This is the story that inspired the acclaimed Burt Lancaster film, Go Tell the Spartans. It's 1964--early days in South Vietnam--and the U.S. Army Raiders have garrisoned a town that the French abandoned ten years before. The Viet Cong attack; the Americans reinforce. They're not about to repeat the mistakes of the French! "'Sad, bawdy, and compelling," wrote the Detroit Free Press. Prophetic, too, of how the larger war would end. Revised 2015 edition.

When Japanese planes laid waste to Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, the United States had just one air combat unit on the continent of Asia. That was the 1st American Volunteer Group - sponsored by the White House, equipped and paid by a U.S. loan, but officially part of the Chinese Air Force. On December 20, this band of mercenaries won immortality over the city of Kunming as the "Flying Tigers." This is an expanded version, with new photographs, of the cover story for

Early in the Second World War, in the skies over Rangoon, a handful of American pilots met and bloodied the Japanese Army Air Force, winning immortality as the "Flying Tigers." Arguably America's most famous combat unit, they were hired to defend beleaguered China for $600 a month, plus $500 for each Japanese plane shot down--fantastic money in 1941, when a Manhattan hotel room cost three dollars a night. Revised and updated May 2023.

A group of Internet aviation fans once debated the subject of the worst fighter of World War II. Their hands-down favorite: the Brewster Buffalo. Two books are titled The World's Worst Aircraft. The Buffalo is the only fighter from any era to have a chapter in both of them.The Royal Air Force fobbed the Brewster fighter onto the Fleet Air Arm and colonial squadrons; the U.S. Navy gave it to the Marines. Pilots thought it was a sweet plane to fly, but complained that the wh...

It's the summer of 1964. The bush hat, and not the steel helmet, is the favored headgear of the sixteen thousand American advisors in South Vietnam. They love their work, and they're very good at it. How can they possibly fail? Covering their war are a handful of foreign reporters, including novelist Daniel Ford. Armed with a camera and a notebook, he wanders the country on foot and by military transport--helicopter, jeep, landing craft, junk, armored personnel carrier, and an Air Force fl...

Dan Ford learned to fly at the age when most men are well into retirement. In this short book, he tells how it was to have a flight instructor one-third his age, to make a Sentimental Journey to the Pennsylvania airport where the Piper Cub first saw the light of day, to practice spins and aerobatic turns in a Great Lakes biplane, to fly low and slow in New Jersey, to make a leisurely tour around Lake Winnipesaukee and into his past, and to have a close encounter with the National Defense E...

In December 1941, the Japanese Imperial Army came ashore on the British colony of Malaya. In support of that invasion, its air arm soon began to raid neighboring Burma and especially its seaport and capital city of Rangoon, protected by a weak squadron of Royal Air Force Brewster Buffaloes and an untested squadron of P-40s flown by the American Volunteer Group of mercenary pilots in the employ of China. The battle of Rangoon would soon make them famous as the "Flying Tigers." Beginning in ...

In 1941, Glen Edwards learned to fly in a fabric-covered biplane. Seven years later, he died in the crash of the Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing, the Air Force’s most advanced jet warplane and forerunner of the B-2 Stealth bomber of today. As a combat pilot in North Africa and Italy during World War II, and as a test pilot during a period of astonishing innovation, Edwards was among the best of a new generation of military aviators. The isolated desert base where Edwards crashed would be named ...

When he set out on his road to rebellion, Michael Ford only wanted to keep the foxes out of Hannon's Glen. But before he was done, he found himself exchanging rifle fire with the British army, with an unlikely ally in the form of Annabel Love, the squire's daughter. Michael's War tracks the course of revolution and civil war that rended Ireland from 1916 to 1923.It ends with its hero escaping to America--but what sweetheart will he ask to join him in the new world? Mic...

"A richly colorful novel," said the New York Times, but in the author's home town, the bookstore manager kept it under the counter and sold it only to those who dared ask for it. Woodstock was still four years in the future, and American students were more concerned about nuclear weapons than a war in Vietnam. But already there was something blowing in the wind, as the young Daniel Ford was among the first to document in his debut novel. "It is impossible ...

Annie Crowley was one of eleven children born in the farmhouse at Kilnahone, outside the village of Ballygarvan in the County Cork. Their father died a few weeks after the youngest was born, and the eldest emigrated to Australia not long after. Annie was six at the time, and a pupil at Ballygarvan National School, where the English language and English history were drilled into Irish children.Then came the First World War, and the oldest girl went off to become a nurse in England. A...

John Boyd was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, an instructor at the US Air Force Fighter Weapons School, and arguably America's greatest military thinker of the 20th Century. His concept of the OODA Loop helped guide the US military during two wars against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. This 4000-word 'long essay' was originally prepared for the War in the Modern World program at King's College London by Daniel Ford, an American journalist and historian. Revised 2014. With illustrations, source ...