During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency’s biggest and longest paramilitary operation was in the tiny kingdom of Laos. Hundreds of advisors and support personnel trained and led guerrilla formations across the mountainous Laotian countryside, as well as running smaller road-watch and agent teams that stretched from the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the Chinese frontier. Added to this number were hundreds of contract personnel providing covert aviation services.It was dangerous w...

Today the vast archipelago of Southeast Asia islands known as Indonesia is in the headlines because of political instability, religious tension, and violence in the streets. Forty years ago similar conditions led the Central Intelligence Agency to mount a top-secret covert action campaign designed to hold that nation's left-leaning President Sukarno's feet to the fire and prevent a strategic crossroad from falling into the communist camp. The Agency supported rebels with weapons, planes, a...

In 1940 Japan placed Vietnam under military occupation, restricting the local French administration to a figurehead authority.Seizing the opportunity, the Communists organised a Vietnamese independence league, the Viet Minh, whose armed forces became known as the PAVN (more commonly known to the West as the Vietcong, or NVA) and prepared to launch an uprising against the French at the war's end.This text details the history, organisation and uniforms of the...

This book examines the uniforms, equipment, history and organisation of the troops that fought in Cambodia in the 1970s.Kenneth Conboy and Ken Bowra's detailed text discusses all the US and Cambodian forces, including Special Operations, and summarises the course of the war. Alongside the text, uniforms are shown in full illustrated detail, highlighting the varied range of military clothing used by each of the different forces.

This book examines the uniforms, equipment, history and organisation of the troops that fought in Cambodia in the 1970s.Kenneth Conboy and Ken Bowra's detailed text discusses all the US and Cambodian forces, including Special Operations, and summarises the course of the war. Alongside the text, uniforms are shown in full illustrated detail, highlighting the varied range of military clothing used by each of the different forces.

Officially the war in Laos did not exist – both North Vietnam and the USA denied they had troops there. In fact, thousands of North Vietnamese were invading the country and pouring down the Ho Chi Minh Trail on their way to the south, and the Americans were fighting a vigorous war against them from the air. The Ravens were the pilots, all volunteers, who flew through heavy groundfire to identify targets and call in air-strikes. Their mission was so secret that they were ‘sold’ their prop-d...

David Halberstam’s masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain."A rich, entertaining, and profound reading experience.”—The New York TimesUsing portraits of America’s flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country’s recent history: ...

"This shocking expose of the CIA operation aimed at destroying the Vietcong infrastructure thoroughly conveys the hideousness of the Vietnam War" ( Publishers Weekly).In the darkest days of the Vietnam War, America's Central Intelligence Agency secretly initiated a sweeping program of kidnap, torture, and assassination devised to destabilize the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, commonly known as the "Viet Cong." The vi...

In June 1942, Japanese troops occupied the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska in Alaska, the first enemy occupation of US territory since the War of 1812. For the next year a bloody conflict raged that was nearly invisible to most North Americans as Canadian and American soldiers, airmen and sailors went north to hold the Japanese in check.This is the complete story of the war in the North Pacific, including details of: Japanese subs lurking off the west coast, sinking ships and sh...

An absorbing and definitive modern history of the Vietnam War from the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Secret War.Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of Am...

When de Havilland proposed, in 1938, an unarmed bomber constructed almost entirely from wood, few would have thought it could become one of the most versatile aircraft of the Second World War. The Mosquito easily outran a Spitfire on its test flight and was ordered into mass production, soon proving itself a key weapon in the fight against the Luftwaffe by day and the Nachtjagd by night. Illustrated throughout with previously unpublished photographs, this book tel...

Pol Pot was an idealistic, reclusive figure with great charisma and personal charm. He initiated a revolution whose radical egalitarianism exceeded any other in history. But in the process, Cambodia desended into madness and his name became a byword for oppression.In the three-and-a-half years of his rule, more than a million people, a fifth of Cambodia's population, were executed or died from hunger and disease. A supposedly gentle, carefree land of slumbering temples and smiling ...