Hardcover. NY, Viking Press, 2nd pr., 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 430 pages. Immediately after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to restore the honor of the United States with a dramatic act of a retaliatory bombing raid on Tokyo. On April 18, 1942, eighty brave young men, led by the famous daredevil Jimmy Doolittle, took off from a navy carrier in the mid-Pacific on what everyone regarded as a suicide mission but instead became a resounding American victory and helped turn the tide of the war. The First Heroes is the story of that mission. Meticulously researched and based on interviews with twenty of the surviving Tokyo Raiders, this is a true account that almost defies belief, a tremendous human drama of great personal courage, and a powerful reminder that ordinary people, when faced with extraordinary circumstances, can rise to the challenge of history. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, New York University Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, pages. The GI War Against Japan recounts the harrowing experiences of American soldiers in Asia and the Pacific. Based on countless diaries and letters, it sweeps across the battlefields, from the early desperate stand at Guadalcanal to the tragic sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis at war's very end. From the daunting spaces of the China-India theater to the fortress islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Schrijvers brings to life the GIs' struggle with suffocating wilderness, devastating diseases, and Japanese soldiers who preferred death over life. Amidst the frustration and despair of this war, American soldiers abandoned themselves to an escalating rage that presaged Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Softcover. NY, American Italian Historical Association, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 244 pages, 35th Conference of the American Italian Historical Association . "'Italian Americans and World War II, ' explores many facets of the dynamic period of the 1940s and the consequences of war and peace. Scholars within AIHA and outside the academy have been slow to recognize the significance of World War II, now recognized as a seminal event in Italian-American life and culture. . . . "This volume is dedicated to all Italian Americans who lived and died, fought and prayed during World War II." Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1st, 1957, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt lettering on spine. Volume XI in The History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. 360 pages, illustrated with maps (one fold-out) and b&w photos. Gilt on spine with light fading, lacks dust jacket, dj flap copy pasted inside front cover, otherwise clean, tight copy.
Softcover. Washington DC, The Infantry Journal, reprint, 1944, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Small softcover, 335 pages. "The primary purpose of this book is to provide a guide to the main forces, institutional and ideological, in the Nazi system." Published for the American servicemen. Name on front cover,mild wear to covers.
Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, reprint, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt lettering on spine. Volume III in The History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. 411 pages, illustrated with maps and b&w photos. Gilt on spine with light fading, lacks dust jacket, otherwise clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, reprint, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt lettering on spine. Volume V in The History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. 389 pages, illustrated with maps (one fold-out) and b&w photos. Gilt on spine with light fading, lacks dust jacket, otherwise clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 352 pages. Alfred Lee Loomis (1887-1975) made his fortune in the 1920s by investing in public utilities, but science was his first love. In 1928, he established a premier research facility in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., that attracted such brilliant minds as Einstein, Bohr and Fermi and became instrumental in the Allies' WWII victory. Conant, a magazine writer, draws on studies, family papers and interviews with Loomis's friends, family and colleagues (she's a relative of two scientists who worked with Loomis) to trace the story of the tycoon's professional and social life (the latter fairly racy). At the Tuxedo Park lab, Loomis attracted top-flight scientists who experimented with sound, time measurement and brain waves. During WWII, he established a laboratory at MIT (the "rad lab") where radar was developed. He also served as a conduit between civilian scientists and Roosevelt's military establishment. Although he lost some of his top people to the Manhattan Project, the "rad lab" was a major contributor to the allies' defense. In his well-publicized personal life, Loomis angered family members by trying to have his emotionally unstable wife institutionalized while he pursued an affair with another woman. Through Conant's spare, unobtrusive prose and well-paced storytelling, Loomis emerges as a contradictory man who craved scientific accomplishment and influence, but rarely took credit for himself.
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.