With the conquest of Australia a very real possibility, the stakes were high. Their target: the Japanese-held Soloman Islands, in particular the southern island of Guadalcanal.Hamstrung by arcane pre-war thinking and a bureaucratic mind-set, the US Navy had to adapt on the fly in order to compete with the mighty Imperial Japanese Navy, whose ingenuity and creativity thus far had fostered the creation of its Pacific empire. Starting with the amphibious assault on Savo Island, the campaign turned into an attritional struggle where the evenly matched foes sought to grind out a victory.Following on from his hugely successful book Rising Sun, Falling Skies, Jeffrey Cox tells the gripping story the first Allied offensive of the Pacific War, as the Allies sought prevent Japan from cutting off Australia and regaining dominance in the Pacific.

    Half-naked, their bodies gleaming in the yellow light, the men tumbled out of their bunks. The narrow passageways were suddenly filled with men and then as suddenly cleared as each man fitted into his assigned position. The USS Seawolf was one of the greatest submarine raiders of all time. Having narrowly avoided the attack on Pearl Harbor the Seawolf set out for the seas of the Pacific to wreak havoc on Japanese shipping. Joseph Melvin Eckberg was on the Seawolf from her maiden voyage and remained with her until January 1943. As chief radioman he was instrumental in assisting Captain Frederick Warder to find and destroy enemy targets. From the claustrophobia of being trapped under water and the overwhelming fear of depth charges to the joys of aiding the war-effort and the camaraderie on the ship, Eckberg’s account, told to the authors Gerold Frank and James Horan, gives remarkable insight into submarine warfare of the Second World War. “It is a narrative straight as a sword, from which emerges the story of how that happy marriage of courage and skill was achieved which made our submarines more than any other group the fleet that won the war.” The Saturday Review, Fletcher Pratt. “The successes of the Seawolf bear testimony to the effectiveness of single-purposeness and teamwork.” Jonas H. Ingram, U. S. Navy Commander-in-Chief. Gerold Frank and James Horan were professional authors who wrote down Eckberg’s story after meeting him on a slow train between New York City and New London, Connecticut, in August 1943. U.S.S. Seawolf: Submarine Raider of the Pacific was first published in 1945. Frank went on to become a prominent ghostwriter and passed away in 1998. Horan, author of more than forty books, died in 1981. Eckberg died four years before him in 1977.

    Originally published as a paperback in 1961, it has long been treasured by World War II buffs and professional historians for its insights into the Japanese side of the surface war in the Pacific. The book has been credited with correcting errors in U.S. accounts of various battles and with revealing details of high-level Imperial Japanese Navy strategy meetings. The author, Captain Tameichi Hara, was a survivor of more than one hundred sorties against the Allies and was known throughout Japan as the Unsinkable Captain. Called the workhorses of the navy, Japanese destroyers shouldered the heaviest burden of the surface war and took part in scores of intense sea battles, many of which Captain Hara describes here. In the early days of the war victories were common, but by 1943, the lack of proper maintenance of the destroyers and sufficient supplies, along with Allied development of scientific equipment and superior aircraft, took its toll. On April 7, 1945, during the Japanese navy s last sortie, Captain Hara managed to survive the sinking of his own ship only to witness the demise of the famed Japanese battleship Yamato off Okinawa. A hero to his countrymen, Captain Hara exemplified the best in Japanese surface commanders: highly skilled (he wrote the manual on torpedo warfare), hard driving, and aggressive. Moreover, he maintained a code of honor worthy of his samurai grandfather, and, as readers of this book have come to appreciate, he was as free with praise for American courage and resourcefulness as he was critical of himself and his senior commanders. The book s popularity over the past forty-six years testifies to the author s success at writing an objective account of what happened that provides not only a fascinating eyewitness record of the war, but also an honest and dispassionate assessment of Japan s high command. Captain Hara s sage advice on leadership is as applicable today as it was when written. For readers new to this book and for those who have read and re-read their paperback editions until they have fallen apart, this new hardcover edition assures them a permanent source of reference and enjoyment.

    If the German U-boats had prevailed, the maritime artery across the Atlantic would have been severed. Mass hunger would have consumed Britain, and the Allied armies would have been prevented from joining in the invasion of Europe. There would have been no D-Day. Through fascinating contemporary diaries and letters, from the leaders and from the sailors on all sides, Jonathan Dimbleby creates a thrilling narrative that uniquely places the campaign in the context of the entire Second World War. Challenging conventional wisdom on the use of intelligence and on Churchill's bombing campaign, The Battle of the Atlantic tells the epic story of the decisions that led to victory, and the horror and humanity of life on those perilous seas.

    Raymond A. Spruance. Spruance, victor of the battles of Midway and the Philippine Sea and commander of the Fifth Fleet in the invasions of the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Marianas, and Okinawa, is one of the towering figures in American naval history. Yet his reserved, cerebral personality did not make good copy for correspondents, and until the publication of The Quiet Warrior he remained an elusive figure. Thomas Buell has succeeded in evoking the nature of the man as well as recording the achievements of the admiral in this brilliant biography, which won the Alfred Thayer Mahan Award for Literary Achievement the year of its publication.

    It was a duty few men could handle—and even fewer would survive.This is the true story of those brave men who served and too often died under the ocean surface, written by a man who was there. Edward L. Beach masterfully weaves his gripping experiences aboard the USS Trigger with those of other boats fighting the war in the Pacific. Part action-packed combat chronicle, part testament to the courageous sacrifices made by those who never came back, this is a compelling eyewitness account of the war as few have seen it.

    From the earliest operations in the Pacific through the decisive Battle of Midway, it offers a narrative account of how ace fighter pilots like Jimmy Thach and Butch O'Hare and their skilled VF squadron mates--called the first team--amassed a remarkable combat record in the face of desperate odds. Tapping both American and Japanese sources, historian John B. Lundstrom reconstructs every significant action and places these extraordinary fighters within the context of overall carrier operations. He writes from the viewpoint of the pilots themselves, after interviewing some fifty airmen from each side, to give readers intimate details of some of the most exciting aerial engagements of the war. At the same time he assesses the role the fighter squadrons played in key actions and shows how innovations in fighter tactics and gunnery techniques were a primary reason for the reversal of American fortunes. After more than twenty years in print, the book remains the definitive account and is being published in paperback for the first time to reach an even larger audience.

    But this is ultimately a combat tale—as violent and harrowing as any that has come before. From fighting through the fiery hell that was Peleliu to the deadly battleground of Okinawa, Mace traces his path from the fear of combat to understanding that killing another human comes just as easily as staying alive. He learns that bravery often equates to stupidity, leading to the death of close friends, but also that life goes on, with death on its heels. Battleground Pacific is one of the most important and entertaining memoirs about the Pacific theater in WWII.

    Interweaving the stories of survivors, Doug Stanton has brought this astonishing human drama to life in a narrative that is at once immediate and timeless. The definitive account of a little-known chapter in World War II history, In Harm's Way is destined to become a classic tale of war, survival, and extraordinary courage.On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed in the South Pacific by a Japanese submarine. An estimated 300 men were killed upon impact; close to 900 sailors were cast into the Pacific Ocean, where they remained undetected by the navy for nearly four days and nights. Battered by a savage sea, they struggled to stay alive, fighting off sharks, hypothermia, and dementia. The captain's subsequent court-martial left many questions unanswered: How did the navy fail to realize the Indianapolis was missing? And perhaps most amazing of all, how did these 317 men manage to survive?

    The end of World War II finally appears to be nearing. The Third Reich is collapsing in Europe, and the Americans are overpowering the once-mighty Japanese Empire in the Pacific. For a group of young pilots trained in the twilight of the war, the greatest worry is that it will end before they have a chance to face the enemy. They call themselves Tail End Charlies. They fly at the tail end of formations, stand at the tail end of chow lines, and now they are catching the tail end of the war. What they don’t know is that they will be key players in the bloodiest and most difficult of naval battles—not only of World War II but in all of American history.The Twilight Warriors relives the drama of the world’s last great naval campaign. From the cockpit of a Corsair fighter we gaze down at the Japanese task force racing to destroy the American amphibious force at Okinawa. Through the eyes of the men on the destroyers assigned to picket ship duty, we experience the terror as wave after wave of kamikazes crash into their ships. Standing on the deck of the legendary superbattleship Yamato, we watch Japan’s last hope for victory die in a tableau of gunfire and explosions.Among the Tail End Charlies are men such as a twenty-two-year-old former art student who grows to manhood on the day of his first mission over Japan and his best friend, a ladies’ man and intrepid fighter pilot whose life abruptly changes when his Corsair goes down off the enemy shore. Another is a young Texan lieutenant who volunteers for the most dangerous flying job in the fleet—intercepting kamikazes at night over the blackened Pacific. Their leader is a charismatic officer who rises to greatness in the crucible of Okinawa. Directing the vast armada of sea, air, and land forces is a cast of brilliant and flawed commanders—from the imperturbable admiral and master of carrier warfare to the controversial soldier assigned to command the land forces. The fate of the Americans at Okinawa is intertwined with the lives of the “young gods”— the honor-bound Japanese airmen who swarm like killer bees toward the U.S. ships. The kamikazes are dispatched on their deadly one-way missions by a classic samurai warrior who vows that he will follow them to a warrior’s grave.The ferocity of the Okinawa fighting stuns the world. Before it ends, the long battle will cost more American lives, ships, and aircraft than any naval engagement in U.S. history. More than simply the account of a historic battle, The Twilight Warriors brings to life the human side of an epic conflict. It is the story of young Americans at war in the air and on the sea—and of their enigmatic, fanatically courageous enemy.

    Tasked with guarding vital Atlantic convoys and later commanding 'Hunter/Killer' groups, author Captain Donald MacIntyre (1904-1981) became a near-legend during the war, with 7 destroyed German submarines to his credit, as well as several U-boat captures. He also survived a torpedo hit, and, after ramming a U-boat, successfully piloted the damaged ship back to safety.

    Here for the first time is the definitive history of the submarine war against Japan--the only full-scale submarine war the United States ever fought--which has for the most part been shrouded in secrecy for three decades. Only recently have the codebreakers who played such a pivotal role in the submarine war been willing to talk about their work. And only recently have the private papers, diaries, and official reports of the submarine admirals and skippers been made available to historians.In preparing to write this book, Clay Blair, Jr. combed hundreds of thousands of pages of recently declassified documents and personal letters. In individual interviews he listened to scores of skippers, staff officers, and codebreakers speaking freely. He researched in depth the development of submarine and torpedo from prewar days down to the present time. The result is a revealing and immensely exciting book that sets the submarine war within the framework of history and the overall war in the Pacific.Silent Victory takes you into the submarine war at all levels--the highest strategy sessions in Washington, the terrifying moments in a submarine trapped on the bottom for hours as depth charges explode around it, the zany efforts of a torpedo crew coaxing an emaciated chicken to lay an egg. It tells of the jealous infighting of admirals vying for power . . . of "overcautious" skippers, trained in peacetime and ill suited for war, and the mutinies they provoked . . . of the shocking torpedo scandal and the toll it took . . . of the later breed of younger skippers whose daring was so effective against Japanese shipping that the war, as Blair argues, could have ended months earlier, saving thousands of lives.The complete saga that led to victory is here supplemented by ● 37 specially drawn maps showing submarine activity in the context of every important naval engagement in the Pacific ● 32 pages of photographs ● 12 appendixes, including a calendar of all submarine war patrols ● an index of over 2,000 entries. A work of great scholarship and scope, Silent Victory is a timeless contribution to the history of World War II.

    It is the true story of the man behind Pearl Harbor---Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto---and the courageous young American fliers who flew the million-to-one suicide mission that shot him down.Yamamoto was a cigar-smoking, poker-playing, English-speaking, Harvard-educated expert on America, and that intimate knowledge served him well as architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the next sixteen months, this military genius, beloved by the Japanese people, lived up to his prediction that he would run wild in the Pacific Ocean. He was unable, however, to deal the fatal blow needed to knock America out of the war, and the shaken United States began its march to victory on the bloody island of Guadalcanal.Donald A. Davis meticulously tracks Yamamoto's eventual rendezvous with death. After American code-breakers learned that the admiral would be vulnerable for a few hours, a desperate attempt was launched to bring him down. What was essentially a suicide mission fell to a handful of colorful and expendable U.S. Army pilots from Guadalcanal's battered "Cactus Air Force":- Mississippian John Mitchell, after flunking the West Point entrance exam, entered the army as a buck private. Though not a "natural" as an aviator, he eventually became the highest-scoring army ace on Guadalcanal and the leader of the Yamamoto attack. - Rex Barber grew up in the Oregon countryside and was the oldest surviving son in a tightly knit churchgoing family. A few weeks shy of his college graduation in 1940, the quiet Barber enlisted in the U.S. Army. - "I'm going to be President of the United States," Tom Lanphier once told a friend. Lanphier was the son of a legendary fighter squadron commander and a dazzling storyteller. He viewed his chance at hero status as the start of a promising political career.- December 7, 1941, found Besby Holmes on a Pearl Harbor airstrip, firing his .45 handgun at Japanese fighters. He couldn't get airborne in time to make a serious difference, but his chance would come. - Tall and darkly handsome, Ray Hine used the call sign "Heathcliffe" because he resembled the brooding hero of Wuthering Heights. He was transferred to Guadalcanal just in time to participate in the Yamamoto mission---a mission from which he would never return.They flew the longest over-water fighter mission ever and ambushed and killed Yamamoto. After his death, the Japanese never won another major naval battle. But the victorious American pilots seemed cursed by the samurai spirit of the admiral and were tormented for the rest of their lives by what happened that day. Davis paints unforgettable personal portraits of men in combat and unravels a military mystery that has been covered up at the highest levels of government since the end of the war.

    Despite the risks, they had a better chance of survival than the rest of Convoy PQ-17, a fleet of thirty-five cargo ships carrying $1 billion worth of war supplies to the Soviet port of Archangel--the limited help Roosevelt and Churchill extended to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to maintain their fragile alliance, even as they avoided joining the fight in Europe while the Eastern Front raged.The high-level politics that put Convoy PQ-17 in the path of the Nazis were far from the minds of the diverse crews aboard their ships. U.S. Navy Ensign Howard Carraway, aboard the SS Troubadour, was a farm boy from South Carolina and one of the many Americans for whom the convoy was to be a first taste of war; aboard the SS Ironclad, Ensign William Carter of the U.S. Navy Reserve had passed up a chance at Harvard Business School to join the Navy Armed Guard; from the Royal Navy Reserve, Lt. Leo Gradwell was given command of the HMT Ayrshire, a fishing trawler that had been converted into an antisubmarine vessel. All the while, The Ghost Ships of Archangel turns its focus on Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, playing diplomatic games that put their ships in peril.The twenty-four-hour Arctic daylight in midsummer gave no respite from bombers, and the Germans wielded the terrifying battleship Tirpitz, nicknamed The Big Bad Wolf. Icebergs were as dangerous as Nazis. As a newly forged alliance was close to dissolving and the remnants of Convoy PQ-17 tried to slip through the Arctic in one piece, the fate of the world hung in the balance.

    Navy ships and their crews in the Pacific until their day of reckoning three years later with a far different enemy: a deadly typhoon. In December 1944, while supporting General MacArthur's invasion of the Philippines, Admiral William "Bull" Halsey neglected the Law of Storms, placing the mighty U.S. Third Fleet in harm's way. Drawing on extensive interviews with nearly every living survivor and rescuer, as well as many families of lost sailors, transcripts and other records from naval courts of inquiry, ships' logs, personal letters, and diaries, Bruce Henderson finds some of the story's truest heroes exhibiting selflessness, courage, and even defiance.