Cold War Berlin

Author : Iain MacGregor
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1982100052
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Checkpoint Charlie written by Iain MacGregor and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “constantly captivating…well-researched and often moving” (The Wall Street Journal) history of Checkpoint Charlie, the famous military gate on the border of East and West Berlin where the United States confronted the USSR during the Cold War. In the early 1960s, East Germany committed a billion dollars to the creation of the Berlin Wall, an eleven-foot-high barrier that consisted of seventy-nine miles of fencing, 300 watchtowers, 250 guard dog runs, twenty bunkers, and was operated around the clock by guards who shot to kill. Over the next twenty-eight years, at least five thousand people attempt to smash through it, swim across it, tunnel under it, or fly over it. In 1989, the East German leadership buckled in the face of a civil revolt that culminated in half a million East Berliners demanding an end to the ban on free movement. The world’s media flocked to capture the moment which, perhaps more than any other, signaled the end of the Cold War. Checkpoint Charlie had been the epicenter of global conflict for nearly three decades. Now, “in capturing the essence of the old Cold War [MacGregor] may just have helped us to understand a bit more about the new one” (The Times, London)—the mistrust, oppression, paranoia, and fear that gripped the world throughout this period. Checkpoint Charlie is about the nerve-wracking confrontation between the West and USSR, highlighting such important global figures as Eisenhower, Stalin, JFK, Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Zedung, Nixon, Reagan, and other politicians of the period. He also includes never-before-heard interviews with the men who built and dismantled the Wall; children who crossed it; relatives and friends who lost loved ones trying to escape over it; military policemen and soldiers who guarded the checkpoints; CIA, MI6, and Stasi operatives who oversaw operations across its borders; politicians whose ambitions shaped it; journalists who recorded its story; and many more whose living memories contributed to the full story of Checkpoint Charlie.

Author : Barry Turner
Publisher : Icon Books
ISBN 13 : 178578255X
Total Pages : 215 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Berlin Airlift written by Barry Turner and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed historian Barry Turner presents a new history of the Cold War's defining episode. Berlin, 1948 – a divided city in a divided country in a divided Europe. The ruined German capital lay 120 miles inside Soviet-controlled eastern Germany. Stalin wanted the Allies out; the Allies were determined to stay, but had only three narrow air corridors linking the city to the West. Stalin was confident he could crush Berlin's resolve by cutting off food and fuel. In the USA, despite some voices still urging 'America first', it was believed that a rebuilt Germany was the best insurance against the spread of communism across Europe. And so over eleven months from June 1948 to May 1949, British and American aircraft carried out the most ambitious airborne relief operation ever mounted, flying over 2 million tons of supplies on almost 300,000 flights to save a beleaguered Berlin. With new material from American, British and German archives and original interviews with veterans, Turner paints a fresh, vivid picture the airlift, whose repercussions – the role of the USA as global leader, German ascendancy, Russian threat – we are still living with today.

Author : James Stejskal
Publisher : Casemate Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1612004458
Total Pages : 383 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Special Forces Berlin written by James Stejskal and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The previously untold story of a Cold War spy unit, “one of the best examples of applied unconventional warfare in special operations history” (Small Wars Journal). It is a little-known fact that during the Cold War, two US Army Special Forces detachments were stationed far behind the Iron Curtain in West Berlin. The existence and missions of the two detachments were highly classified secrets. The massive armies of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies posed a huge threat to the nations of Western Europe. US military planners decided they needed a plan to slow the expected juggernaut, if and when a war began. This plan was Special Forces Berlin. Their mission—should hostilities commence—was to wreak havoc behind enemy lines and buy time for vastly outnumbered NATO forces to conduct a breakout from the city. In reality, it was an ambitious and extremely dangerous mission, even suicidal. Highly trained and fluent in German, each of these one hundred soldiers and their successors was allocated a specific area. They were skilled in clandestine operations, sabotage, and intelligence tradecraft, and were able to act, if necessary, as independent operators, blending into the local population and working unseen in a city awash with spies looking for information on their every move. Special Forces Berlin left a legacy of a new type of soldier, expert in unconventional warfare, that was sought after for other deployments, including the attempted rescue of American hostages from Tehran in 1979. With the US government officially acknowledging their existence in 2014, their incredible story can now be told—by one of their own.

Author : Allan Hailstone
Publisher : Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN 13 : 144567291X
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Berlin in the Cold War written by Allan Hailstone and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating insight into Berlin in a key period of the Cold War.

Author : Daniel F. Harrington
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813140641
Total Pages : 635 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Berlin on the Brink written by Daniel F. Harrington and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-06-24 with total page 635 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Berlin blockade brought former allies to the brink of war. Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union defeated and began their occupation of Germany in 1945, and within a few years, the Soviets and their Western partners were jockeying for control of their former foe. Attempting to thwart the Allied powers' plans to create a unified West German government, the Soviets blocked rail and road access to the western sectors of Berlin in June 1948. With no other means of delivering food and supplies to the German people under their protection, the Allies organized the Berlin airlift. In Berlin on the Brink: The Blockade, the Airlift, and the Cold War, Daniel F. Harrington examines the "Berlin question" from its origin in wartime plans for the occupation of Germany through the Paris Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in 1949. Harrington draws on previously untapped archival sources to challenge standard accounts of the postwar division of Germany, the origins of the blockade, the original purpose of the airlift, and the leadership of President Harry S. Truman. While thoroughly examining four-power diplomacy, Harrington demonstrates how the ingenuity and hard work of the people at the bottom—pilots, mechanics, and Berliners—were more vital to the airlift's success than decisions from the top. Harrington also explores the effects of the crisis on the 1948 presidential election and on debates about the custody and use of atomic weapons. Berlin on the Brink is a fresh, comprehensive analysis that reshapes our understanding of a critical event of cold war history.

Author : John M Schuessler
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781648430602
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Berlin Airlift and the Making of the Cold War written by John M Schuessler and published by . This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For eleven months that spanned 1948 and 1949, cargo aircraft from the air forces of the western Allies carried out one of the most extraordinary feats of peacetime military power projection in history: ferrying supplies to the city of Berlin, then under Soviet blockade. By spring 1949, the Berlin Airlift, initially considered unlikely to succeed, had convinced the Soviets that their efforts to force a solution to Berlin's future were badly miscalculated. The city became a symbol of the escalating division of Europe into competing blocs in a new Cold War order. This largely improvised military action had exerted unforeseen influence on the post-World War II world. The Berlin Airlift and the Making of the Cold War brings together historians and political scientists to explore the origins, course, and impacts of the Berlin Airlift after seventy years. Here, scholars and authorities on the Airlift, its logistics, the great power competition involved, and the position of Berlin within a divided and occupied Central Europe discuss not only the Airlift itself but also the critical role the operation played in shaping the physical and mental landscape of Cold War confrontation in Europe. The Berlin Airlift was just one of a series of decisions and events that shaped the Cold War across a global stage. It was a pivotal moment in the story of how Germany and its people experienced recovery and rebuilding after 1945. This book offers fresh insights into the legacies and lessons of the Airlift in theoretical and historical context.

Author : Giles Milton
Publisher : Henry Holt and Company
ISBN 13 : 1250247551
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Checkmate in Berlin written by Giles Milton and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a master of popular history, the lively, immersive story of the race to seize Berlin in the aftermath of World War II as it’s never been told before BERLIN’S FATE WAS SEALED AT THE 1945 YALTA CONFERENCE: the city, along with the rest of Germany, was to be carved up among the victorious powers— the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. On paper, it seemed a pragmatic solution. In reality, once the four powers were no longer united by the common purpose of defeating Germany, they wasted little time reverting to their prewar hostility toward—and suspicion of—one another. The veneer of civility between the Western allies and the Soviets was to break down in spectacular fashion in Berlin. Rival systems, rival ideologies, and rival personalities ensured that the German capital became an explosive battleground. The warring leaders who ran Berlin’s four sectors were charismatic, mercurial men, and Giles Milton brings them all to rich and thrilling life here. We meet unforgettable individuals like America’s explosive Frank “Howlin’ Mad” Howley, a brusque sharp-tongued colonel with a relish for mischief and a loathing for all Russians. Appointed commandant of the city’s American sector, Howley fought an intensely personal battle against his wily nemesis, General Alexander Kotikov, commandant of the Soviet sector. Kotikov oozed charm as he proposed vodka toasts at his alcohol-fueled parties, but Howley correctly suspected his Soviet rival was Stalin’s agent, appointed to evict the Western allies from Berlin and ultimately from Germany as well. Throughout, Checkmate in Berlin recounts the first battle of the Cold War as we’ve never before seen it. An exhilarating tale of intense rivalry and raw power, it is above all a story of flawed individuals who were determined to win, and Milton does a masterful job of weaving between all the key players’ motivations and thinking at every turn. A story of unprecedented human drama, it’s one that had a profound, and often underestimated, shaping force on the modern world – one that’s still felt today.

Author : David E. Murphy
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300078718
Total Pages : 588 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Battleground Berlin written by David E. Murphy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two veteran intelligence agents, one from the CIA and the other from the KGB, join together in an unprecedented collaboration to trace the activities of the two intelligence agencies at the start of the Cold War in postwar Berlin. UP.

Author : Paul Steege
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521864968
Total Pages : 31 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Market, Cold War written by Paul Steege and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-05 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a history of everyday life and explains how and why Berlin became the symbolic capital of the Cold War. Paul Steege anchors his account of this emerging global conflict in the terrain of a city literally shattered by World War II.

Author : Robert M. Slusser
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421432277
Total Pages : 414 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Berlin Crisis of 1961 written by Robert M. Slusser and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1973. This book uses the Berlin Crisis of 1961 as a starting point to investigate Soviet-American relations in the Kruschev period. The book first chronicles the timeline of the succession of events during the Berlin Crisis and their interrelation. It then turns to the close interaction between Soviet and foreign policy before situating the event into the broader timeline of Soviet history.