Military Air

In 1996, John Greenewald, Jr. began researching the secret inner workings of the US Government at the age of 15. He targeted such agencies as the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, Air Force, Army, Navy, NSA, DIA, and countless others. Greenewald utilized the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to gain access to more than two million pages of documents. This archive includes information relating to UFOs, the JFK assassination, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and top secret aircraft.

This remarkable tale of the devastation and horrors of an international war was written in 1908—six years before the start of World War I. It describes the results of aerial attacks on New York and other cities in terrifying detail. It is provocative and sadly, prophetic in many ways. In the end, we can only agree with Wells that "it should never have begun".

After a lifetime of training, 17-year-old Princess Nile Greysik, a lieutenant on the prestigious Ashing navy flagship, sails into battle with one vital mission - and fails. Barred from the sea and facing a political marriage, Nile masquerades as a common sailor on the first ship she can find. With a cowardly captain, incompetent crew, and a cruel, too-handsome first officer intent on making her life a living hell, Nile must hide her identity while trying to turn the sorry frigate battle worthy. Worse, a terrifying and forbidden magic now tingles in Nile's blood.

Concealed deep within China's inland borders is one of the most secret airplanes ever flown, known as Devil Dragon. She's sleek, unbelievably fast, and mysterious - her test pilots have one mission in mind: make her test flights successful for operational use as soon as possible. Or sooner. But when strange transmissions of pilots are recorded without an aircraft appearing on radar and bizarre cell phone signals are detected at towers hundreds of miles apart, Ford Stevens is asked to take on the most dangerous assignment of his life.

They are voices lost to time. Beginning in the late 1970s, five veteran airmen sat for private interviews. Decades after the guns fell silent, they recounted in vivid detail the most dangerous missions that made the difference in the war. Ed Haydon dueled with the deadliest of German aces - and forced him to the ground. Robert Johnson racked up 27 kills in his P-47 Thunderbolt, but nearly lost his life when his plane was shot to ribbons and his guns jammed. Cigar-chomping Curtis LeMay was the Air Corps general who devised the bomber tactics that pummeled Germany's war machine.

Few are aware of the risks that the pioneering airmen of the First World War took. On a Wing and a Prayer is a narrative history that conveys the perils of those early days, the thrills of learning to fly, and the horrors of war in the air at a time when pilots carried little defensive armament and no parachutes.

The history of the Spitfire contains many hitherto hidden or little-known stories of the men and women behind the plane - not only the gifted creators and inventors who brought the Spitfire to life or the brave fighter pilots from many countries who triumphed in battle but also the thousands of other people whose lives were affected by their personal connection to it - engineers, ground crew, factory or office workers, and their families. Spitfire Stories recounts the memories and stories of these people, from the birth of the iconic Spitfire in the 1930s to the present day.

This essential, pause-resister narrative on the history of drone warfare by the acclaimed author of Rumsfeld explores how this practice emerged, who made it happen, and the real consequences of targeted killing.

Sixty-five thousand tons, 280 metres long. A flight deck the size of 60 tennis courts. A giant piece of Sovereign British territory that's home to up to 50 aircraft. HMS Queen Elizabeth in the biggest ship in the Royal Navy's history and one of the most ambitious and exacting engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK. But it's her ship's company of 700, alongside an air group of 900 air and ground crew, that are Big Lizzie's beating heart. And How to Build an Aircraft Carrier tells their story.

The involvement of the US Air Force in the Southeast Asian Wars began in 1962 with crews sent to train Vietnamese pilots, and with conflict in Laos, and finally ended in 1972 with the B-52 bombing of Hanoi, though there were Air Force pilots unofficially flying combat in Laos up to the end in 1975. The missions flown by USAF aircrews during those years in Southeast Asia differed widely, from attacking the Ho Chi Minh Trail at night with modified T-28 trainers, to missions “Downtown,” the name aircrew gave Hanoi, the central target of the 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.

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.

You hear them first, the whop whop sound of rotor blades chopping through the humid Vietnam air. Suddenly they appear, screaming toward the landing zone at treetop level. When one helicopter crashes in flames, the pilots in the others maintain formation and push ahead. Nothing deters these warriors, volunteers all, from flying on with the tenaciousness of zealots. Mended Wings is their story. Follow the lives of ten Purple Heart heroes as they relate the Vietnam War experience from the perspective of the helicopter cockpit.

During the Battle of Midway in June 1942, US Navy dive bomber pilot Wade McClusky proved himself to be one of the greatest pilots and combat leaders in American history, but his story has never been told - until now. It was Wade McClusky who remained calm when the Japanese fleet was not where it was expected to be. It was he who made the counterintuitive choice to then search to the north instead of to the south.

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.

In 1939 off the New England coast, the submarine USS Squalus accidentally sinks to the bottom of the sea during a training exercise, killing half her crew. Coming to the rescue is the USS Sculpin, in many ways the Squalus’s twin. As their oxygen supply dwindles, the remaining crew aboard the Squalus are saved in a time-consuming, white-knuckle operation. Eventually the sunken submarine is raised, repaired, and returned to duty, with a new name: the Sailfish.

This first audiobook of sea stories encompasses the brutal experiences of Marine Corps Boot Camp, the exotic ports of call in Asia, combat in Viet Nam, and the rigors of Marine Officer Candidate School. The author weaves the sea stories into a journey that put the listener in the moment, and allows for discovery of what it means to be a United States Marine. During the journey, the sea stories unveil a young man, like many born in the 1940s, who faced that period in their lives when the expectations of family and friends didn't match those of the individuals.

Britain was the first country to ever suffer a ballistic missile attack from beyond its borders. This book tells the story of that attack. During 1942 and 1943, confusing rumours circulated about the German development of a 'giant rocket'. Most experts, including Winston Churchill's own scientific adviser Lord Cherwell, declared that such a weapon was impossible. It was only after the patient sifting of European intelligence that the most influential doubters were convinced such a weapon was being built. Then on 8 September 1944, the first V-2 landed in Chiswick. Between then and the final rocket impact on 27 March 1945, more than a thousand landed on British soil, killing nearly three thousand people and seriously injuring more than six thousand.

By the author of Ashes Under Water, here is one of the great untold stories of World War II. The Hidden Hindenburg at last reveals the cause of aviation's most famous disaster and the duplicity that kept the truth from coming to light for three generations. It also finally catches up with a German legend who misled the world about the Hindenburg to bury his own Nazi connections.

Graham Pitchfork has built on these reminiscences to trace the roles of Beaufighter squadrons spread across all the theaters of World War Two operations. From home bases, through north-west Europe, North Africa, Malta, and the Mediterranean to the far Far East and south-west Pacific, the Beaufighter served far and wide as did the crews of the RAF, RAAF, SAAF, and New Zealand and Canadian squadrons. All are covered in this quite unique book to be savored by all those interested in the war in the air from 1939-1945.