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Olga Greenlaw kept the War Diary of the American Volunteer
Group--the Flying Tigers--while those gallant mercenaries defended
Burma and China from Japanese aggression during the opening months
of the Pacific War. Returning to the United States in 1942, she
wrote 'The Lady and the Tigers', which war correspondent Leland
Stowe hailed as "an authoritative, gutsy and true to life story of
the AVG." Out of print for more than half a century, her book has
now been brought up to date by Daniel Ford, author of 'Flying
Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers'. What's more,
Ford explains for the first time where Olga and Harvey Greenlaw
came from, how they became caught up in the saga of the Flying
Tigers, and what happened to them after their tumultuous year with
the AVG.
"The High Country Illuminator created Avalon by climbing to the
fourth tower of old Number One lift and crying: 'Lest there be
light '"
Thus begins the madcap adventure of a ski-bum winter toward the
end of the 1960s. HCI is otherwise known as George Togalok, a
Native American from the Salt River Canyon country. Around him
assemble cunning Silver Fox, brainy Duke University, the
Outt-keepers, Max, Max's Buddy, some fluffy birds, and other young
slackers who want nothing more from life than the chance to ski the
fluffy white powder of the Colorado Rockies. "The writing is
adept," marveled the review for "Skier" magazine, 'the plot
bewildering, the pace dizzy, and the skiing scenes (as the children
say) are out of sight."
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Button (Paperback)
Daniel Ford
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R462
R414
Discovery Miles 4 140
Save R48 (10%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The Second World War -- the worst thing that ever happened. It
started in September 1939, with Hitler's Wehrmacht invading Poland
from the west, while Stalin's Red Army stormed in from the east.
Among their victims was a five-year-old named Basia Deszberg. The
Russians shot her father and brother in the Katyn Forest, then
loaded Basia, her sister, and her mother were loaded into a cattle
car for a horrific three-week journey to the steppes of Kazakhstan,
there to survive as best they could. Over the next eight years,
they would escape through Persia, Lebanon, and Egypt to find safe
haven in England. By contrast, Daniel Ford grew up in a United
States mired by the Great Depression. Europe's agony was America's
windfall Dan went from hardscrabble poverty to a college degree and
a fellowship that took him to the English university where Basia
was also a student. This is the story of their meeting, their
travels, and their parting. It is, promises the author, both a love
story and a history lesson, and one you will never forget.
When young Eddie Gillespie discovers a World War II airplane in the
jungle, with a grinning skeleton at the controls, he sets a story
in motion. Two American fighter pilots in the Chinese Air Force,
with their English and Burmese girlfriends, and a Japanese suicide
pilot whose name happens to mean "tree of the sun"--they clash at
Rangoon, while the British empire falls about their ears. Here is a
story of the Flying Tigers, immortalized by their exploits in
Southeast Asia in the opening months of the Pacific War, as told by
a man uniquely qualified to write about those stirring times.
Ford's history of the Flying Tigers won the award of excellence
from the Aviation-Space Writers Association, while his novel of the
Vietnam war inspired the Burt Lancaster film "Go Tell the
Spartans," which the "Cincinnati Enquirer" called "one of the
noblest films, ever, about men in crisis." Here he deftly melds
fact and fiction in an unforgettable wartime romance. "You can't
beat remains, kid," Lieutenant Atherton says in a beautifully
limned conclusion. "They'll tell the story every time."
Annie Crowley was one of eleven children born in the farmhouse at
Kilnahone, outside the village of Ballygarvan in the County Cork.
There were nearly twenty-four years between the oldest and youngest
of the Crowley boys and girls, Their father died a few weeks after
young Billy was born, and Jack the eldest emigrated to Australia
not long after. Annie was six years old at the time, and a pupil at
Ballygarvan National School, where the English language and English
history were drilled into Irish children.
Then came the First World War, and Mary Crowley went off to become
a nurse in England. Annie was needed at home then, to take care of
the house and the younger children. She loved the farm work, but
soon enough she became a rebel against the English crown, in the
fight for independence that began at Easter Week in 1916. The
struggle ended in a bitter civil war, as diehard Republicans fought
the compromising leaders willing to accept an Irish Free State with
token allegiance to London. Thousands of veterans of the Irish
Republican Army emigrated to America, including her sweetheart Pat
Forde from Ballinhassig. Thus Annie came to America, never again to
see her mother or siblings, or the farm at Kilnahone.
In 1941, Glen Edwards learned to fly in a fabric-covered biplane.
Seven years later, he died in the crash of the Northrop YB-49
Flying Wing, the Air Force's most advanced jet-propelled aircraft
and forerunner of the B-2 Stealth bomber of today. As a combat
pilot in North Africa and Italy during World War II, and as a test
pilot during a period of astonishing innovation, Edwards was among
the best of a new generation of military aviators. The isolated
desert base at Muroc, California, where Edwards crashed would be
named in his honor. All through his military career, Glen Edwards
kept a daily record of what he did and what he thought. Military
historian Daniel Ford situates that diary in the context of World
War II, the development of flight testing as a science, and the
birth of an independent U.S. Air Force. He shows how military
pilots in the 1940s augmented their seat-of-the-pants bravado and
precision flying skills with rigorous academic training. Conveying
both the exhaustion of combat and the exhilaration of flying some
of the world's fastest, most sophisticated planes, the book traces
the tragic course of Glen Edwards's career: the near-daily bombing
missions over Africa and Italy, a record-breaking cross-country
flight in the XB-42 Mixmaster, and trial flights in the YB-49
Flying Wing-the first plane Edwards ever actively disliked. The
innovative Northrop bomber, Daniel Ford concludes, just wasn't
ready for prime time. About 70,000 words; with photographs from the
Air Force and the Edwards family. "A fascinating tale and a tribute
to an unassuming man who simply loved to fly." --
Air&Space/Smithsonian
It's the summer of 1964. The bush hat, not the steel helmet, is the
favored headgear of the sixteen thousand American advisors in South
Vietnam. They love their work, and they're very good at it. How can
they possibly fail? Covering their war are a handful of foreign
reporters, including novelist Daniel Ford. Armed with a camera and
a notebook, he wanders the country on foot and by military
transport--helicopter, jeep, landing craft, junk, armored personnel
carrier, and an Air Force flare ship--from the Mekong Delta to the
Central Highlands. Once or twice a week, or whenever he is reunited
with his Hermes portable, he types up an account of what he has
seen and done. Here is that journal, a generation after it was
written. It is a freeze-frame picture of the Vietnam War before it
became a quagmire. "How good-hearted we were " Ford says of himself
and the men he met in his travels. "And how badly it all turned
out."
John Boyd was arguably the greatest American military theorist
since the sea power strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan at the turn of
the 20th Century. Best known for his formulation of the OODA Loop
as a model for competitive decision making, Colonel Boyd was also
an original thinker in developing tactics for air-to-air combat,
designing warplanes, and the fluid, mobile warfare known to the
Germans as blitzkrieg and to modern armies as "maneuver warfare."
As much as anyone, John Boyd was the architect of the two great
campaigns against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, both the 1991 liberation
of Kuwait and the 2003 "March Up" to Baghdad by the U.S. Army and
Marines. But what of the costly, drawn-out insurgency that baffled
the invaders once Baghdad had fallen? In this short book, Daniel
Ford applies Boyd's thinking to the problem of counter-insurgency.
Unlike the U.S. military in 2003, it turns out that Boyd had indeed
put considerable thought into what might transpire after an
effective "blitz" campaign. Indeed, he found many similarities
between "blitzers" and what he preferred to call guerrillas, and he
thought that they might be defeated by turning their own tactics
against them. This is an expanded version of a dissertation
submitted in the War Studies program at King's College London.
Larger than the state of Rhode Island and laced by a thousand miles
of trails, the White Mountains have long been a hiker's paradise.
Here is a first-person account of the world that begins where the
pavement ends. Fishermen, backpackers, trail-bikers ... goofers,
peak baggers, and through hikers ... you'll find them all in the
White Mountains, and you'll meet them all in the pages of this
compelling book.The year is 1975, when it was still possible to
find space in a lean-to shelter, when the Old Man of the Mountains
still showed his splendid profile over Franconia Notch, and when
hikers still smoked.
Your 12-week Guide to Running offers an achievable step-by-step
guide to help get an unfit person to a definable goal - running a
5km race in 12 weeks. The book outlines how to get started, what's
needed and how to make that first step. Then using the week-by-week
guide the reader works towards the target goal in very gradual
steps with a weekly programme plus basic tips on nutrition,
motivation, stretching and so on. The emphasis is on a very gradual
approach towards achieving the goal so that the reader feels
comfortable and there is constant reaffirmation of achievements as
he/she works through the programme. There will also be sections for
the reader's own notes, which are important for that all-important
feeling of success as he/she works towards the ultimate goal of
looking better and feeling fitter.
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