Showing titles in Air Forces

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.

Operation Tidal Wave tells the story of the bloodiest air battle in the history of war. It is about 1,700 airmen who set out to bomb the oil refineries surrounding the city of Ploesti, Romania, on August 1, 1943. Success, they thought, would be a force in ending the war. Success, instead, was extremely limited, and 500 airmen were killed, wounded, captured, or interned. Negligible damage resulted at the Ploesti refineries, and a few months later, they were operating at 100 percent capacity.

It was the evening of 16 May 1943. Nineteen modified Lancaster bombers from 617 Squadron RAF, under the command of youthful Wing Commander Guy Gibson, roared into the night sky from their Lincolnshire base. They were on a top-secret Bomber Command mission, codenamed Operation Chastise, now regarded as one of the most dangerous and audacious bombing raids of World War II - an attack on the formidable, well-defended dams of Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Slung beneath the belly of each aircraft was one of the war’s greatest secrets - a bouncing bomb.

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.

For 113 terrifying days in 1940, Nazi Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, threw everything it had at Great Britain in hopes of early victory in World War II. The task of defending southern England from airborne attack fell to pilots in the Royal Air Force, supplemented in their darkest hour by more than 100 flyers from Canada. These Canadians, some from famous families, some straight off the farm, served in forty-seven different Battle of Britain squadrons.

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.

The ability of the US Navy to fight and win a protracted war in the Pacific was not solely the result of technology, tactics, or leadership. Naval aviation maintenance played a major role in the US victory over Japan in WWII. The naval war against Japan did not achieve sustained success until enough aircraft technicians were available to support the high tempo of aviation operations that fast carrier task force doctrine demanded.

Ghostriders: Mors De Caelis is a comprehensive history of AC-130 gunship combat operations in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The story begins with the first AC-130 in 1968, and ends in 1975 at the end of the war in Vietnam. It tells the life and death stories of Spectre crews, who faced extreme danger while hunting trucks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and providing fire support for US and allied ground forces.

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.

To Command the Sky is a scholarly record of the fight for domination of the skies over Western Europe during World War II. It also explains the technical details of the tactics used to defeat the Luftwaffe. This book is important for serious students of World War II or military aviation.

To be an airman in the Eighth Air Force flying over the war-torn skies of Europe required skill, tenacity, and luck. Those who were shot down and evaded capture needed all of that and more if they were to make it back to friendly lines. These are their stories. Each is compiled from the original intelligence debrief written by the pilots or aircrew themselves. Bill Yenne details how a spider web of escape routes sprang up, created by the local Résistance.

Gerald "Jerry" Keyser and I became friends in 1966, when we were both in USAF Pilot Training. In 1970 I got out of the Air Force and Jerry stayed in. We remained friends and I followed along in awe as he went on to have the most amazing flying career I have ever seen. He flew 100 different types of airplanes, helicopters, and gliders during his 20 years in the Air Force, including a stint with NASA, and his 17 years as a test pilot for Hughes-McDonell Douglas-Boeing Helicopter Company in Arizona.

The P-38 Lightning was one of the fastest operational fighters of World War II, famous for its successes in North Africa and the Pacific. In The P-38 Lightning and the Men Who Flew It, Wolfgang W. E. Samuel shares the stories of the young men who climbed into the cockpits of the P-38 to fight for freedom, and of those who created, tested, and deployed these fearsome machines. The P-38 was the product of the Lockheed Corporation, the first fighter they ever built, principally conceptualized by Kelly Johnson, whose design was to meet Air Corps specifications. But it was no easy plane to fly.

On November 18, 1944, the end of the war in Europe finally in sight, American co-pilot Lieutenant Lee Lamar struggled alongside pilot Randall Darden to keep Bottoms Up, their B-24J Liberator, in the air. They and their crew of eight young men had believed the intelligence officer who, at the pre-dawn briefing at their base in southern Italy, confided that their mission that day would be a milk run. It was not....

World War I, also known in its time as the Great War or the War to End all Wars, was an unprecedented conflict in terms of its sheer scale. Before 1914, flying machines were objects of public curiosity. By 1918, all the major belligerents were fielding squadrons of fighting aircraft. Bombs were dropped on Paris in August 1914, and Zeppelins bombed Belgian forces as the Germans advanced on Liège. Zeppelin raids on Britain would continue for nearly four years. These raids and the attempts to stop them would be carried out at the cutting edge of new technology.

Book three of the Sea Stories takes listeners to entirely new dimensions of adventures in "Foreign Lands". We find our young Marine captain and family totally immersed in "British Society" during a two-year assignment as an exchange officer with the Royal Navy and Royal Marines. What they experience is professionally broadening and personally enriching while they are "On Her Majesty's Service".

This second book of Sea Stories continues to follow the journey of a young Midwesterner, now Marine Lieutenant, through the rigors of Naval Flight School in Pensacola, Fatherhood, and Combat as a Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam. It also provides an interesting look at his fellow pilots and crewmen, as they fight their war from under a helicopter rotorhead.

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.

There have been volumes of books written about the development of US airpower and the technological specifications of each American or Allied aircraft. This is not one of them. This book focuses on the young men who answered the call to duty and were literally transformed from “farm boys to fighter pilots.”

Joey Jacobson, a young Jewish man from Westmount on the Island of Montreal, trained as a navigator and bomb-aimer in Western Canada. On arriving in England, he was assigned to No. 106 Squadron, a British unit tasked with the bombing of Germany. Joey Jacobson’s War tells, in his own words, why he enlisted, his understanding of strategy, tactics, and the effectiveness of the air war at its lowest point, how he responded to the inevitable battle stress, and how he became both a hopeful idealist and a seasoned airman.