Air War

On the morning of August 15, 1945, Captain Jerry Yellin flew the last combat mission of World War II out of Iwo Jima. Today, Captain Yellin is a sharp, engaging, 93-year-old veteran whose story is brought to life by best-selling author Don Brown.

Midair is a true account of one of the most remarkable tales of survival in the history of aviation - a midair collision at 30,000 feet by two bomb-laden B-52s over a category 5 super typhoon above the South China Sea during the outset of the Vietnam War.

Hap Arnold: The General Who Invented the US Air Force is an adventure biography for history buffs, aviation enthusiasts, and anyone interested in the events that shaped America and the world in the first half of the 20th century.

Born in the Philippines to an American father and a Filipina mother, George Cooper is one of the few surviving veteran pilots who saw action over such fearsome targets as Rabaul and Wewak. Not just another flag-waving story of air combat, Jayhawk describes the war as it really was - a conflict with far-reaching tentacles that gripped and tore at not only the combatants, but also their families, friends, and the way they lived their lives.

The story of one of the most remarkable–and feared–British aircraft of the Second World War: the de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito fighter-bomber.

This is the nonfiction memoir of a young pilot, Bert Stiles, who flew 35 missions in the B-17 Flying Fortress over Germany and Italy during World War II. At 22 years of age, Stiles left college and joined the American Air Force. The next year he began his tour of duty as a copilot of a B-17, flying missions high over Germany, Italy, and other European targets, bombing cities far below.

David R. “Buff” Honodel was a cocky young man with an inflated self-image when he arrived in 1969 at his base in Udorn, Thailand. His war was not in Vietnam; it was a secret one in the skies of a neighboring country almost unknown in America, attacking the Ho Chi Minh Trail that fed soldiers and supplies from North Vietnam into the South. Stateside he learned the art of flying the F-4, but in combat, the bomb-loaded fighter handled differently, targets shot back, and people suffered. Inert training ordnance was replaced by lethal weapons.

By the author of Ashes Under Water, here is one of the great untold stories of World War II. The Hidden Hindenburg at last reveals the cause of aviation's most famous disaster and the duplicity that kept the truth from coming to light for three generations. It also finally catches up with a German legend who misled the world about the Hindenburg to bury his own Nazi connections.

As a young man growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, Robert Morgan was a fast-driving party boy - a hell-raiser. But when his mother committed suicide upon learning she had inoperable brain cancer, Morgan's life changed dramatically. He was no longer a carefree playboy; he was a man searching for meaning. He found that meaning at the controls of an airplane, and in the flak-and fighter-filled skies over Occupied France and Nazi Germany.

Sunday, December 7, 1941, dawned clear and bright over the Pacific....

But for the Dauntless dive-bomber crews of the USS Enterprise returning to their home base on Oahu, it was a morning from hell. Flying directly into the Japanese ambush at Pearl Harbor, they lost a third of their squadron and witnessed the heart of America's Navy broken and smoldering on the oil-slicked waters below.

America's Few delves into the history of US Marine Corps aviation in World War II, following the feats of the Corps’ top-scoring aces in the skies over Guadalcanal. Marine Corps aviation began in 1915, functioning as a self-contained expeditionary force. During the interwar period, the support of USMC amphibious operations became a key element of Marine aviation doctrine, and the small force gradually grew. But in December 1941 came the rude awakening. Within hours of Pearl Harbor, heroic Marine aviators were battling the Japanese over Wake Island.

The story of the man who won the battle of Midway and avenged Pearl Harbor for the United States. During the Battle of Midway in June 1942, US Navy dive bomber pilot Wade McClusky proved himself to be one of the greatest pilots and combat leaders in American history, but his story has never been told - until now.

At the turn of the twentieth century two new technologies—the car and airplane—took the nation's imagination by storm as they burst, like comets, into American life. The brave souls that leaped into these dangerous contraptions and pushed them to unexplored extremes became new American heroes: the race car driver and the flying ace. No individual did more to create and intensify these raw new roles than the tall, gangly Eddie Rickenbacker, who defied death over and over with such courage and pluck that a generation of Americans came to know his face better than the president's.

Before becoming an instructor in the Navy's Topgun program, Dave "Bio" Baranek was just another kid with a dream. Upon graduating from college, he joined the Navy with the goal of becoming a fighter pilot. But, his eyesight waning, he knew that he would never be able to reach that goal. Undaunted, he plowed ahead and found his niche as a radar intercept operator in the backseat of the sleek, new Grumman F-14 Tomcat.

Bronx-born top turret-gunner Arthur Meyerowitz was on his second mission when he was shot down in 1943. He was one of only two men on the B-24 Liberator known as Harmful Lil Armful who escaped death or immediate capture on the ground. After fleeing the wreck, Arthur knocked on the door of an isolated farmhouse, whose owners hastily took him in. Fortunately, his hosts not only despised the Nazis but had a tight connection to the French resistance group Morhange and its founder, Marcel Taillandier.

In September 1943, as America began advancing from its foothold on Guadalcanal, a young American airman was lost in heavy weather over the South Pacific on what was expected to be a routine flight. In examining that loss and the events leading up to a rescue attempt on an island in the South Pacific, and bringing together societies utterly alien to each other, Survival in the South Pacific brings together the big themes of the Pacific War.

On February 15, 1991, Captain Steve Phillis was leading his wingman, Lieutenant Rob Sweet, on their 30th combat mission of Desert Storm flying the A-10 Warthog. They were tasked with attacking Iraq's vaunted Medina Division of the Republican Guards - by far their most dangerous mission of the war. Near the end of their attacks, Rob was forced to eject from his aircraft and began a five-minute parachute ride down to the troops he and Steve had just finished bombing. Steve immediately sprang into action to save the life of his wingman.

Black Tulip locates the ambiguous truth about Erich Hartmann and so much of the German Wehrmacht in general: that many of these men were neither full-blown Nazis nor impeccable knights. They were complex, contradictory, and elusive. This book portrays a complex human rather than the heroic caricature we're used to, and it argues that the tidy, polished hero stories we've inherited about men like Hartmann say as much about those who've crafted them as they do about the heroes themselves.

In 1939 off the New England coast, the submarine USS Squalus accidentally sinks to the bottom of the sea during a training exercise, killing half her crew. Coming to the rescue is the USS Sculpin, in many ways the Squalus’s twin. As their oxygen supply dwindles, the remaining crew aboard the Squalus are saved in a time-consuming, white-knuckle operation. Eventually the sunken submarine is raised, repaired, and returned to duty, with a new name: the Sailfish.

The growing buzz of aircraft engines disturbed the Japanese military construction personnel hauling equipment ashore on the beige coral sand of Tulagi Island at 8:20 AM on May 4, 1942. Offshore, the large IJN (Imperial Japanese Navy) minelayer Okinoshima, flagship of Admiral Shima Kiyohide, lay at anchor, along with two destroyers, Kikuzuki and Yutsuki, and transport ships. Six Japanese Mitsubishi F1M2 floatplanes also rested on the gentle, deep blue swell, marking Tulagi's future as an IJN floatplane base.