On the morning of Saturday, November 20, 1943, the U.S. 2d Marine Division undertook the first modern amphibious assault against a well-defended beachhead. The objective was tiny Betio Island in Tarawa Atoll. The result was an immortal story of tragedy and near defeat turned around into an epic of victory and indomitable human spirit.

Built around the updated text of their 76 Hours: The Invasion of Tarawa, Hammel and Lane now reveal the graphic horror of warfare at its worst with the addition of 307 photos and combat drawings taken from U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps archives and several private collections. Many of the photos used in Bloody Tarawa have never been published before.

Although the admirals commanding the Tarawa invasion fleet had assured the Marines that Betio would be pounded to coral dust by a massive naval and air bombardment-the largest of its kind ever seen to that time-the first waves of Marines found the Japanese defenses intact and manned by determined foes.

Even in as bloody and bluntly violent a war as Americans encountered in the Pacific, Iwo Jima, the ultimate expression of death and mayhem, stands out. It was in a class by itself, a meatgrinder smashed by a blunt instrument at exceedingly high cost. Relying upon a purely attritional strategy of "defend and die," Iwo's Japanese commander oversaw the construction of thousands of concrete bunkers, pillboxes, blockhouses, and other fighting positions as well as multistory underground command centers and barracks, some as deep as seventy-five feet.

"Marines On Iwo Jima: A Photographic Record" is an enhanced and expanded ebook edition of the hardcover and trade paperback book entitled Iwo Jima: Portrait of a Battle. The much larger book requires that it be presented in two volumes, each with more than three hundred photos.

Even in as bloody and bluntly violent a war as Americans encountered in the Pacific, Iwo Jima, the ultimate expression of death and mayhem, stands out. It was in a class by itself, a meatgrinder smashed by a blunt instrument at exceedingly high cost. Relying upon a purely attritional strategy of "defend and die," Iwo's Japanese commander oversaw the construction of thousands of concrete bunkers, pillboxes, blockhouses, and other fighting positions as well as multistory underground command centers and barracks, some as deep as seventy-five feet.

"Marines On Iwo Jima: A Photographic Record" is an enhanced and expanded ebook edition of the hardcover and trade paperback book entitled Iwo Jima: Portrait of a Battle. The much larger book requires that it be presented in two volumes, each with more than three hundred photos.

The American mid-1944 campaign in the Mariana Islands was an important strategic step that placed Tokyo and the rest of Japan’s industrial heartland within range of the new U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 very-long-range bombers. Once the islands were secured and the airfields were built, the army air forces in the Pacific could do to Japanese industry what their counterparts in Europe had been doing to German industry since mid-1943.

Even though these important objectives in the Marianas had been accorded an early place in prewar strategic planning, the shape of the Pacific War had left them alone for two and a half years of hard battles in the Solomon Islands and at the far eastern periphery of Japanese central Pacific holdings: first Tarawa in November 1943, then the Marshall Islands in January and February 1944. The first and most difficult objective in the Marianas was Saipan, a former German colony that had been in Japanese hands since the end of World War I but had not been fortified in any meaningful way until the spring of 1944. By early June, despite effective interference from U.S. Navy submarines, the island was defended by approximately thirty-one thousand combat troops of varying quality and in various states of readiness. Squaring off against the defenders were two battle-hardened Marine divisions, each numbering about twenty thousand troops and supported by an array of twelve combat, combat support,and service battalions, not to mention ample carrier air support and U.S. Navy warships.

The American mid-1944 campaign in the Mariana Islands was an important strategic step that placed Tokyo and the rest of Japan’s industrial heartland within range of the new U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 very-long-range bombers. Once the islands were secured and the airfields were built, the new Twentieth Air Force could do to Japanese industry what its strategic counterparts in Europe had been doing to German industry since mid-1943.

Even though these important objectives in the Marianas had been accorded an early place in prewar strategic planning, the shape of the Pacific War had left them alone for two and a half years of hard battles in the Solomon Islands and at the far eastern periphery of Japanese central Pacific holdings: first Tarawa in November 1943, then the Marshall Islands in January and February 1944.

The first and most difficult objective in the Marianas was Saipan, a former German colony that had been in Japanese hands since the end of World War I but had not been fortified in any meaningful way until the spring of 1944. It was invaded by the 2d and 4th Marine divisions on June 15, 1944, and declared secure on July 9.

A natural extension of the Saipan battle, Tinian was invaded by the 2d and 4th Marine Division on July 24, and the separate invasion of Guam, a former American base captured in December 1941, was launched by the 3d Marine Division and 1st Provisional Marine Brigade on July 21.

By early 1944 the Americans' westward drive across the Pacific required airfields in the Marshall Islands at Kwajalein and Eniwetok atolls.

In late January, the 4th Marine Division and U.S. Army troops wrenched control of Kwajalein Atoll in three days of heavy fighting. Then, beginning February 18, the reinforced 22d Marine Regiment landed on three islands in Eniwetok Atoll. The three newly rebuilt former Japanese airfields at Kwajalein and Eniwetok would support operations in the Mariana Islands as the Marine Corps continued its island-hopping campaign to victory in the Pacific.

Although U.S. Marines had broken the back of the Japanese on Guadalcanal in furious combat between August 1942 and February 1943, much hard fighting remained to be endured on jungle-choked islands to the north. Between late 1942 and the end of 1943, the Marines on the ground and in the air took part in a series of battles and campaigns in the central and northern Solomon Islands, all part of the effort to reach and neutralize the Japanese regional air, naval and supply base at Rabaul, at the northeastern tip of New Britain. Throughout these campaigns, first over and on New Georgia,and then over and on Bougainville, the Marines fought their way through some of the most difficult terrain and inhospitable weather encountered in World War II.

As a result of the unbroken chain of land and air victories along the Solomons chain, the mighty Japanese fortress at Rabaul was brought within range of American and New Zealand air groups operating from Bougainville and other surrounding island air bases. The aggressive, unremitting offensive efforts supported by these bases secured the flank of the continuing American and Australiam campaign for eastern New Guinea. The high tide of Japanese conquest in the South and Southwest Pacific areas would recede, and the Marines would be free to undertake the long-planned island-hopping campaign in the Central Pacific and the Philippines, all the way to the Japanese home islands.

The six-month Guadalcanal campaign was the longest and most complicated operation U.S. Marines faced in the Pacific War. In July 1942, when it was discovered that the Japanese were building a bomber base on the island, the 1st Marine Division was the only Allied force available to respond to the threat. Although the airfield was seized without a fight after the Marines landed on August 7,1942, a Japanese naval attack the following night drove off the supporting U.S. Navy forces before the transports finished unloading supplies.

Sixteen thousand Marines were on their own, without naval or air support. They had a limited food supply and munitions sufficient for just four days of heavy fighting; the Japanese, however, were able to land fresh troops and supplies from Rabaul, their main regional base, six hundred miles to the northwest. The Marines were repeatedly on the verge of being overrun, and it was not until mid-November that the Americans turned the tide. After being relieved by U.S. Army forces in December, many Marines were too weak to climb the cargo nets to reach the decks of the troop transports that would take them to Australia.

The Guadalcanal-blooded 1st Marine Division's assault on Cape Gloucester in western New Britain on December 26, 1943, was unconnected to the preceding seventeen month slog along the nearby Solomon Islands chain. Nor did it have anything to do with the neutralization of the Japanese naval and air fortress at Rabaul, on the eastern end of New Britain. True enough, the Cape Gloucester invasion happened to strategically isolate the vast Rabaul logistics base from Japanese-held areas in nearby New Guinea. But the invasion of Cape Gloucester was a tactical operation aimed at preventing a pair of badly built airfields from supporting an effort to interdict the passage of two Australian Army divisions then fighting their way along the New Guinea shore adjacent to Vitiaz Strait. On the eastern shore of Vitiaz Strait, the Cape Gloucester airfields, once captured and improved, were to support the Australian drive - but not the air offensive against Rabaul.

By late March 1945, the pathway to invasion of the southernmost major island of the Japanese archipelago, Kyushu, had been secured but for one necessary stepping stone American forces required to support their tactical air effort leading up to and overhead the projected invasion of Japan, set to begin in the autumn of 1945.

The seizure of Okinawa and its airfields was vital to the land-based strategic bombing campaign that would precede and support the invasion of Japan and for close-in basing of the scores of Marine and U. S. Army Air Forces tactical air units that were slated to guard the approach of the Kyushu invasion fleet and operate over the beachheads and inland battlefields in the face of anticipated fanatical Japanese air defenses.

The American campaign in the western Pacific from the late summer 1944 to mid-1945 was a violent undertaking at every turn. The Japanese had been relentlessly pushed back throughout 1943 and 1944. Except for the western Caroline Islands, the Philippines, Formosa, a few islands near Japan, and Japan itself, there was very little left for them to defend. They had clearly lost their war of conquest in the Pacific and East Asia, but they could not bring themselves to settle gracefully; their warrior code prevented them from doing anything less than standing their ground especially in their homeland and dying.

The western Carolines would have been bypassed had the American drive into the Philippines not required an aviation stepping stone between American bases off western New Guinea and Mindanao, in the southern Philippines. A ready-made airfield on Peleliu, in the Palau Islands, thus became an objective to be invaded in the late summer of 1944. It was to be the site of a quick smash-and-grab combat landing modeled on a winning scheme that had seen to the successful ten-month American drive all across the central Pacific at Tarawa, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. Fast, efficient, easy; another in an unbroken string of American victories. What could possibly go wrong?

Conceived as a visual record rather than a definitive history, The Steel Wedge is a substantial photographic archive-263 photos, many never before published-focused on the coming of age of U.S. Marine Corps tanks, tank destroyers, and armored amphibian tractors through the Pacific island-hopping campaign from earliest pre-war development to Okinawa in 1945.

A slice of the Marine Corps experience in the Pacific Theater during World War II, The Steel Wedge employs explanatory captions and narrative text to supplement its large and broad array of combat photographs. It is the first book ever to focus mainly upon this outstanding photographic record.

"My first time at the controls of the N3N was a nightmare of jerky, uncoordinated movements, over-corrections, needless exertions, and red-faced certainty that I did not, in fact, have the right stuff. The instructor calmly got me and himself out of trouble and never uttered a sound of dismay. Until we were safely on the ground. Then he looked at me a wet rag, sweating fear and embarrassment into my bulky flight suit and said just the thing to make my day: 'Porter, you will never solo. You are the dumbest cadet I have ever laid eyes on.'"

Ace! is Bruce Porter's life as a Marine combat fighter pilot from his earliest days as a naval aviation cadet before World War II, to his adventures guarding America's forwardmost defense line in the South Pacific, to his aerial combat over the Solomons. Follow Bruce Porter through his exacting night-fighter training and fly with him on his rare double-kill night mission over Okinawa in 1945.

In this volume of his critically acclaimed series, The American Aces Speak, noted military historian Eric Hammel brings fresh first-person accounts from thirty-nine U.S. Army Air Corps fighter aces who blasted their way across the skies of North Africa, the Mediterranean, and northern and southern Europe in the great crusade against Hitler's vaunted Luftwaffe and the other Axis air forces. Coupled with a clear, concise historical overview of America's brilliant air war against the Axis in Europe and North Africa, Hammel's detailed interviews bring out the most thrilling in-the-cockpit experiences of some of our country's best pilots.

Climb aboard a P-38 Lightning as Maj. Bill Leverette fights America's highest-scoring single personal air battle against the Luftwaffe. And get into the cockpit of a P-47 Thunderbolt as 15-victory ace Capt. Don Bryan scores his dream kill by outwitting the pilot of a far speedier German jet in the closing days of the war in Europe.

In yet another superb, originally conceived offering, noted military historian, Eric Hammel brings us first-person accounts from thirty-nine of the American fighter aces who blasted their way across the skies of the Pacific and East Asia from December 7, 1941, until the final air battles over Japan itself in August 1945.

Coupled with a clear view of America's far-flung air war against Japan, Hammel's detailed interviews bring out the most thrilling in-the-cockpit experiences of the air combat that the Pacific War's best Army, Navy, and Marine pilots have chosen to tell.

Meet Frank Holmes, who defied death in an outmoded P-36 while still clad in a seersucker suit he had worn to mass earlier that morning. Fly with Scott McCuskey as, single-handed at Midway, he takes out two waves of Japanese dive-bombers that are attacking his precious aircraft carrier. Sweat out the last precious drops of fuel in a defective Marine Wildcat fighter as Medal of Honor recipient Jeff DeBlanc bores ahead to his target to keep the faith with the bomber crews he has been assigned to protect. Experience the ecstasy of total victory as Ralph Hanks becomes the Navy's first Hellcat ace-in-a-day when he destroys five Japanese fighters over the Gilbert Islands in a single mission.

Picking up where he left off in his acclaimed Aces Against Japan and Aces Against Germany, leading combat historian Eric Hammel comes through again with an engrossing new collection of thirty-eight first-person accounts by American World War II fighter aces.

Coupled with a clear overview of America's far-flung air war against Japan and a clear appreciation of the burgeoning industrial might backing the American war effort, Hammel's detailed interviews bring forth the most thrilling in-the-cockpit experiences that World War II's fabled Army, Navy, Marine, and Flying Tiger aces have chosen to tell.

Ride with 2d Lieutenant Jack Donalson as he downs three Zeros over Luzon on the second desperate day of World War II in the Philippines. Share three lonely air battles over Burma and China with Flying Tiger aces RT Smith, Dick Rossi, and Joe Rosbert. Hear the cry of victory as 2d Lieutenant Don McGee survives yet another encounter with Zeros over embattled Port Moresby, New Guinea, in his substandard P-39 Airacobra. Feel your heart beat with anxiety as an injured Ensign Ed Wendorf races against time to land his damaged Hellcat aboard the USS Lexington before he bleeds to death. And thrill to the hunt as Pearl Harbor veteran 1st Lieutenant Frank Holmes seeks personal revenge against Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto on one of history's most important and most thrilling fighter missions.

Adding to his acclaimed series, The American Aces Speak, leading combat historian Eric Hammel comes through with yet another engrossing collection of thirty-eight first-person accounts by American fighter aces serving in World War II, the Israeli War of Independence, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War

As are the three earlier volumes, Aces At War is a highly charged excursion into life and death in the air, told by men who excelled at piston-engine and jet-engine aerial combat and lived to tell about it. It is an emotional rendering of what brave airmen felt and how they fought in the now-dim days of America's living national history.

Ride with Flying Tigers ace Charlie Bond as he is shot down in flames over the Chinese city he alone has been able to defend against Japanese bombers. Share the loneliness of command as Lieutenant Commander Tom Blackburn decides the fate of the fellow Navy pilot whose F4U Corsair malfunctions in a desperate battle over Rabaul. Feel 2d Lieutenant Deacon Priest's overwhelming sense of duty to a friend as he lands his P-51 Mustang behind German lines to rescue his downed squadron commander. Share Lieutenant Colonel Ed Heller's desperation as he fights his way out of his uncontrollable F-86 Sabre jet over the wrong side of the Yalu River. And join Major Jim Kasler as he leads what might well be the most important air strike of the Vietnam War.

Adding to the his acclaimed series of exciting, in-the-cockpit series, The American Aces Speak, leading combat historian Eric Hammel comes through with yet another engrossing collection of thirty-nine first-person accounts by American fighter aces serving in World War II and the Korean War.

As are the four earlier volumes, Aces In Combat is a highly charged excursion into life and death in the air, told by men who excelled at piston-engine and jet-engine aerial combat and lived to tell about it. It is an emotional rendering of what brave airmen felt and how they fought in the now-dim days of America's living national history.

There was never a military campaign like it, and there never will be another.

Here is an opportunity to follow the great crusade as it unfolded in the air over the Nazi empire in North Africa and Europe. This exhaustive chronology sheds a fascinating light on the course of America's air war against Germany and her allies.

THE AIR WAR EUROPA CHRONOLOGY is a day-by-day accounting of all the major combat missions undertaken by United States Army Air Forces and United States Navy aviation units in the European, Mediterranean, and North African theaters of operations in World War II.

A special introductory narrative explains the crucial evolution of fighter tactics over western Europe and how it led to the inexorable defeat of Hitler's vaunted Luftwaffe.

All U.S. Army Air Forces theater fighter aces are covered: including unit affiliation, date and time ace status was attained, and date and time of highest victory tally (over ten).

Information pertaining to the arrival, activation, transfer, departure, and decommissioning of air commands, combat units, and special units. Comings and goings of the commanders of major aviation units are also covered.

THE GREAT AMERICAN AERIAL CRUSADE OF WORLD WAR II: There was never a military campaign like it, and there never will be another. Here is an opportunity to follow the great crusade as it unfolded in the air over the Japan's ill-gotten empire in East Asia and the Pacific. This exhaustive chronology sheds a fascinating light on the course of America's air war against Japan in all the active theaters.

The Air War Pacific Chronology is a day-by-day accounting of all the major combat aviation missions undertaken by United States Army Air Forces, United States Navy, United States Marine Corps, and American Volunteer Group units and commands in China, Burma, India, and throughout the Pacific during World War II.

All Army Air Forces, Navy, Marine, and Flying Tiger theater fighter aces are covered including unit affiliation, date and time ace status was attained, and date and time of highest victory tally (over ten).

Information pertaining to the arrival, activation, transfer, departure, and decommissioning of air commands, combat units, and special units. Comings and goings of the commanders of major aviation units are also covered.

In the summer of 1967, the Marines in I Corps, South Vietnam's northernmost military region, were doing eveything they could to lighten the pressure on the besieged Con Thien Combat Base.

Still fresh after months of relatively light action around Khe Sanh, the 3d Battalion, 26th Marines, was sent to the Con Thien region to secure the combat bases's endangered main supply route. On September 7, 1967, its first full day in the new area of operations, separate elements of the battalion were attacked by at least two battalions of North Vietnamese infantry, and both were nearly overrun in night-long battles.

On September 10, while advancing to a new sector near Con Thien, the 3d Battalion, 26th Marines, was attacked by at least a full North Vietnamese regiment, the same NVA unit that had attacked it two days earlier. Isolated into two separate defensive perimeters, the Marines battled through the afternoon and evening against repeated assaults by waves of NVA regulars intent upon achieving a major victory. In a battle described as Custer's Last Stand With Air Support, the Americans prevailed by the narrowest of margins.

The Invasion of Guadalcanal and the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, August 1942

Newly discovered Japanese records provide a fresh appraisal of this little-known battle.

Carrier Clash is an exciting, fact-filled narrative that takes the reader into the air with brave U.S. Navy pilots as they defend their ships against incoming Japanese bombers, into the cockpits of U.S. Navy dive-bombers as they dive on the light carrier Ryujo, and into firey compartments as the crew of the damaged USS Enterprise battles to keep their bomb-battered ship afloat.

The Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, October 1942

The Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, a strategic naval action in the bitter Guadalcanal Campaign, was history's fourth carrier-versus-carrier naval battle. Though technically a Japanese victory, the battle proved to be the Empire of Japan's last serious attempt to win the Pacific War by means of an all-out carrier confrontation. Only one other carrier battle occurred in the Pacific War, in June 1944, in the Philippine Sea. By then, however, the U.S. Navy's Fast Carrier Task Force was operational, and Japan's dwindling fleet of carriers was outnumbered and completely outclassed.

Though hundreds of Japanese naval aviators perished in the great Marianas Turkey Shoot of June 1920, 1944, it was during the first four carrier battles in the six-month period from early May through late October 1942 that the fate of Japan's small, elite naval air arm was sealed. It was at Coral Sea, in May, that Japan's juggernaut across the Pacific was blunted. It was at Midway, in June, that Japan's great carrier fleet was cut down to manageable size. And it was at Eastern Solomons, in August, and Santa Cruz, in October, that Japan's last best carrier air groups were ground to dust.

Told from the point of view of the men in the foxholes and tanks, outposts, and command posts, Eric Hammel's Chosin is the definitive account of the epic retreat under fire of the 1st Marine Division from the Chosin Reservoir in December 1950.

The author first sketches in the errors and miscalculations on the part of the American high command that caused the Marines to be strung out at the end of a narrow road scores of miles from the sea. He then plunges right into the action: the massing of Chinese forces in about ten-to-one strength; the Marines' command problems due to the -35-degree climate, mountainous terrain, and high-level overconfidence; and the onset of the overwhelming Chinese assault.

With a wealth of tactical detail and small-unit action Chosin: Heroic Ordeal of the Korean War is the most complete, most compelling book written on this iconic battle. Author Eric Hammel's masterful account offers invaluable perspective on war at the gut level.

In only a lifetime, the long United States Marine Corps campaign across the Pacific Island has become the stuff of enduring legend. We are down to just a few Pacific Warriors who lived it and can still tell us about it from their own experiences. Now, in Coral and Blood, the critically acclaimed military historian Eric Hammel, who has specialized in writing about Marines in the Pacific, has compiled a brief but comprehensive history of the Marines' island war. This book was conceived as a starting point for readers who have not yet read much about the Pacific War, but it is also designed to provide a simple yet complete overview for seasoned Pacific War enthusiasts who have not yet examined the island campaigns as an integrated whole. Perhaps by finding out about battles not yet examined, an experienced Pacific War enthusiast will find inspiration for moving on to new battles and looking for even broader understanding.

The first Saturday in October 1973: A traditional Jewish Sabbath in Israel. It is also Yom Kippur, and the Israeli Defense Force is preparing to observe the holiest of the Jewish holy days.

Meanwhile the Syrian army, the greatest achievement of the modern Syrian state, is massed on the Golan Heights. Together with newly arrived Soviet-made equipment, 1,200 main battle tanks, 1,000 armored personnel carriers, 1,000 artillery pieces, and more than 100 mobile antiaircraft missile carriers are ready to strike in a lightning-swift offensive that will drive to the sea and cut Israel in two.

Duel for the Golan, the first book to be written on this aspect of the Yom Kippur War, is based on interviews with the participants from both sides of the fighting. As such it remain a compelling and powerful account of one of the greatest tank battles fought since World War II. It also provides the first in-depth analysis of exactly how and why an inferior number of Israeli defenders was capable of inflicting one of the greatest defeats in modern military history upon awe-inspiring Arab armored forces.

In Fire in the Streets, the dramatic narrative of the battle unfolds on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis. The focus is on the U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers and Marines - from the top commanders down to the frontline infantrymen and on the men and women who supported them. Eric Hammel, a renowned military historian, expertly draws on first-hand accounts from the battle participants in this engrossing mixture of action and commentary.

First Across the Rhine is the first-person narrative by the commander of the celebrated 291st Engineer Combat Battalion, one of the rough, hard-working U.S. Army engineer combat units that literally paved the way from Normandy to the Rhine and beyond.

Landing in Normandy shortly after D-Day, the 291st quickly acquired a reputation as a savvy, can-do engineer combat unit. During the race across France and Belgium in the summer of 1944, the 291st proved itself to be the First U.S. Army's premier engineer battalion. In December 1944, the lightly armed 291st found itself virtually alone as it stood astride the route of the panzer spearhead charged with leading the northern army group in Hitler's last-ditch Ardennes offensive the Battle of the Bulge. Tough and confident, the 291st blew up bridge after vital bridge in the face of the German assault and thus denied Germany her needed victory in the West. Days later, the 291st was selected from among all U.S. army engineer combat battalions in Germany to throw the first bridge across the Rhine River in the face of enormous resistance. It thus built the longest combat bridge in Europe in record time and opened the German heartland to the Allied juggernaut.

Guadalcanal: Decision at Sea is a full-blown examination in vivid detail of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, November 13-15, 1942, a crucial step toward America's victory over the Japanese during World War II.

The three-day air and naval action incorporated America's most decisive surface battle of the war and the only naval battle of this century in which American battleships directly confronted and mortally wounded an enemy battleship. This American victory decided the future course of the naval war in the Pacific, indeed of the entire Pacific War. Hammel has brilliantly blended the detailed historical records with personal accounts of many of the officers and enlisted men involved, creating an engrossing narrative of the strategy and struggle as seen by both sides. He has also included major new insights into crucial details of the battles, including a riveting account of the American forces' failure to effectively use their radar advantage.

The Japanese defeats at Midway and Guadalcanal decided the out-come of the Pacific War. Guadalcanal was the classic three-dimensional campaign. On land, at sea, and in the air, fierce battles were fought with both sides stretching their supplies and equipment to the breaking point. The campaign lasted six months, involved nearly one million men, and stopped Japanese expansion in the Pacific.

When the campaign began on August 7, 1942, no one on either side quite knew how to conduct it, as Eric Hammel shows in this masterly account. Guadalcanal: Starvation Island corrects numerous errors and omissions in the official records that have been perpetuated in all the books previously published about the campaign. Hammel also draws on the recollections of more than 100 participants on both sides, especially the enlisted men at the sharp end. Their words bring us into the heart of the battle and portray the fighting accurately, realistically, and very powerfully.

From critcally acclaimed military historian Eric Hammel comes a vivid oral history account of the Tet 1968 siege of the Khe Sanh Combat Base. The words of American fighting men caught up in the grueling, deadly seventy-seven-day ordeal create a harrowing tapestry of tragedy and triumph.

As two North Vietnamese Army divisions move to surround them, the vastly outnumbered U.S. Marines rush to strengthen their defenses at the isolated base and several nearby hilltop positions. The Communist forces repeatedly attack, are repeatedly repelled, and then dig in to take the American base by siegethe makings of a classic, modern set-piece strategy in which the defenders become bait to tie the attackers to fixed positions in which they can be pummeled and pulverized by American artillery and air support.

When Bob Goebel left home to join the Army Air Corps in 1942, he was a 19 years old and a high-school graduate. The only previous time he had traveled far from his native Racine, Wisconsin, was an epic trip in the summer of 1940, when he and a pal had ridden the rails to Texas and back to visit two of Bob's brothers who were in the service.

Even during his weeks in Pre-flight training, young Goebel found that he felt at home in the service, and he looked forward to the great adventure on which he had embarked out of a sense of patriotism and yearning to see the wide world. Easygoing and quick to learn, Cadet Goebel worked his way steadily through the Basic, Primary, and Advanced phases of military flight training, and found in himself an aptitude for flight. However, like nearly all of his comrades, Goebel could not learn how to hit a flying target with the guns mounted on the trainers he flew. Nevertheless, he and theygraduated to fighter school and, after earning their wings and commissions, were sent on to join an operational fighter unit in Panama.

The months of rigorous operational flying in Panama seasoned Lieutenant Goebel and his young companions, and made better aviators of them, but it did little to advance their gunnery skills. When a new crop of novices arrived, Goebel and his companions found themselves on their way to Europe to join the fight. They wound up in North Africa in the Spring of 1944 with orders to join the 31st Fighter Group in Italy.

Just as Goebel and his young companions were about to join the leading fighter group in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations, the 31st turned in its British-made Spitfire fighters for new P-51 Mustang fighters. Within weeks, Bob Goebel had flown his first combat missions and had lost his element leader, who was shot down in a swirling dogfight. But master the job he did

In Six Days in June, distinguished military historian Eric Hammel becomes the first chronicler of the 1967 Six Day War to unite the story of development of Israel's bold brand of military training and planning with a detailed narrative account of her breathtaking victories in Sinai, Jerusalem, The West Bank, and the Golan Heights.

Unlike all earlier accounts of the 1967 war, Hammel's sweeping narrative describes how, from the early 1950s, the Israel Defense Force Zahal undertook a relentless and often visionary campaign to prepare for the inevitable war of national survival that, when it came, radically altered the Middle East and has profoundly influenced international politics ever since.

Israel's brilliant, innovative military thinkers developed extremely flexible strategies, operational plans, and battlefield tactics aimed at overcoming several large Arab forces with Zahal's much smaller army and air force. Zahal's innovations proved to be so effective and fundamentally sound that they established the norms of modem military planning and performance that saw the United States and her coalition allies through the lightning Desert Storm campaign of 1991.

Though he would object to being called such, Hamilton McWhorter III's service to family and country make him a standout among America's Greatest Generation. A Georgia native whose family roots date from that region's settlement during the 1700s, Mac McWhorter was a naval aviation cadet undergoing training when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941.

After earning his Wings of Gold in early 1942, Ensign McWhorter was trained as a fighter pilot in the robust but technologically outmoded F4F Wildcat. Initially assigned to VF-9 - a fiercely spirited and hard-playing fighter squadron - he saw first combat in November 1942 against Vichy French forces in North Africa.

After returning to the United States, VF-9 became the first unit to convert to the new Grumman F6F Hellcat fighter - the fighter the U.S. Navy would use to crush Japanese air power during the long offensive from the Southwest Pacific to the shores of Japan.

From mid 1943, Hamilton McWhorter was constantly engaged in the unforgiving and deadly aerial warfare that characterized the battles against Imperial Japan. His fifth aerial victory, in November 1943 off Tarawa Atoll, made him the first ace in the Hellcat, and seven subsequent victories ensured his place in the annals of air-to-air combat. McWhorter's combat service, from the beginning of the war to the last campaign off the shores of Okinawa, makes his story a must-read for the serious student of the Pacific air war.

The Jolly Rogers is the true story of one of the U.S. Navy's foremost World War II fighter squadrons, VF-17, and its charismatic commander, fighter ace Tom Blackburn. In his action-packed war memoir and unit history, Blackburn describes VF-17's intense, winning campaign against the Japanese over the northern Solomon Islands and Rabaul in late 1943 and early 1944.

Beginning with his own experiences as a trainer of fighter pilots early in World War II and his leadership of a small carrier-based fighter squadron supporting the invasion of North Africa, Blackburn goes on to provide a rich, detailed account of how he shaped a crew of over-eager hotshots into one of the highest scoring fighter squadrons of World War II. In only seventy-six days of combat, Tom Blackburn's Jolly Rogers knocked down a record 154 enemy warplanes, and Blackburn himself emerged as one of VF-17's leading aces with eleven kills to his credit.

In this vividly told first-person narrative, retired Marine Colonel Dick Camp colorfully recounts the daily combat actions and command decisions of his Vietnam experience as Lima-6 the commander of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marinesfrom June 1967 through January 1968.

Upon his arrival in Vietnam, Captain Camp finessed his way into the immediate command of Lima Company following the death of its previous commander near Khe Sanh. Instantly, he was thrown into the tense experience of patrolling the beautiful, deadly jungle valleys around Khe Sanh and escorting supply convoys along embattled Highway 9 between Dong Ha and Khe Sanh.

For six full months, Dick Camp commanded Lima Company in alternating periods of intense combat and intense waiting a typical, virtually emblematic experience shared by his peers in the 1967-1968 phase of the war in northern Quang Tri Province, bordering the DMZ and North Vietnam. In early September 1967, Camp's battalion was almost overrun near besieged Con Thien in an ambush sprung by a full North Vietnamese Army regiment. In early January 1968, Lima Company ambushed the commander and staff of a North Vietnamese regiment apparently charged with assaulting the Marine lines at Khe Sanh. Three weeks later, Lima Company and the rest of the reinforced 26th Marine Regiment were besieged inside the Khe Sanh Combat Base by two North Vietnamese divisions.

In twenty hard-hitting, action-packed true, heroic stories, Eric Hammel chronicles the making of the modern U.S. Marine Corps legend from the desperate Guadalcanal landings in 1942 to the tragic bombing of the Marine headquarters in Beirut in 1983. Excerpted from all of Hammel's books on Marine Corps battles and a number of articles he has written over the years for Leatherneck and other magazines, this collection will prove to be inspiring to Marines, former Marines, friends of the U.S. Marine Corps, and any other reader of military history who wants to know what war looks like from the bottom up.

Most of the stories in Marines at War are taken from Hammel's books, which are well known to avid military-history readers for the way the author blends riveting accounts of men at the bloody spearpoint with the big picture. This blending of facts and analysis is the essence of Eric Hammel's writing. Several of the chapters in Marines at War are rendered in the actual words of combat Marines.

Munda Trail is the dramatic, harrowing story of green American soldiers encountering for the first time impenetrable swamps, solid rain forests, invisible coconut-log pillboxes, tenacious snipers tied into trees, torrential tropical rains, counterattack by enemy aircraft and naval guns, and the logistical nightmare of living and moving in endless mud. A carefully planned offensive quickly degenerates into isolated small-unit actions as the terrain breaks unit cohesion and leads inexperienced soldiers into deadly ambushes. As physical and psychological strains mount, Army doctors begin to define a new disease nearing epidemic proportions—combat fatigue. Men without injuries simply become useless for further fighting, the advance bogs down. Yet, over time, the scared American soldiers find their inner resolve and climb out of the psychological abyss, emerge steady and true, combat veterans at last—and victors.

The Road to Big Week begins with a thorough examination of American development of a strategic bombing doctrine from its earliest conception in the years after World War I. Balancing the demands of the ground army's desire and need for air support and the visionary outlook of such early Air Corps leaders as General Billy Mitchell with the cash-strapped circumtances of the Great Depression and the limitations imposed by the Congressional peace lobbies, the Air Corps was able to deliver a fully formed doctrine that could not at first be supported by adequate aircraft nor even a public acknowlegement that the drive to perfect strategic bombing was even on. Before the doctrine or a fully funtional heavy strategic bomber were quite perfected, the United States was drawn into World War II. Facing numerous obstacles unperceived during peacetime, not the least being simple bad weather, the early American efforts to mount a strategic bombing campaign in northern Europe nearly failed in the face of unsustainable casualties and ineffective strategic direction. Only the belated modernization of escort-fighter policy saved the strategic bombing force from failure and, indeed, formed the foundation upon which the strategic bombing campaign ultimately reached maturity and achieved success.

At 6:22 A.M. on October 23, 1983, a yellow Mercedes truck raced across the parking lot of the Beirut International Airport in Lebanon. Crashing through a chain-link gate into the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit's headquarters compound, it raced on careening through a shack and into the open atrium lobby of a terminal building where the men were housed, many still asleep. The truck lurched to a stop. Seconds later, 12,000 pounds of high explosives piled in the bed of the truck exploded. The four-story steel and concrete building shuddered, then collapsed. Two hundred forty-one Americans were killed and many more were injured in the disaster.

Upon graduating from Annapolis in February 1941, Francis Fox Parry and his classmates were sent directly to a makeshift artillery course. Following the crudest training imaginable -- they never fired a gun -- and without even attending The Basic School, at which Marine officers usually receive their indoctrination, Parry found himself serving with a hastily activated Reserve artillery battalion. Little more than a year out of the Naval Academy, and having learned all he could "on the job," Parry was in the Pacific, an ill-prepared defender of an isolated island bastion. In September 1942, Parry's artillery battalion was landed at Guadalcanal and immediately sent into action.

The early chapters of Three-War Marine are a chronicle of America's makeshift early-war effort. That Fox Parry's generation rose so quickly to command artillery batteries in combat after receiving such shoddy training addresses the underlying issue of the level of preparedness at which America faced two of Parry's three wars. By the end of the Okinawa Campaign, where he served as an artillery battalion executive officer, Parry still did not feel that he knew very much about the artilleryman's "black art."

Three-War Marine covers thirty action-packed years. In it, we see the maturing Marine combat officer: the unseasoned battery commander; the confident battalion commander; and the thoroughly competent colonel overseeing day-to-day operations throughout a vast war zone. Three-War Marine is an insiders view of the Marine Corps during its most thrilling decades.

On the night of March 24–25, 1944, seventy-nine Allied airmen clambered through a tunnel at Stalag Luft III in eastern Germany in the final act of what history and Hollywood have dubbed The Great Escape. The culmination of more than four years of toil, triumph, and heartbreak, the escape was intend­ed to cause as much disruption as possible in Hitler's Europe. In this, the escapers succeeded beyond their wildest expectations, but the escape sent shockwaves through the German high command that were to have tragic consequences.

This is the story of that remarkable battle to escape from captivity. Built around a cast of colorful and engaging characters from every corner of the world, it describes their ongoing struggle to outwit their captors, the growing sophistication of their escape attempts, and their ambitious plan to construct three huge escape tunnels and scatter hundreds of airmen across occupied Europe. It is a tale of ingenuity, perseverance, and courage, and a testament to what ordinary men can achieve in extraordinary circumstances.

The Three Day Promise is an inspiring saga that traces the author's life from his humble birth in Korea to his medical pre-eminence in the United States. Dr. Chung documents this half-century passage with powerful insights into Korea's culture and vivid images of its people.

Dr. Chung affords an intimate understanding of the Korean War from his perspective as a soldier. The book deftly transcends a strict study of war by making it the context for examining human values. Out of love, the youthful Chung promises his mother to return from the war in three days. The war that separated his family and his country kept the vow from being realized for more than three decades.

Here is the largely unknown story of the decline and rebirth of the U.S. military between the last day of World War I and the Pearl Harbor attack. It focuses on the key dilemmas the military services faced in even planning a competent national defense through the late 1930s and hinges on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's crucial "Aircraft Meeting" in November 1938, which got the rearmament ball rolling nearly in time for America's entry into World War II. While it focuses on the military's travails and solutions, The Forge is also a political history centered on national defense issues still in play today.

The annals of aerial combat are as immensely deep as they are immensely wide. Aviation stories—especially combat aviation stories—never fail to fascinate and instruct listeners and readers across national or generational boundaries. They have been sought out and devoured from the earliest days of flight, and their popularity has done nothing but grow ever since.

Thomas McKelvey Cleaver started collecting live-action tales of aviation combat heroics—from the aviators' own lips—at a tender age, and he has been sharing them with the reading public, chiefly with subscribers to Flight Journal, for decades. Air Combat Annals is a notworthy collection of his writing and storytelling, and it includes exciting material never before published. It is a fitting tribute, mainly to American combat airmen of World War II, but also to several Axis pilots as well as American combat aviators who flew in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Urban "Ben" Drew was a P-51 Mustang pilot in the 375th Fighter Squadron of the Eighth Air Force's 361st Fighter Group. He was the first Allied pilot to shoot down two of the Luftwaffe's "jet wonder weapon," the Messerschmitt Me 262, and he finished the war as a six-plane ace. His tales of air combat over Europe are exciting reading.

This book is far more than a biography of Ben Drew. Powell has worked in details, anecdotes, and the stories of people around Drew in order to help readers feel that they were there. Colonel Thomas J.J. Christian, Bob McCandliss, Martin Johnson, and the other "Katzenjammer Kid," Bill Kemp, all flew with Drew and shared in the dangers of aerial combat. Their stories are all part of this book.