The couple had worked in China as members of a tight community of foreign correspondents with close ties to Chinese leaders; if captured by invading Japanese troops, they were certain to be executed. Racing to the docks just before midnight, they barely escaped on a freighter—the beginning of a tumultuous journey that would take them from one island outpost to another. While keeping ahead of the approaching Japanese, Mel and Annalee covered the harrowing war in the Pacific Theater—two of only a handful of valiant and dedicated journalists reporting from the region.Supported by deep historical research, extensive interviews, and the Jacobys’ personal letters, Bill Lascher recreates the Jacobys’ thrilling odyssey and their love affair with the East Asia and one another. Bringing to light their compelling personal stories and their professional life together, Eve of a Hundred Midnights is a tale of an unquenchable thirst for adventure, of daring reportage at great personal risk, and of an enduring romance that blossomed in the shadow of war.

    They had refused or been unable to leave for many different reasons; their actions during the course of the German occupation would prove to be just as varied. Glass interweaves the experiences of some of the individuals who belonged to this unique colony of American expatriates living in Paris. Among the stories highlighted are those of Charles Bedaux, an American millionaire determined to carry on with his business affairs as usual; Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous English-language bookstore Shakespeare & Company; Clara Longworth de Chambrun, patroness of the American Library in Paris and distantly related to FDR; and Dr. Sumner Jackson, the American Hospital’s chief surgeon. These fascinating tales reflect the complicated network of choices—passive compromise, outright collaboration, patient retreat, and active resistance—that existed for Americans caught in the German web.

    On June 14, 1940, German tanks entered a silent and nearly deserted Paris. Eight days later, France accepted a humiliating defeat and foreign occupation. Subsequently, an eerie sense of normalcy settled over the City of Light. Many Parisians keenly adapted themselves to the situation-even allied themselves with their Nazi overlords. At the same time, amidst this darkening gloom of German ruthlessness, shortages, and curfews, a resistance arose. Parisians of all stripes -- Jews, immigrants, adolescents, communists, rightists, cultural icons such as Colette, de Beauvoir, Camus and Sartre, as well as police officers, teachers, students, and store owners -- rallied around a little known French military officer, Charles de Gaulle. When Paris Went Dark evokes with stunning precision the detail of daily life in a city under occupation, and the brave people who fought against the darkness. Relying on a range of resources -- memoirs, diaries, letters, archives, interviews, personal histories, flyers and posters, fiction, photographs, film and historical studies -- Rosbottom has forged a groundbreaking book that will forever influence how we understand those dark years in the City of Light.

    Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal? In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?” Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. Hansell believed in precision bombing, but when he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war.

    From 1942 to 1948, trains delivered more than 10,000 civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, Texas, a small desert town at the southern tip of Texas. The trains carried Japanese, German, Italian immigrants and their American-born children. The only family internment camp during World War II, Crystal City was the center of a government prisoner exchange program called "quiet passage." During the course of the war, hundreds of prisoners in Crystal City, including their American-born children, were exchanged for other more important Americans - diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries - behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany. Focusing her story on two American-born teenage girls who were interned, author Jan Jarboe Russell uncovers the details of their years spent in the camp; the struggles of their fathers; their families; subsequent journeys to war-devastated Germany and Japan; and their years-long attempt to survive and return to the United States, transformed from incarcerated enemies to American loyalists. Their stories of day-to-day life at the camp, from the ten-foot high security fence to the armed guards, daily roll call, and censored mail, have never been told. Combining big-picture World War II history with a little-known event in American history that has long been kept quiet, "The Train to Crystal City" reveals the war-time hysteria against the Japanese and Germans in America, the secrets of FDR's tactics to rescue high-profile POWs in Germany and Japan, and how the definition of American citizenship changed under the pressure of war.

    The classified Japanese program required developing a squadron of top secret submarines—the Sen-toku or I-400 class—which were the largest and among the most deadly subs of World War II. Incredibly, the subs were designed as underwater aircraft carriers, each equipped with three Aichi M6A1 attack planes painted to look like US aircraft. Called Seiran, the planes were concealed in a huge, watertight deck hangar and meant to appear suddenly over American cities as their Japanese name suggests: like a “storm from a clear sky.”This operation remained unknowns to the Allies despite U.S. intelligence having broken the Japanese naval codes. Even more amazing is how close the Japanese came to pulling off their mission. In spite of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, including Allied air raids, mine-laden waters, fuel shortages, and a catastrophic depth-charge attack, the Sen-toku squadron was determined to complete their mission no matter what. But when the captain of an American combat sub inadvertently crossed paths with the squadron’s flagship, what promised to be a routine sub patrol soon threatened to rekindle World War II with untold consequences for Japan’s surrender ceremony only five days away.

    The Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific War pulls from many of Osprey's bestselling books on the subject in addition to the most recent research on the subject, including many sources from Japan, and is the most recent and accurate book on this fascinating force.Even after its setback at midway, the IJN remained a powerful force and inflicted sever setbacks on the US Navy at Guadalcanal and elsewhere. The Imperial Japanese Navy focuses on the Japanese ships which fought the battles in the Pacific including design details, where and when they were engaged and their ultimate effectiveness. In addition, the construction, design and service history of each ship from destroyer size on up is included. A comprehensive survey of the submarine force is also included. Modifications of each ship are covered making this a valuable reference source for Pacific War enthusiasts and historians, as well as ship modelers.A short history of the IJN during the Pacific War places all warship design and history in proper context. Finally, a chapter discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the IJN is included ultimately asking the question of whether the IJN really was a modern Navy which was fully prepared for the rigors of combat in the Pacific.

    Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, “a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened—muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox.”In weaving together the historical facts and human drama leading up to and culminating in the war in the Pacific, Toland crafts a riveting and unbiased narrative history. In his Foreword, Toland says that if we are to draw any conclusion from The Rising Sun, it is “that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.”

    In this shocking and hauntingly beautiful book, historian Childers paints an entirely new picture of the aftermath of World War II in America.

    This was to be 'Station X', the Allies' top-secret centre for deciphering enemy codes.Their task was to break the ingenious Enigma cypher used for German high-level communications. The settings for the Enigma machine changed continually and each day the German operators had 159 million million million different possibilities. Yet against all the odds this gifted group achieved the impossible, coping with even greater difficulties to break Shark, the U-Boat Enigma, and Fish, the cypher system used by Hitler to talk to his generals.'Sation X' is also the story of the people involved from leading codebreakers such as Alan Turing, father of the modern computer, to the female operators who intercepted the messages. Through interviews with surviving members of Bletchley Park, Michael Smith has discovered what life was like there. In this chaotic and isolated environment they found time for drama performances, music recitals, orchestras and love affairs.Not only did these people shorten the war by several years - they were essential to victory in the Atlantic and North Africa and to the masterminding of the D-Day landings - 'Station X' was also the birth place of the world's first programmable computer and the successful Anglo-American intelligence partnership.

    Minutes later, the ship that had launched the Doolitte Raid six months earlier slipped beneath the waves of the Coral Sea. Of the pre-war carrier fleet the Navy had struggled to build over 15 years, only three were left: Enterprise, that had been badly damaged in the battle of Santa Cruz; USS Saratoga (CV-3) which lay in dry dock, victim of a Japanese submarine torpedo; and the USS Ranger (CV-4), which was in mid-Atlantic on her way to support Operation Torch. For the American naval aviators licking their wounds in the aftermath of this defeat, it would be difficult to imagine that within 24 months of this event, Zuikaku, the last survivor of the carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor, would lie at the bottom of the sea. Alongside it lay the other surviving Japanese carriers, sacrificed as lures in a failed attempt to block the American invasion of the Philippines, leaving the United States to reign supreme on the world's largest ocean. This is the fascinating account of the Central Pacific campaign, one of the most stunning comebacks in naval history as in 14 months the US Navy went from the jaws of defeat to the brink of victory in the Pacific.

    Herbert A. Werner, one of the few surviving German U-boat commanders, served on five submarines from 1941 to 1945. From the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, from the English Channel to the North Sea, he takes the reader with him through the triumphant years of 1941 and 1942, when German U-boats nearly strangled England, to the apocalyptic final years of destruction, disillusionment, and defeat.

    How were these decisions made? What were the options facing these leaders as they saw them? What intelligence, right and wrong, did they have? What was the impact of personality, what that of larger forces? In a brilliant work with haunting contemporary relevance, Ian Kershaw tells the connected stories of these ten fateful decisions from the shifting perspectives of the protagonists, and in so doing rescues them from the sense of inevitability that now envelops them and restores to them a feeling of vivid drama and contingency-the feeling that things could have turned out very differently indeed. Each chapter follows the process of arriving at one decision, from the viewpoint of the leader who made it: Decision 1: May 1940. The British War Cabinet, driven by Churchill, agrees to fight on after the German blitzkrieg defeat of France, despite loud calls for negotiated settlement. Decision 2: Hitler decides to attack the Soviet Union. Decision 3: Japan decides to seize the "Golden Opportunity" and turn south, going after the colonial empires of the countries that have fallen to Hitler. Decision 4: Mussolini decides to join the war on Hitler's side to grab a share of the spoils. Decision 5: Roosevelt decides to lend a helping hand to England. Decision 6: Stalin decides he knows best and ignores all the clear signals that Germany is going to invade. Decision 7: Roosevelt decides to wage undeclared war. Decision 8: Japan decides to go to war against the United States. Decision 9: Hitler decides to declare war on the USA. Decision 10: Hitler decides to kill the Jews. Decision relates to subsequent decision, though never simply or necessarily as expected. The clash of personalities, the various weaknesses of the different political systems, the challenge of intelligence, the misdiagnosis of risk and possibility: all play their part. And after nineteen months, though much remained to be decided, the world's fate had been profoundly altered by these ten choices.

    Yet the actions of the 3rd Battalion were every bit as incredible and this book finally gives them deserved attention. Formed in 1942, the 506th PIR were shortly after attached to the 101st Airborne Division. After training they were transported to Wiltshire in 1943 to prepare for the invasion of Europe. Whilst taking part in the D-Day landings, the battalion suffered many immediate casualties, including the battalion commander. This is the astounding story of how the surviving paratroopers fought on towards their objectives against horrendous odds, told in their own words, and those of the French civilians who witnessed the Normandy campaign. Through many hours of interviews, and in-depth research, the authors have pieced together the perspectives of the soldiers to create a unique, comprehensive account. Including a foreword by Ed Shames, veteran of the 3rd Battalion, and illustrated with black and white photographs and maps throughout, this book vividly details the experiences of the 3rd battalion from training through to D-Day and beyond.

    Dunkirk was not just about what happened at sea and on the beaches. The evacuation would never have succeeded had it not been for the tenacity of the British soldiers who stayed behind to ensure they got away. Men like Sergeant Major Gus Jennings who died smothering a German stick bomb in the church at Esquelbecq in an effort to save his comrades, and Captain Marcus Ervine-Andrews VC who single-handedly held back a German attack on the Dunkirk perimeter thereby allowing the British line to form up behind him. Told to stand and fight to the last man, these brave few battalions fought in whatever manner they could to buy precious time for the evacuation. Outnumbered and outgunned, they launched spectacular and heroic attacks time and again, despite ferocious fighting and the knowledge that for many only capture or death would end their struggle. 'A searing story . . . both meticulous military history and a deeply moving testimony to the extraordinary personal bravery of individual soldiers' Tim Gardam, The Times 'Sebag-Montefiore tells [the story] with gusto, a remarkable attention to detail and an inexhaustible appetite for tracking down the evidence' Richard Ovary, Telegraph Hugh Sebag-Montefiore was a barrister before becoming a journalist and then an author. He wrote the best-selling Enigma: The Battle for the Code. One of his ancestors was evacuated from Dunkirk.