Fortnight of Infamy

Fortnight of Infamy PDF Author: John Burton
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 161251524X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
While America was preoccupied with the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, an even greater tragedy was unfolding across Southeast Asia. From Wake Island to Burma, the Empire of Japan opened the largest front in the history of warfare: an aircraft-driven invasion of colonial possessions throughout the Far East that crumbled the entire Western imperial legacy of the nineteenth-century. Events during the first two weeks of battle set the stage for the greatest military defeats America and Great Britain would suffer during any conflict. This book offers the first comprehensive overview of the collapse of Allied air forces during the period between December 8 and 24, 1941. Written for a wide audience, it gives readers both a cockpit view of the desperate actions that took place and an understanding of why such heavy losses occurred. The narrative account includes enough detail and analysis to hold the interest of serious students of Pacific War aviation and enough exciting descriptions of air combat to attract those with little knowledge of the subject. Explaining how and why the Japanese were able to win a quick victory, John Burton points to U.S. failures in the concepts for employment of airpower and a significant underestimation of Japanese "air-mindedness" and aviation capabilities, failures that resulted in the loss or surrender of more than 200,000 troops at Bataan and Singapore.

Fortnight of Infamy

Fortnight of Infamy PDF Author: John Burton
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 161251524X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
While America was preoccupied with the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, an even greater tragedy was unfolding across Southeast Asia. From Wake Island to Burma, the Empire of Japan opened the largest front in the history of warfare: an aircraft-driven invasion of colonial possessions throughout the Far East that crumbled the entire Western imperial legacy of the nineteenth-century. Events during the first two weeks of battle set the stage for the greatest military defeats America and Great Britain would suffer during any conflict. This book offers the first comprehensive overview of the collapse of Allied air forces during the period between December 8 and 24, 1941. Written for a wide audience, it gives readers both a cockpit view of the desperate actions that took place and an understanding of why such heavy losses occurred. The narrative account includes enough detail and analysis to hold the interest of serious students of Pacific War aviation and enough exciting descriptions of air combat to attract those with little knowledge of the subject. Explaining how and why the Japanese were able to win a quick victory, John Burton points to U.S. failures in the concepts for employment of airpower and a significant underestimation of Japanese "air-mindedness" and aviation capabilities, failures that resulted in the loss or surrender of more than 200,000 troops at Bataan and Singapore.

Fortnight of Infamy

Fortnight of Infamy PDF Author: John Burton
Publisher: Naval Inst Press
ISBN: 9781591140962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Beretter om de indledende kampe i Stillehavskrigen, hvor japanerne umiddelbart efter angrebet på Pearl Harbour på ca. to uger nedkæmpede de allierede flystyrker i Sydøstasien.

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.

A Ceaseless Watch

A Ceaseless Watch PDF Author: Angus Britts
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1682475514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
A Ceaseless Watch: Australia’s Third Party Naval Defense, 1919–1942 illustrates how Australia confronted the need to base its post–World War I defense planning around the security provided by a major naval power: in the first instance, Britain, and later the United States. Spanning the period leading up to Australia’s greatest security crisis—the military threat posed by Japan throughout the majority of 1942—the work takes the reader all the way up to the defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy by the United States Navy in the Solomon Islands campaign. Angus Britts focuses on Anglo-Australian defense relations from 1919–42 when the British were Australia’s primary naval protectors until they were superseded in the Pacific by the United States in May 1942 at the battle of the Coral Sea. Britts traces the process of the alignment or divergence of differing strategic interests between Australia and Britain in particular. Taking place against the backdrop of Imperial Japan’s expansionism debates within Australian political and defense circles during this period, namely the nature of the most likely threat to the continent itself, what became an important subplot to the events then unfolding in the Pacific. Looking at the development of the “Singapore strategy” which utilized the British fleet at Singapore to protect Australia’s interests, Britts lays out how the cornerstone for Australian defense planning was based on the continued assurances from successive British governments that they would honor their naval commitments should Australia itself eventually come under serious threat from Japanese aggression. The Australian-American defense relationship evolved at a later stage within the timeframe in this work, but the varying interactions between both nations throughout the interwar years are likewise addressed, as is the foundation of their wartime relations. Britts illustrates the difficulty in forming a defense relationship between small and great powers, where the needs of the former are not subsumed by the interests of the latter, from the interwar years to the start of World War II. In an era when the entire Pacific region was at war, the inability of a larger power to fulfill its side of a defensive pact with a smaller power shaped the future of the region itself.

Refighting the Pacific War

Refighting the Pacific War PDF Author: James C Bresnahan
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 161251068X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Refighting the Pacific War looks at how World War II in the Pacific might have unfolded differently, giving historians, authors and veterans the opportunity to discuss what happened and what might have happened. Contributors to this alternative history include noted military historians William Bartsch, John Burton, Donald Goldstein, John Lundstrom, Robert Mrazek, Jon Parshall, Douglas Smith, Peter Smith, Barrett Tillman, Anthony Tully, and H. P. Willmott. In all more than thirty Pacific War experts will provide commentary, employing a roundtable panel discussion format. The reader will hear from the experts on how history could and could not have been altered during the course of the war in the Pacific. With multiple opinions, the reader will be provided with an interesting collection of divergent views about the outcome of the war. Refighting the Pacific War focuses largely on naval battles and campaigns, including Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf. While the main concentration is on the major naval actions, the book also delves into key island battles, like Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, as well as pre-war and post-war political issues The panelists debate questions like whether the Japanese could have inflicted even greater damage on the U. S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and how Yamamoto might have won at Midway and how such a victory might have impacted the direction of the war. The book extensively studies the opening year of the war when the Japanese war machine seemed unstoppable. Also explored is whether the Pacific War was inevitable and whether the conflict could have ended without the use of the atomic bomb.Vice Admiral Yoji Koda, Japan Maritime Self Defense Force (Ret.), provides the book's Introduction.

Neglected Skies

Neglected Skies PDF Author: Angus Britts
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1682471586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Neglected Skies uses a reconsideration of the clash between the British Eastern Fleet and the Imperial Japanese Navy’s First Air Fleet in the Indian Ocean in April 1942 to draw a larger conclusion about declining British military power in the era. In this book, Angus Britts explores the end of British naval supremacy from an operational perspective. By primarily analyzing the evolution of British naval aviation during the interwar period, as well as the challenges that the peacetime Royal Navy was forced to confront, a picture emerges of a battle fleet that entered the war in September 1939 unready for combat. By examining the development of Japan’s first-strike carrier battle group, the Kido Butai, Britts charts both the rise of Japan as a wartime power as well as the demise of the Royal Navy. Japan, by concentrating their six largest aircraft-carriers into a single strike force with state-of-the-art aircraft, had taken a quantum leap forward in warfighting at sea. Simultaneously, British forces found themselves outmatched in this Eastern theatre and Britts makes the case, by looking at a set of key battles, that this is where the global supremacy of Britain’s naval power ended.

In the Service of the Emperor

In the Service of the Emperor PDF Author: N.S. Nash
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1399090089
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
The expansion of the Japanese Empire between 1931 until its defeat in 1945 is one of the most extraordinary yet shocking episodes in human history. Extraordinary in that a relatively non-industrialised island nation was prepared to go to war, concurrently, with China, the most populous country, Great Britain with its world-wide empire and the USA, the wealthiest and most powerful country on earth. Shocking, as those 'in the service of the Emperor’ practiced persistent and unrestrained brutality as they conquered and occupied swathes of South East Asia. But, as this superbly researched work reveals, there is no denying their fighting and logistical expertise. The author examines the political, economic and strategic effects of the rapid Japanese expansion and explores the cult of deity that surrounded the Emperor. The contribution of the Allied forces and their leadership is given due attention. When retribution duly came, it was focussed on the military leadership responsible for unspeakable atrocities on their military and civilian victims. The physical perpetrators remaining largely unpunished. Japan, today, has still not acknowledged its wartime guilt. The result is an authoritative, balanced and highly readable account of a chapter of world history that must never be forgotten.

History of Alaska , Volume II

History of Alaska , Volume II PDF Author: Jonathan M. Nielson, Ph.D.
Publisher: Academica Press
ISBN: 1680530593
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
The most significant military development to touch Alaska during the interwar years was the advent of air power, an innovation that completely altered Alaska's strategic position. Suddenly the world became smaller as areas once thought safely distant from potential enemies became vulnerable. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Pacific, whose countless islands became potential advanced air bases. As air technology improved, the ability of long-range bombers and, by the 1930s, of carrier aircraft, to penetrate American airspace was a development of far reaching significance. While such warnings were largely limited to a handful of air-power advocates their vocal advocacy constituted nothing less than an “insurrection”, a revolution in military thinking fought against entrenched military conservatism, cultural aversion to change, fears of budget cuts, and War Department lethargy. Indeed it was the air power crusader General Billy Mitchell who aggressively fought to convince the War and Navy Departments to embrace the new doctrine of offensive air power. Mitchell came to understand Alaska's strategic importance early on. Consequently, he saw the Aleutians as a vulnerability: if left unguarded Japan could “creep up” and, by establishing air dominance, take Alaska and Canada’s West Coast. But he also saw Alaska as a strategic base from which American planes could “reduce Tokyo to powder.” Prophetically, in 1923 Mitchell forecast precisely the military threat and strategic arguments that would shape military thinking almost twenty years later: “I am thinking of Alaska. In an air war, if we were unprepared Japan could take it away from us, first by dominating the sky and creeping up the Aleutians." By the mid-to late 1930s military and civilian advocates of air power and more visionary strategists were beginning to make their voices heard in Congress and elsewhere, decrying Alaska’s military vulnerability. Between 1933 and 1944 no one was more adamant than Alaska’s Delegate in Congress, Anthony Joseph “Tony” Dimond, who challenged the nation to defend itself by defending Alaska. To Dimond, it seemed poor strategy to fortify one pacific base, Hawaii, while ignoring another, Alaska. Dimond’s campaign was strengthened by passage of the Wilcox Bill, sponsored by Representative J. Mark Wilcox (D-Florida), officially known as the National Air Defense Act. This truly significant legislation authorized the location and construction of military airfields throughout the United States as a general defense preparedness measure. Alaska was recognized as one of the nation’s six strategic regions, and two bases, one at Anchorage, the other at Fairbanks, were recommended in part, “because Alaska was closer to Japan than it is to the center of [the] continental United States.” Fortuitously for Alaska defense advocates, General Douglas MacArthur stepped down as Chief of Staff of the Army and was replaced by Major General Malin Craig in October 1935. Craig and Brigadier General Stanley D. Embick advocated a substantial reconfiguration of Plan Orange arguing that the Philippines presented an invitation to attack and should be “neutralized” in favor defending the “Alaska-Hawaii-Panama Triangle.” Both the Army and Navy were charged with defending Alaska as far west as Dutch Harbor, and the army pledged to mobilize 6,600 troops in Alaska within a month of attack by Japan. In contemplating the defense of Alaska the Army General Staff formulated five priority objectives: first, increase the Alaska garrison; second, establish a major base for Army operations near Anchorage; third, develop a network of air bases within Alaska; fourth, garrison these bases with combat troops; and fifth, protect the naval installations at Sitka, Kodiak, and Dutch Harbor. Alaska was about to go to war.

Naval History

Naval History PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Naval history
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description


A Fortnight's Ramble through London, or a ... display of all the cheats ... practized in that ... metropolis ... Being a ... narrative of the adventures of a farmer's son

A Fortnight's Ramble through London, or a ... display of all the cheats ... practized in that ... metropolis ... Being a ... narrative of the adventures of a farmer's son PDF Author: London
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description