A remarkable series of over 200 eye-witness accounts taken from diaries, letters, speeches, interviews and memoirs of those who were there: pilots, sailors, generals, infantrymen, war correspondents and leaders.
These include Spitfire pilot Richard Hillary''s account of bailing out of his plane in the Battle of Britain; a German sailor''s view of HMS Royal Oak being torpedoed at Scapa Flow; insights into Rommel''s ailing health from a lieutenant in the Afrika Korps; famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle''s account of GI meals during Operation Torch; Anne Frank''s recollection of the rounding up of Jews in Amsterdam; the last letters home from anonymous German soldiers in Stalingrad; the view from a Japanese cockpit over Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941; a German officer''s memories of the airborne assault on Crete in May 1941; the firestorm following the bombing of Dresden in July 1943 in the words of a German woman; a lieutenant in the 1st Airborne Divsion''s eyewitness account of the fighting in Arnhem; Martha Gellhorn on the aftermath of the Battle of the Bulge; a British tank officer crossing the German border on 28 February 1945; on the Kokoda Trail in New Guinea; an Allied intelligence officer being executed by the Japanese; the tunnels of Iwo Jima; and a kamikaze pilot''s final letter.
