From breaking wild horses in Colorado to fighting the Red Baron's squadrons in the skies over France, here in his own words is the true story of a forgotten American hero: the cowboy who became our first ace and the first pilot to fly the American colors over enemy lines.Growing up on a ranch in Sterling, Colorado, Frederick Libby mastered the cowboy arts of roping, punching cattle, and taming horses. As a young man he exercised his skills in the mountains and on the ranges of Ariz...

June 6, 1944, is one of the most famous dates in world history, and, as David Howarth shows, a defining date in countless personal histories. In this intimate chronicle, the 7,000 vessels, 12,000 aircraft, and 750,000 men committed on D-Day are taken for granted. Instead, we see D-Day through the eyes of the men on the ground as Howarth weaves together the larger story of the beginning of the battle of Normandy with the stories of the beachhead itself. The scope of Howarth's vision-focusin...

For the first time, a Navy SEAL tells the story of the US's clandestine operations in North Vietnam and the Congo during the Cold War.Sometime in 1965, James Hawes landed in the Congo with cash stuffed in his socks, morphine in his bag, and a basic understanding of his mission: recruit a mercenary navy and suppress the Soviet- and Chinese-backed rebels engaged in guerilla movements against a pro-Western government. He knew the United States must preserve deniabilit...

Intrepid's Last Case chronicles the post-World War II activities of Sir William Stephenson, whose fascinating role in helping to defeat the Nazis was the subject of the worldwide bestseller A Man Called Intrepid. Sir William Stephenson (Intrepid) still stood at the center of events when he and author William Stevenson discussed in the 1980s an investigation into sudden allegations that Intrepid's wartime aide, Dick Ellis, had been both a Soviet mole and a Nazi spy. They c...

For readers of American Sniper, the stirring account of a life of service by the father of the US Navy SEALs”One month after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, when President John F. Kennedy pressed Congress about America’s urgent national needs,” he named expanding US special operations forces along with putting a man on the moon. Captain William Hamilton was the officer tasked with creating the finest unconventional warriors ever seen. Merging his own experience ...

Set against the harsh beauty of Alaska, a veteran helicopter pilot is torn between ending his own embattled life and rescuing survivors from a mountain plane crash.Last Flight is the heroic story of Gil Connor, a senior Army helicopter pilot and aging Vietnam vet, as he struggles with an impending terminal illness and the desire to pull off one last daring rescue. Connor finds himself in a constant battle against his internal demons during his quest to rea...

Dave Baranek (callsign "Bio") was one of 451 young men to receive his Wings of Gold in 1980 as a naval flight officer. Four years later, seasoned by intense training and deployments in the tense confrontations of the cold war, he became the only one of that initial group to rise to become an instructor at the navy's elite Fighter Weapons School. As a Topgun instructor, Bio was responsible for teaching the best fighter pilots of the Navy and Marine Corps how to be even better. He schooled t...

Frank Luke, Jr. was an unlikely pilot. In the Great War, when fliers were still knights of the air,” Luke was an ungallant loner-a kid from Arizona who collected tarantulas, shot buzzards, and boxed miners. But during two torrid weeks in September 1918, he was the deadliest man on the Western Front. In only ten missions, he destroyed fourteen heavily-defended German balloons and four airplanes, the second highest American tally in the entire war. Author Blaine Pardoe retraces and refreshe...

"With penetrating insight, Lehrman unfolds the contrasts and similarities between these two leaders . . . I savored every page of this magnificent work."—Doris Kearns Goodwin, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham LincolnWinner of the Abraham Lincoln Institute of Washington's 2019 book prizeLewis E. Lehrman, a renowned historian and National Humanities Medal winner, gives new perspe...

A global study of how soldiers lived, worked, and fought, and how many died, spanning from the Napoleonic War to World War II.No matter the war, no matter the army, no matter the nationality, common threads run through the experiences of men at war. Soldiers highlights these shared experiences across 150 years of warfare, from the Napoleonic Wars through World War II and everything in between, such as the Mexican and Crimean Wars, the American Civil War, t...

The thrilling true story of the daring double agents who thwarted Hitler's spy machine in Britain and turned the tide of World War II.After the fall of France in the mid-1940s, Adolf Hitler faced a British Empire that refused to negotiate for peace. With total war looming, he ordered the Abwehr, Germany's defense and intelligence organization, to carry out Operation Lena—a program to place information-gathering spies within Britain.Quickly, a network of secr...

October 8th, 1918—amid the last of the Allies attempts to the Germans, Sergeant Alvin York of Tennessee, found himself and his platoon of only seventeen men trapped in the thick of heavy machine gun fire. Rather than retreating or calling upon the artillery to take out the nest, York single-handedly took out twenty-five Germans, dropping them one-by-one, and captured many more.This is only one of the many tales of York’s famed heroism, which were heralded as some of the most impres...