Patrol Wing Ten was the only U.S. Navy aviation unit to fight the Japanese in the early weeks of World War II, and the daring exploits of its PBY scout-plane pilots offer a dramatic tale of heroism, duty, and controversy. Poorly equipped and dead tired from flying back-to-back patrols with no fighter cover, the men lost sixty-six percent of their aircraft in just eight weeks as they took on an enemy that outnumbered them nearly 1,000 to one. This forceful narrative places the reader right in the midst of their courageous battle. Dwight Messimer's aggressive research on the topic has resulted in a work that provides moving details to their desperate but valiant acts against the seemingly invincible Japanese juggernaut that swept across the southwest Pacific at the opening of the war.
By Christmas Day in 1941, Patrol Wing Ten was forced to split into two groups, one fighting an air and sea campaign in Java, the other fighting as infantry on Bataan and Corregidor. Moving back and forth between the two groups, Messimer skillfully interweaves their experiences with the major events of the overall war. He uses material from the fifty survivors he managed to track down and deftly captures their ability to maintain a sense of humor in the face of overwhelming danger. The more than one hundred personal and official documents uncovered during years of research reveal new information relating to technical points about the planes, facts verified by the PBY crews that do not agree with popularly accepted ideas. To those who believe the wing accomplished nothing--and this group includes many pilots--Messimer argues that while attempts to bomb the Japanese fleet proved futile because the PBYs were unsuitable for such a task, the wing's rescue and evacuation missions saved many lives. The airdales themselves were not so lucky. When Corregidor fell, nearly half of them were captured and many died in captivity.

An Incipient Mutiny covers the period 1892 to 1918, the years during which Army Aviation was a part of the Signal Corps. This is a historical account of mismanagement, criminal fraud, and cover-up, as well as self-promotion, shortsightedness, and political intrigue. The author has focused on the personalities of the pilots who formed the rebellion and on the Signal Corps officers whose mismanagement brought it on. The official air force histories have ignored what happened at Texas City in the spring of 1913. They rarely mention the Goodier court martial in 1915, and they gloss over the outcome and the findings of the Garlington Board and the Kennedy Committee in 1916. The official histories say nothing about the poor construction and design flaws in the airplanes the Signal Corps bought that killed 25 percent of the officers who were rated pilots between May 1911 and July 1914. The death rate among army pilots was so high that no life insurance company would issue them a policy. At the same time, there were airplanes on the market that were superior in every way to the planes the army was using, and less expensive to buy.

By the summer of 1915, Germany was faced with two related, but somewhat dissimilar problems; how to break the British blockade and how to stop or seriously disrupt the British supply line across the Atlantic. The solution to breaking the blockade was to find a way over it, through it, or under it. Aircraft in those days were too primitive, underpowered, and short range to accomplish the first and Germany lacked the naval strength to force a passage through the blockade. But if a fleet of cargo U-boats could be built that were large enough to carry meaningful loads and had the range to make a round trip between Germany and the United States without having to refuel, the blockade might be successfully broken. Responsibility for implementing this solution rested with a section of German Navy Intelligence known as the Etappendienst. The Germans also lacked the naval strength to effect the solution to the other problem; cutting Britain's supply line to America. The German Navy could not defeat the Royal Navy in a slug-fest and there were not enough U-boats to effectively block Britain's cross-Atlantic sea trade. The answer lay in sabotage--blowing up the munitions factories, the depots, and the ships, and infecting the remounts--horses and mules--with Anthrax and Glanders at the western end of the supply line. Responsibility for carrying out sabotage of all types in the United States rested with a newly established subsection of the German Army Intelligence called the Sektion Politik that sent trained saboteurs to the United States beginning in 1915. German agents, together with American sympathizers, carried out more than fifty successful attacks involving fire and explosion before America's entry into the war on 6 April 1917, in addition to spreading Anthrax and Glanders on the East Coast. Of the two solutions to those problems, sabotage was incompatible with Germany's primary diplomatic goal to keep the United States out of the war, while the other, breaking the blockade with a fleet of cargo U-boats, provided the least danger of bringing the United States into the war. The two solutions were widely dissimilar, but the fact that the cargo U-boat project and the sabotage campaign were run by intelligence agencies--the Etappendienst (Navy) and the Geheimdienst (Army), through the agency of one man--Paul Hilken, in one US city--Baltimore, make them inseparable. Those separate solutions created the dichotomy that produced the U-Boat Deutschland and the Baltimore Sabotage Cell.

This superbly crafted collection of classic literature preserves the celebrated works of the foremost writers of naval history, biography, and fiction. Since 1984 the series, edited by Jack Sweetman, has brought back into print a total of over sixty titles. The original unabridged texts are accompanied by authoritative new introductions and notes.

By 1916 the German merchant fleet had been driven from the seas by a British blockade that had cut off Germany from foreign markets and put the nation on the verge of economic collapse. Germany's desperate response was the Deutschland, a merchant U-boat uniquely designed with an exceptionally wide beam to carry cargo. Its brief career as a blockade-runner captured international headlines, and Paul Konig's fast-moving account of its maiden voyage was one of the most popular books of the year when first published in the United States in 1917.

Although an acknowledged piece of German propaganda, the story is nevertheless a thrilling one that has attracted readers for decades. Veteran submariners and landlubbers alike have been fascinated by the author's descriptions of life on board the World War I submarine. Ordered to transport valuable cargo to America and return with equally valuable cargo, the captain intended to make a joke of the blockade. The trip was no ordinary passage, however, and Konig keeps readers on the edge of their seats with his tales of the Deutschland barely managing to evade British ASW on its way to the port of Baltimore, where Konig and his crew were welcomed as heroes. The informative introduction that accompanies this new edition of the work has been written by Dwight R. Messimer, the author of a study of theU-boat's entire career called The Merchant U-Boat and Find and Destroy: Antisubmarine Warfare in World War I

On July 26, 1918, American aviator First Lt. George Puryear shot down a German observation plane and then, in an act of bravado, landed to accept the crew's surrender. In fact, by miscalculation he had landed inside the German lines, and it was the Germans who accepted his surrender. But Puryear redeemed himself ten weeks later when he led a mass escape from the prison camp at Villingen, Germany. Once he was out of prison and safely in the Black Forest, Puryear "went to a prearranged spot where we were to meet and waited fifteen minutes. While I waited there were about fifty shots fired. No one came, so I got down on my knees, prayed for luck and started off." Five days later he reached Switzerland, the first American officer to escape from the Germans and return to his unit during World War I. Early the following morning Edouard Isaacs and Harold Willis made the hazardous crossing of the Rhine River to freedom.