Showing titles in Armed Forces

Into Enemy Waters is the story of World War II's most elite and daring unit of warriors, the direct precursors to the Navy SEALs, told through the eyes of its last living member, ninety-five-year-old George Morgan. Morgan was just a wiry, seventeen-year-old lifeguard from New Jersey when he joined the Navy's new combat demolition unit, tasked to blow up enemy coastal defenses ahead of landings by allied forces. His first assignment: Omaha Beach on D-Day. When he returned stateside, Morgan learned that his service was only beginning.

Since he was a child in the 1950s watching Vampires and Meteors operating from RAF Turnhouse, Jim Walls wanted to fly aircraft; he just never envisaged that his flying career would be spent in the back seat as opposed to the front. This fascinating book showcases the vital role that air electronics operators held and the importance of radar and electronic warfare in the fight against enemy forces. It is also a tribute to the much-loved Cold War icons, the Nimrod and the Vulcan. This book will appeal to Cold War enthusiasts and fans of the iconic jets of that era.

August 1990: Iraqi forces under the command of Saddam Hussein invaded the tiny emirate of Kuwait. In response, the US military led a coalition of thirty-four nations in what became known as Operation Desert Storm—a violent air and ground campaign to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait. At the tip of the spear were the men of the US Air Force’s 58th Fighter Squadron. Based on hours of interviews and archival research by author Mike Guardia, this book reveals an intimate, no-holds-barred account of modern aerial combat…as told by the men who lived it.

Operation Tidal Wave tells the story of the bloodiest air battle in the history of war. It is about 1,700 airmen who set out to bomb the oil refineries surrounding the city of Ploesti, Romania, on August 1, 1943. Success, they thought, would be a force in ending the war. Success, instead, was extremely limited, and 500 airmen were killed, wounded, captured, or interned. Negligible damage resulted at the Ploesti refineries, and a few months later, they were operating at 100 percent capacity.

Warship Builders is the first scholarly study of the US naval shipbuilding industry from the early 1920s to the end of World War II, when American shipyards produced the world's largest fleet that helped defeat the Axis powers in all corners of the globe. A colossal endeavor that absorbed billions and employed virtual armies of skilled workers, naval construction mobilized the nation's leading industrial enterprises in the shipbuilding, engineering, and steel industries to deliver warships whose technical complexity dwarfed that of any other weapons platform.

The last installment of the War in the Far East trilogy, Asian Armageddon 1944-1945, continues and completes the narrative of the first two volumes, describing how a US-led coalition of nations battled Japan into submission through a series of cataclysmic encounters. Leyte Gulf, the biggest naval battle ever, was testimony to the paramount importance of controlling the ocean, as was the fact that the US Navy carried out the only successful submarine campaign in history, reducing Japan's military and merchant navies to shadows of the former selves.

 Few events have ever shaken a country in the way that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor affected the United States. After the devastating attack, Japanese forces continued to overwhelm the Allies, attacking Malaya with its fortress of Singapore, and taking resource-rich islands in the Pacific - Borneo, Sumatra, and Java - in their own blitzkrieg offensive. Allied losses in these early months after America's entry into the war were great, and among the most devastating were those suffered during the Java Sea Campaign.

On August 9, 1945, on the tiny island of Tinian in the South Pacific, a 25-year-old American Army Air Corps major named Charles W. Sweeney climbed aboard a B-29 Superfortress in command of his first combat mission, one devised specifically to bring a long and terrible war to a necessary conclusion.... The last military officer to command an atomic mission, Maj. Gen. Charles W. Sweeney has the unique distinction of having been an integral part of both the Hiroshima and the Nagasaki bombing runs.

Bismarck entered service in the summer of 1940. She was well-armed, with eight 15-inch guns as well as a powerful array of lighter weapons, while her armored protection earned her the reputation of being unsinkable. This claim was finally put to the test in May 1941, when she sortied into the Atlantic and fought the legendary battle of the Denmark Strait, destroying HMS Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy. Bismarck was now loose in the North Atlantic.

In November 1921, the first purpose-built aircraft carrier was launched by the Japanese, followed a year later by the launch of the British Hermes. The conversion of battle cruisers into aircraft carriers after World War I required the consideration of issues including handling aircraft on the flight deck and the techniques of attacking enemy ships, and the evolution of carrier operations was ongoing when World War II broke out.  

In early 1942, while the American military was still in disarray from the devastating attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, a single U.S. Army squadron advanced to the far side of the world to face America's new enemy. Based in Australia with inadequate supplies and no ground support, the...

The prizewinning historian and internationally bestselling author of D-Day reconstructs the devastating airborne battle of Arnhem in this gripping new account. On September 17, 1944, General Kurt Student, the founder of Nazi Germany's parachute forces, heard the groaning roar of airplane engines...

This highly regarded war memoir was a best seller in both Japan and the United States during the 1960s and has long been treasured by historians for its insights into the Japanese side of the surface war in the Pacific. The author was a survivor of more than one hundred sorties against the Allies and was known throughout Japan as the Unsinkable Captain.

"A" Force explores an area of World War II deception history that has often been neglected. While older studies have focused on the D-day deception campaign and Britain's infamous double-agents, this work explores the origins of Britain's deception activities to reveal how the British became such masterful deceivers. This is the first work to focus exclusively on "A" Force and the origins of British deception, examining how and why the British first employed deception in World War II. More

Called a great book worthy of a great man, this definitive biography of the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet in World War II is considered the best book ever written about Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Highly respected by both the civilian and naval communities, Nimitz was sometimes overshadowed by more colorful warriors in the Pacific such as MacArthur and Halsey. Potter's lively and authoritative style fleshes out Admiral Nimitz's personality to help listeners appreciate the contributions he made as the principle architect of Japan's defeat. 

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The exhilarating true story of the U.S. Navy’s improbable victory at the Battle of Samar—“a dire survival-at-sea saga” (Denver Post) from the acclaimed author of Neptune’s Inferno “A critically acclaimed, blow-by-blow look at a small American force...

Elite paratrooper Sgt. Don Malarkey takes us not only into the World War II battles fought from Normandy to Germany, but into the heart and mind of a soldier who lost his best friend during the nightmarish engagement at Bastogne. Drafted in 1942, Malarkey arrived at Camp Toccoa in Georgia and...

Just days before Chad Williams was scheduled to report for basic training at the Great Lakes naval base, he turned on the television and was greeted with the horrifying image of his mentor and training partner, US Navy SEAL Scott Helvenston, being brutally murdered in a premeditated ambush on the streets of Fallujah, Iraq. Steeled in his resolve, Chad committed himself to completing the US military’s most difficult training to become a Navy SEAL - and avenge his friend’s death.

The Instant New York Times Bestseller by Co-Star of Fox's American Grit and Legendary Ranger Nicholas Irving. Groundbreaking, thrilling and revealing, The Reaper is the astonishing memoir of Special Operations Direct Action Sniper Nicholas Irving, the 3rd Ranger Battalion's deadliest sniper with...

Dave Baranek (callsign "Bio") was one of 451 young men to receive his Wings of Gold in 1980 as a naval flight officer. Four years later, seasoned by intense training and deployments in the tense confrontations of the Cold War, he became the only one of that initial group to rise to become an instructor at the navy's elite Fighter Weapons School. As a Topgun instructor, Bio was responsible for teaching the navy's and Marine Corps' best fighter pilots how to be even better. He schooled them in the classroom and then went head-to-head with them in the skies.