The 1st Marines stormed the Pacific island of Peleliu. Captain Hunt and his company of two hundred and thirty-five men were among some of the first to land; forty-eight hours later, only seventy-eight of them were alive. Outnumbered and outgunned by the enemy, they beat off all attacks with a courage which is at the same time matter-of-fact and superhuman individual, yet collective and drawn from the real comradeship of men who cannot let each other down. Here are dramatic accounts of wounded men miraculously still fighting, of two men seen in silhouette at night against the flashes of guns in a death struggle atop a cliff, of the flame-scarred bodies of Japanese in caves and pillboxes, of a nervous and badly scared youngster shooting one of his own comrades. When, at last, relief came and Captain Hunt and his handful of men staggered back to the beach, they had withstood three terrible counterattacks and killed more than five hundred enemy soldiers. “Coral Comes High is an unpretentious, stark, blow-by-blow story of a terrible action, well told in the fewest possible words” Time Magazine “This is a story of fighting men told by a fighting man.” General Alexander Vandegrift, United States Marine Corps. Captain Hunt served in the 1st Regiment of the 1st Marine Division in the South Pacific and was decorated with the Silver Star medal and the Navy Cross. He received the Navy Cross for his part in the action described in this book. The citation for this decoration relates how Captain Hunt's company of riflemen was reduced to thirty-four men; how these survivors defended an isolated position "against three counterattacks killing four hundred and twenty-two Japanese.” After the war he worked as a writer and editor for Fortune and Life magazines. Coral Comes High was first published in 1946 and Hunt passed away in 1991.

    Army bombers under the command of daredevil pilot Jimmy Doolittle lifted off from the deck of the USS Hornet on a one-way mission to pummel Japan’s factories, refineries, and dockyards in retaliation for their attack on Pearl Harbor. The raid buoyed America’s morale, and prompted an ill-fated Japanese attempt to seize Midway that turned the tide of the war. But it came at a horrific cost: an estimated 250,000 Chinese died in retaliation by the Japanese. Deeply researched and brilliantly written, Target Tokyo has been hailed as the definitive account of one of America’s most daring military operations.

    It was the only infantry division in the armies of the British Empire that accompanied Monty from during Alamein to BerlinAfter the 1940 disaster at St Vale'ry when many were killed or captured, the re-formed 51st were a superlative division, brilliantly inspired and led. The 'Highway Decorators' (after their famous HD cypher) fought with consummate success through North Africa and Tunisia and from Normandy into the heart of Germany. Blooded at Alamein - where they suffered over 2000 casualties - they pursued the Afrika Korps via Tripoli and Tunis fighting fierce battles along the way. They lost 1,500 men helping to liberate Sicily. Back to the UK for the second front, the Highlanders battled their way through Normandy bocage, the break-out to the Seine, triumphal re-occupation of St Vale'ry, and were the first troops to cross the Rhine, fighting on to Bremen and Bremerhaven. In the eleven months fighting in NW Europe in 1944 and 1945 the Highlanders suffered more than 9000 casualties.

    The insights are brilliant and intriguing as Deighton warns that the lessons of the War remain unheeded.

    Chosen as a Main Selection of the Military Book Club.

    The daily heroism of those fighters comes to life in this comprehensive, compelling history of that year, which encompasses the most dangerous periods of the Battle of Berlin and the unparalleled losses over Magdeburg, Leipzig, and Nuremberg. Personal accounts reveal how ordinary men coped with the constant pressure of flying, the loss of their colleagues, and the constant threat of death or capture. By exploring famous events such as the Great Escape and D-Day, we discover how the "'Men of Air" finally turned the tide against the Germans.

    It ended with the surrender of 76,000 Filipinos and Americans, the single largest defeat in American military history. The defeat, though, was only the beginning, as Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman make dramatically clear in this powerfully original book. From then until the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the prisoners of war suffered an ordeal of unparalleled cruelty and savagery: forty-one months of captivity, starvation rations, dehydration, hard labor, deadly disease, and torture--far from the machinations of General Douglas MacArthur. The Normans bring to the story remarkable feats of reportage and literary empathy. Their protagonist, Ben Steele, is a figure out of Hemingway: a young cowboy turned sketch artist from Montana who joined the army to see the world. Juxtaposed against Steele's story and the sobering tale of the Death March and its aftermath is the story of a number of Japanese soldiers. The result is an altogether new and original World War II book: it exposes the myths of military heroism as shallow and inadequate; it makes clear, with great literary and human power, that war causes suffering for people on all sides.

    Using eye-witness accounts from tank crews and infantry, Ken Tout reveals how on 7 August 1944 a combined Canadian and British force sent four armoured columns south of Caen to close the Falaise gap. Caen had been an objective of the British forces assaulting Sword Beach on D-Day. However, the German defences were strongest in this sector, and most of the German reinforcements sent to Normandy were committed to the defence of the city.Driving through the night, the British tanks reached their objectives behind German lines and linked up with their Canadian colleagues.The elite Wittman Troop counter-attacked with Tiger tanks, the most feared weapon of the Normandy campaign, only to be wiped out for minimal Allied loss. Operation Totalize I was a stunning success and sealed the fate of the German forces now encircled and trapped in the Falaise Pocket.Ken Tout served with the 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry during the Second World War, fighting in Sherman tanks and seeing action in Operation ‘Totalize I’. Tout’s books have attracted many plaudits and have been described as Second World War classics. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

    

     The battle for the island of Okinawa would last for the next eighty-two days. Through the course of this dramatic battle over 20,000 Americans would lose their lives and over 75,000 Japanese were killed in one of the bloodiest clashes of World War Two. Okinawa: The Last Battle is a remarkably detailed account of this monumental event by four soldiers who witnessed the action first-hand. They take the reader to heart of the fight explaining the preparations for the invasion, under its codename Operation Iceberg, through to the major conflicts at the beachhead, Ie Shima, breaking through the defenses surrounding Shuri and overcoming the last-ditch counter-offenses of the Japanese. This book is essential reading for anyone interested the Pacific Theater and how the United States Marines and Army were able to overcome the Japanese in the last few months of the war. Corporal Eugene B. Sledge said of the battle: "The Japanese fought to win - it was a savage, brutal, inhumane, exhausting and dirty business." Okinawa: The Last Battle was written by U. S. Army historians who participated in the Ryukyus campaign as members of a group organized to accompany the American forces to the Ryukyus and secure at first hand the materials for a history of their operations. Maj. Roy E. Appleman was attached to the 27th Division, M/Sgt. James M. Burns and Lt. Col. Stevens accompanied the Tenth Army headquarters and Capt. Russell A. Gugeler served with the 7th Division on Okinawa. After the war many of the authors went on to become prominent military historians. Appleman passed away in 1996, Burns in 2014, Stevens in 2001 and Gugeler in 1985. Their work was first published in 1948.

    The relentless and unstoppable German advances that had seen the panzers sweep hundreds of miles into Russia was finally brought to a halt. The elite German 6th Army was first fought to a standstill, then surrounded and forced to surrender.Over 1.5 million people lost their lives during the six months of fighting, many of them civilians caught up in the campaign. For the first time in the war, the German army had been defeated on the field of battle. Before Stalingrad the Russians never won; after Stalingrad they could not lose.This book looks at the titanic struggle that ended in the total destruction of the second city of the Soviet Union, the greatest battle the world has ever seen.

    Designed to dislodge the German Army from its position west of Moscow, Mars cost the Soviets an estimated 335,000 dead, missing, and wounded men and over 1,600 tanks. But in Russian history books, it was a battle that never happened. It became instead another victim of Stalin's postwar censorship.David Glantz now offers the first definitive account of this forgotten catastrophe, revealing the key players and detailing the major events of Operation Mars. Using neglected sources in both German and Russian archives, he reconstructs the historical context of Mars and reviews the entire operation from High Command to platoon level.Orchestrated and led by Marshal Georgy Kostantinovich Zhukov, one of the Soviet Union's great military heroes, the twin operations Mars and Uranus formed the centerpiece of Soviet strategic efforts in the fall of 1942. Launched in tandem with Operation Uranus, the successful counteroffensive at Stalingrad, Mars proved a monumental setback. Fought in bad weather and on impossible terrain, the ambitious offensive faltered (despite spectacular initial success in some sectors). Zhukov kept sending in more troops and tanks only to see them decimated by the entrenched Germans.Illuminating the painful progress of Operation Mars with vivid battle scenes and numerous maps and illustrations, Glantz presents Mars as a major failure of Zhukov's renowned command. Yet, both during and after the war, that failure was masked from public view by the successful Stalingrad operation, thus eliminating any stain from Zhukov's public image as a hero of the Great PatrioticWar.For three grueling weeks, Operation Mars was one of the most tragic and agonizing episodes in Soviet military history. Glantz's reconstruction of that failed offensive fills a major gap in our knowledge of World War II, even as it raises important questions about the reputations of national military heroes.

    An epic tale of family, separation, divided loyalties, love, reconciliation, loss, and redemption, Pamela Rotner Sakamoto’s history is a riveting chronicle of U.S.-Japan relations and of the Japanese experience in America.After their father’s death, the Fukuhara children—all born and raised in the Pacific Northwest—moved with their mother to Hiroshima, their parents’ ancestral home. Eager to go back to America, Harry and his sister, Mary, returned there in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor. Harry and Mary were sent to an internment camp until a call came for Japanese translators, and Harry dutifully volunteered to serve his country. Back in Hiroshima, their brothers, Frank and Pierce, became soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army.As the war raged on, Harry, one of the finest bilingual interpreters in the United States Army, island-hopped across the Pacific, moving ever closer to the enemy—and to his younger brothers. But before the Fukuharas would have to face one another in battle, the U.S. detonated the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, gravely injuring tens of thousands of civilians, including members of the Fukuhara family.Alternating between American and Japanese perspectives, Midnight in Broad Daylight captures the uncertainty and intensity of those charged with the fighting, as well as the deteriorating home front of Hiroshima—never depicted before in English—and provides a fresh look at the events surrounding the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Intimate and evocative, here is an indelible portrait of a resilient family, a scathing examination of racism and xenophobia, an homage to the tremendous Japanese American contribution to the American war effort, and an invaluable addition to the historical record of this extraordinary time.

    This book portrays the gradual awakening in the mind of a young Hitler Youth æeducatedÆ soldier of a Panzer Division, bogged down in the bitterest fighting on the Eastern Front, to the truth of the criminal character of what he is involved in.Having in mind that about 9 out of 10 German soldiers who died in WWII were killed in Russia, the book throws light on the largely unreported heroic sacrifices of Soviet soldiers and civilians often against seemingly hopeless odds, without which Europe might well have fallen to fascism. It deals less with grand strategies, tactics and military technicalities than with the human involvement of ordinary people, from both sides, who were caught up in that enormity of a tragedy, that epic struggle in Russia.It throws light on the chasm which existed between officers and men in the sharply class-divided Wehrmacht with most of the top rank officers having been drawn from the old imperial aristocracy.

     October 24, 1944: As World War II raged, six young American torpedo bombers were sent on a search-and-destroy mission in the Sibuyan Sea. Their target: the superbattleship Musashi, the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The pilots were tasked with preventing the immense enemy warship from inflicting damage on American supply ships. Little did these men know that they had embarked on the opening round of history’s greatest—and last—epic naval battle. Two bomber crews launched in the first wave of attackers were shot out of the sky. Only pilot Will Fletcher survived the crash landing. Adrift at sea, Will made his way to land and escaped into the jungles of the Philippines, where he eluded capture by the Japanese with the help of Filipino guerrillas, whose ranks he joined to fight against their common enemy. Intrepid Aviators is the thrilling true story of these brave bomber pilots, their daring duel with the Musashi, and Will Fletcher’s struggle to survive as a guerrilla soldier. The sinking of Musashi inflicted a crucial blow in the Battle of Leyte Gulf and marked the first time in history that aviators sank a Japanese battleship on the high seas. MAIN SELECTION OF THE MILITARY BOOK CLUB INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS