Rendezvous By Submarine: The Story Of Charles Parsons And The Guerrilla-Soldiers In The Philippines


Travis Ingham - 2018
     Manila had fallen and MacArthur had retreated with the famous words, “I shall return.” Many thousands of American and Filipino prisoners of war were forced to march in atrocious conditions from Bataan to various prison camps with huge numbers dying along the way. Yet the Imperial Japanese Army was not able to subdue all of its enemies. A motley group of American and Filipino soldiers escaped into the depths of Mindanao and began to form a new force that would fight with coordinated guerrilla tactics against the occupying forces. Charles “Chick” Parsons, who previously had been in charge of the naval docks of Manila, led his men to cause terror among the Japanese as they stuck time and again in hit-and-run raids. Endlessly spying on the Japanese forces they became the eyes and ears for MacArthur’s forces who were preparing to retake the Philippines. Parsons became instrumental in organization of the guerrilla movement as they moved ammunition, medicine and arms from under the noses of the Japanese, installed coast watchers and radio stations, evacuated American and Allied personnel and civilians, and undertaking secret submarine missions to the Philippines. Travis Ingram drew much of the material for this book directly from Parsons who frequently interjects through the book with his own opinion of certain situations. This is the remarkable story of the man that MacArthur described as “the bravest man I ever met” and deserves to be read by all who wish to find out more about individual acts of heroism that took place in the most trying of circumstances. “A story of military and morale building that paid dividends to our advantage, told with the flourish and zest it deserves.” Kirkus Reviews “No small part of the credit for the reconquest of the Philippines goes to an American businessman turned Navy Commander — Mr. Charles Parsons — who organized guerrilla forces in a number of islands. This is the exciting narrative of how he did this job.” Foreign Affairs Travis Ingham was an American writer. His book Rendezvous By Submarine: The Story Of Charles Parsons And The Guerrilla-Soldiers In The Philippines was first published in 1945. He passed away in 1969.

The Boats of Cherbourg: The Navy That Stole Its Own Boats and Revolutionized Naval Warfare


Abraham Rabinovich - 1988
    The boats, ordered by Israel from a local shipyard, had been embargoed for more than a year by French President Charles de Gaulle. In a brazen caper, the Israelis were now running off with them. As the boats raced for home and Paris fumed, the world media chortled at Israel’s hutspa. But the story was far bigger than they knew.Eight years before, the commander of the Israeli navy had assembled senior officers for a brainstorming session. The navy faced downgrading to a coast guard unless it could reconstitute itself as a fighting force on a starvation budget. What to do? A desperate proposal emerged from the two-day meeting.Israel’s fledgling military industries had developed a crude missile which was rejected by both the army and air force. The navy would now try adapting it. If placed on small patrol boats, the missiles, with their large warheads, could give these cheap vessels the punch of a heavy cruiser.Over the next decade, engineers working virtually round-the-clock developed the first missile boats in the West. Of a dozen boat platforms ordered in Cherbourg seven sailed before the embargo. The five that escaped completed the flotilla. But the Soviets had meanwhile also developed missile boats which they distributed to their Arab allies. Their powerful and accurate missiles had twice the range of Israel’s. To secure Israel’s sea lanes, the navy devised electronic countermeasures that would hopefully divert the enemy missiles.On the first night of the Yom Kippur War, an Israeli squadron engaged three Syrian missile boats in the first ever missile-to-missile battle at sea. The Syrian boats fired first but all three were sunk. Two nights later, three Egyptian missile boats were sunk. The electronic umbrella had worked and no Israeli boat was hit. A new naval age had dawned.

The Raid: The Son Tay Prison Rescue Mission


Benjamin F. Schemmer - 1976
    on November 21, 1970, more than one hundred U.S. war planes shattered the dark calm of the skies over Hanoi. Their mission: rescue sixty-one American POWs from Son Tay prison. Less than thirty minutes later, the raid was over, but no Americans had been rescued. The prisoners had been moved from Son Tay four and a half months earlier and that wasn’t all. Part of the raiding force landed at the wrong compound, a “school” bristling with enemy soldiers, but the soldiers weren’t Vietnamese . . . Replete with fascinating insights into the workings of high-level intelligence and military command, The Raid is Benjamin Schemmer’s unvarnished account of the courageous mission that was quickly labeled an intelligence failure by Congress and a Pentagon blunder by the world press. Determined to ferret out the truth, Schemmer uncovers one of the CIA’s most carefully guarded secrets. From the planning and live-fire rehearsals to the explosive reactions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff watching the drama unfold to the aftermath as the White House and Pentagon struggled for damage control, Schemmer tackles the tough questions. What really happened during the twenty-seven minutes the raiders spent on the ground? Did the CIA know the whole time that the Americans were gone? Had the Agency in fact been responsible for the POWs being moved? And perhaps most intriguing, why was the rescue—though it never freed a single prisoner—not a failure after all?

Devil's Own Luck: Pegasus Bridge to the Baltic 1944-45


Denis Edwards - 1999
    He brilliantly conveys what it was like to be facing death, day after day, night after night, with never a bed to sleep in nor a hot meal to go home to. This is warfare in the raw ' brutal, yet humorous, immensely tragic, but sadly, all true.

Dak to: America's Sky Soldiers in South Vietnam's Central Highlands


Edward F. Murphy - 1993
    Brings together interviews with more than eighty survivors to recount one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War, the 1967 campaign in the mountains of Dak To, during which members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade found themselves caught up in a deadly struggle against overwhelming odds, often cut off from supplies, communications, and reinforcements.

The Man in the Black Fur Coat: A Soldier's Adventures on the Eastern Front


Oskar Scheja - 2014
    The Russian army was camped on the other side. When the signal came to begin Operation Barbarossa he and his comrades from the German Wehrmacht stormed over the River and began an assault that took millions of Germans deep into Russian territory. For some the journey was brief. For others, like Oskar, it would last for years, and the struggle did not end when the fighting was over. This is the story of one German soldier’s experience in combat and captivity. It is the story of bravery, despair, deception, and survival.

Admiral Chester W. Nimitz: The Life and Legacy of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s Commander in Chief during World War II


Charles River Editors - 2019
    soil.” – Admiral Nimitz All Americans are familiar with the “day that will live in infamy.” At 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor, the advanced base of the United States Navy’s Pacific Fleet, was ablaze. It had been smashed by aircraft launched by the carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy. All eight battleships had been sunk or badly damaged, 350 aircraft had been knocked out, and over 2,000 Americans lay dead. Indelible images of the USS Arizona exploding and the USS Oklahoma capsizing and floating upside down have been ingrained in the American conscience ever since. In less than an hour and a half the Japanese had almost wiped out America’s entire naval presence in the Pacific. Despite fighting in North Africa and the Atlantic, the United States still had the resources and manpower to fight the Japanese in the Pacific. Though the Japanese had crippled the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, its distance from Japan made an invasion of Pearl Harbor impossible, and Japan had not severely damaged important infrastructure. Thus, the United States was able to quickly rebuild a fleet, still stationed at Pearl Harbor right in the heart of the Pacific. This forward location allowed the United States to immediately push deeply into the Pacific Theater. The Americans would eventually push the Japanese back across the Pacific, and one of the most instrumental leaders in the effort was Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who commanded the U.S. Pacific Fleet and helped coordinate joint operations with the legendary General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Area. The ensuing strategies would lead to decisive operations at places like Midway, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and others before the use of the atomic bombs compelled Japan’s surrender in August 1945. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz: The Life and Legacy of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s Commander in Chief during World War II chronicles Nimitz’s life and examines the decisions he made during history’s deadliest war. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Admiral Nimitz like never before.

Goodbye Poland


Stefan B. Maczka - 2014
    Good addition to other books on this subject. I enjoyed it very much.' UK Reviewer.Stefan Maczka’s father, (also Stefan), was a cavalry officer who fought victoriously in possibly the last and greatest cavalry battle of the preceding one hundred years, the ‘Miracle of the Vistula’. It was the final victory in the Russian/Polish War of 1920. He was one of nine thousand former soldiers rewarded with a plot of land in the reclaimed borderlands. Stalin never forgot that humiliating defeat.Stefan B. was born in 1922 just over two years later.Life was hard in those early years; the military settlers had to defend their borders against invasion by armed bands from Russia, crossing into Poland from the east.By 1937, the rewards of hard work were paying off, and life was beginning to get easier... Then came the war, and Stalin’s revenge on the military settlers he so bitterly despised for their victory over Soviet forces twenty years earlier. Rounded up, they were uprooted from their homes, put on cattle trucks, and forcibly deported to the frozen and inhospitable wastes of Siberia.Goodbye Poland is one man’s account of his journey into adversity at the age of just seventeen. Written exactly as he spoke, his accent comes through loud and clear, in this inspirational true story of stoicism, and survival against the odds.

Red Flight, Break!: Gripping Fighter Action Over Europe in World War II


Roger Maxim - 2017
    Tom's story, told in his own words, let's us share in his transformation from a college boy to a skilled fighter pilot, taking on the best the Luftwaffe has to offer. Excitement and surprises abound! Tom experiences the best—and the worst—of not only the skilled and ruthless enemy, but of our own military as well. Ranging from patient flight instructors to a psycho in the back seat, you can face it along with Tom. Join in the shocking realization of what the war means—REALLY means—as he and his mates witness devastation and heartbreak such as they never dreamed possible. Providing high altitude, high speed fighter escort for the growing numbers of Eighth Air Force bombers puts him in the midst of the most transformative period of the air war, including the famed "Big Week". Drawn from authorized Eighth Air Force mission descriptions, and supported by extensive historical research, "Red Flight, Break!" takes you on the long journey to victory. The story is fiction, but the history is real! Fasten your seat belt and come along!

Why Didn't You Get Me Out?: A POW's Nightmare in Vietnam


Frank Anton - 1997
    Now, more than thirty years later, he tells the story of how his own government failed him...For give hellish years, American soldier Frank Anton was held as a POW in Vietnam. Subject to disease, starvation, and physical and psychological torture, Anton and his fellow prisoners held out hope that the U.S. government would find and rescue them.When he was finally freed in 1973, Anton returned to the United States bruised and battered. And the most devastating blow of all had yet to even be struck. Upon his release, Anton and debriefed by the government and saw both aerial photographs of the prison camps where he was held and a close-us picture of himself walking the grueling Ho Chi Minh Trail. The government had known all along where and when Anton and his fellow soldiers were being held--and made no attempt to rescue them.now, in this harrowing first-person account and shocking expose, Frank Anton recounts his years as a POW and the aftermath--devoting his life to understanding why and how his own government left him and others to suffer and possibly die in the Vietnamese prison camps. And the answers he's uncovered will forever astound and disturb you.With eight pages of dramatic photosA main selection of the Military Book Club

Battle of Surigao Strait (Twentieth-Century Battles)


Anthony P. Tully - 2009
    A radical reassessment of this important World War II naval battle

A Short History of the Korean War


James L. Stokesbury - 1988
    The first third covers the North Korean invasion of June 1950, the Pusan perimeter crisis, MacArthur's master stroke at Inchon and the intervention by Chinese forces that November. At this point, other popular histories of the war reach the three-quarter mark, ending often with a cursory summary of the comparatively undramatic three-and-a-half years required to bring the war to its ambiguous conclusion on July 27, 1953. Stokesbury renders the latter period as interesting as the operational fireworks of the first six months: the Truman-MacArthur controversy; the political limitations on U.S. air power; the need for the Americans to fight the war as cheaply as possible, due to NATO commitments; the prolonged negotiations at Panmunjom over the prisoner-exchange issue; and the effect of the war on the home front. Whether the United States could have/should have stayed out of the war in the first place comes under discussion: "no" on both counts, according to the author.

MIA Rescue


Kregg P.J. Jorgenson - 1995
    Night was coming, the skies were dark, and so were the men's thoughts--they'd just found freshly dug NVA bunkers inside a scrub-brush tree line and their position was not secure. As they carefully searched for better night lager, they learned the hard way that they had walked into an ambush kill zone: NVA fire quickly downed two men and wounded two others. In minutes, Team 5-2 had been transformed from the hunters to the hunted. They had no radio comms with their headquarters and had just two rifles and fifteen magazines of ammunition.Two men were down, but the team was not out. MIA RESCUE is the story of Team 5-2 and the heroic and ultimately successful attempts to rescue them despite extraordinarily bad weather and an angry and aware enemy. "Seldom can an author stimulate emotions, from the taste of fear to sweaty palms to the feeling of relief when the mission is over, but Jorgenson does and much more. If the reader was never in combat, he will feel like a Nam vet when he finishes this book."--Jerry Boyle Author of Apache SunriseFrom the Paperback edition.

Termite Hill


Tom "Bear" Wilson - 1992
    Here is the Vietnam War, in the air and on the ground: gritty, urgent, genuine, a story torn from the hearts and minds of those who served.

Magnum! The Wild Weasels in Desert Storm. The Elimination of Iraq's Air Defence


Braxton R. Eisel - 2009
    Building upon that record and the recollections of other F-4G Wild Weasel aircrew, the authors show a slice of what life and war was like during that time. The pawns in the game, the ones that had to actually do the fighting and dying were the hundreds of thousands of men and women who left their homes and families to live for seemingly endless months in the vast, trackless desert while the world stage-play unfolded. To them, the war was deeply personal. At times, the war was scary; at other times, it was funny as hell. Usually, if you survive the former, it turns into the latter.