World War II continues to fascinate us--the 80th anniversary of D-Day on the beaches of Normandy showed that the war is still considered a watershed event for Western society. The lessons of WWII must be recounted for current and future generations, or we all may be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, with potentially more devastating results this time. April, 1945. While German soldiers know they are defeated--Germany's borders breached, concentration camps horrors discovered, cities bombed into rubble--hard-core Nazis won't give up. Soviet troops enter Berlin. Hitler commits suicide. Yet his fanatical followers vow to fight a guerilla war until the military leadership agrees to unconditional surrender. Fear of the Russians lead German troops into the arms of the Americans, until millions are literally penned up behind barbed wire waiting for the war to end. When it's over, some German units don't believe it and have to check with their superiors before laying down arms--creating incredibly tense standoffs. Suddenly, masses are on the move--POWs returning to their militaries; interned and enslaved people returning to their homes in France, Poland, Russia; concentration camp survivors trying to return home only to find their houses occupied and their belongings taken; American troops "vacationing" on the French Riviera before demobilizing and returning to the States. A massive cleanup begins. New people come in to handle the overwhelming logistical problems of feeding and housing and transporting millions. Opportunists and businessmen arrive looking to do deals and snap up German technology at bargain basement prices. The Last Days of World War II draws from over 140,000 hours of oral histories from Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation and the National World War II Museum. Wars may be fought by armies, but they are made up of people who wrote touching letters, took candid photos, and recorded their impressions and memories that bring those days back to life. The Last Days of WWII is a page-turning read.
Douglas Keeney is a historian, researcher, speaker, and author of more than a dozen books on American history. After spending sixteen years as an advertising executive at many of the top advertising agencies including Ogilvy & Mather and Young & Rubicam, he launched Douglas Keeney & Company, a publishing and production firm that includes content creation for cable television networks and book packaging. In 1992, Keeney cofounded The Military, now Discovery Communications, and hosted the series "On Target." He is probably best-known for unearthing the official U.S. manual on how the government would function after a devastating nuclear attack--the basis for his book by the same name, The Doomsday Scenario, excerpted by the New York Times. This was followed by the first exhaustive history of the air war against Nazi Germany in the bestseller, The Pointblank Directive (Osprey/London). The Eleventh Hour (Wiley) was another bestseller and was widely reviewed as groundbreaking and comprises unseen diaries and logs chronicling Franklin D. Roosevelt's trip to the 1943 Tehran Conference. He is also the editor of the Lost Histories of World War II book series. He has appeared on Fox, The Discovery Channel, CBS, PBS, and The Learning Channel. Keeney earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Southern California. During his years in marketing, he won numerous awards for new product development. A pilot and scuba diver, he lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, the journalist Jill Johnson Keeney.
