Showing titles in Air Forces

July 1967: At the Moscow Air Show, the Soviets unveiled six new state-of-the-art aircraft. From among this lineup of new fighters and interceptors stood the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 - purportedly capable of outrunning and outmaneuvering any aircraft in NATO’s inventory. Yet even before its public appearance in Moscow, the MiG-25 had been a grave concern for Western analysts.

Strap into a mortar-fired parachute, a rocket-powered ejection seat, and fly with Col Chuck Lehman in the fastest single engine jet fighter ever built, the F-106 Dart. Feel the exhilaration of hurtling through the blue at a mile every 2.35 seconds, the “G” forces, and the satisfaction of keeping the bad guys out of our airspace. You’ll laugh at some of these stories, sweat out a few, and ask, “How could he have been so stupid?” in others.

Between 1918 and 1955, 60 airmen were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) and Two Bars. In this book, recorded for the first time together are the mini-biographies of those 60 along with the citations that accompanied their awards, or in some cases the recommendations for them. As the listener will discover, the range of airmen who received the DFC and Two Bars cover most of the ambit of World War II operations, be they fighter pilots, bomber pilots, night-fighter aircrew, aircrew navigators, engineers, etc, or reconnaissance pilots

VPB-117 - the Blue Raiders - was unique not only because its B-24 Liberators flew for the US Navy and not the Army, but also because most of the Raiders’ missions entailed bombers venturing out over the Pacific, alone, to seek and destroy on long-range missions of a thousand miles out and a thousand back, often at altitudes close enough for sea spray to cloud their windows. This is their story.

By the summer of 1945, Adm. Bull Halsey's US Third Fleet had fought its way far enough in the Pacific that its carrier-based fighters could launch attacks on Japan itself in preparation for the invasion of the home islands, planned for the fall of 1945. This mission US Navy fighters, fighter-bombers, dive-bombers, and torpedo-bombers - Hellcats, Avengers, Helldivers, and more - carried out with a vengeance, striking airfields, industrial targets, and coastal facilities while flying into the teeth of Japanese air defenses.

Looking behind his plane, first class airman Shigenori Nishikaichi sees his Japanese Zero fighter plane has a bullet hole in the gas tank. As gasoline pours from his aircraft fresh off the second wave of attacks on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, he realizes he must crash land to avoid falling into the ocean. Shigenori desperately guides his fighter plane to the designated crash landing spot on the island of Niihau, which is believed to be uninhabited. He is knocked unconscious landing on the forbidden island.

Since the Wright brothers made their famed flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, aviation has emerged as the indispensable arm of American military power. In this detailed and informative history, Charles J. Gross traces its development from the technological antecedents of the Wright brothers' triumph through the air war for Kosovo. Drawing on examples from all periods and all service branches, he explains the roles of politics, economics, and technology in shaping air power in the US armed forces and assesses the actual impact of military aviation.

Generals during World War II usually stayed to the rear, but not Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor. During D-Day and the Normandy campaign, these commanders of the 82nd "All-American" and the 101st "Screaming Eagle" Airborne Divisions refused to remain behind the lines and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their paratroopers in the thick of combat. Jumping into Normandy during the early hours of D-Day, Ridgway and Taylor fought on the ground for six weeks of combat that cost the airborne divisions more than 40 percent casualties.

At the height of World War II, five hundred Army flight nurses served with the Army Air Forces as members of thirty-one medical air evacuation squadrons located throughout the world on both the European and Pacific fronts. Their work was not insignificantover one million patients were evacuated by air between January 1943 and May 1945. These specially trained Army nurses took nursing to new heights. Often decorated for their accomplishments, they exemplify the ability of a group of nurses to cope successfully with the challenges of war.

The last battle of World War II was not for military victory but for the technology of the Third Reich. In American Raiders, Wolfgang Samuel assembles from official Air Force records and survivors' interviews the largely untold stories of the disarmament of the Luftwaffe and of Operation Lusty—the hunt for Nazi technologies.

Formed in the fall of 1943, the Fifteenth Air Force was popularly known as the "The Forgotten Fifteenth," as its achievements were overshadowed by more glamorous exploits of the Eighth Air Force in the air war over Germany. Nevertheless, the Fifteenth's contribution to Allied victory was crucial, and a vital part of that was the role played by the escorting fighter groups from the Fifteenth Fighter Command who protected the B-17s and B-24s from the Luftwaffe in the skies over Romania.

With a new century and a new enemy came a new kind of war: low intensity and civilian-dominated, blending austere rural and dense urban environments alike. Into this new kind of war, the American military launched two invasions against terrorist networks and military rivals, relying on airpower—close air support (CAS)—at a scale never before seen.

Grasshopper Pilot gives long-overdue attention and credit to the crucial role these courageous men played in combat and adds valuable information to an understudied dimension of the war.

Uniting against the Reich: The American Air War in Europe addresses how the United States swiftly reversed its air war against the Axis powers by reevaluating both individual agency and the structural elements that impeded the US from taking the lead in the European Theater. Luke W. Truxal argues that the appointment of General Dwight D. Eisenhower as the Supreme Allied Commander incorporated various air commands under a single authority, which allowed them to unify their efforts against a specific strategic objective.

In February 1942, a reconnaissance party of US Army Air Force officers arrived in England. Firmly wedded to the doctrine of daylight precision bombing, they believed they could help turn the tide of the war in Europe. In the months that followed, they formed the Eighth Air Force—an organization that grew at an astonishing rate. To accommodate it, almost seventy airfields were built across the eastern counties of England. At the heart of the Eighth Air Force was its bombardment groups, each equipped with scores of heavily armed, four-engine bombers. This is the story of just one "Bomb Group".

Of the 6,600 paratroopers of the 101st 'Screaming Eagles' Airborne Division who parachuted into France in the early hours of 6 June 1944—D-Day—some 3,500 were listed as missing by midnight that same night. Yet it was only the beginning of their 'rendezvous with destiny.'

On the night of July 4, 1943, transport aircraft Liberator AL523 took off from Gibraltar's North Front tarmac and within moments crashed into the sea with only one survivor, the pilot. The commander-in-chief of the Polish army and prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, was dead. Rumors as to the cause of the crash abounded. Was it pilot error? Was it, as officially classified, merely an accident, or was it, as the authors conclude in this riveting and meticulous study, an act of sabotage?

From the author of national bestsellers The Bedford Boys and The Longest Winter comes "a rousing tale of little-known heroes" (Booklist). The Few tells the dramatic and unforgettable story of eight young Americans who joined Britain's Royal Air Force, defying their country's neutrality laws and...

At the height of World War II, LOOK Magazine profiled a small American community for a series of articles portraying it as the wholesome, patriotic model of life on the home front. Decades later, author Matthew Rozell tracks down over thirty survivors who fought the war in the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor to the surrender at Tokyo Bay. Rage is instantaneous. He's looking at me from a crawling position. I didn't shoot him; I went and kicked him in the head. Rage does funny things. After I kicked him, I shot and killed him. ~Thomas Jones, Marine veteran, Battle of Guadalcanal

In Marshall's Great Captain, author Kathy Wilson details Andrews's extraordinary life and career. The first biography dedicated to the namesake of Joint Base Andrews, this book sheds a light on Andrews's crucial role in orchestrating US involvement in WWII, as well as the professional relationship between Andrews and Marshall. Wilson raises Andrews's legacy to its legitimate place within the annals of both air power and WWII history and posits that there is a high probability that Andrews was Marshall's first choice for the office of Supreme Allied Commander.