Fighter Pilot is the memoir of legendary ace American fighter pilot and general officer in the U.S. Air Force, Robin Olds.Robin Olds was a larger-than-life hero with a towering personality. A graduate of West Point and an inductee in the National College Football Hall of Fame for his All-American performance for Army, Olds was one of the toughest college football players at the time. In WWII, Olds quickly became a top fighter pilot and squadron commander b...

A larger-than-life hero with a towering personality, Robin Olds was a graduate of West Point and an inductee in the National College Football Hall of Fame for his All-American performance for Army. In World War II, Olds quickly became a top fighter pilot and squadron commander by the age of twenty-two—a double ace with twelve aerial victories. But it was in Vietnam where the man became a legend. He motivated a dejected group of pilots by placing himself under junior officers and challengin...

Few perspectives epitomize the sheer drama and sacrifice of combat more perfectly than those of the fighter pilots of World War II. As romanticized as any soldier in history, the World War II fighter pilot was viewed as larger than life: a dashing soul waging war amongst the clouds. In the sixty-five-plus years since the Allied victory, stories of these pilots' heroics have never been in short supply. But what about their adversaries—the highly skilled German aviators who pushed the Allies...

The gripping story of an extraordinary American hero, the most decorated man in U.S. Marine Corps history, from a New York Times bestselling author.In the glorious chronicles of the U.S. Marine Corps, no name is more revered than that of Lt. Gen. Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller. The only fighting man to receive the Navy Cross five separate times—a military honor second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor—he was the epitome of a professional warrior. A son of...

A Pilot's Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions Over Laos During the Vietnam WarLike Jarhead, We Were Soldiers Once..., and Young, John T. Halliday's combat memoir is gripping, novelistic, and startlingly candid, taking readers through the devastating trials and hard-won victories of flying in the Vietnam War.The year is 1970, and John T. Halliday has just landed in the middle of the Vietnam War, primed to begin his assignment wit...

In 1960 Argentina, a covert team of Israeli agents hunted down the most elusive war criminal alive: Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust. The young spy who tackled Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street—and fought every compulsion to strangle the Obersturmführer then and there—was Peter Z. Malkin. For decades Malkin's identity as Eichmann's captor was kept secret. Here he reveals the entire breathtaking story—from the genesis of the top-secret surveillance operation to the ...

THE WORLD'S GREATEST TEST PILOT TELLS HIS STORY'When you read through his life story, it makes James Bond seem like a bit of a slacker'Kirsty Young, Desert Island Discs'The greatest test pilot who ever lived. A true inspiration'Tim Peake, astronaut and former regular British Army Air Corps officer'The stories beggar belief'Guardian'Fascinating...

On September 15, 1944, the United States invaded the tiny Pacific island of Peleliu, located at the southern end of the Palau Islands. Boasting a large airfield from which the Americans could mount bomber campaigns, Peleliu was a strategically essential part of Gen. MacArthur's long-awaited liberation of the Philippines. With the famed 1st Marine Division making the amphibious assault, Pacific High Command was confident that victory would be theirs in just a few days.They were dras...

"The flak started about four or five minutes before the target and immediately it was apparent that it was intense and extremely accurate. Oboe entailed the pilot flying dead straight and level for ten minutes on the attack run. Suddenly a tremendous flash lit up the sky about fifty yards ahead of our nose and exactly at our altitude. Within a tenth of a second, we were through the cloud of dirty yellowish-brown smoke and into the blackness beyond. I shall never forget the spontaneous ...

“In 1963…there was no way I could have known, sitting in a classroom on that beautiful campus in Ohio, that by raising my hand I would be going to war in Vietnam and that I would see things, hear things, and do things that most people cannot imagine.”—James Joyce.The author was drawn into the United States Army through ROTC, and went through training to fly helicopters in combat over Vietnam. His experiences are notable because he flew both Huey “Slicks” and Huey “Gunships”: the fo...

The time is 1943, the place is Sicily, and the event is the start of the most remarkable career of any American infantryman in the war. Audie Murphy was a desperately poor eighteen-year-old orphan when he joined the Army, nineteen when he first saw a buddy die from an enemy bullet and an enemy die from one of his own. By V-E day, he had killed at least 240 Germans, had single-handedly destroyed a German tank in one battle and held off six tanks in another, and had become the most decorated...

For the first four months of 1942, U.S., Filipino, and Japanese soldiers fought what was America's first major land battle of World War II, the battle for the tiny Philippine peninsula of Bataan. It ended with the surrender of 76,000 Filipinos and Americans, the single largest defeat in American military history.The defeat, though, was only the beginning, as Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman make dramatically clear in this powerfully original book. From then until the Japanese surren...