This compelling book explores the first four months of fighting in the Pacific between the United States and its Allies against Japan, focusing mainly on the aircraft carrier action of the respective navies in the Pacific Theater.In the chaotic months after Pearl Harbor, the Pacific War was anything but certain. The U.S. Navy, reeling from sudden loss, scrambled to slow Japanese momentum, while the Imperial Japanese Navy pressed outward, convinced that seizing Sout...

A study of the historic World War II naval battle, the first involving aircraft carriers and first in which neither warship was in sight of the other.By the beginning of May 1942, five months after the Pearl Harbor attack, the US Navy was ready to challenge the Japanese moves in the South Pacific. When the Japanese sent troops to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, the Americans sent the carriers Lexington and Yorktown to counter the move, setting ...

"An entertaining and informative review of the evolution of one of the most important classes of warship, from the technology of WWII into the missile age." —FiretrenchCruisers probably vary more in their characteristics than any other warship type and have certainly been subject to the most convoluted development. There was always a basic tension between quantity and quality, between numbers and unit size, but at a more detailed level every one of the naval powers ...

This naval history of WWII explores the advancing technology and tactics of battleships through a fascinating survey of ship-to-ship duels.While many naval battles of the Second World War were decided by the torpedo or the aerial bomb, there was a surprising number of traditional ship-to-ship engagements involving the big guns of battleships and cruisers. Big Gun Battles recounts some of the most significant and technically fascinating of these gunfire due...

The author of Big Gun Battles "shows how the US Navy was slowly but surely drawn into WW2 in the Atlantic theatre of operations . . . well researched" (Warships Magazine).Although the defeat of Japan was the US Navy's greatest contribution to the Second World War, it also played a significant role in the battle against Hitler. Even before Germany declared war in 1941, US naval vessels were actively engaged in Atlantic convoy battles, and suffered their firs...

A World War II naval history of the Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz carrier battles that tested U.S. momentum after Midway.While the resounding American victory at Midway in June 1942 blunted Japanese momentum to a great extent, it left the opposing forces precariously balanced, particularly in the South Pacific. In Knife‘s Edge Robert C. Stern provides an account of the Battles of the Eastern Solomons and the Santa Cruz Islands, the two pivotal carrier ai...

In the chaotic months after Pearl Harbor, the Pacific War was anything but certain. The US Navy, reeling from sudden loss, scrambled to slow Japanese momentum, while the Imperial Japanese Navy pressed outward, convinced that seizing Southeast Asia's resources was essential to survival. This book captures that dangerous, uncertain moment—from December 1941 through April 1942—when the outcome of the Pacific War remained very much in doubt.Moving across a vast maritime battlefield,

A history of one of the least known and most misunderstood battles in the Vietnam War.The strategic potential of the three-day attack of two North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regiments on Kham Duc, a remote and isolated Army Special Forces camp, on the eve of the first Paris peace talks in May 1968, was so significant that former President Lyndon Johnson included it in his memoirs. This gripping, original, eyewitness narrative and thoroughly researched analysis of a widel...

**A close-up, action-filled account of the crucial role the U.S. Navy played in the early years of the Cold War, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Fleet at Flood Tide and The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors“A lucid, fast-moving and fitting finale to [Hornfischer’s] career.”—The Wall Street Journal**A landmark chronicle of the U.S. Navy in the Cold War, Who Can Hold the Sea combines narrative history with scenes ...

"An amazing tribute to the people who designed, built and flew it—a comprehensive history of one of the most beautiful aircraft ever manufactured. "— Books MonthlyThe magnificent Vickers Supermarine Spitfire, together with its able partner the Hawker Hurricane, saved Britain from Nazi invasion in the summer of 1940 and irrevocably changed the course of the Second World War. This book from Philip Kaplan celebrates one of history's most impo...

"A compelling account of the air war against Germany" written by the navigator portrayed by Anthony Boyle in Apple TV's Masters of the Air ( Publishers Weekly).They began operations out of England in the spring of '43. They flew their Flying Fortresses almost daily against strategic targets in Europe in the name of freedom. Their astonishing courage and appalling losses earned them the name that resounds in the annals of aerial warfare and made the...

A detailed and fully illustrated account of the development of American aircraft carriers up to and during World War II.This extensively illustrated volume tells the dramatic yet successful story of U.S. aircraft carriers in World War II by class, ranging from early pre-war designs to escort carriers built from destroyer hulls, to the gigantic fleet carriers serving as the predecessors of modern-day super carriers.Besides covering the famous great carrier bat...