When J.J. Clark graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at the end of World War I he was ready to be a pioneer in one of the great transformations of the U.S. Navy in the twentieth century – the change from a surface-only force to one in which aviation played a key if not determinant role. Under the leadership of the key aviation admirals, William Moffett and John Towers, «Jocko» Clark with other aviation-minded officers battled low budgets and un ...
Published to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, this new paperback edition brings back into print a book that became an essential source for a 2006 study of the battle by the U.S. Army s Center of Military History. It takes a critical look at what went wrong in early 1968 during one of the first engagements of Tet, when a U.S. infantry battalion was ordered to attack a large North Vietnamese force near Hue City without air or ...
The tragic, the comic, the terrifying, the poignant are all part of the story of the Black Pony pilots who distinguished themselves in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War. Flying their turboprop Broncos down and dirty, low and slow, they killed more of the enemy and saved more allied lives with close-air support than all the other naval squadrons combined during the three years they saw action. Author Kit Lavell was part of this squadron of ...
An instant bestseller when it was first published in 1946, this memoir recounts the author's nearly forty years of service in naval intelligence, beginning in 1908. One of the first to venture into the realm of psychological warfare, Ellis Zacharias was awarded the Legion of Merit with two gold stars for his contributions. Among the highlights of his impressive career was the role he played in convincing the Japanese to accept surrender in ...
Stephen Bower Young was a seaman first class assigned to gunnery duty in turret no. 4 on the Oklahoma when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Struck by torpedoes, the battleship started to sink, and Young and others became trapped when it overturned. Here, he recounts their terrifying experience with stunning clarity, recalling their frantic search for an escape route and horror at finding the exits blocked. He describes the water's inexor ...
During the Vietnam War, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group (MACVSOG) was a highly-classified, U.S. joint-service organization that consisted of personnel from Army Special Forces, the Air Force, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance units, and the CIA. This secret organization was committed to action in Southeast Asia even before the major build-up of U.S. forces in 1965 and also fielded a division-si ...
Covering both Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom as two campaigns within a single, if discontinuous, conflict, this book analyzes the strategic interaction between Iraq and the United States from 1990 to 2010 and the key operational decisions that determined the course of the war. The author’s assessment of the long war against Iraq includes misunderstandings between government leaders in Iraq and the United States that ...
For the World War II submariner, every day was a life-or-death trial: going to sea for months at a time; existing in dank, claustrophobic conditions; enduring long stretches of monotonous silence punctuated by adrenaline-spiked episodes of paralyzing fear and victorious elation. It was a duty few men could handle – and even fewer would survive.This is the true story of those brave men who served and too often died under the ocean surface, writte ...