In 1944, with the invasion of Europe underway and Battles in the Atlantic and Mediterranean all but won, the Royal Navys strength could be focussed on the Far East and the Pacific where the Japanese were still a long way from defeat. Since the Battle of Midway, in June 1942, the United States had been slowly forcing the Japanese back, but it was a long, bloody process. The Allies needed to combine their forces more effectively if they were to bring the war to an end quickly. In response the Royal Navy massed its ships to add weight to the US Navy. With an attack force of four fleet carriers, and two more on the way, the RNs role would be significant, but would take time to work up to the state of preparedness of their American cousins. And so a fleet was born for use in the Indian Ocean and, later, the Pacific.From April 1944 to August 1945 they would successfully fight many long, intensive battles. In this time each carrier would contribute greatly to victory, none more so than HMS Indomitable with her 5th Fighter Wing. They would be in thick of the fighting, achieve success and live perilously for a prolonged period, losing many men along the way. It was a war of attrition, which allowed little room for compassion or benevolence.The story told in this book is about the exceptional group of young men, from Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Holland and South Africa who joined the Fleet Air Arm as pilots. With their American-built Hellcats they were in the thick of the action, providing a hard, professional core to this fighting fleet that few would equal. Although its operational history is second to none, this was only achieved by the sacrifice and endurance of the men who flew many dangerous missions and daily lived with the spectre of a searing death. And so the book is about them, with war providing a back drop that broods and eviscerates in turn. How did these men come to be fighting as pilots with the Fleet Air Arm, how were they trained, how did they live, how did they prepare themselves to kill or be killed, what sustained them and what did they feel about their extremely dangerous experiences? Luckily some survived to record their thoughts and others left poignant memories for the curious to follow and explore. And here the author was lucky to meet or correspond with nearly all the survivors and be privileged to hear their stories. He follows the young pilots lives from selection, through training to operations. The 5th Wing went to sea in 1944 and were in continuous action, in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, from then until the last days of the war. They participated in strikes on Sumatra with the aim of destroying its highly important oil refineries, then they joined in the battles for Leyte and Okinawa, before moving with the British Fleet to begin the invasion Japan itself.

Face au peloton d’exécution qui allait le fusiller le 17 août 1946 à 7 h 05 à Alençon, Bernard Jardin, très pâle, prononçait d’une voix assez faible ses derniers mots : « Vive le national socialisme », puis avant que les balles ne fusent, il ajoutait « Et vive la France quand même ». À notre connaissance, Bernard Jardin demeure le seul auxiliaire de la Sipo-SD en Normandie à proclamer jusqu’au bout son adhésion au national-socialisme. Pourquoi ce jeune homme commis boucher choisit-il délibérément le camp nazi ? L’appât du gain l’amène d’abord à monter des affaires de marché noir. Repéré par Hildebrandt, le chef roué et manipulateur de l’antenne ornaise du Sipo-SD, Bernard Jardin devient d’abord agent de renseignement avant de prendre la responsabilité d’opérations contre la Résistance ornaise ; en quelques mois, lui et son équipe, portent des coups très durs à celle-ci. D’abord enquêteur, Jardin frappe et torture ses victimes avant de devenir un assassin.

In 1984, Editions Heimdal brought out their very first divisional history : the 9.SS-Panzer-Division. Written by the late Herbert Fürbinger, a former Hohenstaufen soldier, this book made its mark and is one of the best references on the subject. Today the two top specialists on the Waffen-SS, Pierre Tiquet and Charles Trang have come together to create its indispensable supplement. Almost 800 photos, mostly unpublished, almost 200 documents, numerous eye-witness accounts as well as biographies of the main officers in the division.

A brilliant American combat officer and this country's most famous traitor, Benedict Arnold is one of the most fascinating and complicated people to emerge from American history. His contemporaries called him "the American Hannibal" after he successfully led more than 1,000 men through the savage Maine wilderness in 1775. The objective of Arnold and his heroic corps was the fortress city of Quebec, the capital of British-held Canada. The epic campaign to bring Canada into the war as the 14th colony is the subject of Benedict Arnold's Army: The 1775 American Invasion of Canada during the Revolutionary War, now available in paperback.George Washington provided the initiative for the assault when he learned that a fast moving detachment could surprise Quebec by following a chain of rivers and lakes through nearly uncharted wilderness. Washington picked Col. Benedict Arnold, an obscure and controversial Connecticut officer, to command the corps of men who signed up for the secret and dangerous mission.Instead of a twenty-day march, the route consumed months as Arnold's men toiled across 270 miles of treacherous rapids, raging waterfalls, and trackless forests—at times up to their waists in freezing water dragging and pushing their clumsy boats through surging rapids and hauling them up and over waterfalls. In one of the greatest exploits in American military history, Arnold led his famished corps through the early winter snow up and over the Appalachian Mountains to the St. Lawrence River. On the distant riverbank, Quebec beckoned. Arnold crossed his corps and besieged the British. When the second prong of the invasion arrived under General Montgomery, the officers launched a daring assault on the last day of the year upon the walled city.Based upon extensive primary sources and a keen understanding of the terrain, Benedict Arnold's Army examines in fascinating detail a largely unknown but important period of both the Revolution and Arnold's fascinating life. An award-winning author, Arthur Lefkowitz provides key insights into Arnold's character during the earliest phase of his military career, revealing his aggressive nature, his need for recognition, his experience as a competitive businessman, and his obsession with honor. When readers close this book, they will understand for the first time what started one of Washington's favorite and most capable officers down the fateful path to treason.While preparing to write this book, Lefkowitz made numerous trips along the same route that Arnold's army marched. This knowledge, coupled with his peerless research, makes him uniquely qualified to write Benedict Arnold's Army.There is a growing interest in the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary War as a source of national pride and identity. The Arnold Expedition, as told in the pages of Benedict Arnold's Army, is one of the greatest adventure stories in American history.

There were no mission limits for a pilot in the Pacific during World War II; unlike in Europe, you flew until it was time to go home. So it was for James “Jug” Curran, all the way from New Guinea to the Philippines with the 348th Fighter Group, the first P-47 Thunderbolt outfit in the Pacific. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Curran volunteered to try flying in the blue yonder, and trained as an Army fighter pilot. He got his wish to fly the P-47 in the Pacific, going into combat in August 1943, in New Guinea, and later helping start the “Black Rams” fighter squadron. The heavy U.S. Thunderbolts were at first curious to encounter the nimble, battle-hardened Japanese in aerial combat, but soon the American pilots gained skill of their own and their planes proved superior. Bombers on both sides could fall to fighters, but the fighters themselves were eyeball to eyeball, best man win. Check Six! is an aviation chronicle that brings the reader into flight, then into the fight, throughout the Pacific War and back. This work, from someone who was there, captures the combat experience of our aviators in the Pacific, aided by pertinent excerpts from the official histories of units that “Jug” Curran flew with. It is a tale of perseverance, as Curran flew over 200 combat missions, and with the men of the 348th Fighter Group proved the Thunderbolt’s great capability as they battled their way against a stubborn and deadly foe. This work increases the body of knowledge on the critical role of aviation in the Pacific War, as U.S. fighter pilots took the lead in our counteroffensive against the short-lived island Empire.

In 2014, Eric J. Wittenberg published “The Devil’s to Pay”: John Buford at Gettysburg. A History and Walking Tour, an award-winning study of Union cavalry delaying actions at Gettysburg. Fast-forward four years to 2018 and Wittenberg’s latest release, a companion Western Theater study entitled Holding the Line on the River of Death: Union Mounted Forces at Chickamauga, September 18, 1863.This volume focuses on the two important delaying actions conducted by mounted Union soldiers at Reed’s and Alexander’s bridges on the first day of Chickamauga. A cavalry brigade under Col. Robert H. G. Minty and Col. John T. Wilder’s legendary “Lightning Brigade” of mounted infantry made stout stands at a pair of chokepoints crossing Chickamauga Creek. Minty’s small cavalry brigade held off nearly ten times its number on September 18 by designing and implementing a textbook example of a delaying action. Their dramatic and outstanding efforts threw Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg’s entire battle plan off its timetable by delaying his army’s advance for an entire day. That delay cost Bragg’s army the initiative at Chickamauga. Wittenberg brings his expertise with Civil War cavalry operations to bear with vivid and insightful descriptions of the fighting and places the actions in their full and proper historic context.This thoroughly researched and well-written book includes three appendices—two orders of battle and a discussion of the historic context of some of the tactics employed by the Union mounted force on September 18, and an epilogue on how the War Department and National Park Service have remembered these events. It also includes a detailed walking and driving tour complete with the GPS coordinates, a trademark of Wittenberg’s recent works. Complete with more than 60 photos and 15 maps by master cartographer Mark Anderson Moore, Holding the Line on the River of Death: Union Mounted Forces at Chickamauga, September 18, 1863 will be a welcome addition to the burgeoning Chickamauga historiography.

From First Manassas in 1861 to Third Winchester in 1864, Robert Rodes served in all the great battles and campaigns of the legendary Army of Northern Virginia. Jedediah Hotchkiss, Stonewall Jackson’s renowned mapmaker, expressed the feelings of many contemporaries when he declared that Rodes was the best division commander in Lee’s army. A combat officer of this stature deserves a complete and deeply researched biography, and now he finally has one in Major General Robert E. Rodes of the Army of Northern Virginia: A Biography.A graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and a prewar railroad engineer, Rodes was one of only a handful of officers in the Confederate army to rise so high without the benefit of a West Point education. That fact that he did so speaks to his well-earned reputation as a courageous and inspiring leader who routinely delivered hard-hitting attacks and stout defensive efforts. His greatest moment on the field came at Chancellorsville in the spring of 1863, when he spearheaded Stonewall Jackson’s famous flank attack that crushed the left wing of General Hooker’s Army of the Potomac. But like all men, he was not perfect. In his next fight at Gettysburg, Rodes faltered, turning in a curiously disjointed and apathetic performance that to this day raises questions that remain only partially answered.But he was much more than just a combat leader. Rodes’ prewar life, which has been left largely unexplored, shaped the general he was destined to become. The native of Lynchburg, Virginia, was a VMI instructor, a hard working engineer, a loving husband, a loyal friend, and a very complex man. The strict disciplinarian entered the conflict with a deep yearning for recognition and glory, coupled with an indifferent attitude toward religion and salvation. When he was killed at the height of his combat career at Third Winchester on September 19, 1864, a trove of prayer books and testaments were found on his corpse.Based upon exhaustive new research that puts flesh and blood on the man and the general, Darrell Collins’ biography, now available in paperback, breathes life into this largely overlooked man of the South. Although Rodes’ widow consigned his personal papers to the flames after the war, Collins uncovered a substantial amount of firsthand information to complete his compelling portrait of the life, mind, and combat career of one of Robert E. Lee’s most dependable field generals.

Robert E. Lee is well known as a Confederate general and as an educator later in life, but most people are exposed to the same handful of images of one of America’s most famous sons. It has been almost seven decades since anyone has attempted a serious study of Lee in photographs, and with Don Hopkins’s painstakingly researched and lavishly illustrated

War in the Asia Pacific is a trilogy of books comprising a general history of the war against Japan; unlike other histories it expands the narrative beginning long before Pearl Harbor and encompasses a much wider group of actors to produce the most complete narrative yet written and the first truly international treatment of the epic conflict. Peter Harmsen uses his renowned ability to weave together complex events into an entertaining and revealing narrative, including facets of the war that may be unknown to many readers of WWII history, such as the war in Subarctic conditions on the Aleutians, or the mass starvations that cost the lives of millions in China, Indochina, and India, and offering a range of perspectives to reflect what war was like both at the top and at the bottom, from the Oval Office to the blistering sands of Peleliu. Storm Clouds over the Pacific begins the story long before Pearl Harbor, showing how the war can only be understood if ancient hatreds and long-standing geopolitics are taken into account. Peter Harmsen demonstrates how Japan and China’s ancient enmity grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leading to increased tensions in the 1930s which exploded into conflict in 1937. The battles of Shanghai and Nanjing were followed by the battle of Taierzhuang in 1938, China’s only major victory. A war of attrition continued up to 1941, the year when Japan made the momentous decision for all-out war; the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor catapulted the United States into the war, and the Japanese also overran British and Dutch territories throughout the western Pacific.

“The present seems to be the most propitious time since the commencement of the war for the Confederate Army to enter Maryland,” wrote Robert E. Lee following his army’s stunning success at Second Manassas.Confederate armies advanced across a thousand mile front in the summer of 1862. The world watched anxiously—could the Confederacy achieve its independence?Reacting to the Army of Northern Virginia’s trek across the Potomac River, George B. McClellan gathered the broken and scattered remnants of several Federal armies within Washington, D. C. to repel the invasion and expel the Confederates from Maryland. “Everything seems to indicate that they intend to hazard all upon the issue of the coming battle,” he said of the invading force.Historians Robert Orrison and Kevin Pawlak trace the routes both armies traveled during the Maryland Campaign, ultimately coming to a climactic blow on the banks of Antietam Creek. That clash on September 17, 1862, to this day remains the bloodiest single day in American history.To Hazard All: A Guide to the Maryland Campaign, 1862 offers several day trip tours and visits many out-of-the-way sites related to the Maryland Campaign. Chapters include:Confederates Enter MarylandThe Federals RespondThe Investment of Harpers FerryThe Battle of South MountainThe Battle of AntietamReturn to Virginia

Vietman Bao Chi brings together interviews with 35 combat correspondents who reported on the Vietnam War. They wrote the stories of Vietnam, captured the images and filmed the television coverage of their fellow servicemen on the battlefields from the Mekong Delta in the south to the DMZ in Central Vietnam, from the Tet Offensive in 1968 to the fall of Saigon in 1975. They were men like Dale Dye, who would go on to play an integral role in the making of Platoon, the first film to realistically portray the Vietnam War; marine Steve Stibbens, the first Stars and Stripes reporter in Vietnam in early 1962; Jim Morris, 1st and 5th Special Forces Group, whose works such as War Story and Fighting Men, recount the soldiering of the Green Berets and their Montagnard counterparts in the Central Highlands of Vietnam; John Del Vecchio, whose classic work of nonfiction, The 13th Valley, mirrors his own existence as a combat correspondent with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam; and U. S. Navy Seal Chip Maury, renowned for his free fall and underwater photography in Vietnam. For years, there has been a well-deserved plethora of work by and about those who covered the war as civilians, with this book dedicating four of its chapters to civilian media. There hasn't been enough about the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen who did so while wearing an American uniform. Yablonka's extensive experience as a military journalist brought him into contact with many of these combat correspondents, giving him a unique insight into their professions and lives. This book honours these brave chroniclers in uniform who brought the Vietnam War home to us.

From the Capture of Algiers to the disbanding of the REP, through the Carlist Wars in Spain, Camerone, the Great War, Bir-Hakeim or Indochina, this book retraces the history of the most famous corps in military history over the last two centuries.

The stakes for George Gordon Meade could not have been higher.After his stunning victory at Gettysburg in July of 1863, the Union commander spent the following months trying to bring the Army of Northern Virginia to battle once more and finish the job. The Confederate army, robbed of much of its offensive strength, nevertheless parried Meade’s moves time after time. Although the armies remained in constant contact during those long months of cavalry clashes, quick maneuvers, and sudden skirmishes, Lee continued to frustrate Meade’s efforts.Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Meade’s political enemies launched an all-out assault against his reputation and generalship. Even the very credibility of his victory at Gettysburg came under assault. Pressure mounted for the army commander to score a decisive victory and prove himself once more.Smaller victories, like those at Bristoe Station and Rappahannock Station, did little to quell the growing clamor—particularly because out west, in Chattanooga, another Union general, Ulysses S. Grant, was once again reversing Federal misfortunes. Meade needed a comparable victory in the east.And so, on Thanksgiving Day, 1863, the Army of the Potomac rumbled into motion once more, intent on trying again to bring about the great battle that would end the war.The Great Battle Never Fought: The Mine Run Campaign, November 26-December 2 1863 recounts the final chapter of the forgotten fall of 1863—when George Gordon Meade made one final attempt to save the Union and, in doing so, save himself.

George Washington Gayle is not a name known to history. But it soon will be.Forget what you thought you knew about why Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. No, it was not mere sectional hatred, Booth’s desire to become famous, Lincoln’s advocacy of black suffrage, or a plot masterminded by Jefferson Davis to win the war by crippling the Federal government. Christopher Lyle McIlwain, Sr.’s Untried and Unpunished: George Washington Gayle and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln exposes the fallacies regarding each of those theories and reveals both the mastermind behind the plot, and its true motivation.The deadly scheme to kill Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward was Gayle’s brainchild. The assassins were motivated by money Gayle raised. Lots of money. $20,000,000 in today’s value.Gayle, a prominent South Carolina-born Alabama lawyer, had been a Unionist and Jacksonian Democrat before walking the road of radicalization following the admission of California as a free state in 1850. Thereafter, he became Alabama’s most earnest secessionist, though he would never hold any position within the Confederate government or serve in its military. After the slaying of the president Gayle was arrested and taken to Washington, DC in chains to be tried by a military tribunal for conspiracy in connection with the horrendous crimes.The Northern press was satisfied Gayle was behind the deed—especially when it was discovered he had placed an advertisement in a newspaper the previous December soliciting donations to pay the assassins. There is little doubt that if Gayle had been tried, he would have been convicted and executed. However, he not only avoided trial, but ultimately escaped punishment of any kind for reasons that will surprise readers.Rather than rehashing what scores of books have already alleged, Untried and Unpunished offers a completely fresh premise, meticulous analysis, and stunning conclusions based upon years of firsthand research by an experienced attorney. This original, thought-provoking study will forever change the way you think of Lincoln’s assassination.

Captured Arms / Beutewaffen is Vol. IX in the Propaganda Photo Series on World War II German small arms. This volume is dedicated to the millions of small arms that were captured by the German army in more than 12 different countries. Most weapons were re-issued to the German army, para-military units and auxiliaries and they were often used in their original state, but sometimes modified to German standards, or re-purposed to improve the weapons being fought with by the army. Such captures often led to new and adapted technologies, as the weapon developers took the best of the ideas from others and enhanced them with their own.This book covers all small arms described in the 'Kennblätter fremden Geräts' (instruction sheets on foreign material) and many other weapons.Last but not least, Captured Arms / Beutewaffen features a unique selection of original German World War II propaganda photos, depicting captured arms in use in German service.

A 32-page monograph on the world’s first tanks, from the Infantry Tank Mark I used in September 1916 on the Somme and the famous Mark IV of the battle of Cambrai in November 1917, to the Mark V, the King of the battlefields during the summer and autumn 1918 (the Hundred Days). With colour profiles, maps and WW1 photographs.