Air War

At the height of World War II, LOOK Magazine profiled a small upstate New York community for a series of articles portraying it as the wholesome, patriotic model of life on the home front. Seventy years later, a history teacher tracks down the veterans with a connection to “Hometown, USA” who fought the war in the air over Europe, men who were tempered in the tough times of the Great Depression and forged in battle.

During the early years of World War II in the Pacific theatre, against overwhelming odds, young American airmen flew the longest and most perilous bombing missions of the war. They faced determined Japanese fighters without fighter escort, relentless anti-aircraft fire with no deviations from target, and thousands of miles of over-water flying with no alternative landing sites.

Merton Naydler joined the RAF at the age of 19 and served for the next six years until May 1946. He flew Spitfires and Hurricanes during a tour of duty that took him to North Africa, Burma, and Malaya. This extremely entertaining memoir portrays wartime life in the desert environment where sand and flies and life under canvas made living and flying a daunting experience. This is the story of a sergeant pilot who learned his trade the hard way, in action over Africa and then honed his combat skills in the skies over Japanese-held tropical forests where he was eventually commissioned.

The inspiration for this brilliant anthology is the "I Learnt About Flying from That" articles that first appeared in the RAF flight safety magazine Air Clues in the 1940s and continue to feature in the magazine to this day. Flying Through the Ranks gets a five-star start with an extraordinary tale from a marshal of the Royal Air Force and continues in the same vein. Men and women of every rank—pilots, navigators, engineers, a RAF regiment officer, and airmen too—reveal similar intriguing experiences in both war and peace.

From August 7th 1942 until February 24th 1944, the US Navy fought the most difficult campaign in its history. Between the landing of the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal and the final withdrawal of the Imperial Japanese Navy from its main South Pacific base at Rabaul, the US Navy suffered such high personnel losses that for years it refused to publicly release total casualty figures.

The War in the Air: And Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted is a military science fiction novel written by H. G. Wells. It is (like many of Wells's works) notable for its prophetic ideas, images, and concepts - particularly the use of aircraft for the purpose of warfare - as well as conceptualizing and anticipating events related to World War I. The novel's hero and main character is Bert Smallways, who is described as "a forward-thinking young man" and a "kind of bicycle engineer of the let's-'ave-a-look-at-it and enamel-chipping variety."

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.

The firebombing of Tokyo. Strategic Air Command. John F. Kennedy. Dr. Strangelove. George Wallace. All of these have one man in common—General Curtis LeMay, who remains as enigmatic and controversial as he was in life. Until now. Warren Kozak traces the trajectory of America’s most infamous general, from his troubled background and heroic service in Europe to his firebombing of Tokyo, guardianship of the U.S. nuclear arsenal in the Cold War, frustrated career in government, and short-lived political run.

Listen to this captivating memoir by Wilhelm Johnen who flew his first operational mission in July 1941, having completed his blind-flying training. In his first couple of years he brought down two enemy planes. The tally went up rapidly once the air war was escalated in spring 1943, when Air Marshal Arthur Harris of the RAF Bomber Command began the campaign dubbed the Battle of the Ruhr.

On November 5, 1942, a U.S. cargo plane slammed into the Greenland ice cap. Four days later, a B-17 on the search-and-rescue mission also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on the B-17 survived. The U.S. military launched a second daring rescue operation, but the Grumman Duck amphibious plane sent to find the men vanished. In this thrilling adventure, Mitchell Zuckoff offers a spellbinding account of these harrowing crashes and the fate of the survivors and their would-be saviors.

Lynn Spencer takes listeners right to the front lines as the realization hits that multiple hijackings are underway - and then that the country is under attack. She follows the story all the way through the end of the day, when the fog of war had finally lifted and the country could assess exactly what had happened.

Paul Tremelling was just seven years old when he watched the Royal Navy's Sea Harriers leave their home base in Somerset to do battle against the Argentine Air Force in the Falklands War. Two decades later, he would join this exclusive club, one of an elite band of Fleet Air Arm fighter pilots, charged with standing in the way of Her Majesty's enemies. This is the story of what it takes to make it in the dog-eat-dog arena of fighter combat. In the cockpit or crew room, the pressure is relentless, the humour merciless. It's no place for the faint-hearted.

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.

A definitive new edition of a classic memoir, published in association with the RAF Museum. Guy Gibson was the leader of the famous Dambusters raid and Enemy Coast Ahead is a vivid, honest account, widely regarded as one of the best books on World War II. It is also an insider's account that sets down in clear, honest detail the challenges that the RAF faced in the war against Germany's Luftwaffe.

Created during the Second World War, the SAS was a small band of men brought together in the North African desert. They were the toughest and brightest of their cohort, the most resilient, most capable in close combat and most careful in surveillance. Winning approval for this radical new form of warfare was no small feat, but eventually it was achieved. The SAS was born, their mission to take on small-scale but often devastating raids and risks behind enemy lines. Levine tours us through the wartime experience, taking us behind the scenes through exclusive access to SAS archives.

Michel Paradis’ Last Mission to Tokyo, a “superb” (The Wall Street Journal) and “engrossing...richly researched” (The New York Times Book Review) account of a key but underreported moment in World War II: The Doolittle Raids and the international war crimes trial in 1945 that defined the Japanese American relations and changed legal history.

In May 1943, Guy Gibson led 617 Squadron on an audacious assault on the dams of the Ruhr valley using Barnes Wallis' ingenious 'bouncing bombs.' What happened to RAF 617 Squadron after the completion of Operation Chastise? The raid had been a success, but the bombing offensive against Nazi-occupied territories did not let up and 617 Squadron continued to be at the heart of these operations.

As a young band of brothers flies over German-occupied France, they come under heavy fire. Their B-17 is shot down and the airmen - stumbling through fields and villages - scatter across Europe. Some struggled to flee for safety. Others were captured immediately and imprisoned. Now, for the first time, their incredible story of grit, survival, and reunion is told. Join George as he retraces his steps to freedom and discover the amazing stories of sacrifice and survival and how 10 young American boys plus their French helpers became heroes.

The theme of this book is the exploration of the theory and practice of dive-bombing, which tactic proved more precise than that of level-flight bombers and more effective than air-launched torpedo attacks against surface ships. It is also the author's purpose to come to a more general conclusion as to the effectiveness of dive-bombing under actual combat conditions. In this regard the words and observations of several dive-bomber aviators have been incorporated.

On September 7, 1940, the long-feared and anticipated attack by the German Luftwaffe plunged London into a cauldron of fire and devastation. This compelling book recreates that day in all its horror, using rich archival sources and first-hand accounts, many never before published. Eminent historian Peter Stansky weaves together the stories of people who recorded their experiences of the opening hours of the Blitz. Then, exploring more deeply, the author examines what that critical day meant to the nation at the time, and what it came to mean in following years.