Hampton Sides' superb account of this epic clash in the Korean War relies on years of archival research, unpublished letters, declassified documents, and interviews with scores of marines and Koreans who survived the siege.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.

The Last Stand of Fox Company is a fast-paced and gripping account of heroism and self-sacrifice in the face of impossible odds. The authors have conducted dozens of firsthand interviews with the battle's survivors, and they narrate the story with the immediacy of such classic accounts of single battles as Guadalcanal Diary, Pork Chop Hill, and Black Hawk Down.

Holding the Line chronicles the carrier war in Korea from the first day of the war to the last, focusing on frontline combat while also describing the technical development of aircraft and shipboard operations and how these all affected the broader strategic situation on the Korean Peninsula.

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.

In The Cactus Air Force, Pacific War expert Thomas McKelvey Cleaver worked closely with Eric to build on his collection of diary entries, interviews and first-hand accounts to create a vivid narrative of the struggle in the air over the island of Guadalcanal between August 20 and November 15, 1942.

Up until now, the Korean War has been the black hole of modern American history. The Coldest Winter changes that. Halberstam gives us a masterful narrative of the political decisions and miscalculations on both sides. He charts the disastrous path that led to the massive entry of Chinese forces near the Yalu, and that caught Douglas MacArthur and his soldiers by surprise. He provides astonishingly vivid and nuanced portraits of all the major figures.

The celebrated 2010 HBO miniseries The Pacific, winner of eight Emmy Awards, was based on two classic books about the War in the Pacific, Helmet for My Pillow and With The Old Breed. Audible Studios, in partnership with Playtone, the production company co-owned by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and creator of the award-winning HBO series Band of Brothers, John Adams, and The Pacific, as well as the HBO movie Game Change, has created new recordings of these memoirs, narrated by the stars of the miniseries.

When Chuck Tatum began Marine boot camp, he was just a smart-aleck teenager eager to serve his country. Little did he know that he would be training under a living legend of the Corps - Medal of Honor recipient John Basilone, who had almost single-handedly fought off a Japanese force of three thousand on Guadalcanal.

Dale Hanson takes us from a northern Minnesota boyhood to the incredible stresses of US special operations during the Vietnam War, the deadly world of MAC-V-SOG, the top-secret Special Forces project that conducted America’s secret war against the Communist forces on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Shrouded in mystery and equipped with exotic weaponry, SOG operators suffered casualty rates in excess of 100 percent for three successive years.

By January 1968, despite an influx of half a million American troops, the fighting in Vietnam seemed to be at a stalemate. Yet General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces, announced a new phase of the war in which "the end begins to come into view". The North Vietnamese had different ideas. In mid-1967, the leadership in Hanoi had started planning an offensive intended to win the war in a single stroke.

In November 1965, some 450 men of the First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War. How these men persevered makes a vivid portrait of war at its most inspiring and devastating.

On the first Sunday in December 1941, an armada of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Six months later, in a sea fight north of the tiny atoll of Midway, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent into the abyss. Pacific Crucible tells the epic tale of these first searing months of the Pacific war, when the U.S. Navy shook off the worst defeat in American military history and seized the strategic initiative.

October 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, a conflict that shaped the modern Middle East. The War was a trauma for Israel, a dangerous superpower showdown, and, following the oil embargo, a pivotal reordering of the global economic order. The Jewish State came shockingly close to defeat. After the war, Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned in disgrace, and a 9/11-style commission investigated the "debacle." But, argues Uri Kaufman, from the perspective of a half century, the War can be seen as a pivotal victory for Israel.

Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the US in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed two million people.

Eighteen-year-old Marine recruit William V. Taylor, Jr. and his brother Marines are assembled into a new reaction force that is immediately tested in the fire of a bloody conflict known as Operation Beaver Cage. After a traumatic first fight, they push through back-to-back operations with little time to rest or reflect. Those who survive will return home ensnared by everlasting memories of a real but entirely surreal nightmare. Now, after more than 50 years of holding everything in, Taylor shares his experience in explicit—and often horrific—detail.

Between December 16, 1944 and January 15, 1945, American forces found themselves entrenched in the heavily forested Ardennes region of Belgium, France, and Luxembourg defending against an advancing German army amid freezing temperatures, deep snow, and dense fog. Operation Herbstnebel - Autumn Mist - was a massive German counter-offensive that stunned the Allies in its scope and intensity.

This is the strange and fascinating life of Erwin Rommel, from his days as a youth in Imperial Germany - when he had a child out of wedlock with an early girlfriend - through his lauded military exploits during World War I to his death by suicide during World War II, after he attempted a failed coup against Hitler. Rommel was a man of contradictions: a soldier who wrote a best-selling book about World War I, a commander who went from commanding Hitler's bodyguard to trying to kill him, and a serious military mind who was known for participating in practical jokes.

One American soldier called it "a green hell on Earth". Monsoon-soaked wilderness, debilitating heat, impassable mountains, torrential rivers, and disease-infested swamps - New Guinea was a battleground far more deadly than the most fanatical of enemy troops. Japanese forces numbering some 600,000 men began landing in January 1942, determined to seize the island as a cornerstone of the empire's strategy to knock Australia out of the war.

Unlike most other World War II accounts, this work covers the South Pacific operations in detail. The audiobook includes many now-forgotten operations that deserve to be well remembered. Significantly, the official Australian history of World War II correctly observed that Australia's part in the Pacific war is barely mentioned in American histories. This volume finally brings the major Australian contribution to the fore.

When General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia in March 1942, having successfully left the Philippines to organize a new American army, he vowed, "I shall return!" More than two years later he did return, at the head of a large U.S. army to retake the Philippines from the Japanese. The place of his re-invasion was the central Philippine Island of Leyte. Much has been written about the naval Battle of Leyte Gulf that his return provoked, but almost nothing has been written about the three-month long battle to seize Leyte itself.

The outcome of the Korean War was decided in the first three months. The Darkest Summer is the hour-by-hour, casualty-by-casualty story of those months---a period that saw American and UN forces almost driven into the sea by the North Korean invaders, then stage an incredible turn-around that reversed the entire course of the war.

victorious American army, having driven through Belgium almost unopposed, ran head-on into German soldiers on their own home ground, in some of the most rugged country in western Germany - and at the beginning of the worst fall and winter weather in decades.

In June 1944, the attention of the nation was riveted on the events unfolding in France. But in the Pacific, the Battle of Saipan was of extreme strategic importance. D-Day in the Pacific: The Battle of Saipan is a gripping account of one of the most dramatic engagements of World War II. The conquest of Saipan and the neighboring island of Tinian was a turning point in the war in the Pacific, making the American victory against Japan inevitable.

In the spring of 1940, the Germans launched a military offensive in France and the Low Countries that married superb intelligence, the latest military thinking, and new technology. It was a stunning victory, altering the balance of power in Europe in one stroke, and convincing the entire world that the Nazi war machine was unstoppable. But as Lloyd Clark, a leading British military historian and academic, argues, much of our understanding of this victory, and blitzkrieg itself, is based on myth.

The Crimea was one of the crucibles of the war on the Eastern Front, where first a Soviet and then a German army were surrounded, fought desperate battles, and were eventually destroyed. The fighting in the region was unusual for the Eastern Front in many ways, in that naval supply, amphibious landings, and naval evacuation played major roles, while both sides were also conducting ethnic cleansing as part of their strategy - the Germans eliminating the Jews and the Soviets purging the region of Tartars.

Renowned historian Antony Beevor, the man who "single-handedly transformed the reputation of military history" (The Guardian) presents the first major account in more than 20 years of the Normandy invasion and the liberation of Paris. This is the first book to describe not only the experiences of the American, British, Canadian, and German soldiers, but also the terrible suffering of the French caught up in the fighting.

This book is a stimulating and entirely plausible insight into how Hitler and his generals might have defeated the Allies, and a convincing sideways look at the Third Reich's bid at world domination in World War II. What would have happened if, for example, the Germans captured the whole of the BEF at Dunkirk? Or if the RAF had been defeated in the Battle of Britain?

On July 5, 1943, the greatest land battle in history began when Nazi and Red Army forces clashed near the town of Kursk, on the western border of the Soviet Union. Code named Operation Citadel, the German offensive would cut through the bulge in the eastern front that had been created following Germany's retreat at the battle of Stalingrad. But the Soviets, well informed about Germany's plans through their network of spies, had months to prepare.

There is a chapter of World War II history that remains largely untold: the story of the fourth largest Allied military of the war, and the only nation to have fought in the battles of Leningrad, Arnhem, Tobruk, and Normandy. This is the story of the Polish forces during the Second World War, the story of millions of young men and women who gave everything for freedom and in the final victory lost all. In a cruel twist of history, the monumental struggles of an entire nation have been largely forgotten, and even intentionally obscured. No Greater Ally redresses the balance,

Under orders of the Fuhrer, the German General Staff reluctantly drew up a lackluster plan of invasion for France. Yet it was the audacious scheme of three of Hitler’s top generals that brought down France’s military force, Rather than simply move troops to engage the enemy, for the first time they would unleash the tank and drive straight into the heart of their foe.

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.

This Kind of War is a monumental study of the conflict that began in June 1950. Successive generations of U.S. military officers have considered this book an indispensable part of their education. T. R. Fehrenbach's narrative brings to life the harrowing and bloody battles that were fought up and down the Korean Peninsula.

I'm Staying with My Boys is a firsthand look inside the life of one of the greatest heroes of the Greatest Generation. Sgt. John Basilone held off 3000 Japanese troops at Guadalcanal after his 15-member unit was reduced to three men. At Iwo Jima he single-handedly destroyed an enemy blockhouse, allowing his unit to capture an airfield. Minutes later he was killed by an enemy artillery round. He was the only Marine in World War II to have received the Medal of Honor, the Navy Cross, and a Purple Heart.

A detailed and comprehensive study of the carrier formations of the Pacific War, including their origins, development, and key battles from the Coral Sea, through Midway and Guadalcanal to the battle of the Philippine Sea.

In the U.S. Marine Corps, the most dangerous job in combat is that of the sniper. With no backup and little communication with the outside world, these men disappear for weeks on end in the wilderness with nothing but intellect and iron will to protect them - as they watch, wait, and finally strike. But of all of the snipers who ever hunted human prey, one man stands above the rest as the most legendary fighting man to ever pull a trigger. That man is Carlos Hathcock.

Following the disastrous Java Sea campaign, the Allies went on the offensive in the Pacific in a desperate attempt to halt the Japanese forces that were rampaging across the region. With the conquest of Australia a very real possibility, the stakes were high. Their target: the Japanese-held Soloman Islands, in particular the southern island of Guadalcanal. Hamstrung by arcane pre-war thinking and a bureaucratic mind-set, the US Navy had to adapt on the fly in order to compete with the mighty Imperial Japanese Navy, whose ingenuity had fostered the creation of its Pacific empire.

On February 19, 1945, nearly 70,000 American soldiers invaded a tiny volcanic island in the Pacific. Over the next 35 days, approximately 28,000 soldiers died, including nearly 22,000 Japanese and 6,821 Americans, making Iwo Jima one of the costliest battles of World War II.

The War Below is a dramatic account of extraordinary heroism, ingenuity, and perseverance—and the vital role American submarines played in winning the Pacific War. Focusing on the unique stories of the submarines Silversides, Drum, and Tang—and the men who skippered and crewed them—James Scott takes readers beneath the waves to experience the thrill of a direct hit on a merchant ship and the terror of depth charge attacks.

The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was the third most powerful navy in the world at the start of World War II and came to dominate the Pacific in the early months of the war. This was a remarkable turnaround for a navy that only began to modernize in 1868. The Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific War details the Japanese ships which fought in the Pacific and examines the principles on which they were designed, how they were armed, when and where they were deployed, and how effective they were in battle.

From D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge and more, here is the authorized biography of one of the most celebrated paratroopers of Easy Company, Sergeant Shifty Powers, the legendary sharpshooter from the Band of Brothers.