Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Showing 1 - 5 of 5 matches in All Departments
In 1942 Attu, the westernmost island in the Aleutian chain, was home to two Americans and forty-five Aleut hunters and their families. Located one thousand miles from the Alaska mainland and isolated by year-round damp fogs which manage to survive the constant high winds, Attu was called by an early visitor "the lonesomest spot this side of hell." In June 1942 Attu and the nearby island of Kiska were invaded by the Japanese in the hopes of accomplishing several goals: forestalling use of the islands by the Americans, hindering U.S.-Soviet cooperation, and establishing bases for attacks on the American mainland. On 11 May 1943, the U.S. effort to retake Attu began. The struggle was essentially an infantry battle. The ever-present fog, rain, and high wind limited the use of air power, and the craggy terrain made mechanized equipment next to useless. The infantry retook the island foot by foot. Lieutenant Robert J. Mitchell was one American wounded in the battle. During his convalescence he took down the accounts of the survivors while their memories were fresh. He presents them here in their own immediate, direct, and informal language.
Although the siege of Wake Island was not one of World War II's biggest campaigns, it had a profound psychological effect on the course of the nation's struggle. This was the battle that first raised American spirits in the dark weeks following Pearl Harbor. For sixteen suspenseful days, 449 U.S. Marines, assisted by a handful of sailors and soldiers and a few hundred civilian construction workers, withstood repeated attacks by numerically superior Japanese forces. Although Wake finally fell on 23 December 1941, its garrison made the Japanese pay an embarrassingly high price for a tiny coral outpost. Based on interviews with over seventy American and Japanese participants, the riveting, you-are-there narrative pulsates with the crack of rifles, the stutter of machine guns, the roar of cannon, and the concussion of bombs. This is a military history from the bottom up, an unforgettable reading experience told from the perspective of enlisted men and junior officers who served on the front lines.
In the election year of 1876 the Battle of the Little Big Horn was
horrifyingly fresh to opinion makers, who divided along political
lines in assigning blame. The late General George A. Custer, who
had been a Democrat with aspirations to high office, was more
pilloried than praised by President Grant and influential editors
of Republican newspapers. Coming to the defense of Custer was
Frederick Whittaker, who less than six months after the disaster
published this first biography of him. "A Complete Life" was the
beginning of a legend, and Whittaker did more than anyone else
except Libby Custer to make the flamboyant Boy General a permanent
resident of the national consciousness.
"Custer found himself in the one dilemma all soldiers most dread--he was outnumbered and completely surrounded. With disaster looming in every quarter and no chance of escape. . . ." So Gregory J. W Urwin pulls the reader into a scene describing not the Battle of the Little Big Horn but a Civil War engagement that George Armstrong Custer and his troop survived, thanks to strategy as much as naked courage. Many books have focused on Custer's Last Stand in 1876, making legend of total defeat. "Custer Victorious" is the first to examine at length, with attention to primary sources, his brilliant Civil War career. Urwin writes: "None of Custer's exploits against the Plains Indians could compare with those he performed while with the Army of the Potomac." The leader of a brigade called "the Wolverines," Custer was promoted to major general and the helm of the Third Cavalry Division when he was only twenty-four. Urwin describes the Boy General's vital contributions to Union victories from Gettysburg to Appomattox.
|
You may like...
|