Showing results for "Brian" in World War II & Holocaust

The island of Tarawa, a tiny spit of sand out in the middle of the Pacific, teemed with five hundred pillboxes filled with artillery pieces and highly motivated Japanese soldiers. Their commanding officer encouraged his troops, saying, “It would take one million men one hundred years” to conquer Tarawa. They were convinced that the Americans would be slaughtered before they ever got ashore.

For Sergeant Pete “Hardball” Talbot, recently returned from being wounded on Tarawa seven months earlier, Saipan is just another battle as the United States leaps island to island toward an invasion of the Japanese homeland. But the Japanese have learned, all too well, how to defend their islands, with carefully constructed and concealed bunkers and machine gun nests. Talbot and the dozen men of Second Squad have no idea they are running headlong into thirty-five thousand Japanese soldiers who have sworn to fight to the last man.

The Willow Wren is based on the true story of a neurodivergent boy growing up in Nazi Germany, surviving bombing, the Hitler Youth, and Russian occupation before escaping to the west.