Air Heroes of World War II

Air Heroes of World War II PDF Author: Robert Jackson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description

Air Heroes of World War II

Air Heroes of World War II PDF Author: Robert Jackson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description


Forgotten Heroes of World War II

Forgotten Heroes of World War II PDF Author: Thomas E. Simmons
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 158979964X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
World War II was the defining event of the twentieth century. For everyone it was a time of confusion, fear, destruction, and death on a scale never before seen. Much has been written of the generals, campaigns, and battles of the war, but it was young, ordinary American kids who held our freedom in their hands as they fought for liberty across the globe. Forgotten Heroes of World War II offers a personal understanding of what was demanded of these young heroes through the stories of rank-and-file individuals who served in the navy, marines, army, air corps, and merchant marine in all theaters of the war. Their tales are told without pretense or apology. At the time, each thought himself no different from those around him, for they were all young, scared, and miserable. They were the ordinary, the extraordinary—the forgotten.

Silent Heroes

Silent Heroes PDF Author: Sherri Greene Ottis
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813147980
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In the early years of World War II, it was an amazing feat for an Allied airman shot down over occupied Europe to make it back to England. By 1943, however, pilots and crewmembers, supplied with "escape kits," knew they had a 50 percent chance of evading capture and returning home. An estimated 12,000 French civilians helped make this possible. More than 5,000 airmen, many of them American, successfully traveled along escape lines organized much like those of the U.S. Underground Railroad, using secret codes and stopping in safe houses. If caught, they risked internment in a POW camp. But the French, Belgian, and Dutch civilians who aided them risked torture and even death. Sherri Ottis writes candidly about the pilots and crewmen who walked out of occupied Europe, as well as the British intelligence agency in charge of Escape and Evasion. But her main focus is on the helpers, those patriots who have been all but ignored in English-language books and journals. To research their stories, Ottis hiked the Pyrenees and interviewed many of the survivors. She tells of the extreme difficulty they had in avoiding Nazi infiltration by double agents; of their creativity in hiding evaders in their homes, sometimes in the midst of unexpected searches; of their generosity in sharing their meager food supplies during wartime; and of their unflagging spirit and courage in the face of a war fought on a very personal level.

Masters of the Air

Masters of the Air PDF Author: Donald L. Miller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743235452
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 688

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Book Description
Masters of the Air is the deeply personal story of the American bomber boys in World War II who brought the war to Hitler's doorstep. With the narrative power of fiction, Donald Miller takes readers on a harrowing ride through the fire-filled skies over Berlin, Hanover, and Dresden and describes the terrible cost of bombing for the German people. Fighting at 25,000 feet in thin, freezing air that no warriors had ever encountered before, bomber crews battled new kinds of assaults on body and mind. Air combat was deadly but intermittent: periods of inactivity and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fire and fear. Unlike infantrymen, bomber boys slept on clean sheets, drank beer in local pubs, and danced to the swing music of Glenn Miller's Air Force band, which toured U.S. air bases in England. But they had a much greater chance of dying than ground soldiers. In 1943, an American bomber crewman stood only a one-in-five chance of surviving his tour of duty, twenty-five missions. The Eighth Air Force lost more men in the war than the U.S. Marine Corps. The bomber crews were an elite group of warriors who were a microcosm of America -- white America, anyway. (African-Americans could not serve in the Eighth Air Force except in a support capacity.) The actor Jimmy Stewart was a bomber boy, and so was the "King of Hollywood," Clark Gable. And the air war was filmed by Oscar-winning director William Wyler and covered by reporters like Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite, all of whom flew combat missions with the men. The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was the longest military campaign of World War II, a war within a war. Until Allied soldiers crossed into Germany in the final months of the war, it was the only battle fought inside the German homeland. Strategic bombing did not win the war, but the war could not have been won without it. American airpower destroyed the rail facilities and oil refineries that supplied the German war machine. The bombing campaign was a shared enterprise: the British flew under the cover of night while American bombers attacked by day, a technique that British commanders thought was suicidal. Masters of the Air is a story, as well, of life in wartime England and in the German prison camps, where tens of thousands of airmen spent part of the war. It ends with a vivid description of the grisly hunger marches captured airmen were forced to make near the end of the war through the country their bombs destroyed. Drawn from recent interviews, oral histories, and American, British, German, and other archives, Masters of the Air is an authoritative, deeply moving account of the world's first and only bomber war.

A Wing and a Prayer

A Wing and a Prayer PDF Author: Harry H. Crosby
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504067320
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
“A compelling account of the air war against Germany” written by the navigator portrayed by Anthony Boyle in Apple TV’s Masters of the Air (Publishers Weekly). They began operations out of England in the spring of ’43. They flew their Flying Fortresses almost daily against strategic targets in Europe in the name of freedom. Their astonishing courage and appalling losses earned them the name that resounds in the annals of aerial warfare and made the “Bloody Hundredth” a legend. Harry H. Crosby—depicted in the miniseries Masters of the Air developed by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg—arrived with the very first crews, and left with the very last. After dealing with his fear and gaining in skill and confidence, he was promoted to Group Navigator, surviving hairbreadth escapes and eluding death while leading thirty-seven missions, some of them involving two thousand aircraft. Now, in a breathtaking and often humorous account, he takes us into the hearts and minds of these intrepid airmen to experience both the triumph and the white-knuckle terror of the war in the skies. “Affecting . . . A vivid account . . . Uncommonly thoughtful recollections that address the moral ambiguities of a great cause without in any way denigrating the selfless valor or camaraderie that helped ennoble it.” —Kirkus Reviews “Re-creates for us the sense of how it was when European skies were filled with noise and danger, when the fate of millions hung in the balance. An evocative and excellent memoir.” —Library Journal “The acrid stench of fear and cordite, the coal burning stoves, the heroics, the losses . . . This has to be the best memoir I have read, bar none.” —George Hicks, director of the Airmen Memorial Museum

Fly Boy Heroes

Fly Boy Heroes PDF Author: James H. Hallas
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0811771326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
On the morning of December 7, 1941, Chief Aviation Ordnanceman John W. Finn, though suffering multiple wounds, continued to man his machine gun against waves of Japanese aircraft attacking the Kaneohe Bay Naval Station during the infamous Pearl Harbor raid. Just over three years later, as World War II struggled into its final months, a B-29 radioman named Red Erwin lingered near death after suffering horrific burns to save his air crew in the skies off Japan. They were the first and last of thirty U.S. Navy, Army, and Marine Corps aviation personnel awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions against the Japanese during World War II. They included pilots and crewmen manning fighters and dive bombers and flying boats and bombers. One was a general. Another was a sergeant. Some shot down large numbers of enemy aircraft in aerial combat. Others sacrificed themselves for their friends or risked everything for complete strangers. Who were these now largely forgotten men? Where did they come from? What inspired them to rise “above and beyond”? What, if anything, made them different? Virtually all had one thing in common: they always wanted to fly. They came from a generation that revered the aces of World War I, like Eddie Rickenbacker, the civilian flyer Charles Lindbergh, and the lost aviator Amelia Earhart—and then they blazed their own trail during World War II.

Heroes in the Skies

Heroes in the Skies PDF Author: Ian Darling
Publisher: Union Square + ORM
ISBN: 1454936185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
A gripping collection of true stories that capture the bravery of American pilots who helped win WWII. American pilots fought fierce and often deadly battles in every theater of the Second World War, and many overcame incredible obstacles to survive. Meet some of these courageous aviators, including George McGovern, who survived enemy fire that left 110 holes in his aircraft; George H. W. Bush, shot down in the Pacific; Jim Landis, a naval flyer stationed in Pearl Harbor who returned fire even after sustaining a bullet through his hand; Alex Jefferson, a Tuskegee airman shot down over France and taken prisoner; and Betty Blake, one of the little-known women pilots who aided the war effort. Clifton Truman Daniel, a grandson of President Truman, provides the foreword to this collection of carefully researched and vividly told profiles in courage that will transport you to the bullet-ridden, bomb-laden skies of the early 1940s.

Heroes of Aviation

Heroes of Aviation PDF Author: Laurence La Tourette Driggs
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aeronautics
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Written and published prior (the Preface is dated September 24, 1918) to the end of the Great War (now known as World War I) the author describes the advent of aerial warfare and gives a contemporaneous account of those aviators engaged in the conflict.

Women Heroes of World War II—the Pacific Theater

Women Heroes of World War II—the Pacific Theater PDF Author: Kathryn J. Atwood
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 161373171X
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
A Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People 2017 Glamorous American singer Claire Phillips opened a nightclub in manila, using the earnings to secretly feed starving American POWs. She also began working as a spy, chatting up Japanese military men and passing their secrets along to local guerrilla resistance fighters. Australian Army nurse Vivian Bullwinkel, stationed in Singapore, then shipwrecked in the the Dutch East Indies, became the sole survivor of a horrible massacre by Japanese soliders. She hid for days, tending to a seriously wounded British soldier while wounded herself. Humanitarian Elizabeth Choy lived the rest of her life hating war, though not her tormentors, after enduring six months of starvation and torture by the Japanese military police. In these pages, readers will meet these and other courageous women and girls who risked their lives through their involvement in the Pacific Theater of Operations during World War II. Fifteen suspense-filled stories unfold across China, Japan, Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines, providing an inspiring reminder of womens' and girls' refusal to sit on the sidelines around the world and throughout history. These women—whose stories span 1932 to 1945, the last year of the war—served in dangerous roles as spies, medics, journalists, resisters, and saboteurs. Seven of them were captured and imprisoned by the Japanese, enduring brutal conditions. Author Kathryn J. Atwood provides appropriate context and framing for teens 14 and up to grapple with these harsh realities of war. Discussion questions and a guide for further study assist readers and educators in learning about this important and often neglected period of history.

The Other Pearl Harbor

The Other Pearl Harbor PDF Author: John Martin Meek
Publisher: Tate Publishing & Enterprises
ISBN: 9781613467657
Category : Pearl Harbor (Hawaii), Attack on, 1941
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The story of two men who are usually given only one or two lines in most books but were truly American heroes and who, unlike many on that fateful morning, were not asleep.' - Donald M. Goldstein, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh and co-author of 'At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, ' 'God's Samuai: Lead Pilot at Pearl Harbor' and 'Dec. 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor.' 'Meek begins his story a week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and presents the two pilots as ... young officers who had the 'chutzpah' to act on their own ... ' - Dr. George M. Watson Jr., Senior Historian, Air Force Historical Studies. ' ... 'The Other Pearl Harbor, the Army Air Corps & its Heroes on Dec. 7, 1941, ' makes up a good bit for the poor coverage the Army personnel and facilities have been given before.' - Col. Gail Halvorsen USAF Ret., Famed 'Candy Bomber' of the Berlin Airlift. 'Through seventy years what happened to the Army Air Corps during the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor ... mostly disappeared. But Author John Martin Meek ... puts it into perspective with the Navy's vast and tragic losses.' - Astronaut/Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Stafford USAF Ret. WERE OUR TWO MILITARY LEADERS AT PEARL HARBOR LEFT OUT OF THE LOOP? 'Smoking Guns' May Answer the Question For seventy years there has been the question about why our military in Hawaii was not prepared and on alert when the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941. Both Army Lt. Gen. Walter Short and Navy Vice Adm. Husband Kimmel had publicly boasted they could protect Hawaii from an aerial attack. Author John Martin Meek in ten years of research has found several 'smoking guns' showing their strategies deeply flawed, not operative and numerous warning signs of a possible Japanese attack ignored."