On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, more than 184,000 US troops began landing on the only Japanese home soil invaded during the Pacific war. Just 350 miles from mainland Japan, Okinawa was to serve as a forward base for Japan's invasion in the fall of 1945. Nearly 140,000 Japanese and auxiliary soldiers fought with suicidal tenacity from hollowed-out, fortified hills and ridges. Under constant fire and in the rain and mud, the Americans battered the defenders with artillery, aerial bombing, naval gunfire, and every infantry tool.

Midway is the most famous naval battle of the Pacific War, and one of the most mythologized. The traditional view of the battle, popularized in its immediate aftermath and surviving through to the present day, is of a heavily outnumbered American force snatching victory in the face of overwhelming odds. This view is simplistic and, in many respects, wrong. Pacific War expert Mark Stille provides a detailed analysis of this pivotal battle, and argues that Midway was neither a miraculous American victory, nor a product of good fortune.

Throughout the war on the Eastern Front, there were two consistent trends. The Red Army battled to learn how to fight and win, while involved in a struggle for its very survival. But by 1944 it had a leadership that was able to wield it with lethal effect and with far more effective equipment than before. By contrast, the Wehrmacht had commenced a slow process of decline after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler became increasingly unwilling to delegate decision-making to commanders in the field, which had been crucial to earlier success.

Published on the 75th anniversary of the battle and utilizing vivid accounts written by the combatants at Guadalcanal, along with marine corps and army archives and oral histories, Midnight in the Pacific is both a sweeping narrative and a compelling drama of individual marines, soldiers, and sailors caught in the crosshairs of history.

In late 1944, as a precursor to the invasion of the Philippines, U.S. military analysts decided to seize the small island of Peleliu to ensure that the Japanese airfield there could not threaten the invasion forces. This important new book explores the dramatic story of this ‘forgotten’ battle and the campaign’s strategic failings. Bitter Peleliu reveals how U.S. intelligence officers failed to detect the complex network of caves, tunnels, and pillboxes hidden inside the island’s coral ridges.

When North Korean forces invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, Otto Apel was a surgical resident living in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife and three young children. A year later he was chief surgeon of the 8076th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, constantly near the front lines in Korea. Immediately upon arriving in camp, Apel performed 80 hours of surgery. His feet swelled so badly, he had to cut his boots off, and he saw more surgical cases in those three and a half days than he would have in a year back in Cleveland.

In the wake of World War II, with America ascendant and the Soviet Union devastated by the conflict, the Space Race should have been over before it started. But the underdog Soviets scored a series of victories—starting with the 1957 launch of Sputnik and continuing in the years following--that seemed to achieve the impossible. It was proof, it seemed, that the USSR had manpower and collective will that went beyond America's material advantages. They had asserted themselves as a world power. But in The Wrong Stuff, John Strausbaugh tells a different story.

In 1940, the German army fought and won an extraordinary battle with France in six weeks of lightning warfare. With the subtlety and compulsion of a novel, Horne's narrative shifts from minor battlefield incidents to high military and political decisions, stepping far beyond the confines of military history to form a major contribution to our understanding of the crises of the Franco-German rivalry.

In this remarkable history, we discover each of the individuals whose actions determined the outcome of the battle for Hill 107, the key event that decided the campaign to capture the vitally strategic island of Crete in May 1941. Drawing upon original combat reports, diary entries, letters and interviews, the battle is brought vividly to life. The narrative feels like a Shakespearean tragedy, the soldiers revealing their stories in and around the shadows of Hill 107.

Con Thien was a United States Marine Corps firebase that was the scene of fierce combat for months on end during 1967. Staving off attacks and ambushes while suffering from ineffectual leadership from Washington as well as media onslaughts, courageous American Marines protected this crucial piece of land at all costs. They would hold Con Thien, but many paid the ultimate price. By the end of the war, more than 1,400 Marines had died and more than 9,000 sustained injuries.

Explore the brutal realities and tactical decisions that shaped the Korean War. From the desperate defense at the Pusan Perimeter to the audacious Incheon Landing and the harrowing winter retreat at Chosin Reservoir, this comprehensive history captures the conflict's most pivotal moments.

The USS Cowpens and her crew weren’t your typical heroes. She was a flattop that the US Navy initially didn’t want, with a captain nearly scapegoated for the loss of his last command, pilots who self-trained on the planes they would fly into combat, and sailors that had been in uniform barely longer than the ship had been afloat. Despite their humble origins, Cowpens and her band of second-string reservists and citizen sailors served with distinction, fighting in nearly every major carrier operation from 1943 to 1945, including the Battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf.

On August 7, 1942, two events of major military importance occurred on separate sides of the planet. In the South Pacific, the United States went on the offensive, landing the First Marine Division at Guadalcanal. In England, 12 B-17 bombers of the new Eighth Air Force’s 97th Bombardment Group bombed the Rouen–Sotteville railroad marshalling yards in France. While the mission was small, the aerial struggle that began that day would ultimately cost the United States more men killed and wounded by the end of the war in Europe than the Marines would lose in the Pacific War.

At the height of World War II the people of Leningrad endured a bitter 900-day siege. Prit Buttar tells the story of how the siege was finally broken. The Red Army had suffered multiple setbacks in the preceding two years but achieved a partial success by breaking the blockage in early 1943. However, this was followed by further failed attempts to lift the siege completely. This compelling history uses original Russian source material to vividly describe the deprivations visited upon those trapped. But it also details the tactical successes and strategic failures of both sides.

From the overwhelming operational victories at Kerch and Kharkov in May to the catastrophic defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad, Death of the Wehrmacht offers an eye-opening new view of that decisive year. Building upon his widely respected critique in The German Way of War, Citino shows how the campaigns of 1942 fit within the centuries-old patterns of Prussian/German warmaking and ultimately doomed Hitler's expansionist ambitions.

In late 1944, as a precursor to the invasion of the Philippines, U.S. military analysts decided to seize the small island of Peleliu to ensure that the Japanese airfield there could not threaten the invasion forces. This important new book explores the dramatic story of this ‘forgotten’ battle and the campaign’s strategic failings. Bitter Peleliu reveals how U.S. intelligence officers failed to detect the complex network of caves, tunnels, and pillboxes hidden inside the island’s coral ridges.

On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, more than 184,000 US troops began landing on the only Japanese home soil invaded during the Pacific war. Just 350 miles from mainland Japan, Okinawa was to serve as a forward base for Japan's invasion in the fall of 1945. Nearly 140,000 Japanese and auxiliary soldiers fought with suicidal tenacity from hollowed-out, fortified hills and ridges. Under constant fire and in the rain and mud, the Americans battered the defenders with artillery, aerial bombing, naval gunfire, and every infantry tool.

Published on the 75th anniversary of the battle and utilizing vivid accounts written by the combatants at Guadalcanal, along with marine corps and army archives and oral histories, Midnight in the Pacific is both a sweeping narrative and a compelling drama of individual marines, soldiers, and sailors caught in the crosshairs of history.

The Frozen Chosen is an account of the breakout from the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea by the First Marine Division from November to December 1950, following the intervention of Red China in the Korean War. Fought during the worst blizzard in a century, it is considered by the US Marine Corps to be the Corps' finest hour. Fourteen Medals of Honor, a record for any American battle, and 85 Navy Crosses attest to the intensity of the battle.

In February 1944, in one of the most astonishing battles of World War II, a ragtag collection of British clerks, drivers, doctors, muleteers, and other base troops, stiffened by a few dogged Yorkshiremen and a handful of tank crews, managed to defeat a much larger and sophisticated contingent of some of the finest infantry in the Japanese army on their march toward India.

Alongside Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan is the least known of the triumvirate of generals most responsible for winning the Civil War. Yet, before Sherman's famous march through Georgia, it was General Sheridan who introduced scorched-earth warfare to the South, and it was his Cavalry Corps that compelled Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Sheridan's innovative cavalry tactics and "total war" strategy became staples of 20th-century warfare.

In the spring of 1864, Robert E. Lee faced a new adversary: Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. Named commander of all Union armies in March, Grant quickly went on the offensive against Lee in Virginia. On May 4th, Grant's army struck hard across the Rapidan River into north central Virginia, with Lee's army contesting every mile. They fought for 40 days until, finally, the Union army crossed the James River and began the siege of Petersburg. The campaign cost 90,000 men - the largest loss the war had seen.

“The Devil’s Playground” was anything south of the second canal to the men of Charlie Company’s 2nd Platoon—Two Charlie—during their 2009–2010 deployment to the Arghandab River Valley in Afghanistan. The valley had been a notorious hot spot throughout history, with the Russians unable to maintain a foothold in the 80s and Coalition forces now facing the same problem during Operation Enduring Freedom.

Joe Owen tells it like it was in this evocative story of a marine rifle company in the uncertain, early days of the Korean War. His powerful description of close combat in the snow-covered mountains of the Chosin Reservoir and of the survival spirit of his Marines provide a gritty real-life view of frontline warfare.As a lieutenant who was with them from first muster in California, Owen was in a unique position to see the hastily assembled mix of some 200 regulars and raw reservists harden into a superb Marine rifle company. The action and narrative move fast as the company learns to fight under enemy fire, eat frozen rations, and keep pushing forward when its wounded and dead go down.

Hampton Sides' superb account of this epic clash in the Korean War relies on years of archival research, unpublished letters, declassified documents, and interviews with scores of marines and Koreans who survived the siege. While expertly detailing the follies of the American leaders, On Desperate Ground is an immediate, grunt's-eye view of history, enthralling in its narrative pace and powerful in its portrayal of what ordinary men are capable of in the most extreme circumstances.

Of the many myths that emerged following the end of the Korean War, the prevailing one in the West was that of the absolute supremacy of US Air Force pilots and aircraft over their Soviet-supplied opponents. The claims of the 10:1 victory-loss ratio achieved by the US Air Force fighter pilots flying the North American F-86 Sabre against their communist adversaries, amongst other such fabrications, went unchallenged until the end of the Cold War, when Soviet records of the conflict were finally opened. From that point onwards, a very different story began to emerge.

We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward, and unchanging time characterized by violence, ignorance, and superstition. By contrast, we believe progress arose from science and technological innovation, and that inventions of recent centuries created the modern world. We couldn't be more wrong.

The master of military historical fiction turns his discerning eye to the Korean War in this riveting new novel, which tells the dramatic story of the Americans and the Chinese who squared off in one of the deadliest campaigns in the annals of combat: the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, also known as Frozen Chosin.

Following victory in Sicily, while the central command planned the spring 1944 invasion of France, Allied troops crossed into Southern Italy in September 1943, expecting to drive Axis forces north and liberate Rome by Christmas. Italy quickly surrendered but German divisions fiercely resisted, and the hoped-for quick victory descended into one of the most challenging and protracted battles of the entire war. James Holland’s The Savage Storm chronicles the dramatic opening months of the Italian Campaign in unflinching and insightful detail.

In World War II, over 12,000 Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, and Jewish rabbis left the safety of home to join the Chaplain Corps, following the armed forces into battle across Europe, Asia, North Africa, and the high seas. These are the personal stories of some of the bravest and most selfless men who served. All of them battled the pain of separation from their own loved ones as they gave some of the best years of their lives to keep the military personnel spiritually awake, morally fit—and prepared to make the journey from this world to the next without fear or despair.