THE BOOKS OF LEAH GARRETT
BOOKS
Award-winning histories of courage, resistance, and lives nearly lost to the record.
THE NEW BOOK
The Flight Nurses’ War: The American Women Who Saved Thousands of Lives at Iwo Jima and Okinawa
BASIC BOOKS (US) · ATLANTIC BOOKS (UK) · OCTOBER 2026
The Pacific Theater was the setting for some of World War II’s bloodiest battles, and yet much of its history remains untold. In The Flight Nurses’ War, award-winning historian Leah Garrett traces the lives of eight nurses from their small-town origins to the devastation of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. They risked their lives on rickety, unpressurized aircraft and braved constant enemy assaults. As the battles intensified, Army nurses were also deployed to hospital ships and the infantry front line, where they endured disease, snipers, and kamikazes. Successfully evacuating thousands of wounded men from danger, the combat nurses freed up troops to secure both islands and help win the war.
Uncovering an extraordinary story of Second World War heroism, The Flight Nurses’ War powerfully brings to life the remarkable women who risked everything to save lives and help secure America’s success in the Pacific campaign.
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II
HARPERCOLLINS (US) · PENGUIN (UK)
ISBN-10 : 0358172039
X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos Who Helped Defeat the Nazis tells the story of a secret Jewish commando unit that fought for the British against the Nazis on the front lines of many of the major battles of World War II.
The commandos were Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany who had escaped to the United Kingdom, many through the Kindertransport. When the war began, these German-speaking Jewish refugees were rounded up and interned in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada as “enemy aliens.”
Desperate to turn the tide of the war, Winston Churchill created this top-secret commando unit in 1942. Every member was required to assume a false British name and identity. The men of X Troop served both as commandos, fighting the Nazis directly, and in counterintelligence, interrogating enemy soldiers on the battlefield. Remarkably, one of the commandos even rescued his own parents from the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
To uncover this extraordinary story, Leah declassified top-secret files, interviewed surviving commandos and their families, and conducted research in archives around the world. The story remains especially powerful because it shows how a group of Jewish refugees came together, fought back, and played a vital role in defeating the Nazi regime.
X Troop was published in hardcover and paperback in the United States by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, and in the United Kingdom and Australia by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Penguin. It was also translated into Hebrew and published by Matar Press.
The book led to dozens of events and talks at institutions including the National WWII Museum, the University of Oxford, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, West Point, The U.S. Army War College, and Holocaust museums across the United States.
WINNER OF THE JORDAN SCHNITZER AWARD FOR MODERN JEWISH HISTORY
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD
Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Cultural Expressions)
NORTHWESTERN UP, 2017 · ISBN-10 : 0810131757
Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jewish writers, traditionally cast as weak or cowardly, became central literary voices in defining what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American.
Revisiting bestselling works ranging from Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and drawing on previously unknown archival material, Leah Garrett examines how Jewish authors used World War II to reshape the American public’s ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life.