The story of the African-American crew of the USS Mason that made history in World War II when they escorted six convoys across the Atlantic.

Nearly 50 years after Japan's attack, this text takes a fresh look at the air raid that plunged America into World War II. Michael Slackman scrutinizes the decisions and attitudes that prompted the attack and left the US unprepared to mount a successful defence.

A New York Times bestseller, The Conquerors reveals how Franklin Roosevelt's and Harry Truman's private struggles with their aides and Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin affected the unfolding of the Holocaust and the fate of vanquished Nazi Germany.

With monumental fairness and balance, The Conquerors shows how Roosevelt privately refused desperate pleas to speak out directly against the Holocaust, to save Jewish refugees and to explore the possible bombing of Auschwitz to stop the killing. The book also shows FDR's fierce will to ensure that Germany would never threaten the world again. Near the end of World War II, he abruptly endorsed the secret plan of his friend, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, to reduce the Germans to a primitive existence -- despite Churchill's fear that crushing postwar Germany would let the Soviets conquer the continent. The book finally shows how, after FDR's death, President Truman rebelled against Roosevelt's tough approach and adopted the Marshall Plan and other more conciliatory policies that culminated in today's democratic, united Europe.

This book examines the postwar memoir fight over the broad front versus the single thrust strategy, the Allied advance on the Rhine, and the British call for a ground-forces commander other than General Eisenhower. It traces the argument in the postwar memoirs from 1946 through 1968 as well as the official histories of the United States, Britain, and Canada to see what the documents really said. What were men willing to say, what did they feel that they had to cover up? Field Marshal Montgomery was deeply chagrined that he had only one army group to command when he thought himself the most professional commander in Northwest Europe. Montgomery had little grasp of the intricacies of politics and could not understand that American public opinion made it impossible for Eisenhower to name him ground-forces commander. During the Battle of the Bulge the U.S. President and Chief of Staff settled the issue in Eisenhower's favor.

When World War II broke out in Europe, the American army had no specialized division of mountain soldiers. But in the winter of 1939-40, after a tiny band of Finnish mountain troops brought the invading Soviet army to its knees, an amateur skier named Charles Minot "Minnie" Dole convinced the United States Army to let him recruit an extraordinary assortment of European expatriates, wealthy ski bums, mountaineers, and thrill-seekers and form them into a unique band of Alpine soldiers. These men endured nearly three years of grueling training in the Colorado Rockies and in the process set new standards for both soldiering and mountaineering. The newly forged 10th Mountain Division finally faced combat in the winter of 1945, in Italy's Apennine Mountains, against the seemingly unbreakable German fortifications north of the Gothic Line. There, they planned and executed what is still regarded as the most daring series of nighttime mountain attacks in U.S. military history, taking Mount Belvedere and the sheer, treacherous face of Riva Ridge to smash the linchpin of the German army's lines.
Drawing on unique cooperation from veterans of the 10th Mountain Division and a vast archive of unpublished letters and documents, The Last Ridge is written with enormous warmth, energy, and honesty. This is one of the most captivating stories of World War II, a blend of Band of Brothers and Into Thin Air. It is a story of young men asked to do the impossible, and succeeding.

"From the Hardcover edition.

The Untold Story of the American Entrepreneur Who Helped Build the Atomic Bomb and Defeat the Nazis.

Legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the twentieth century -- Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and others -- at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York, in the late 1930s. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

Jennet Conant, the granddaughter of James Bryant Conant, one of the leading scientific advisers of World War II, enjoyed unprecedented access to Loomis' papers, as well as to people intimately involved in his life and work. She pierces through Loomis' obsessive secrecy and illuminates his role in assuring the Allied victory.

Magic was the name given to the American decoding of the secret Japanese codes used in diplomatic communications before and during the Pacific War of 1941-45. Presenting a Japanese perspective, this work argues that, in the final phase of the eight months of US-Japan talks leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor, serious mistranslations in Magic were a significant factor in the cumulative effect of mutual misunderstandings which grew between the two sides over a longer period.

In Day of Deceit, Robert Stinnett delivers the definitive final chapter on America's greatest secret and our worst military disaster. Drawing on twenty years of research and access to scores of previously classified documents, Stinnett proves that Pearl Harbor was not an accident, a mere failure of American intelligence, or a brilliant Japanese military coup. By showing that ample warning of the attack was on FDR's desk and, furthermore, that a plan to push Japan into war was initiated at the highest levels of the U.S. government, he ends up profoundly altering our understanding of one of the most significant events in American history.

History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II.

When Bob Greene went home to central Ohio to be with his dying father, it set off a chain of events that led him to knowing his dad in a way he never had before -- thanks to a quiet man who lived just a few miles away, a man who had changed the history of the world.

Greene's father -- a soldier with an infantry division in World War II -- often spoke of seeing the man around town. All but anonymous even in his own city, carefully maintaining his privacy, this man, Greene's father would point out to him, had "won the war." He was Paul Tibbets. At the age of twenty-nine, at the request of his country, Tibbets assembled a secret team of 1,800 American soldiers to carry out the single most violent act in the history of mankind. In 1945 Tibbets piloted a plane -- which he called Enola Gay, after his mother -- to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where he dropped the atomic bomb.

On the morning after the last meal he ever ate with his father, Greene went to meet Tibbets. What developed was an unlikely friendship that allowed Greene to discover things about his father, and his father's generation of soldiers, that he never fully understood before.

Duty is the story of three lives connected by history, proximity, and blood; indeed, it is many stories, intimate and achingly personal as well as deeply historic. In one soldier's memory of a mission that transformed the world -- and in a son's last attempt to grasp his father's ingrained sense of honor and duty -- lies a powerful tribute to the ordinary heroes of an extraordinary time in American life.

What Greene came away with is found history and found poetry -- a profoundly moving work that offers a vividly new perspective on responsibility, empathy, and love. It is an exploration of and response to the concept of duty as it once was and always should be: quiet and from the heart. On every page you can hear the whisper of a generation and its children bidding each other farewell.

Winner of both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Paul Fussell's classic The Great War and Modern Memory remains one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. In its panoramic scope and poetic intensity, it illuminated a war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the world.

Now, in Wartime, Paul Fussell turns to the Second World War, the conflict in which he himself fought, to weave a more intensely personal and wide-ranging narrative. Whereas his former book focused primarily on literary figures, here Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on soldiers and civilians. He compellingly depicts the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II by analyzing the wishful thinking and the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality; by describing the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most importantly, by emphasizing the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity, and wit.

Of course, no book of Fussell's would be complete without serious attention to the literature of the time. He offers astute commentary on Edmund Wilson's argument with Archibald MacLeish, Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, the war poetry of Randall Jarrell and Louis Simpson, and many other aspects of the wartime literary world. In this stunning volume, Fussell conveys the essence of that war as no other writer before him has.

After the fall of the Philippines in 1942 - and after leading the last horse cavalry charge in U.S. history - Ed Ramsey refused to surrender. Instead, he joined the Filipino resistance and rose to command more than 40,000 guerrillas. The Japanese put the elusive American leader at the top of their death list. Rejecting the opportunity to escape, Ramsey withstood unimaginable fear, pain, and loss for three long years. "Lieutenant Ramsey's War" chronicles a remarkable true story of courage and perseverance.

"This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can."
With these words, Lieutenant Commander Robert W. Copeland addressed the crew of the destroyer escort USS "Samuel B. Roberts on the morning of October 25, 1944, off the Philippine Island of Samar. On the horizon loomed the mightiest ships of the Japanese navy, a massive fleet that represented the last hope of a staggering empire. All that stood between it and Douglas MacArthur's vulnerable invasion force were the "Roberts and the other small ships of a tiny American flotilla poised to charge into history.
In the tradition of the #1 "New York Times bestseller "Flags of Our Fathers, James D. Hornfischer paints an unprecedented portrait of the Battle of Samar, a naval engagement unlike any other in U.S. history--and captures with unforgettable intensity the men, the strategies, and the sacrifices that turned certain defeat into a legendary victory.

"From the Hardcover edition.

There is no such thunder in history -- nor ever will be again -- as the deep-throated roar of the mighty, four-engined B-17s that streamed across the skies in World War II. The long runways are silent now, the men and planes are gone.

But out of the massive files of records available, and the memories of the men who flew, Martin Caidin has assembled this dramatic portrait of America's most formidable heavy bomber of the war.

The B-17: The Flying Forts recreates a vanished era and a great and gallant plane -- a plane that could absorb three thousand enemy bullets, fly with no rudder, and complete its mission on two engines. A plane that American pilots flew at Pearl Harbor, Tunis, Midway, Palermo, Schweinfurt, Regensberg, Normandy, and Berlin, in thousands of missions and through hundreds of thousands of miles of flak-filled skies. A plane that proved itself in every combat theater as the greatest heavy bomber of World War II.

The first definitive account of one of the most critical naval battles of World War II in the Pacific!

Spring 1942: Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America was reeling under the successive Japanese victories in Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines and more. Desperate to stop what was seen as an inexorable Japanese advance toward Australia, the weak U.S. Navy intercepted the larger Japanese fleet in the Coral Sea. The Battle of the Coral Sea ushered a new era in sea warfare. For the first time ever opposing fleets used carrier-launched aircraft to fight each other. It was a fight that would determine the future of the war.

Deemed "irreplaceable" by Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson assumed his nickname during the Battle of Bull Run in the Civil War. It is said that The Army of Northern Virginia never fully recovered from the loss of Stonewall's leadership when he was accidentally shot by one of his own men and died in 1863. Davis highlights Stonewall Jackson as a general who emphasized the importance of reliable information and early preparedness (he so believed in information that he had a personal mapmaker with him at all times) and details Jackson's many lessons in strategy and leadership.

This is the true story of the legendary soldier who performed more POW raids than any other American in history. He went into battle as a boy. And, on one of the most daring missions of World War II, he became a man - and the perfect soldier for America's next wars. Charles Kittleson was slight, modest, and born to wage war. The son of an Iowa farmer, Kittleson volunteered in 1943 and caught the eye of his commanders. By 1945, PFC Kittleson was selected for the Army's smallest elite unit, the Alamo Scouts. While U.S. forces were pushing back the Japanese in the Pacific, the Alamo scouts unleashed legendary raids deep behind enemy lines, including the liberation of over 500 starved, beaten prisoners of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines. For Kittleson, a career as a raider had just begun. Charles W. Sasser chronicles the remarkable journey that was Kit Kittleson's courageous life in the service of his country. Now, as a veteran after first going to war as a boy twenty-five years ago, Kittleson volunteered for one last mission - the most extraordinary and daring POW raid ever attempted by secret American Special Forces in Vietnam.

Drawing on his own experiences as the captain of PT 105 at Guadalcanal, Bougainville, and more, the author tells how the fastest little boat in combat contributed to the war effort.

THE GREATEST WAR
Volume III: The Battle of the Bulge to Hiroshima

From the thunderous battles in the Ardennes to the flight of the Enola Gay, this book recreates the triumphant return of MacArthur, Patton's irresistible drive into the German heartland, and the relentless kamikaze attacks off Okinawa.

THEIR WAR
THEIR WORDS

American fighting men engaged the enemy on land, at sea, and in the air. Now one of the nation's most acclaimed military historians presents an authoritative and dramatic three-volume oral history of World War II that is both richly sweeping and startlingly intimate. A gripping account of how American warriors, from buck privates to five-star generals, fought, bled, thought, and felt, THE GREATEST WAR is the ultimate tribute to the "greatest generation"—a saga of unparalleled courage, honor, and glory.

Look for Volumes I and II of
THE GREATEST WAR

THE GREATEST WAR
Volume I: From Pearl Harbor to the Kasserine Pass

THE GREATEST WAR
Volume II: D-Day and the Assault on Europe

From the author of the bestselling Abandon Ship! comes aclassic work of World War II history.

Richard F. Newcomb is one of the true masters of military storytelling. In researching Iwo Jima he interviewed hundreds of Iwo veterans, both American and Japanese; read the diaries and letters of fighting men; and combed through masses of official navy and marine records to write the full story of one of the most famous battles in U.S. history. With exceptional depth, intelligence, and emotional power, Newcomb recounts the events of February 19, 1945, in which common men were thrust into impossible circumstances, demonstrating valor and even humor amid the horror and chaos of war.