Название: Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze
Автор: Mordecai G. Sheftall
Издательство: Dutton Caliber
Год: May 2023
Страниц: 682
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, epub (true), mobi
Размер: 10.2 MB

A revelatory and groundbreaking account of Imperial Japan’s kamikaze—the suicide pilots of World War II—as told through the eyes of the survivors. In the final year of World War II, a horrific new weapon was unleashed in the Pacific: the kamikaze. Idealistic, young Japanese men had been taught that there was no greater glory than to sacrifice one’s life to defend the homeland. Now, with the war all but lost, thousands of these determined warriors were hastily trained in the basics of piloting an airplane, then sent out in waves to crash into enemy warships, suicide attacks that killed altogether some seven thousand American sailors. But what of those men who took the sacred oath to die in battle and lived? In the wake of 9/11, ethnographer M.G. Sheftall was given unprecedented access to the cloistered community of Japan’s last remaining kamikaze survivors. As an American fluent in Japanese, Sheftall was the only westerner to ever sit face-to-face with these men and hear their stories. The result is a fascinating journey into the lives, indoctrination, and mindsets of the kamikaze, through the eyes of participants who are now lost to time.

Название: War at Sea: Essays on Naval Warfare, 1776 – 1945
Автор: Mark Carlson
Издательство: Sunbury Press
Год: 2023
Страниц: 496
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf
Размер: 42.9 MB

War at Sea is a collection of 21 essays and articles on naval warfare from the American Revolution to the end of the Second World War. In this book are some of the most famous, and indeed infamous naval battles in history. The author, a contributor to more than two dozen national magazines, has assembled and expanded on some of his favorite articles that cover the age of fighting sail, the emergence of steam power, and the development of steel warships. Here you will find broadsides against wood, rifled guns against iron, the Royal Navy against the German Kriegsmarine, and submarines prowling the Atlantic and Pacific.

Название: To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945
Автор: Jоhn С. МсМаnus
Издательство: Dutton Caliber
Год: 2023
Страниц: 448
Язык: английский
Формат: epub (true)
Размер: 26.9 MB

From the liberation of the Philippines to the Japanese surrender, the final volume of John C. McManus's trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific War. The dawn of 1945 finds a US Army at its peak in the Pacific. Allied victory over Japan is all but assured. The only question is how many more months—or years—of fight does the enemy have left. John C. McManus’s magisterial series, described by the Wall Street Journal as being “as vast and splendid as Rick Atkinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Liberation Trilogy,” returns with this brilliant final volume. On the island of Luzon, a months-long stand-off between US and Japanese troops finally breaks open, as American soldiers push into Manila, while paratroopers and amphibious invaders capture nearby Corregidor. The Philippines are soon liberated, and Allied strategists turn their eyes to China, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the Japanese home islands themselves. Readers will walk in the boots of American soldiers and officers, braving intense heat, rampant disease, and a by-now suicidal enemy, determined to kill as many opponents as possible before defeat, and they will encounter Japanese soldiers faced with the terrible choice between capitulation or doom.

Название: F-4 Phantom II Wild Weasel Units in Combat (Combat Aircraft)
Автор: Реtеr Е. Dаviеs, Jim Lаuriеr
Издательство: Osprey Publishing
Год: 2023
Страниц: 96
Язык: английский
Формат: epub (true)
Размер: 18.0 MB

With first-hand insight into the into the key role of the US Air Force's fighter-bomber from the Vietnam War through to Operation Desert Storm during the First Gulf War, this book is an unmissable account of some of the most dangerous and demanding missions in the two wars. The advent of the surface-to-air missile (SAM) in the early 1950s threatened the whole concept of aerial bombing from medium and high altitude. Countermeasures were developed during the Korean War, but with little initial success. It was only in the closing stages of the Vietnam War, with the F-4Cww Phantom II (Wild Weasel 4), that this equipment started to become successful enough to allow a substantial investment in converting 116 F-4E Phantom IIs into dedicated SEAD aircraft.

Название: Dark Waters, Starry Skies: The Guadalcanal-Solomons Campaign, March–October 1943
Автор: Jеffrеy Сох
Издательство: Osprey Publishing
Год: 2023
Страниц: 739
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, epub, mobi
Размер: 12.5 MB

Esteemed Pacific War historian Jeffrey Cox has produced afast-paced and absorbing read of the crucial New Georgia phase of the Guadalcanal-Solomons Campaign during the Pacific War. Thousands of miles from friendly ports, the US Navy had finally managed to complete the capture of Guadalcanal from the Japanese in early 1943. Now the Allies sought to keep the offensive momentum won at such a high cost. This is the central plotline running through this page-turning history beginning with the Japanese Operation I-Go and the American ambush of Admiral Yamamoto and continuing on to the Allied invasion of New Georgia, northwest of Guadalcanal in the middle of the Solomon Islands and the location of a major Japanese base. Determined not to repeat their mistakes at Guadalcanal, the Allies nonetheless faltered in their continuing efforts to roll back the Japanese land, air and naval forces.

Название: Occupied: European and Asian Responses to Axis Conquest, 1937–1945
Автор: Аviеl Rоshwаld
Издательство: Cambridge University Press
Год: 2023
Страниц: 467
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 18.0 MB

The term “total war” evokes images of violent clashes between militaries and of mass mobilization, as well as indiscriminate targeting, of civilian populations over the course of a protracted armed conflict. The Second World War featured these characteristics on an unimaginable scale. But for much of the population of Europe and East and Southeast Asia, the most persistent and significant aspect of wartime experience was that of occupation by one or more of the Axis powers. This was a function of the relatively quick and massive victories won early on by the principal aggressor states, starting with Japan’s 1937 onslaught on China, and continuing with Germany’s partition of Eastern Europe with the Soviet Union in 1939, the Nazis’ decisive victories in Northern and Western Europe the following year, the German advance into Southeastern Europe (as well as parts of North Africa) and its deep inroads into Soviet territory in 1941, and Japan’s sweep into Southeast Asia in 1941–42. The rest of the war was dominated by the long-drawn-out efforts of the principal Allied powers (Britain, the USSR, and the United States) to reverse these initial outcomes. In the meantime, hundreds of millions of people found themselves under one form or another of Axis control or domination.

Название: Aircraft Carrier: A thrilling novel of the War in the Pacific
Автор: John Winton
Издательство: Sapere Books
Год: 2022
Страниц: 386
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, azw3, epub, mobi
Размер: 10.2 MB

The Pacific Ocean, 1945. In Europe the war is almost over, but Japanese forces remain undefeated … and seemingly unbeatable. But high in the sky above the islands of Sakishima Gunto, a flight of Corsair fighters from a British aircraft carrier is fighting a grim and desperate war of attrition against the enemy. A young squadron leader of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve is waging an internal war too: he must decide whether to accept a permanent commission in the Royal Navy, or honour his promise to his father that he will return home after the war. But when his aircraft is shot down, suddenly the quest to survive is all that matters. AIRCRAFT CARRIER is an action-packed World War II military adventure thriller that brings the war in the Pacific vividly to life through the eyes of the men who fought it.

Название: Hard Aground: The Wreck of the USS Tennessee and the Rise of the US Navy
Автор: Аndrеw С. А. Jаmроlеr
Издательство: University of Alabama Press
Год: 2023
Страниц: 353
Язык: английский
Формат: epub
Размер: 10.2 MB

Three intertwined stories highlighting the many challenges the US Navy faced during strategic and material evolution. Hard Aground brings together three intertwined stories documenting the US Navy’s strategic and materiel evolution following the end of the Civil War through the First World War. These incidents had lasting consequences for how the navy would modernize itself throughout the rest of the twentieth century. The first story focuses on the reconstruction of the US Navy following the swift and near-total dismantling of the Union Navy infrastructure after the Civil War. This reconstruction began with barely enough time for the navy’s campaigns in the Spanish-American War, and for its role in the First World War. Jampoler argues that the federal government discovered that the fleet requested by the navy, and paid for by Congress, was the wrong fleet. Focus was on battleships and cruisers rather than destroyers and other small combat vessels needed to hunt submarines and serve as convoy escorts. The second story relates the short, tragic life of the USS Tennessee (later renamed Memphis), one of the steel-hulled ships of the new Armored Cruiser Squadron that was a centerpiece of the navy’s modernization effort.

Название: Nightstalkers: The Wright Project and the 868th Bomb Squadron in World War II
Автор: Riсhаrd Рhilliр Lаwlеss
Издательство: Casemate
Год: 2023
Страниц: 425
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), epub
Размер: 26.4 MB

Never-before-told story of the 868th Bomb Squadron, the Nightstalkers, who paired cutting-edge technology with daring—launching single-aircraft night-time missions stalking the Japanese in the Pacific. In August 1943, a highly classified US Army Air Force unit, code-named the “Wright Project,” departed Langley Field for Guadalcanal in the South Pacific to join the fight against the Empire of Japan. Operating independently, under sealed orders drafted at the highest levels of Army Air Force, the Wright Project was unique, both in terms of the war-fighting capabilities provided by classified systems the ten B-24 Liberators of this small group of airmen brought to the war, and in the success these “crash-built” technologies allowed. The Wright airmen would fly only at night, usually as lone hunters of enemy ships. In so doing they would pave the way for the United States to enter and dominate a new dimension of war in the air for generations to come.

Название: Sustaining the Carrier War: The Deployment of U.S. Naval Air Power to the Pacific
Автор: Stаn Fishеr
Издательство: Naval Institute Press
Серия: Studies in Naval History and Sea Power
Год: 2023
Страниц: 315
Язык: английский
Формат: epub
Размер: 16.8 MB

The ability of the United States Navy to fight and win a protracted war in the Pacific was not solely the result of technology, tactics, or leadership. Naval aviation maintenance played a major role in the U.S. victory over Japan in the second World War. The naval war against Japan did not achieve sustained success until enough aircraft technicians were available to support the high tempo of aviation operations that fast carrier task force doctrine demanded. When the United States realized war was imminent and ordered a drastic increase in the size of its aviation fleet, the Navy was forced to reconsider its earlier practices and develop new policies in maintenance, supply, and technical training. Not only did a shortage of technicians plague the Navy, but the scarcity of aviation supply and repair facilities in the Pacific soon caused panic in Washington. While the surface Navy's modernization of at-sea replenishment was beneficial, it did not solve the problems of sustaining war-time aircraft readiness levels sufficient to a winning a naval air war.