Impetuosity aside, Stout's account has stood up to challenges from within and outside the Marine Corps. Controversy aside, Stout provides plenty of action and accurate descriptions of tactics and combat that have stood the test of time. At the same time he provides a self-effacing picture of his own performance, a factor that makes this work that much more credible and readable. A "must read" for anyone interested in air combat.

    

    W. Crocker III (The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, Robert E. Lee on Leadership, etc.) now turns his guns on the epic story of America’s involvement in the First World War with his new book The Yanks Are Coming: A Military History of the United States in World War I. 2014 marks the centenary of the beginning of that war, and in Crocker’s sweeping, American-focused account, readers will learn: How George S. Patton, Douglas MacArthur, George C. Marshall (of the Marshall Plan), "Wild Bill" Donovan (future founder of the OSS, the World War II precursor to the CIA), Harry S. Truman, and many other American heroes earned their military spurs in "The Great War"Why, despite the efforts of the almost absurdly pacifistic administration of Woodrow Wilson, American involvement in the war was inevitableHow the First World War was "the War that Made the Modern World"—sweeping away most of the crowned heads of Europe, redrawing the map of the Middle East, setting the stage for the rise of communism and fascismWhy the First World War marked America’s transition from a frontier power—some of our World War I generals had actually fought Indians—to a global superpower, with World War I generals like Douglas MacArthur living to see, and help shape, the nuclear age"The Young Lions of the War" -- heroes who should not be forgotten, like air ace Eddie Rickenbacker, Sergeant Alvin York (memorably portrayed by Gary Cooper in the Academy Award–winning movie Sergeant York), and all four of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons (one of whom was killed) Stirring, and full of brilliantly told stories of men at war, The Yanks Are Coming will be the essential book for readers interested in rediscovering America’s role in the First World War on its hundredth anniversary.

    Apart from flying Alouette helicopter gunships in Angola, he has fought in the Balkan War (for Islamic forces), tried to resuscitate Mobutu’s ailing air force during his final days ruling the Congo, flew Mi-8s for Executive Outcomes, and thereafter an Mi-8 fondly dubbed 'Bokkie' for Colonel Tim Spicer in Sierra Leone. Finally, with a pair of aging Mi-24 Hinds, Ellis ran the Air Wing out of Aberdeen Barracks in the war against Sankoh's vicious RUF rebels. For the past two years, as a “civilian contractor,” Ellis has been flying helicopter support missions in Afghanistan, where, he reckons, he has had more close shaves than in his entire previous four-decades put together.Twice, single-handedly (and without a copilot), he turned the enemy back from the gates of Freetown, effectively preventing the rebels from overrunning Sierra Leone’s capital—once in the middle of the night without the benefit of night vision goggles. Nellis (as his friends call him) was also the first mercenary to work hand-in-glove with British ground and air assets in a modern guerrilla war. In Sierra Leone, Ellis' Mi-24 (“it leaked when it rained”) played a seminal role in rescuing the 11 British soldiers who had been taken hostage by the so-called West Side Boys. He also used his helicopter numerous times to fly SAS personnel on low-level reconnaissance missions into the interior of the diamond-rich country, for the simple reason that no other pilot knew the country—and the enemy—better than he did.Al Venter, the author of War Dog and other acclaimed titles, accompanied Nellis on some of these missions. “Occasionally we returned to base with holes in our fuselage,” Venter recounts, “though once it was self-inflicted: in his enthusiasm during an attack on one of the towns in the interior, a side-gunner onboard swung his heavy machine-gun a bit too wide and hit one of our drop tanks. Had it been full at the time, things might have been different.” The upshot was that over the course of a year of military operations, the two former Soviet helicopters operated for the Sierra Leone Air Wing by Nellis and his boys were patched more often than any other comparable pair of gun ships in Asia, Africa or Latin America. Nellis himself earned a price on his head: some reports spoke of a $1 million reward dead or alive while others doubled it.This book describes the full career of this storied aerial warrior, from the bush and jungles of Africa to the forests of the Balkans and the merciless mountains of today’s Afghanistan. Along the way the reader encounters a multiethnic array of enemies ranging from ideological to cold-blooded to pure evil, as well as well as examples of incredible heroism for hire.

    Though brought together in a friendship that neither jealousy nor violence could shatter, the Hazards and the Mains are torn apart by the storm of events that has divided the nation. "Superb! You will gain a firsthand knowledge of life at West Point in the early 1800s...a peek at the Texas frontier, a vacation in a posh cottage at Newport...experience the savagery of war in Mexico, suffer the suspense of both the Charleston Battery and beleaguered Fort Sumter before the mortar fire that launched a war. It has been a long time since I enjoyed a book so much." (The Asheville Citizen-Times)

    Though lesser known than other wars the US has fought over the years, it was an important conflict that set the stage for the US to earn a reputation as a respected nation that could demonstrate power on foreign lands as well as its homeland…   PLEASE NOTE: This is key takeaways and analysis of the book and NOT the original book.    Inside this Instaread of Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: Overview of the book Important People Key Takeaways Analysis of Key Takeaways   About the Author With Instaread, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

    Reserved seats went on sale at premium prices. Audience members dressed up and arrived early to peruse the program during the overture that preceded the curtain's rise. And when the show began, it was--a rather disappointing film musical.In Roadshow!, film historian Matthew Kennedy tells the fascinating story of the downfall of the big-screen musical in the late 1960s. It is a tale of revolutionary cultural change, business transformation, and artistic missteps, all of which led to the obsolescence of the roadshow, a marketing extravaganza designed to make a movie opening in a regional city seem like a Broadway premier. Ironically, the Hollywood musical suffered from unexpected success. Facing doom after its bygone heyday, it suddenly broke box-office records with three rapid-fire successes in 1964 and 1965: Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music. Studios rushed to catch the wave, but everything went wrong. Kennedy takes readers inside the making of such movies as Hello, Dolly! and Man of La Mancha, showing how corporate management imposed financial pressures that led to poor artistic decisions-for example, the casting of established stars regardless of vocal or dancing talent (such as Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon). And Kennedy explores the impact of profound social, political, and cultural change. The traditional-sounding Camelot and Doctor Dolittle were released in the same year as Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, representing a vast gulf in taste. The artifice of musicals seemed outdated to baby boomers who grew up with the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, race riots, and the Vietnam War.From Julie Andrews to Barbra Streisand, from Fred Astaire to Rock Hudson, Roadshow! offers a brilliant, gripping history of film musicals and their changing place in our culture.

    Cullen is a retired business executive and veteran of The Battle of The Bulge. During the second world war, as an army staff sergeant, he trained infantrymen for battle, then volunteered to go to Europe and enter the trenches himself. He was awarded four battle stars—Normandy, Northern France, Ardennes, and Germany, Bronze Star, Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster, Combat Infantry Badge, and the Belgian fourragère of 1940. Once the war ended, he returned to life as a civilian. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Colgate University on the GI Bill. Mr. Cullen has been married to the love of his life for over fifty years. He has two children, and five grandchildren. He is active in veterans' groups, including the Battle of the Bulge Group, and has participated in a reenactment of the Battle of The Bulge with a group of WWII re-enactors in Washington state. James K. Cullen is 95 years old. Band Of Strangers is his first book.

    The battling powers had already suffered casualties on a scale previously unimaginable. On both the Western and Eastern fronts elaborate war plans lay in ruins and had been discarded in favour of desperate improvisation. In the West this resulted in the remorseless world of the trenches; in the East all eyes were focused on the old, beleaguered Austro-Hungarian fortress of Przemysl.The great siege that unfolded at Przemysl was the longest of the whole war. In the defence of the fortress and the struggle to relieve it Austria-Hungary suffered some 800,000 casualties. Almost unknown in the West, this was one of the great turning points of the conflict. If the Russians had broken through they could have invaded Central Europe, but by the time the fortress fell their strength was so sapped they could go no further.Alexander Watson, prize-winning author of Ring of Steel, has written one of the great epics of the First World War. Comparable to Stalingrad in 1942-3, Przemysl shaped the course of Europe's future. Neither Russians nor Austro-Hungarians ever recovered from their disasters. Using a huge range of sources, Watson brilliantly recreates a world of long-gone empires, broken armies and a cut-off community sliding into chaos. The siege was central to the war itself, but also a chilling harbinger of what would engulf the entire region in the coming decades, as nationalism, anti-semitism and an exterminatory fury took hold.

    Nearly forgotten in the war's massive overall death toll, some 50,000 aircrew would die in the combatant nations' fledgling air forces.The romance of aviation had a remarkable grip on the public imagination, propaganda focusing on gallant air 'aces' who become national heroes. The reality was horribly different. Marked for Death debunks popular myth to explore the brutal truths of wartime aviation: of flimsy planes and unprotected pilots; of burning nineteen-year-olds falling screaming to their deaths; of pilots blinded by the entrails of their observers.James Hamilton-Paterson also reveals how four years of war produced profound changes both in the aircraft themselves and in military attitudes and strategy. By 1918 it was widely accepted that domination of the air above the battlefield was crucial to military success, a realization that would change the nature of warfare forever.

    The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents with axes and boats, and narrow escapes from wolves and bears. Many years later, after returning to the United States, Osborne wrote down all his adventures in a graphic memoir that has become, in the words of author and journalist Roy MacGregor, "an undiscovered Canadian classic."Reluctant Pioneer provides a brooding sense of adventure and un- sentimental realism to deliver a powerful account of pioneer life where tragedies arrive as naturally as rain and where humour resides in irony.

     It was these ships that carried the bulk of the troops and equipment to the bloody assault beaches of the overseas landings. The Japanese military had swept across Pacific Ocean conquering and fortifying hundreds of small islands that the Allied forces would have to conquer one by one in order to defeat their enemy. Despite being unarmored and having little fire power, attack transports continued to make a monumental impact in the fate of the war. Not because they could defeat the Japanese on their own but because they carried in their hulls the war’s one essential combat element: the troops that fought on the ground. U.S.S. Doyen was one such attack transport that served with honor and made its contribution felt through the course of the war. Lawrence Marsden’s fascinating history of this ship uncovers the action of the Doyen from commissioning through to her last operation in World War Two and of course exposes the lives of the men who sailed her through treacherous waters to do their duty. This book provides brilliant insight into the Pacific War as it was seen from one small unit in the fleet as they were involved in some of the most important operations of that front, including the invasions of Kiska, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Saipan, Guam, Leyte, Lingayen Gulf and Iwo Jima. “In war, transports seldom rest. Between assaults, on long and dreary voyages they carry out to distant bases replacement and service troops and freight, and carry back to home ports our casualties and essential war materials. They are the unsung, battle-scarred work horses of the Navy.” Richmond K. Turner, Admiral, U.S. Navy, Former Commander Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet. This book is perfect for readers who wish to learn more about these fascinating boats, the men who fought aboard them and the impact that they made throughout the war. Lieutenant Commander Lawrence A. Marsden served on the U.S.S. Doyen from May 1944 through to the end of the war, and was involved in the landings at Saipan, Guam, Leyte Gulf, Luzon and Iwo Jima. After the war he resigned his commission and became a textile company executive. His book Attack Transport: The Story of The USS Doyen was first published in 1946 and he passed away in 2005.

    It proposes answers to such questions as “Why were the Allies unprepared?”, “Why did France collapse so quickly?”, “Why didn’t the British government accept Hitler’s peace proposals?” and “Why did the Germans allow Hitler to obtain life and death control over them?”But the book’s main purpose is to provide an account of Winston Churchill’s actions and their intended consequences – as well as some of the unintended ones – for readers who are unlikely to read a military history book of 800 pages. The author has pared down the details of this at once fascinating and frightening story to an accessible length of how the world nearly ended in the 1940s. How Churchill Saved Civilization was written in honor of all those who sacrificed their lives in the War, and to caution readers that it could very easily happen again, as key factors like complacency, ignorance, and weakness continue to play a role in international diplomacy.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

    It started like a Hollywood thriller, secretly transporting from England $25 million in British gold bullion, delivered to the ship in unguarded bread trucks, a pre-war “Neutrality Patrol” that was really an unofficial hostile search for the far bigger and more powerful German battleship Prinz Eugen, and sneaking through the Panama Canal at night with the ship’s name and hull number covered for secrecy. Now, with the ship bulging with an unusual load of fuel and supplies, in the company of a large fleet quietly passing under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the crew was about to learn of their latest (but not last) and most improbable adventure yet as the captain made an announcement that would change the war and their lives forever, “We are going to Tokyo!”. Over three years, scores of battles and hundreds of thousands of ocean miles later, the Nashville and her crew had earned 10 Battle Stars, served from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, from the Aleutians to the Yangtze River, as McArthur’s flagship and suffered heavy casualties from a devastating kamikaze attack. Tokyo Rose reported her sunk, repeatedly. Earlier, with goodwill trips that included France, England, Scandinavia, Bermuda and Rio de Janeiro, the new, sleek Nashville built a pre-war reputation as a “glamour ship”. But with war came the secret missions, capturing the second and third Japanese POWs of the war, having a torpedo pass just under the stern, being strafed and bombed by Japanese planes, losing a third of the crew in a single devastating Kamikaze attack, swimming in shark infested waters protected by marines with machine guns, enjoying the beauty of Sydney and her people, planning a suicide mission to destroy the Japanese fishing fleet, and bombarding Japanese troops and airfields across the Pacific. The Nashville crew served their ship and country well. They came from Baltimore row-houses, New York walk-ups, San Francisco flats, Kansas wheat farms, Colorado cattle ranches, Louisiana bayous and Maine fishing towns. Many had never traveled more than 25 miles from home and had never seen the ocean until they joined the service. They were part Irish, part Italian, part Polish and All-American. Battered, burnt and bombed, they made the USS Nashville their home and lived and died as eternal shipmates. Historical narrative enriched with the personal stories of the crew, this is the story of a ship and crew of ordinary men who did extraordinary things.

    It was an unexpected climax to the railway age.' A. J. P. Taylor was one of the most acclaimed historians of the twentieth century. His most provocative legacy was his insistence on the roles of accident and inadvertence in the outbreak of both world wars. First published in 1969, his book 'War by Timetable' still resonates and informs debates. 'War By Timetable' is a history of the mobilisation of the armies of the Great Powers in 1914. Taylor not only argues that the circumstances were already set for a general war, he also examines the flaws in the war plans of the Great Powers. All the plans depended on railways, which had been timed to the minute, months or even years in advance. As the train platforms grew longer (to accommodate prospective armies) the odds upon a great conflict grew shorter. The timetables and limited resources that were meant to serve as a deterrent to war instead relentlessly drove the powers into a conflict that engulfed the world. A.J.P. Taylor (1906-90) was one of the most controversial historians of the twentieth century. He served as a lecturer at the Universities of Manchester, Oxford, and London. Taylor was significant both for the controversy his work on Germany and the Second World War engendered and for his role in the development of history on television. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.