Japan World War

The Battle of Iwo Jima, a major event in the Pacific Theater of World War II - and one of the bloodiest in United States history - began on February 19, 1945. But what happened two days earlier has largely been a footnote - until now.... On February 17, Landing Craft Infantry 449 was among a dozen gunboats helping to prepare the area for their invasion two days later. US military leaders thought that they had weakened Japanese forces in the area.

On September 6, 1945, less than a month after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, became the first free Westerner to enter the devastated city. Going into the hospitals and consulting the doctors of the bomb's victims, Weller was the first to document its unprecedented long-range medical effects. He also became the first to enter the nearby Allied POW camps, which rivaled those of the Nazis for cruelty and bested them for death count.

From the author of Pacific Payback comes the gripping true story of the Cactus Air Force and how this rugged crew of dive bombers helped save Guadalcanal and won the war. November 1942: Japanese and American forces have been fighting for control of Guadalcanal, a small but pivotal island in Japan's expansion through the South Pacific.

At 11.02 am on an August morning in 1945, America dropped the world's most powerful atomic bomb on the Japanese port city of Nagasaki. The city was flattened, and more than 70,000 Japanese citizens were killed. Among the horrific scenes were also hundreds of Allied British, Australian, American and Dutch prisoners of war, working as forced labourers in the shipyards and factories of Nagasaki. This book tells their remarkable untold stories

He is the most-decorated general in American history - and the only five-star general to receive the Medal of Honor. Yet Douglas MacArthur’s greatest victory was not in war but in peace. As the uniquely titled Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, he was charged with transforming a defeated, militarist empire into a beacon of peace and democracy - "the greatest gamble ever attempted", he called it.

March 1942: The world is at war. Too old to fight and with jobs scarce at home, Tom Phelps found work as a carpenter in the goldfields of the New Guinea Highlands. No one expected the Japanese to attack in the Pacific. But they did. Tom and his mates weren't going to hang around and wait to be killed. With escape routes bombed by the Japanese, their only option was to try to reach safety by foot, through some of the most rugged terrain on Earth - the Bulldog Track. Back home in Sydney, Rose Phelps, their son, George, and three daughters, Joy, Shirley and Ann, waited for news of Tom's fate.

The aftershocks of the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor were felt keenly all over America - the war in Europe had hit home. But nowhere was American life more immediately disrupted than on the West Coast, where people lived in certain fear of more Japanese attacks. From that day until the end of the war, a dizzying mix of battle preparedness and rampant paranoia swept the states. Japanese immigrants were herded into internment camps. There was panic on the Pacific coast: The Japanese were coming.

The classic first-hand WWII narrative that chronicles the Marines’ savage five-day struggle to wrest Mount Suribachi from its tenacious Japanese defenders during their 35-day battle for Iwo Jima in 1945. Revised with a new introduction by the author and recently discovered photos, this book served as invaluable source material both for James Bradley’s best-seller Flags of Our Fathers as well as Clint Eastwood’s acclaimed film of the same name.

In late 1944 the Allies invaded the Japanese-held Philippines, and soon the end of the Pacific War was within reach. But for the last 150 American prisoners of war still held on the island of Palawan, there would be no salvation. As soldiers, sailors, and marines were herded into shallow air raid shelters, Japanese soldiers doused them with gasoline and set them on fire. By the next morning, only 11 men were left alive - but their desperate journey to freedom had just begun.

The saga of the flags on Iwo Jima has fascinated America for decades. Hammel himself grew up in the company of WWII veterans and has always been intrigued by the photo of the flag, which became a powerful symbol of patriotism and national pride. But the story of how the flag got there, and even the identity of the soldiers in the photo, has been muddied by history. Eric Hammel here sets the record straight, viewing complex events through the lens of the story of the infantry company in which all the flag raisers served.

Immediately after Japan's December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt sought to restore the honor of the United States with a dramatic act of vengeance: a retaliatory bombing raid on Tokyo itself. In those early days of World War II, America was ill-prepared for any sort of warfare. But FDR was not to be dissuaded, and at his bidding a squadron of scarcely trained army fliers, led by the famous daredevil Jimmy Doolittle, set forth on what everyone regarded as a suicide mission.

Luego de su aplastante victoria en Midway, Estados Unidos había conseguido frenar el peligrosísimo avance japonés que amenazaba con quitarle el dominio de Hawaii, la única base segura con la que contaban. El dominio de la isla de Guadalcanal, clave en la comunicación entre Oceanía y las posesiones norteamericanas en el Pacífico, alcanzó entonces una preponderancia estratégica significativa.

Author Bob Wodnik has masterfully compiled the stories of several World War II prisoners-of-war into a non-fiction historical work with the feel of a novel. Listeners glimpse the unrelenting physical agony and mental anguish of these young heroes as they struggle for survival, and then, following years of captivity, make the difficult and awkward return to civilization.

From Shanghai before and during the Second World War to US occupied Tokyo, and, finally, to the Middle East in the early 1970s, Ian Buruma's masterful novel about the intoxicating power of collective fantasy follows three star-struck men driven to extraordinary acts by their devotion to the same legendary woman. A beautiful Japanese girl born in Manchuria, Yamaguchi Yoshiko is known as Ri Koran in Japan, Li Xianglan in China, and Shirley Yamaguchi in the US, and her past is a closely guarded secret.

October 1941. Twenty-one-year-old Alan Mart is posted to India and taken under the wing of the overbearing Acting-Captain Sam Holl. Following the Japanese advance on Singapore, the men are deployed to Malaya. What follows is a quietly shattering and searingly authentic depiction of the claustrophobia of jungle warfare and the indiscriminate nature of conflict. Based on David Piper's own wartime experience in South East Asia, this new edition of a 1959 classic includes a contextual introduction from IWM which sheds new light on the dramatic true events that so influenced its author.

The story of how two small children had to trek all alone across Manchuria in 1946.70 years