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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.Alone on Guadalcanal
By Martin W. Clemens. 1998
This remarkable memoir tells the compelling story of the near-mythic British district officer who helped shape the first great Allied…
counteroffensive. Scottish-born and Cambridge-educated, Martin Clemens managed to survive months behind Japanese lines in one of the most unfriendly climates and terrains in the world. After countless partisan and spy missions, in 1942 he emerged from the jungle and integrated his Melanesian commando force into the heart of the 1st Marine Division's operations, earning the unfettered admiration of such legendary Marine officers as Vandegrift, Thomas, Twining, Edson, and Pate. The book is based on a journal Clemens kept during the war and might well be the last critical source of analysis of the Solomon's campaign. His eyewitness accounts of harrowing long-distance patrols and life on the run from shadowy Japanese intelligence operatives and treacherous islanders are unmatched in the literature of the Pacific War. First published in 1998, the story is essential and enjoyable reading.Intrepid Aviators
By Gregory G. Fletcher. 2012
The true story of the World War II Pacific naval battle that pitted the USS Intrepid's naval aviators against Japan's superbattleship…
Musashi. . . and made a dramatic difference in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. October 24, 1944: As World War II raged, six young American torpedo bombers were sent on a search-and-destroy mission in the Sibuyan Sea. Their target: the superbattleship Musashi, the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The pilots were tasked with preventing the immense enemy warship from inflicting damage on American supply ships. Little did these men know that they had embarked on the opening round of history’s greatestand lastepic naval battle. Two bomber crews launched in the first wave of attackers were shot out of the sky. Only pilot Will Fletcher survived the crash landing. Adrift at sea, Will made his way to land and escaped into the jungles of the Philippines, where he eluded capture by the Japanese with the help of Filipino guerrillas, whose ranks he joined to fight against their common enemy. Intrepid Aviators is the thrilling true story of these brave bomber pilots, their daring duel with the Musashi, and Will Fletcher’s struggle to survive as a guerrilla soldier. The sinking of Musashi inflicted a crucial blow in the Battle of Leyte Gulf and marked the first time in history that aviators sank a Japanese battleship on the high seas. MAIN SELECTION OF THE MILITARY BOOK CLUB INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS .Hong Kong 1941-45
By Giuseppe Rava, Benjamin Lai. 2014
On 8th December 1941, as part of the simultaneous combine attack against Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) invaded…
the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia and the British colony of Hong Kong. After only 18 days of battle the defenders, a weak, undermanned brigade was overwhelmed by a superior force of two battle-harden IJA divisions. What makes the battle of Hong Kong was not the scale - just 14,000 defended the colony - but the intensity of this battle fought not only by the British Army, Navy and Air Force but also Canadians, Hong Kong's own defence force, the Indian Army as well as many civilians. The campaign itself is characterized by a fierce land battle, with long artillery duals and as well as fast naval actions with intense actions at the Gin Drinkers Line as well as the battle of Wong Nai Chung Gap where a handful of defenders took on an entire Japanese regiment. Less known but equally important are individual valour such as CSM John Robert Osborne winning a posthumous VC, throwing himself over a Japanese grenade to save fellow combatants. Capitulation by the defenders on 25 December 1941 marks the end of one battle and the beginning of another. A subject not significantly covered by Western historian is local resistance to Japanese occupation. Lead by the communist Chinese, many continued to fight the Japanese forming the Guangdong people's Anti-Japanese East River Guerrilla Detachment that by 1945 grew from 200 to a 6,000-strong force. The guerrillas rescued downed allied pilots, harassed the Japanese with bombing and assassinated traitors and collaborators. Those Allies POW that managed to escape to China continued the fight in a secretive new organization - the British Army Aid Group (BAAG).As the war draw to a close, the question of reestablishing British control became a highly contentious diplomatic dual between China, USA and Britain, but with the death President of Roosevelt in 1945, decolonization lost its main champion and Britain was able to outmaneuver Chiang Kai Shek, the Chinese Generalissimo, and recover Hong Kong as a British Colony. After three years and eight months of Japanese occupation, Rear Admiral Sir Harcourt sailed into Hong Kong on board the cruiser HMS Swiftsure to reestablish control over the colony and accepted the formal surrender of Japan on 16 September 1945.Now the Hell Will Start
By Koerner, Brendan I.. 2008
An epic saga of hubris , cruelty, and redemption, Now the Hell Will Start tells the remarkable tale of the…
greatest manhunt of World War II. Herman Perry, besieged by the hardships of the Indo-Burmese jungle and the racism meted out by his white commanding officers, found solace in opium and marijuana. But on one fateful day, Perry shot his unarmed white lieutenant in the throes of an emotional collapse and fled into the jungle. Brendan I. Koerner spent nearly five years chasing Perry's ghost to the most remote corners of India and Burma. Along the way, he uncovered the forgotten story of the Ledo Road's GIs, for whom Jim Crow was as powerful an enemy as the Japanese-and for whom Herman Perry, dubbed the jungle king, became an unlikely folk hero. .Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front
By Jeff Rutherford. 2014
By 1944, the overwhelming majority of the German Army had participated in the German war of annihilation in the Soviet…
Union and historians continue to debate the motivations behind the violence unleashed in the east. Jeff Rutherford offers an important new contribution to this debate through a study of combat and the occupation policies of three frontline infantry divisions. He shows that while Nazi racial ideology provided a legitimizing context in which violence was not only accepted but encouraged, it was the Wehrmacht's adherence to a doctrine of military necessity which is critical in explaining why German soldiers fought as they did. This meant that the German Army would do whatever was necessary to emerge victorious on the battlefield. Periods of brutality were intermixed with conciliation as the army's view and treatment of the civilian population evolved based on its appreciation of the larger context of war in the east.The First Heroes
By Craig Nelson. 2002
18 April 1942. Sixteen planes take off from a US Navy carrier in the mid-Pacific. A squadron of young, barely…
trained flyers under a famous daredevil, Jimmy Doolittle, they are America's first retaliation towards Japan since Pearl Harbor. Their mission: to bomb Japan's 's five main cities including Tokyo. Critically compromised by the discovery of the US fleet by Japanese spies, they are not expected to come back. Having successfully delivered their bombs, most of the squadron run out of fuel and are forced to crash land in Japan, China and the Soviet Union. The stories of their journeys home are as heroic as that of the raid itself. Incredibly of the 80 flyers who left the USS . . . 90% eventually returned alive to the US. The First Heroes tells the extraordinary story of the daring raid and shows for the first time the real story of what was to be the turning point in the war against Japan.Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust
By Elhanan Yakira, Michael Swirsky. 2010
This book contains three independent essays, available in English for the first time, as well as a post-scriptum written for…
the English edition. The common theme of the three essays is the uses and abuses of the Holocaust as an ideological arm in the anti-Zionist campaigns. The first essay examines the French group of left-wing Holocaust deniers. The second essay deals with a number of Israeli academics and intellectuals, the so-called post-Zionists, and tries to follow their use of the Holocaust in their different attempts to demonize and delegitimize Israel. The third deals with Hannah Arendt and her relations with Zionism and the State of Israel as reflected in her general work and in Eichmann in Jerusalem; the views that she formulates are used systematically and extensively by anti- and post-Zionists. Elhanan Yakira argues that each of these is a particular expression of an outrage: anti-Zionism and a wholesale delegitimation of Israel.Atrocity, Deviance, and Submarine Warfare: Norms and Practices during the World Wars
By Nachman Ben-Yehuda. 2013
In the early 20th century, the diesel-electric submarine made possible a new type of unrestricted naval warfare. Such brutal practices…
as targeting passenger, cargo, and hospital ships not only violated previous international agreements; they were targeted explicitly at civilians. A deviant form of warfare quickly became the norm. In Atrocity, Deviance, and Submarine Warfare, Nachman Ben-Yehuda recounts the evolution of submarine warfare, explains the nature of its deviance, documents its atrocities, and places these developments in the context of changing national identities and definitions of the ethical, at both social and individual levels. Introducing the concept of cultural cores, he traces the changes in cultural myths, collective memory, and the understanding of unconventionality and deviance prior to the outbreak of World War I. Significant changes in cultural cores, Ben-Yehuda concludes, permitted the rise of wartime atrocities at sea.The Economics of World War II
By Mark Harrison. 1998
This book provides a new quantitative view of the wartime economic experiences of six great powers; the UK, the USA,…
Germany, Italy, Japan and the USSR. What contribution did economics made to war preparedness and to winning or losing the war? What was the effect of wartime experiences on postwar fortunes, and did those who won the war lose the peace? A chapter is devoted to each country, reviewing its economic war potential, military-economic policies and performance, war expenditures and development, while the introductory chapter presents a comparative overview. The result of an international collaborative project, the volume aims to provide a text of statistical reference for students and researchers interested in international and comparative economic history, the history of World War II, the history of economic policy, and comparative economic systems. It embodies the latest in economic analysis and historical research.Axis Midget Submarines
By Paul Wright, Mark Stille. 2014
During World War II, Germany, Japan, and Italy built approximately 2,000 small, inherently stealthy, naval craft to perform special operations…
and conventional naval missions. Much more numerous and more technically advanced than their Allied counterparts, they saw service worldwide, operating in the Pacific, Mediterranean, Black Sea, Indian Ocean, North Sea, and the English channel. Manned by courageous crews, these vessels made daring attacks on Allied ships in heavily protected anchorages using torpedoes and mines. Most notable were attacks against Gibraltar - launched from an Italian cargo vessel interred in nearby neutral Spain that had been converted into a clandestine support base and equipped with an underwater hatch - and Pearl Harbor. They were used against shipping in coastal waters and, near the end of the war, in desperate attempts to offset their opponents' overwhelming naval superiority during the US advance across the Pacific and the Allied amphibious landings in France and Italy. This volume will detail the history, weapons, and operations of German, Japanese, and Italian midget submarines.Patton's Air Force
By David N. Spires. 2014
From the time the Third Army became operational on August 1, 1944, until the guns fell silent on May 8,…
1945, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton's troops covered more ground and took more enemy prisoners than any other Allied army in northwest Europe. Brig. Gen. Otto P. Weyland's XIX Tactical Air Command (TAC) provided air support every step of the way. Their combined success is something of an anomaly; air-ground relationships are notoriously confrontational and plagued with inter-service competition. How did Patton and Weyland work together to achieve such astounding success? Drawing on exclusive access to official records, David N. Spires finds that this success was due to four key developments: the maturation of tactical aviation doctrine, effective organizational procedures, a technical revolution in equipment, and, above all, the presence of pragmatic men of goodwill who made the system work. He focuses on the highly effective personal relationship between Patton and Weyland -- men who respected, trusted, and fully relied on each other and their respective subordinates. This collaboration extended all the way down the chain of command: Patton's ground troops and Weyland's airmen trained together in England, and so by the time they entered combat, they operated together as a single unit. Contrary to conventional wisdom, air-ground relationships in the field can be cooperative rather than confrontational. Today's air and ground officers can continue to benefit from the amazing success of the Third Army and the XIX TAC.War in Val d'Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944
By Virginia Nicholson, Iris Origo. 2001
In the Second World War Italy was torn apart by German armies civil war and the Allied…
invasion In a corner of Tuscany one woman born in England married to an Italian kept a record of daily life in a country at war Iris Origo s powerful diary War in Val d Orcia is the spare and vivid account of what happened when a peaceful farming valley became a battleground At great personal risk the Origos gave food and shelter to partisans deserters and refugees They took in evacuees and as the front drew closer they faced the knowledge that the lives of thirty-two small children depended on them Origo writes with sensitivity and generosity and a story emerges of human acts of heroism and compassion and the devastation that war can bringA Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940
By Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Iris Origo, Katia Lysy. 2017
In 1939 it was not a foregone conclusion that Mussolini would enter World War II on the side of Hitler…
In this previously unpublished and only recently discovered diary Iris Origo author of the classic War in Val d Orcia provides a vivid account of how Mussolini decided on a course of action that would devastate his country and ultimately destroy his regime Though the British-born Origo lived with her Italian husband on an estate in a remote part of Tuscany she was supremely well-connected and regularly in touch with intellectual and diplomatic circles in Rome where her godfather William Phillips was the American ambassador Her diary describes the Fascist government s growing infatuation with Nazi Germany as Hitler s armies marched triumphantly across Europe and the campaign of propaganda and intimidation that was mounted in support of its new aims The book ends with the birth of Origo s daughter and Origo s decision to go to Rome to work with prisoners of war at the Italian Red Cross Together with War in Val d Orcia A Chill in the Air o ers an indispensable record of Italy at war as well as a thrilling story of a formidable woman s transformation from observer to actor at a great historical turning pointWhen Churchill Slaughtered Sheep
By Giles Milton. 2015
In this marvellous collection of fascinating footnotes, Giles Milton delves into little-known stories from history. Covering everything from adventure, war,…
murder and slavery to espionage, including the stories of the last secret of the Cold War, the man who broke into Auschwitz, the worst banker in history and the woman who gave birth for Hitler, these tales deserve to be told.On the Defensive
By Sharon Marquart. 2015
On the Defensive considers how our ethical responses to the Nazi camps have unintentionally repressed and denied the experiences of…
their victims. Through detailed readings of survivor narratives, particularly the works of political deportees Jorge Semprun and Charlotte Delbo, Sharon Marquart examines how well-intentioned people - including victims, their family members, and readers of witness literature - respond to such testimony in ways that are understood as ethical by their communities but serve instead to ignore victims' experiences.As Marquart shows, collective disasters such as the Holocaust expose the limitations of our ethical theories. To cope with this instability we withdraw and defend ourselves through inattentive and formulaic responses that turn a blind eye to the plight of victims. Challenging contemporary theorizations of community, ethics, testimony, and trauma, On the Defensive is a far-reaching reflection on the ways in which communal understandings of our duties and responsibilities to others can facilitate the denial of an atrocity's horrors.