American WWI

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 2nd pr., 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 926 pages, illustrations. In June 1944, the United States launched a crushing assault on the Japanese navy in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The capture of the Mariana Islands and the accompanying ruin of Japanese carrier airpower marked a pivotal moment in the Pacific War. No tactical masterstroke or blunder could reverse the increasingly lopsided balance of power between the two combatants. The War in the Pacific had entered its endgame. Beginning with the Honolulu Conference, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with his Pacific theater commanders to plan the last phase of the campaign against Japan, Twilight of the Gods brings to life the harrowing last year of World War II in the Pacific, when the U.S. Navy won the largest naval battle in history; Douglas MacArthur made good his pledge to return to the Philippines; waves of kamikazes attacked the Allied fleets; the Japanese fought to the last man on one island after another; B-29 bombers burned down Japanese cities; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized in atomic blasts. Ian W. Tolls narratives of combat in the air, at sea, and on the beaches are as gripping as ever, but he also reconstructs the Japanese and American home fronts and takes the reader into the halls of power in Washington and Tokyo, where the great questions of strategy and diplomacy were decided. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 2nd pr., 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt lettering on spine. Volume XIV in The History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. 407 pages, illustrated with maps (one fold-out) and b&w photos. Gilt on spine with light fading, lacks dust jacket, dj flap pasted to inside front cover, otherwise clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Nigel Hamilton's celebrated trilogy culminates with a story of triumph and tragedy. Just as FDR was proven right by the D-day landings he had championed, so was he found to be mortally ill in the spring of 1944. He was the architect of a victorious peace that he would not live to witness. Using hitherto unpublished documents and interviews, Hamilton rewrites the famous account of World War II strategy given by Winston Churchill in his memoirs. Seventy-five years after the D-day landings we finally get to see, close-up and in dramatic detail, who was responsible for rescuing, and insisting upon, the great American-led invasion of France in June 1944, and why the invasion was led by Eisenhower. As FDR's D-day triumph turns to personal tragedy, we watch with heartbreaking compassion the course of the disease, and how, in the months left him as US commander in chief, the dying president attempted at Hawaii, Quebec, and Yalta to prepare the United Nations for an American-backed postwar world order. Now we know: even on his deathbed, FDR was the war's great visionary.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st thus, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. The Chronicles of America Vol. 54. 364 pages, b&w illustrations. Red gilt-decorated cloth, top edge gilt, no dust jacket as issued. Details the campaigns of the U.S. Armed Forces in all theaters of World War II, including Tunisia, France, Italy, the Philippines, and Guadalcanal. A very nice, tight, clean copy in excellent condition.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Gateway Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 335 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the title page to the previous owner, a Major in the US Air Force Reserve. His ownership signature on the front fly leaf. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. London, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. This revisionist study of Allied diplomacy from 1941 to 1946 challenges Americocentric views of the period and highlights Europe's neglected role. Fraser J. Harbutt, drawing on international sources, shows that in planning for the future Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and others self-consciously operated into 1945, not on "East/West" lines but within a "Europe/America" political framework characterized by the plausible prospect of Anglo-Russian collaboration and persisting American detachment. Harbutt then explains the destabilizing transformation around the time of the pivotal Yalta conference of February 1945, when a sudden series of provocative initiatives, manipulations, and miscues interacted with events to produce the breakdown of European solidarity and the Anglo-Soviet nexus, an evolving Anglo-American alignment, and new tensions that led finally to the Cold War. This fresh perspective, stressing structural, geopolitical, and traditional impulses and constraints, raises important new questions about the enduringly controversial transition from World War II to a cold war that no statesman wanted. Clean copy.