением о начале СВО, не устремился в Верхний Ларс в компании «нетвойнистов», а пересёк погранпереход Изварино и добровольно оказался в охваченной пламенем ЛИР. Не в качестве солдата, а журналиста.Это не хроника военных событий, а откровение автора, его дневник: о себе, о людях, о войне. Войне, которую он возненавидел, по которая открыла для него мир добродетелей. Войне, которая изменила его. Которая изменила всех пас.Книга охватывает период с марта 2022-го по июль 2023 года. Весна страшных городских битв, лето побед и триумфов на освобождённых территориях, осень драматических потерь и депрессия отступлений. Счастливые случаи на войне, беседы со сторонниками и противниками Русского мира, сложный моральный выбор: убить врага или остаться журналистом, стрелковый бой изнутри, работа с «вагнерами» в Бахмуте (Артёмовск), беспримерные подвиги наших бойцов и мирных жителей Донбасса. Эта книга запомнится вам яркими и живыми портретами её героев. Она не про пушки, опа про людей.

They joined an R.A.F. known as “the best flying club in the world”, but when war pitches the young pilots of 409 Squadron into battle over Germany, their training, tactics and equipment are soon found wanting, their twin-engined bombers obsolete from the off. Chances of completing a 30-operation tour? One in three. At best.

Robinson’s crooked salute to the dogged heroes of the R.A.F.’s early bombing campaign is a wickedly humourous portrait of men doing their duty in flying death traps, fully aware, in those dark days of war, there was nothing else to do but dig in and hang on.

The USS Memphis, a dilapidated submarine that that should have been mothballed decades ago, has been given one last mission by the newly elected president. The task: To sneak illegally into Russia’s coastal waters and recon the leaking nuclear fuel containers hidden on the floor of the Arctic Ocean. More than just an environmental nightmare, this radioactive burial ground houses enough nuclear capability to destroy most of America’s major cities.The Memphis’s commander, Lowell Hardy, had been looking forward to flag rank and pleasant duty upon the sub’s decommissioning. Now he is trapped in an inconceivably dangerous and illegal mission which could easily end his career, if not his life and the lives of his crew. But it’s the crew who feel Hardy’s tension as he tyrannizes everyone on board to ensure they’ll be ready for anything:Jerry Mitchell: a former naval pilot with political connections, he is a novice submariner, unprepared for his demanding job as a weapons officer. Central to the Memphis’s mission, Mitchell may be its greatest liability… or its ultimate salvation.Dr. Joanna Patterson: The senior civilian scientist, appointed by and reporting to the president, she is a world-class expert on nuclear fuel contamination—and every bit as demanding as Hardy. Patterson and her partner, Dr. Emily Davis, soon find themselves battling flaring tempers, faulty machinery, lethal radioactivity, and the raging arctic seas.The submariners: Seething with rage at their Captain Bligh-like commander and the equally domineering Joanna Patterson, they are also at war with Jerry Mitchell, and one another. Like the captain, they feel they deserve better, not this antiquated relic, not this hostile scientist, not this novice weapons officer, and definitely not this disastrously dangerous mission.Nor is the mission what it seems. Lurking beneath the frigid, black, radioactive waters is a secret far more deadly than anything naval command could imagine—a secret so menacing the Russian Fleet is hell-bent on destroying the Memphis and all who sail in her.