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Author: Caroline Alexander
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984879243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author, a breathtaking account of combat and survival in one of the most brutally challenging and rarely examined campaigns of World War II In April 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army steamrolled through Burma, capturing the only ground route from India to China. Supplies to this critical zone would now have to come from India by air—meaning across the Himalayas, on the most hazardous air route in the world. SKIES OF THUNDER is a story of an epic human endeavor, in which Allied troops faced the monumental challenge of operating from airfields hacked from the jungle, and took on “the Hump,” the fearsome mountain barrier that defined the air route.They flew fickle, untested aircraft through monsoons and enemy fire, with inaccurate maps and only primitive navigation technology. The result was a litany of both deadly crashes and astonishing feats of survival. The most chaotic of all the war’s arenas, the China-Burma-India theater was further confused by the conflicting political interests of Roosevelt, Churchill and their demanding, nominal ally, Chiang Kai-shek. Caroline Alexander, who wrote the defining books on Shackleton’s Endurance and Bligh's Bounty, is brilliant at probing what it takes to survive extreme circumstances. She has unearthed obscure memoirs and long-ignored records to give us the pilots’ and soldiers’ eye views of flying and combat, as well as honest portraits of commanders like the celebrated “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell and Claire Lee Chennault. She assesses the real contributions of units like the Flying Tigers, Merrill’s Marauders, and the British Chindits, who pioneered new and unconventional forms of warfare. Decisions in this theater exposed the fault-lines between the Allies—America and Britain, Britain and India, and ultimately and most fatefully between America and China, as FDR pressed to help the Chinese nationalists in order to forge a bond with China after the war. A masterpiece of modern war history.
Author: Caroline Alexander
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984879243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497
Get Book Here
Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author, a breathtaking account of combat and survival in one of the most brutally challenging and rarely examined campaigns of World War II In April 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army steamrolled through Burma, capturing the only ground route from India to China. Supplies to this critical zone would now have to come from India by air—meaning across the Himalayas, on the most hazardous air route in the world. SKIES OF THUNDER is a story of an epic human endeavor, in which Allied troops faced the monumental challenge of operating from airfields hacked from the jungle, and took on “the Hump,” the fearsome mountain barrier that defined the air route.They flew fickle, untested aircraft through monsoons and enemy fire, with inaccurate maps and only primitive navigation technology. The result was a litany of both deadly crashes and astonishing feats of survival. The most chaotic of all the war’s arenas, the China-Burma-India theater was further confused by the conflicting political interests of Roosevelt, Churchill and their demanding, nominal ally, Chiang Kai-shek. Caroline Alexander, who wrote the defining books on Shackleton’s Endurance and Bligh's Bounty, is brilliant at probing what it takes to survive extreme circumstances. She has unearthed obscure memoirs and long-ignored records to give us the pilots’ and soldiers’ eye views of flying and combat, as well as honest portraits of commanders like the celebrated “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell and Claire Lee Chennault. She assesses the real contributions of units like the Flying Tigers, Merrill’s Marauders, and the British Chindits, who pioneered new and unconventional forms of warfare. Decisions in this theater exposed the fault-lines between the Allies—America and Britain, Britain and India, and ultimately and most fatefully between America and China, as FDR pressed to help the Chinese nationalists in order to forge a bond with China after the war. A masterpiece of modern war history.
Author: Carl Frey Constein
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 9781585006434
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 133
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Book Description
This is a collection of lyrics, thought experiments, and songs which deal through words and poetry with the depth of the experience of growing up. This includes observations of how people deal with life and conflict in more abstract forms, and attempting to fuse together the elements of writing musically with rhythm, and writing philosophically to explore how individuals think and why.
Author: Robert Ryan
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 148047763X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
The real history of World War II’s most daring fighter squadron is the inspiration for this riveting novel of adventure and romance in the Far East Three years after the liberation of Singapore, transport pilot Lee Crane is finally ready to leave. The Berlin airlift is on, and there’s decent money to be made if you possess both your own plane and a practiced disregard for safety. One last drink with his Indo-Air fly buddies at the Long Bar in Raffles hotel and Crane is gone. Then he sees her: the tall, beautiful redhead he had every reason to believe was dead. If Elsa is alive—and still angry, judging by the sock to the jaw she greets him with—what else might Crane have gotten wrong about the past? In 1941, Lee Crane was a Flying Tiger, one of dozens of American pilots recruited to join the Chinese Air Force in the fight against the Japanese. Wild in the air and on the ground, the Tigers broke hearts all over Burma, and Crane was no different—until he fell in love with a stunning Anglo-Indian widow. But in the chaos of war, Crane lost track of the woman of his dreams, and spent the next seven years convincing himself it wasn’t meant to be. Now a chance encounter with another long-lost beauty has him ready to plunge back into the past, praying he will come up with a different answer this time. The Last Sunrise is the 2nd book in the Post-War Trilogy, which also includes After Midnight and Dying Day.
Author: Dr. Carl Frey Constein
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1420836935
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Returning to India from China on November 3, 1944, WWII C-46 #996 calls an ominous “Mayday.” The author, himself a Hump pilot on a mission that horrendous night, recalls the violent storms. Nothing more is heard from cargo plane 996. Sixty years later, a Tibetan hunter wanders onto the crashed plane at 14,000 feet. An MIA Team based in Hawaii is dispatched to Tibet to excavate and search the crash site. Missing in the Himalayas connects the dots between the C-46’s crash in 1944 and its excavation in 2004, between a gallant aircrew in WWII and a dedicated MIA recovery team today. The book narrates the high-risk adventure in detail---an anatomy of an MIA mission. Illustrated with dramatic photographs, Missing in the Himalayas is of special interest to pilots and aviation enthusiasts, to mountaineers, and to WWII history buffs. Aficionados of the CBI theater and the Hump will find the book of particular interest.
Author: Rory Laverty
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0811772632
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
By the time Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, China was already under siege. The Imperial military invaded and choked off every land and sea route for the young country’s resupply, and what remained of China was out of gas and withering away. So in April 1942 the United States decided to help out, by trying something entirely new and a little bit crazy. The world’s first airlift. Over the Himalayas. Led by brilliant and stubborn American generals including Joseph Stilwell, Claire Chennault, and William Tunner, this improvised lifeline for Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists aimed to keep more than a million Japanese troops tied up in an unwinnable occupation, far away from the brutal combat then unfolding in the Pacific. For 42 months the American ‘Hump pilots’ flew aviation gas, ammunition, food and other life-or-death cargo from Assam, India over Burma and the eastern Himalayas and into southern China. Frequent ice storms, unpredictable Japanese air attacks, impenetrable jungles, and the often-invisible presence of 15,000 feet of granite and ice were a formidable challenge for young American pilots in bare-bones cargo planes with primitive instruments and no margin for error. One out of every three airmen who flew the Hump would not make it home. Aluminum Alley is the true story of an unheralded group of pilots in a cursed and forgotten theater of combat, over the world’s highest mountains and deepest jungles – all to help the Allies defeat Japan in World War II. Based on interviews with survivors of the Hump and the airmen’s letters, journals, flight logs and other resources, this is narrative nonfiction with the immediacy and intimacy of memoir and the big-picture analysis of the best military history.
Author: Carl Frey Constein
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1425947530
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Kent and Angie Rowen . . . have everything going for them—popular, good jobs, happy children and grandchildren, prominent parents. They are the last couple the people of Newbridge would expect to have a midlife crisis. Trouble on paradise begins when Kent, successful insurance agent, decides to follow his Walter Mitty dream of becoming an author. Not content with one published novel he is at work on a second, With Hoops of Steel. Night after night he secludes himself in his den, slaving away feverishly at his laptop, neglecting his wife. He is a chapter shy of finishing the manuscript when the sky falls: his laptop and backup CD are stolen! He sinks into a major life-event depression. No one in the family is spared the grief. His psychotherapist is about to recommend new and dangerous deep brain surgery when there’s word that With Hoops of Steel has been spotted in the bookstore. Will this push Kent deeper into his black hole, or will it put him on the road to recovery? But how can he prove the book is his? Hmm. His professor-friend Scott Navano knows. The turn of the millennium seemed to me as good a time as any to leave behind a lifetime of nose-to-the-grindstone adventures as WWII pilot, English teacher, and school superintendent in order to chase my favorite phantom—becoming an author. In the first scene of Manuscript Missing we get an early hint of how devastated amateur writer Kent Rowen would become if somehow his manuscript disappeared. Guess what. It happens. I hasten to mention that Angie, his wife, is also missing. We watch as the Rowens and their families cope with the crisis. We empathize with Kent and Angie in their deep depression, loneliness, and utter despair. We follow other characters chasing their phantoms, some similar, by coincidence I’m sure, to may own. We watch a psychoanalyst, a lawyer, and a literary critic at work—fragments, no doubt, of someone’s Walter Mitty dreams.
Author: Sarah Byrn Rickman
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574412418
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
"When the United States entered World War II, the Army needed pilots to transport or "ferry" its combat-bound aircraft across the United States for overseas deployment and its trainer airplanes to flight training bases. Male pilots were in short supply, so into this vacuum stepped Nancy Love and her Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). Initially the Army implemented both the WAFS program and Jacqueline Cochran's more ambitious plan to train women to do many of the military's flight-related jobs stateside. By 1943, General Hap Arnold decided to combine the women's programs and formed the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), with Cochran as the Director of Women Pilots. Love was named the Executive for WASP."
Author: William H. Tunner
Publisher: New York : Duell, Sloan and Pearce
ISBN:
Category : Airlift, Military
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
"William Henry Tunner (July 14, 1906 - April 6, 1983) was a general officer in the United States Air Force and its predecessor, the United States Army Air Forces. Tunner was known for his expertise in the command of large-scale military airlift operations, first in Air Transport Command (ATC) during World War II, commanding The Hump operation, and later in Military Air Transport Service (MATS) during the Berlin Airlift in 1949-1951. He eventually rose to the rank of Lieutenant general and commanded MATS itself."--Wikipedia, 10 November 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Tunner
Author: Maurer Maurer
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1428915850
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 520
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Book Description
Author: Gregory Crouch
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 034553235X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
From the acclaimed author of Enduring Patagonia comes a dazzling tale of aerial adventure set against the roiling backdrop of war in Asia. The incredible real-life saga of the flying band of brothers who opened the skies over China in the years leading up to World War II—and boldly safeguarded them during that conflict—China’s Wings is one of the most exhilarating untold chapters in the annals of flight. At the center of the maelstrom is the book’s courtly, laconic protagonist, American aviation executive William Langhorne Bond. In search of adventure, he arrives in Nationalist China in 1931, charged with turning around the turbulent nation’s flagging airline business, the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC). The mission will take him to the wild and lawless frontiers of commercial aviation: into cockpits with daredevil pilots flying—sometimes literally—on a wing and a prayer; into the dangerous maze of Chinese politics, where scheming warlords and volatile military officers jockey for advantage; and into the boardrooms, backrooms, and corridors of power inhabited by such outsized figures as Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; foreign minister T. V. Soong; Generals Arnold, Stilwell, and Marshall; and legendary Pan American Airways founder Juan Trippe. With the outbreak of full-scale war in 1941, Bond and CNAC are transformed from uneasy spectators to active participants in the struggle against Axis imperialism. Drawing on meticulous research, primary sources, and extensive personal interviews with participants, Gregory Crouch offers harrowing accounts of brutal bombing runs and heroic evacuations, as the fight to keep one airline flying becomes part of the larger struggle for China’s survival. He plunges us into a world of perilous night flights, emergency water landings, and the constant threat of predatory Japanese warplanes. When Japanese forces capture Burma and blockade China’s only overland supply route, Bond and his pilots must battle shortages of airplanes, personnel, and spare parts to airlift supplies over an untried five-hundred-mile-long aerial gauntlet high above the Himalayas—the infamous “Hump”—pioneering one of the most celebrated endeavors in aviation history. A hero’s-eye view of history in the grand tradition of Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London, China’s Wings takes readers on a mesmerizing journey to a time and place that reshaped the modern world.
