The name TIME-LIFE has become synonymous with providing readers with a deeper understanding of subjects and world events that matter to us all. Now, as the U.S. commemorates the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, TIME-LIFE revisits the pivotal final battles and events in one of the most influential periods in history in World War II: 1945. Between January and August of 1945, the Allies staged their last great military victories, participated in the Potsdam and Yalta conferences, and mourned the death of FDR. Adolf Hitler committed suicide, Benito Mussolini was hanged. The first atomic bomb was dropped. These are just some of the events in the closing months of World War II, a dramatic period that both marked the end of the bloodiest conflict in history and laid the groundwork for the coming Cold War. Organized chronologically, World War II: 1945 maps out the conflict's end in a visual, easy-to-digest format that illustrates key events, days, battles, personalities, military strategies, political maneuverings and betrayals. A compelling, illustrated package, the book will bring 1945 to life for a public curious to learn about the year that changed the world.

While the impact of World War II on America and other countries has been exhaustively chronicled, few historians have investigated the experiences of individual states during the tumultuous war years. In his study of Louisiana’s home front from 1939 to 1945, Jerry Purvis Sanson examines changes in politics, education, agriculture, industry, and society that forever altered the Pelican State. The war era was a particularly important time in Louisiana’s colorful political history. The gubernatorial victories of prominent anti–Huey Long candidates Sam Jones in 1940 and Jimmie Davis in 1944 reflected shifting sentiments toward politicians and heralded a changing of the guard in the statehouse. This created a system of active dual-faction politics that continued for the next decade. The war also transformed the state’s economy: agricultural mechanization accelerated to compensate for labor shortages, and industries increased production to meet military demands. Louisiana’s educational system modified its curriculum in response to the war, providing technical training and sponsoring scrap-metal collections and war-stamp sales drives. Sanson explores the war’s effect on the everyday lives of Louisianians, showing how their actions at home provided them with a sense of personal participation in the titanic effort against the Axis powers. He also points out that, while many found their lives limited by war, two groups—African Americans and women— experienced increased opportunities as they moved from low-paying jobs to more lucrative positions vacated by white males who had departed for the service. Now condensed for easy and efficient access, Sanson’s historical account provides a wide-ranging yet intimate look at how the war was brought home to the people of the Bayou State.

Although nearly 90% of the population of Great Britain remained civilians throughout the war, or for a large part of it, their story has so far largely gone untold. In contrast with the thousands of books on military operations, barely any have concerned themselves with the individual's experience. The problems of the ordinary family are barely ever mentioned - food rationing, clothes rationing, the black-out and air raids get little space, and everyday shortages almost none at all. This book is an attempt to redress the balance; to tell the civilian's story largely through their own recollections and in their own words.

Text and illustrations describe submarine warfare in the Pacific during World War II.

A marvelous global history of the pivotal year 1945 as a new world emerged from the ruins of World War II Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it. In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political “reeducation” was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective. A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma’s own father’s story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war’s end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into “normalcy” stand in many ways for his generation’s experience. A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.

A history of the Chinese experience in WWII, named a Book of the Year by both the Economist and the Financial Times: “Superb” (The New York Times Book Review). In 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, Chinese troops clashed with Japanese occupiers in the first battle of World War II. Joining with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, China became the fourth great ally in a devastating struggle for its very survival. In this book, prize-winning historian Rana Mitter unfurls China’s drama of invasion, resistance, slaughter, and political intrigue as never before. Based on groundbreaking research, this gripping narrative focuses on a handful of unforgettable characters, including Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, and Chiang’s American chief of staff, “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell—and also recounts the sacrifice and resilience of everyday Chinese people through the horrors of bombings, famines, and the infamous Rape of Nanking. More than any other twentieth-century event, World War II was crucial in shaping China’s worldview, making Forgotten Ally both a definitive work of history and an indispensable guide to today’s China and its relationship with the West.

In this remarkable account of the end of the Second World War, David Stafford looks behind the headlines of history and uncovers the stories of those, soldier and civilian alike, who had lived through the war and now must endure the daily horrors and hardships of its aftermath. Endgame 1945 is an unforgettable panorama of the defeat of Fascism, of ordinary men and women and extraordinary valour, and of Europe in every way tested to its limits. It is the final chapter of war. 'Gripping and moving . . . From a BBC reporter accompanying allied soldiers into the concentration camp at Buchenwald to a New Zealand intelligence officer working with Italian and Yugoslav partisans in Trieste, the men and women Stafford highlights pay eloquent tribute to the chaos and confusion that reigned as war metamorphosed into peace' Nick Rennison, SUNDAY TIMES