Eyewitness Pacific Theater

Eyewitness Pacific Theater PDF Author: D. M. Giangreco
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company Incorporated
ISBN: 9781402762154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
From the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of the atomic bomb that ended the war, the Pacific Theater of World War II comes alive in a compilation of eyewitness accounts of the battles, campaigns, events, and personalities of the war, complemented by hundreds of period photographs and a CD containing personal narratives.

Eyewitness Pacific Theater

Eyewitness Pacific Theater PDF Author: D. M. Giangreco
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company Incorporated
ISBN: 9781402762154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
From the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of the atomic bomb that ended the war, the Pacific Theater of World War II comes alive in a compilation of eyewitness accounts of the battles, campaigns, events, and personalities of the war, complemented by hundreds of period photographs and a CD containing personal narratives.

Eyewitness D-Day

Eyewitness D-Day PDF Author: D. M. Giangreco
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company Incorporated
ISBN: 9780760750452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
"Eyewitness D-Day' tells the epic tale of the invasion of Normandy by documenting the experiences of men and women who were there, presenting their stories against the backdrop of World War II-era Europe.

Radioman

Radioman PDF Author: Carol Edgemon Hipperson
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429994185
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Radioman is the biography of Ray Daves, a noncommissioned officer in the U.S. Navy and an eyewitness to World War II. It is based on the author's handwritten notes from a series of interviews that began on the eighty-second birthday of the combat veteran and gives a first-person account of the world's first battles between aircraft carriers. Ray Daves grew up on a small farm near Little Rock, Arkansas. Impatient with school and the prospect of becoming a farmer like his father, he joined the CCC and went from there to the navy, where he learned to use the radio to send messages, and soon found himself in the momentary peacefulness of Pearl Harbor. Most of America's World War II veterans were not in uniform when the war began. Daves is one of the few who was. He could also tell what was happening on the bridge of the famous carrier Yorktown before it went down and of the secretive relationship between the Russian and American forces in Alaska at the time. Carol Edgemon Hipperson's discovery of this one man's inspiring story is shared with great skill and energy. A must-read for those looking for a personal, intimate account of the events of this tumultuous time in American history.

Eyewitness Vietnam

Eyewitness Vietnam PDF Author: Donald L. Gilmore
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company Incorporated
ISBN: 9781402728525
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Using the same format that made Eyewitness D-Day so unforgettable, this new volume offers an equally powerful look at the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was one of the most controversial conflicts of the 20th century. It was also one of the most divisive. American involvement in Vietnam nearly tore the nation apart, and the war’s repercussions remain a part of the public consciousness. Written by military historian Donald Gilmore and edited by D.M. Giangreco—author of Eyewitness D-Day—Eyewitness Vietnam traces the history of America’s longest war, illuminating its causes, battles, and aftereffects, its unfolding and unraveling. Accompanied by maps and nearly 250 photographs—many seen here for the first time—each chapter highlights a specific operation and special feature of the fighting, from the Viet Cong’s guerrilla tactics to the MIA issue. And, just as in the bestselling Eyewitness D-Day, numerous interviews with first-hand participants, both American and Vietnamese, present a compelling, intimate, and deeply personal view of this tumultuous time. “I never had the thought that our mission wasn’t worth it. I questioned the rules by which we had to operate…those were dumb. Those cost lives.”—Major Leo Thorsness, Wild Weasel squadron pilot, Medal of Honor recipient

Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (Vol. 1) (The Pacific War Trilogy)

Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (Vol. 1) (The Pacific War Trilogy) PDF Author: Ian W. Toll
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393083179
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 732

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Book Description
Winner of the Northern California Book Award for Nonfiction "Both a serious work of history…and a marvelously readable dramatic narrative." —San Francisco Chronicle On the first Sunday in December 1941, an armada of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Six months later, in a sea fight north of the tiny atoll of Midway, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent into the abyss, a blow that destroyed the offensive power of their fleet. Pacific Crucible—through a dramatic narrative relying predominantly on primary sources and eyewitness accounts of heroism and sacrifice from both navies—tells the epic tale of these first searing months of the Pacific war, when the U.S. Navy shook off the worst defeat in American military history to seize the strategic initiative.

Ernie Pyles War

Ernie Pyles War PDF Author: James Tobin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 068486469X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
When a machine-gun bullet ended the life of war correspondent Ernie Pyle in the final days of World War II, Americans mourned him in the same breath as they mourned Franklin Roosevelt. To millions, the loss of this American folk hero seemed nearly as great as the loss of the wartime president. If the hidden horrors and valor of combat persist at all in the public mind, it is because of those writers who watched it and recorded it in the faith that war is too important to be confined to the private memories of the warriors. Above all these writers, Ernie Pyle towered as a giant. Through his words and his compassion, Americans everywhere gleaned their understanding of what they came to call “The Good War.” Pyle walked a troubled path to fame. Though insecure and anxious, he created a carefree and kindly public image in his popular prewar column—all the while struggling with inner demons and a tortured marriage. War, in fact, offered Pyle an escape hatch from his own personal hell. It also offered him a subject precisely suited to his talent—a shrewd understanding of human nature, an unmatched eye for detail, a profound capacity to identify with the suffering soldiers whom he adopted as his own, and a plain yet poetic style reminiscent of Mark Twain and Will Rogers. These he brought to bear on the Battle of Britain and all the great American campaigns of the war—North Africa, Sicily, Italy, D-Day and Normandy, the liberation of Paris, and finally Okinawa, where he felt compelled to go because of his enormous public stature despite premonitions of death. In this immensely engrossing biography, affectionate yet critical, journalist and historian James Tobin does an Ernie Pyle job on Ernie Pyle, evoking perfectly the life and labors of this strange, frail, bald little man whose love/hate relationship to war mirrors our own. Based on dozens of interviews and copious research in little-known archives, Ernie Pyle's War is a self-effacing tour de force. To read it is to know Ernie Pyle, and most of all, to know his war.

Hell to Pay

Hell to Pay PDF Author: D. M. Giangreco
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1682471667
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Two years before the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped bring a quick end to hostilities in the summer of 1945, U.S. planners began work on Operation Downfall, codename for the Allied invasions of Kyushu and Honshu, in the Japanese home islands. While other books have examined Operation Downfall, D. M. Giangreco offers the most complete and exhaustively researched consideration of the plans and their implications. He explores related issues of the first operational use of the atomic bomb and the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, including the controversy surrounding estimates of potential U.S. casualties. Following years of intense research at numerous archives, Giangreco now paints a convincing and horrific picture of the veritable hell that awaited invader and defender. In the process, he demolishes the myths that Japan was trying to surrender during the summer of 1945 and that U.S. officials later wildly exaggerated casualty figures to justify using the atomic bombs to influence the Soviet Union. As Giangreco writes, “Both sides were rushing headlong toward a disastrous confrontation in the Home Islands in which poison gas and atomic weapons were to be employed as MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Charles Willoughby, succinctly put it, ‘a hard and bitter struggle with no quarter asked or given.’ Hell to Pay examines the invasion of Japan in light of the large body of Japanese and American operational and tactical planning documents the author unearthed in familiar and obscure archives. It includes postwar interrogations and reports that senior Japanese commanders and their staffs were ordered to produce for General MacArthur’s headquarters. This groundbreaking history counters the revisionist interpretations questioning the rationale for the use of the atomic bomb and shows that President Truman’s decision was based on real estimates of the enormous human cost of a conventional invasion. This revised edition of Hell to Pay expands on several areas covered in the previous book and deals with three new topics: U.S.-Soviet cooperation in the war against Imperial Japan; U.S., Soviet, and Japanese plans for the invasion and defense of the northernmost Home Island of Hokkaido; and Operation Blacklist, the three-phase insertion of American occupation forces into Japan. It also contains additional text, relevant archival material, supplemental photos, and new maps, making this the definitive edition of an important historical work.

War in Korea, 1950-1953

War in Korea, 1950-1953 PDF Author: D. M. Giangreco
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN: 9780891417293
Category : Korean War, 1950-1953
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A photographic history of the Korean War, focusing on the activities of U.S. troops, as well as the Allied forces that served under the flag of the United Nations.

Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942

Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942 PDF Author: Richard B. Frank
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324002115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1107

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Book Description
"A sweeping epic.… Promises to do for the war in the Pacific what Rick Atkinson did for Europe." —James M. Scott, author of Rampage In 1937, the swath of the globe east from India to the Pacific Ocean encompassed half the world’s population. Japan’s onslaught into China that year unleashed a tidal wave of events that fundamentally transformed this region and killed about twenty-five million people. This extraordinary World War II narrative vividly portrays the battles across this entire region and links those struggles on many levels with their profound twenty-first-century legacies. In this first volume of a trilogy, award-winning historian Richard B. Frank draws on rich archival research and recently discovered documentary evidence to tell an epic story that gave birth to the world we live in now.

War's End

War's End PDF Author: Charles W. Sweeney
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1510724737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
On August 9, 1945, on the tiny island of Tinian in the South Pacific, a twenty-five-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. In the belly of his bomber, Bock's Car, was a newly developed, fully armed weapon that had never been tested in a combat situation. It was a weapon capable of a level of destruction never before dreamed of in the history of the human race, a bomb whose terrifying aftershock would ultimately determine the direction of the twentieth century and change the world forever. The last military officer to command an atomic mission, Major General Charles W. Sweeney has the unique distinction of having been an integral part of both the Hiroshima and the Nagasaki bombing runs. Now updated with a new epilogue from the co-author, his book is an extraordinary chronicle of the months of careful planning and training; the setbacks, secrecy, and snafus; and the nerve-shattering final seconds and the astonishing aftermath of what is arguably the most significant single event in modern history: the employment of an atomic weapon during wartime. The last military officer to command an atomic mission, Major General Charles W. Sweeney has the unique distinction of having been an integral part of both the Hiroshima and the Nagasaki bombing runs. His book is an extraordinary chronicle of the months of careful planning and training; the setbacks, secrecy, and snafus; and the nerve-shattering final seconds and the astonishing aftermath of what is arguably the most significant single event in modern history: the employment of an atomic weapon during wartime.