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D-Day 1944: Gold and Juno Beaches
By Ken Ford, Kevin Lyles. 2002
Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy, was the greatest sea-borne military operation in history. At the heart of the…
invasion and key to its success were the landings of British 50th Division on Gold Beach and Canadian 3rd Division on Juno Beach. Not only did they provide the vital link between the landings of British 3rd Division on Sword Beach and the Americans to the west on Omaha, they would be crucial to the securing of the beachhead and the drive inland to Bayeux and Caen. In the fourth D-Day volume Ken Ford details the assault that began the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe.The Rhine Crossings 1945
By Howard Gerrard, Ken Ford. 2007
'The last great heave of war,' according to Churchill, took place with the crossing of the Rhine in 1945. No…
invading army had crossed this great river since Napoleon's in 1805, and the task fell to Field Marshal Montgomery's 21st Army Group. Opposing them were the forces of a failing fascist regime, including battalions of old men and boys, strengthened by several formations of crack troops, including paratroopers and Panzer Grenadiers.This book details the devastating Anglo-American assault from Arnhem, starting with the battle of Arnhem, and leading on to the successful crossing of the Rhine and eventual breakout, and continuing with the advance across northern Germany. Including comprehensive details on all aspects of the operation, including the amphibious assault, airborne landings, special forces' attack and armored land battle, this book charts the history of the last great set-piece battle of the war, second in magnitude only to the Normandy invasion, that ultimately brought the defeat of Hitler's Nazi regime one step closer.From the Trade Paperback edition.Conversations with Major Dick Winters
By Cole C. Kingseed. 2014
On the hellish battlefields of World War II Europe, Major Dick Winters led his Easy Company--the now-legendary Band of Brothers--from…
the confusion and chaos of the D-Day invasion to the final capture of Hitler's Eagle's Nest. But Winters's story didn't end there. It was only the beginning. He was a quiet, reluctant hero whose modesty and strength drew the admiration of not only his men, but millions worldwide. Now comes the story of Dick Winters in his last years as witnessed and experienced by his good friend, Cole C. Kingseed. Kingseed shares the formative experiences that made Winters such an effective leader. He addresses Winters's experiences and leadership during the war, his intense, unbreakable devotion to his men, his search for peace both without and within after the war, and how fame forced him to make adjustments to an international audience of well-wishers and admirers, even as he attempted to leave a lasting legacy before joining his fallen comrades. Following Winters's death on January 2, 2011, the outpouring of grief and adulation for one of this nation's preeminent leaders of character, courage, and competence shows just how much of an impact Dick Winters left on the world. This is a story of leadership, fame, and friendship, and the journey of one man's struggle to find the peace that he promised himself if he survived World War II.Deciphering the Rising Sun
By Roger Dignman. 1943
This book is the first to document the vital role played by Americans, not of Japanese ancestry, who served as…
Japanese language officers in World War II. Covering the period 1940-1945, it describes their selection, training, and service in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps during the war and their contributions toward maintaining good relations between America and Japan thereafter. Author Roger Dingman argues that their service as codebreakers and combat interpreters hastened victory and that their cross-cultural experience and linguistic knowledge facilitated the successful dismantling of the Japanese empire and the peaceful occupation of Japan. He shows how the war changed relations between the Navy and academia, transformed the lives of these 1,200 men and women, and set onetime enemies on a course to enduring friendship. The book s purpose is twofold: to reveal an exciting and previously unknown aspect of the Pacific War and to demonstrate the enduring importance of linguistic and cross-cultural knowledge within America s armed forces in war and peace. The book is meant for general readers interested in World War II, as well as those with an interest in America's intelligence establishment and those fascinated by Japan and its relations with the United States. Based on extensive interviews with the language officers and on their wartime letters and unpublished memoirs, this history reveals how brains and a devotion to duty allowed these officers to learn an extraordinarily difficult language and use it to hasten Japan s defeat as well as to assist the transformation of the Japanese from enemy to friend of America. It is also, the author notes, a telling example of how empathy and cross-cultural understanding rather than brute force and coercion can lead to greater production of valuable intelligence and active collaboration.Utmost Savagery
By Joseph H. Alexander. 1995
On November 20, l943, in the first trial by fire of America's fledgling amphibious assault doctrine, five thousand men stormed…
the beaches of Tarawa, a seemingly invincible Japanese island fortress barely the size of the Pentagon parking lots (three-hundred acres!). Before the first day ended, one third of the Marines who had crossed Tarawa's deadly reef under murderous fire were killed, wounded, or missing. In three days of fighting, four Americans would win the Medal of Honor. And six-thousand combatants would die.Now, Col. Joseph Alexander, a combat Marine himself, presents the full story of Tarawa in all its horror and glory: the extreme risks, the horrific combat, and the heroic breakthroughs. Based on exhaustive research, never-before-published accounts from Marine survivors, and new evidence from Japanese sources, Colonel Alexander captures the grit, guts, and relentless courage of United States Marines overcoming outrageous odds to deliver victory for their country.Black Sheep
By John K Wukovitz. 2011
The turbulent life of Gregory Pappy Boyington, the top U.S. Marine ace of the Pacific, is captured in memorable detail…
by the acclaimed author of One Square Mile of Hell: The Battle of Tarawa. Wukovits pulls no punches in describing the controversial World War II fighter pilot, who was a hero to some, and a villain to others in the Corps. Boyington was a little of each as this biography of the legendary but complex figure shows. The book details the Marine s early life with abusive parents and frequent moves and his early military career and service with the Flying Tigers in Burma and China. His feats as a Corsair pilot in the South Pacific and his time in Japanese prison camps are also given full coverage. Wukovits contends that Boyington performed miserably when shunted to the sidelines and amassed a spotty record with the Flying Tigers because they treated him as an outsider. He excelled, however, when others looked to him for advice. When put in command of the Black Sheep Squadron, where the men considered him a teacher and leader, he triumphed, making his squadron the most effective in the Pacific. Called one of the preeminent historians of the Pacific War, Wukovits paints a complete portrait of Boyington that allows readers to understand the colorful World War II ace as never before.Unflinching Zeal
By Robin Higham. 2012
Noted aviation historian Robin Higham examines the evolution of the Armée de l'Air and RAF during the interwar period. Although…
France and England shared a mutual enemy in Germany, the development of the air forces of in each nation shared few commonalities.Higham demonstrates that the Armée de l'Terre dominated strategic and doctrinal planning in France. The resulting emphasis on traditional land warfare, combined with the volatility of French politics in 1920s, blunted the development of French air forces. By 1940, they were ill prepared, technologically inferior, and out manned when the Luftwaffe aircraft darkened the skies over the French countryside. Although the causes of the defeat of France in 1940 have been debated by historians, none have focused on the role and place of the Armée de l'Air in that defeat. Historians of France have been much more comfortable arguing about politics and the Armée de Terre. As Higham illustrates, however, it is important understand the impact of the development of the Armée de l'Air, its doctrine, equipment, personnel, and budgets.Comparatively, the success of the Royal Air Force in the skies over Britain was due largely to the fact that the independent RAF evolved into a sophisticated, scientifically based force, supported by consistent government practices. Higham's thorough examination, however, finds the British not without error in the two decades that followed the Treaty of Versailles. But strong government support and technological innovation during this period paved the way for success once the war began.Sole Survivors of the Sea
By James E. Wise. 1943
The incredible stories of twenty-two lone survivors of maritime disasters are presented in this collection of war and peacetime incidents.…
The dramatic accounts--including those of a British sailor who survived 133 days at sea on an open raft and a German sailor who spent 28 hours in the ocean without a life preserver--are based on a wide array of sources, including interviews with the survivors and their families and official records to back up their accuracy. Most took place in World War II, when the navies and merchant fleets of many nations roamed the seas. Each story is one of boundless courage, a tenacious will to survive, and, in many cases, good luck.The Little Giants
By William T. Y'Blood. 1987
The substantial accomplishments of the U.S. Navy's mini-carriers in such battles as Leyte Gulf, Guadalcanal, the Marianas, and Okinawa never…
gained the attention given the fast carriers, but there is little question that their vital operations played an important role in the Pacific campaign. These remarkably versatile vessels--called CVEs, baby flattops, and even jeeps--hunted submarines, escorted convoys, provided air support, and performed dozens of other tasks that are vividly described in this book. Based on interviews with the CVE crewmen and on war diaries, ship histories, and other documents, it tells a moving story of escort carrier operations, from the work of the first CVEs to their final assignment transporting GIs home after the war. Seldom-seen photographs add to this fascinating portrait of the little giants.The Divine Wind
By Roger Pineau. 1958
Operation Alacrity
By Norman Herz. 2004
To win the war against German U-boats, the Allies had to protect their convoys in the vast black hole of…
the mid-Atlantic known as the Azores Gap. In 1943 they devised a plan to set up air bases on the Azores Islands, owned by neutral Portugal. It was essential for the operation to remain secret because the Allies had to get there before the Germans, who had their own plan to build bases. Author Norman Herz took part in the Allied operation as a corporal with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' 928th Engineer Aviation Regiment. At the time he was given little information about the operation and told never to talk about what he did. After the war, Operation Alacrity remained mostly unknown, kept secret, Herz suggests, so the U.S. government would not be embarrassed--they had claimed they would not invade the Portuguese territory. In researching the book, Herz found not a word of the operation mentioned in any official U.S. history of World War II but a treasure trove of declassified memos and others documents from the files of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined U.S. U.K. Chiefs of Staff and in state department files. The story is filled with diplomatic intrigue and double-dealing, including secret meetings between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and Churchill's use of a 1373 treaty with Portugal to justly landing in the Azores. The story also involves all of the Allied engineering branches, from U.S. Navy Seabees to RAF Sappers. The success of their operation is undeniable. U-boats stopped patrolling the Azores Gap and not a single Allied troopship was lost again in the area. Today the base is an important link to American and NATO defense worldwide.The Dragon's War
By Maochun Yu. 2006
Making full use of significant new sources in Chinese-language materials, U.S. Naval Academy professor Maochun Yu provides Western readers with…
the first detailed account of military and intelligence operations conducted inside China by foreign powers between 1937 and 1945. He also addresses the profound impact of these operations upon China's nationalism, wartime politics, and overall military campaigns. Arguing that operations by the USSR, the United States, Britain, and France, in particular, challenged the authority and legitimacy of the Chinese nationalist government, he illustrates how the failure of the Nationalist Government under Chiang Kai-shek to control these operations contributed to its demise following World War II. This provocative work unveils like never before the extraordinary intrigue, command and operational manipulations, international espionage, and politics surrounding military and intelligence operations in wartime China among the allies. It covers such topics as foreign military aid programs to China; the Chinese secret police's massive joint intelligence organization with the U.S. Navy; special intelligence initiatives conducted by the British, Free French, and Americans; secret British and American dealings with the Chinese Communists; America's first covert overseas military operation (the Flying Tigers); and Soviet and American military personnel in the China theater. The author points to the remarkable political and military ramifications that these operations had in China, including the inadvertent creation of conditions that allowed the rise of Communist China. With its implications on the world scene today, such an important new perspective of China during its war against Japan will appeal to a general audience as well as to students of World War II and specialists in the military and intelligence communities.Pacific War Remembered
By John T. Mason. 1986
In this remarkable oral history collection, thirty-three participants in the turbulent epic that began with the day of infamy at…
Pearl Harbor and ended with the signing of the surrender documents in Tokyo Harbor tell their stories. Their remembrances of heartbreak, frustration, heroism, hope, and triumph were collected over a period of twenty-five years by John T. Mason. Their recollections reveal perspectives and facts not included in traditional works of history. Each selection, introduced with a preface that places it in the context of the Pacific War, takes the reader behind the scenes to present the personal, untold stories of naval history.Included are Admiral William S. Sullivan's account of the problems involved in clearing Manila Harbor of some five hundred wrecked vessels left by the departing Japanese and Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid's description of the communications breakdown at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. There are also the very personal recollections of humor and horror told by the unknown actors in the war: the hospital corpsman, the coxswain, and the machinist's mate. Originally published in 1986, this volume is an unusual and lasting tribute to the ingenuity and teamwork demonstrated by America's forces in the Pacific as well as a celebration of the human spiritNazi Steel
By Marcus O. Jones. 2012
This study explores an exemplary instance of the close interaction between private and official interests in planning and executing the…
programs of the Nazi government, namely the acquisition in 1941 of the Rombach steel works by the German industrialist Friedrich Flick. The industrial concern headed by Flick was among the largest and most influential steel producers and manufacturers of war material in the German economy during World War II. Its activities in the occupied territories of western Europe centered on control of the Rombach works, a large operation established in Lorraine in the late nineteenth-century by German industrialists and expropriated by France, along with the entire region, in the aftermath of the First World War. After successful military operations against France in 1940, the Nazi regime actively sought the collusion of the German industrial community in mobilizing the productive capacity of occupied territories for the war effort, and numerous private German businessmen advanced claims on the lucrative assets in Lorraine and adjacent regions. In his bid to gain control of the Rombach works, Flick was successful for reasons specific to his position within the Nazi German economic system and the character of his interests. This account of his activities, then, serves as a fine example of Nazi economic and occupation policy and its response to party, business, and bureaucratic influences.Nothing Less Than Full Victory
By Edward G Miller. 2007
At the onset of World War II, the U.S. Army was a third-rate ground force of 145,000 with some generals…
who still believed in the relevance of horse cavalry. Its soldiers were untrained, its doctrine out of date, and its weapons hopelessly obsolete. Four years later, the U.S. Army was engaged in a global war with a force of more than 8 million men armed with modern weapons and equipment. Nothing Less than Full Victory is the story of how American ground troops in Europe managed to defeat one of the most proficient armies in history. The author, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, draws on his twenty years of experience in military logistics and eight years of scholarly research to examine the Army s remarkable transformation. Focusing on areas rarely considered in other books on World War II, Edward G. Miller analyzes the performance of American soldiers in the 1944 45 campaign in western Europe against a background of logistics, organization, training, and deployment. In doing so, this groundbreaking work refutes decades of assumptions to reset the historical framework for comparison of U.S. and German performance over the course of the campaign. Lieutenant Colonel Miller s skillful melding of little-known individual and small-unit combat action with the various facets of generating, deploying, and projecting power allows the reader to understand as never before the true significance of what took place. This book is published in cooperation with the Association of the United States Army.Double Edged Secrets
By W. J. Holmes. 1979
Assigned to the combat intelligence unit in Honolulu from June 1941 until the end of World War II, author W.…
J. Holmes was an important part of the naval organization that collected, analyzed, and disseminated intelligence information, and his compassionate understanding of the business of intelligence gathering is unique. Here, he not only captures the mood of the period but also gives rare insight into the problems and personalities involved. The reader comes to fully appreciate the painful moral dilemma faced daily by commanders in the Pacific once the Japanese naval codes were broken. Every time the Americans made use of the enemy messages they had decoded, they increased the probability that the Japanese would realize what had happened and change their codes, thereby causing the U.S. Pacific Fleet to lose a vital edge. Withholding the information, however, could - and sometimes did - result in the loss of American lives and ships. This illuminating study reveals not only the difficulties of collecting intelligence, but of deciding when to use it.The Battle of Tassafaronga
By Russell Crenshaw. 2010
The Battle of Tassafaronga, November 30, 1942, was the fifth and last major night surface action fought off Savo Island…
during World War II s Guadalcanal campaign. It ended a string of Japanese victories, but it was also a horrible embarrassment to the U.S. Navy, which had three heavy cruisers damaged and one sunk to enemy torpedoes. After the battle, American commanders erroneously reported that multiple enemy ships had been sunk or seriously damaged, leading Admiral Nimitz to focus on training as the missing ingredient. Not until more than half a century later did Captain Russell S. Crenshaw, Jr., the destroyer Maury s gunnery officer during the battle, discover that the outcome hinged instead on critical shortcomings that had been built into the U.S. Navy before the war defective torpedoes, poor intelligence, blinding gunfire, over-confidence, and a tendency to equate volume of fire with effectiveness of fire factors that turned the battle into a crucible in which the very nature of the U.S. Navy and its weapons was tested [and] a miniature of what might have been, under other circumstances, a truly devastating defeat.Requiem for Battleship Yamato
By Richard Minear, Yoshida Mitsuru. 1923
Admiral Arleigh (31-Knot) Burke
By Ken Jones, Hubert Kelly. 1898
Germany's Last Mission to Japan
By Joseph Mark Scalia. 1996
When U-234 slipped out of a Norwegian harbor on her maiden voyage in March 1945, the submarine carried a precious…
assortment of armaments and a select group of officials destined for Japan. En route came word that Germany had surrendered, and the boat's commander, Johann Heinrich Fehler, suddenly found himself in a rogue submarine. U-234 was not only loaded with the most technically advanced weaponry and electronic detection devices of the era, but also two Japanese naval officers still at war with the Allies who preferred death to surrender. This dramatic account of the fateful voyage offers an intriguing look at the individuals involved. Until now, the legacy of U-234 has centered on her ominous cargo, including 560 kilograms of uranium oxide, the presence of which has been the focus of countless theories and conjecture.With this book Joseph Mark Scalia argues that the submarine's value lies not in her inanimate cargo but in the individuals accompanying the material to Japan. Through exhaustive research into U.S. Navy interrogation records, European and Japanese archives, and interviews with former U-234 crewmembers and other principals, Scalia has produced a fascinating portrait of proud warriors coping with defeat. Among them was a high-ranking naval judge sent to Tokyo to purge the residual elements from an infamous spy ring, an anti-aircraft and air defense expert, a top naval construction engineer, a radar expert, a Messerschmitt designer who later became project manager for the F-105 Thunderchief, and a Luftwaffe general who directed the 1939 aerial blitz of Poland and was implicated in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.Because this is the first book to be solely devoted to U-234, it also provides a thorough examination of the 1600-ton Type XB minelaying submarine, from launch to surrender on 15 May 1945 to an American destroyer. In addition, the work evaluates the technology carried aboard--an actual ME-262 fighter and masking measures for submarines were included--and places the mystery of the uranium oxide cargo in perspective.