Asia Military

In November 1943, the men of the 2d Marine Division were instructed to clear out Japanese resistance on the Pacific island of Betio, a speck at the end of the Tarawa Atoll. When the Marines landed, the Japanese poured out of their underground bunkers — and launched one of the most brutal and bloody battles of World War II.

Autumn 1944. World War II is nearly over in Europe but is escalating in the Pacific, where American soldiers face an opponent who will go to any length to avoid defeat. The Japanese army follows the samurai code of Bushido, stipulating that surrender is a form of dishonor. Killing the Rising Sun takes listeners to the bloody tropical-island battlefields of Peleliu and Iwo Jima and to the embattled Philippines, where General Douglas MacArthur has made a triumphant return and is plotting a full-scale invasion of Japan.

The idea of the sword-wielding samurai, beholden to a strict ethical code and trained in deadly martial arts, dominates popular conceptions of the samurai. As early as the late 17th century, they were heavily featured in literature, art, theater, and even comedy. This book gives listeners access to the real samurai as they lived, fought, and served. Much as they capture the modern imagination, the samurai commanded influence over the politics, arts, philosophy, and religion of their own time, and controlled Japan from the 14th century until their demise in the mid-19th century.

They were young, they were Australian, they were Army engineers and they were the first allied soldiers to risk their lives in the darkness of the Vietcong tunnels of South Vietnam. Staring death squarely in the face every day, not only did they follow their enemy down into these unknown underground labyrinths, but matched the Vietcong’s jungle warfare skills and defused thousands of their clever booby traps. Off duty, it was a different story....

This audiobook is the story of combat from the guerrilla’s perspective and surviving against the overwhelming firepower and technology of a superpower. The audiobook consists of a series of combat vignettes related by Mujahideen combatants in Afghanistan that shows the good and the bad, the mistakes and successes of guerrillas fighting the Soviet military forces.

In this brilliant narrative of America's first limited war, Toland lets both the events and the participants speak for themselves, employing scrupulous archival research and interviews as the bases for the drama and accuracy of his writing. In Mortal Combat reveals Mao's prediction of the date and place of MacArthur's Inchon landing, Russia's indifference to the war, Mao's secret leadership of the North Korean military, and the true nature of both sides' treatment and repatriation of POWs.

The downing of Extortion 17 spurred a number of conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the shootdown was revenge for bin Laden's death. In The Final Mission of Extortion 17, Ed Darack debunks this theory and others and uncovers the truth behind this mysterious tragedy. His account of the brave pilots, crew, and passengers of Extortion 17 and the events of that fateful day is interwoven into a rich, complex narrative that also discusses modern joint combat operations and the history of the Afghan war to that date.

It was the afternoon of 18 August 1966, hot, humid with grey monsoonal skies. D Company, 6RAR were four kilometres east of their Nui Dat base, on patrol in a rubber plantation not far from the abandoned village of Long Tan. A day after their base had suffered a mortar strike, they were looking for Viet Cong soldiers. Then—just when they were least expecting—they found them. Under withering fire, some Diggers perished, some were grievously wounded, the rest fought on, as they remained under sustained attack. For hours these men fought for their lives against the enemy onslaught.

The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness. Dr. Hachiya's compelling diary was originally published by the UNC Press in 1955, with the help of Dr. Warner Wells of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Americans are accustomed to thinking that World War II ended on August 14, 1945, when the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. Yet on the mainland of Asia, in the vast arc stretching from Manchuria to Burma, peace was a brief, fretful interlude. In some parts of Asia, such as Java and Southern Indonesia, only a few weeks passed before new fighting broke out between nationalist forces and the former colonial powers.

The magnificent collections contain a million pieces of art—objects that carry China’s deepest and most ancient memories. Among them are irreplaceable artefacts: exquisite paintings on silk, rare Ming porcelain, and the extraordinary Stone Drums of Qin, which are adorned with 2,500-year-old inscriptions of cultural significance.

World War I and the Russian Revolution together shaped the 20th century in profound ways. In The End of Tsarist Russia, acclaimed scholar Dominic Lieven connects for the first time the two events, providing both a history of the First World War's origins from a Russian perspective and an international history of why the revolution happened.

For decades, a major piece of World War II history has gone virtually unwritten. The war began in China two full years before Hitler invaded Poland, and China eventually became the fourth great ally, partner to the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain. Yet its drama of invasion, resistance, slaughter, and political intrigue remains little known in the West.

The story of the Battle of Saipan has it all. Marines at war: on Pacific beaches, in hellish volcanic landscapes in places like Purple Heart Ridge, Death Valley, and Hell's Pocket, under a commander known as "Howlin' Mad." Naval combat: carriers battling carriers from afar, fighters downing Japanese aircraft, submarines sinking carriers. Marine-army rivalry. Fanatical Japanese defense and resistance. A turning point of the Pacific War. James Hallas reconstructs the full panorama of Saipan in a way that no recent chronicler of the battle has done.

Firsthand accounts from interviews conducted in Japan with five WWII Japanese Naval aviators. All are veterans of the pivotal battles of the Pacific War including; USS Panay, Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Rabaul, Port Darwin, Indian Ocean Raid, Ceylon, Midway, Guadalcanal, Marshall Islands, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the kamikaze in the Philippines, the home defense and the dropping of the atomic bomb. Includes an introduction to the Japanese pilot training system for both officers and enlisted men.

The strategic potential of the three-day attack of two NVA regiments on Kham Duc—a remote and isolated Army Special Forces camp—on the eve of the first Paris peace talks in May 1968, was so significant that former President Lyndon Johnson included it in his memoirs. This gripping, original, eyewitness narrative and thoroughly researched analysis of a widely misinterpreted battle at the height of the Vietnam War radically contradicts all the other published accounts of it.

The 'Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club' was the tongue-in-cheek nickname of the US Seventh Fleet that was stationed off the coast of Vietnam and this book tells the full story of the US Naval air campaign in the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1975.

As Allied ships prepared for the invasion of the Philippine island of Leyte, every available warship, submarine, and airplane was placed on alert while Japanese admiral Kurita Takeo stalked Admiral William F. Halsey's unwitting American armada. It was the beginning of the epic Battle of Leyte Gulf - the greatest naval battle in history.

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.

From Mark Bowden, internationally best-selling and acclaimed author of Black Hawk Down and the preeminent chronicler of the actions of our military and special forces writing today, comes an intensely gripping account of the hunt for and elimination of Osama bin Laden. With unprecedented access to key sources and his great gift for storytelling, Bowden takes us inside the rooms where decisions were made and on the ground where the action unfolded.