Rowe was captured in 1963 in Vietnam, his life became more than a matter of staying alive.In a Vietcong POW camp, Rowe endured beri-beri, dysentery, and tropical fungus diseases. He suffered grueling psychological and physical torment. He experienced the loneliness and frustration of watching his friends die. And he struggled every day to maintain faith in himself as a soldier and in his country as it appeared to be turning against him.His survival is testimony to the disciplined human spirit.His story is gripping.

    On 1 July 1916 the British Army went over the top and attacked the German trenches. It was the first day of the battle of the Somme, and on that day the British suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, two for every yard of their front. With more than fifty times the daily losses at El Alamein and fifteen times the British casualties on D-day, 1 July 1916 was the blackest day in the history of the British Army. But, more than that, it was a watershed in the history of the First World War. The Army that attacked on that day was the volunteer Army that had answered Kitchener's call. It had gone into action confident of a decisive victory. But by sunset on the first day on the Somme, no one could any longer think of a war that might be won. After that it was a struggle that had simply to be endured. Martin Middlebrook's research has covered not just official and regimental histories and tours of the battlefields, but interviews with hundreds of survivors, both British and German. As to the action itself, he conveys the overall strategic view and the terrifying reality of an new kind of war for front-line soldiers.

    In that struggle, its frontline troops were the misfits, criminals and mercenaries of the French Foreign Legion. And among that international army of the desperate and the damned, none were so bloodstained as the fugitive veterans of the German S.S.WHAT THEY DID IN VIETNAM WAS ITS UGLIEST SECRET -- UNTIL NOW.Loathed by the French, feared and hated by the Vietnamese, the Germans fought not for patriotism or glory but because fighting for France was better than hanging from its gallows. Here now is the untold story of the killer elite whose discipline, ferocity and suicidal courage made them the weapon of last resort.

    

    This overview of our national history from Fort Sumter through Appomattox and the death of Abraham Lincoln takes a rightful place among the classics accounts of the war that tore America apart.The present volume, complete in itself, opens with a survey of the condition of the nation midway through the warÐa balance-sheet of the strengths of the opposing armiesÐbut soon we stand outside Vicksburg as, after several false starts, Grant closes in around that city and prepares to seize control of the Mississippi River and cut the Confederacy in two. Coincident with these mighty operations, we are shown the fumbling and uncertainty that followed the Union defeat at Chancellorsville and the eventual conflict at Gettysburg, the high tide of the Confederacy in one sense and its doom in another. Allan Nevins won the National Book Award for The Organized War: 1863-1864 and The Organized War to Victory: 1864-1865, the succeeding volume in The War for the Union.All four volumes of the War for the Union are currently available from Konecky & Konecky.

    Vance. He hadbeen her captain for ninety-nine days. The dispute over what happened aboard the Vance during those three months grew into one of the major controversies in the United States Navy in over a decade -- "The Arnheiter Affair." This is the engrossing story.

    

    But Captain John Murrell’s H.M.S. Hecate was towing a crippled tanker whose cargo was as dangerous as it was precious — four million gallons of high-octane gas!The U-boat commander was desperate: his career depended on sinking the tanker. If he failed, the Luftwaffe would send new long-range Heinkels to destroy the Hecate and her tow.Murrell’s cunning fight against incredible odds soon became a nightmarish eternity of cat-and-mouse moves and countermoves. His agonizing duel to the death makes this one of the most brilliant and memorable sea sagas to come out of World War II.About the author: Denys Arthur Rayner was a Royal Navy officer who fought throughout the Battle of the Atlantic. After intensive war service at sea, Rayner became a writer, a farmer, and a successful designer and builder of small sailing craft.

    Library of Congress catalog card number 79-169172

    

    

    Bernard Millot tries to make this argument in Divine Thunder, a historical overview of the Japanese suicide pilots.This book was originally published in French in 1970, and the English translation came out the following year. The book was also translated into Japanese. Bernard Millot is a French aviation journalist and historian and is the author of a two-volume history of the Pacific War.The first two chapters cover the historical background leading up to Japan's use of kamikaze pilots against the American fleet. The first chapter deals with Japan's ancient traditions such as the bushido code followed by the samurai, and the second one gives several examples during World War II when Japanese soldiers willingly sacrificed themselves to inflict damage on the enemy. Chapters 3 to 8 summarize the history of the kamikazes from the creation of the first kamikaze corps in October 1944 until the end of the war, with one chapter devoted to nautical kamikazes such as the kaiten torpedo steered inside by a pilot toward its target. The first half of the final chapter contains details on several suicide planes under development but never employed by the end of the war. This section has little relevance to the book's overall theme. The last half of the final chapter provides conclusions on Japan's use of the kamikaze pilot.Millot classifies the kamikaze pilots into three psychological categories. First, some pilots were spontaneous heroes who firmly embraced Japan's martial tradition and who possessed a strong sense of patriotism. Second, some men with deep religious beliefs accepted self-sacrifice as a way of elevating themselves spiritually. The third category consisted of men who thought logically that suicide attacks were the only way to deliver a damaging blow against the enemy. Although Millot's categorization of the pilots into three types may have some merit, he provides almost no evidence to support such an analysis. He briefly mentions final letters written by the pilots and includes two long letters in the book, but he does not even indicate to which category these pilots belong. He also fails to mention that the military usually censored the pilots' correspondence, so some last letters may not represent their true beliefs and feelings. Finally, the author never considers that there may have been another category of pilots who did not really support the kamikaze attacks but decided to carry them out only because of social pressure and military discipline.Much of the source material for Divine Thunder comes directly from a few well-known published sources on the kamikazes and the Pacific War. For example, the book's two letters written by kamikaze pilots were first published more than a decade earlier (1958) in The Divine Wind by Inoguchi and Nakajima. The book also lacks Japanese sources other than a few works translated into English. Although the book's descriptions of the overall history of kamikaze operations seem generally accurate, at times Millot will make statements with little or no support. For example, he mentions the "Japanese have a deeply mystical turn of mind" (p. 11), "their mystical predisposition toward self-sacrifice" (p. 65), and "the mystically patriotic fervor" behind the kamikaze attacks (p. 67). However, he never really explains this so-called mysticism and how it related to the creation of the kamikaze suicide missions.Readers who want a general history of Japanese kamikaze operations should avoid this book and try either The Divine Wind by Inoguchi and Nakajima or The Sacred Warriors by Warner and Warner. In comparison to Divine Thunder, these two books have more original material and provide better reasoning and support for their conclusions.