The Soviet Unions first successful atomic bomb detonation in August 1949 was a wakeup call for US Navy planners. The possibility of a single Soviet aircraft wiping out an entire convoy of merchant ships with a nuclear weapon had suddenly become very real. With military budgets having shrunk prior to the Korean War, it was simply not possible to ......
A uniquely detailed study of a Japanese aircraft carrier that took part in the attack on Pearl Harbor, before being sunk at Midway. Hiryu was an aircraft carrier built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during the 1930s. Her aircraft supported the Japanese invasion of French Indochina in mid-1940 and during the first month of the Pacific War, ......
For the first time, this book tells the story of how naval air operations evolved into a vital element of the Royal Navys ability to fight a three-dimensional war against both the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe. An integral part of RN, the Fleet Air Arm was not a large organisation, with only 406 pilots and 232 front-line aircraft available for ......
Few implements of war are as representative of the US presence in Vietnam as the Bell Huey UH-1-series helicopters. Whether serving in the role of troop transport for airborne assault, supply transports, aerial gunships, or medical evacuation, the Huey was seemingly everywhere. The versatile aircraft, officially the "Iroquois," was ......
A fully illustrated history of how the US Navy destroyed Truk, the greatest Japanese naval and air base in the Pacific, with Operation Hailstone, and how B-29 units and the carriers of the British Pacific Fleet kept the base suppressed until VJ-Day. In early 1944, the island base of Truk was a Japanese Pearl Harbor; a powerful naval and air ......
Throughout the first year of the war in the Pacific during World War II the USAAF was relatively ineffective against ships. Indeed, warships in particular proved to be too elusive for conventional medium-level bombing. High-level attacks wasted bombs, and torpedo attacks required extensive training. But as 1942 closed, the Fifth Air Force ......
It’s February 1942 and the Second World War is raging. Japanese planes are bombing Darwin, Australia fears an invasion, and the train track leads straight through the desert to Adelaide. Fourteen-year-old Rosemary Lister begins a diary to share the upheavals and tensions of her new life in the country, storing memories for her father, missing ......
1914. Some men of the First Australian Imperial Force had a rendezvous with death in the silence in the summer night, but many were to survive only to face the thudding of the guns, again and again until 11 November 1918 at 11am, enduring physical and psychological horrors. This volume is packed with unusual stories of a deeply personal nature: ......
HMS Invincible was the lead ship of a class of British light aircraft carriers built between 1973 and 1985, originally designed as "through-deck cruisers" (TDC). This set them apart from conventional helicopter-carrying ships of the time, which typically featured a flight deck in the aft section of the vessel. Invincible-class carriers were the ......
The Ypres salient was the favourite battle ground of the devil and his minions wrote one returned serviceman after the First World War. Few who fought in the infamous third battle of Ypres - now known as Passchendaele - in 1917 would have disagreed. All five of the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) infantry divisions were engaged in this bloody ......
The AIF and the Hundred Days Battlefields such as Gallipoli, Fromelles, Pozières, Bullecourt and Passchendaele are burnt into the Australian Great War psyche. Unfortunately the sheer guts, fortitude and sacrifice of the diggers in those battles had often been wasted by poor leadership and planning. From an Australian perspective, such sacrifice ......
The striking power of the Imperial Japanese Navys carrier- based attack aircraft was established at Pearl Harbor, and the IJNs carrier- based torpedo and dive- bombers showed their prowess again at the Battle of Coral Sea when they sank the US Navy carrier USS Lexington and damaged the carrier USS Yorktown. Even at the disastrous Battle of ......
On the night of 14/15 August 1944, the roar of an unknown aircraft was heard over the dense forests to the south-east of Moscow. Flying past the Soviet capital, the aircraft turned towards a secret landing site at Yegoryevsk on the outskirts of the city. But lying in wait were troops of Stalins elite secret service, SMERSH.
The ......
A collection of war stories closely based on the authors experiences flying scout/observation helicopters in Vietnam. Story telling was a daily evening occurrence for the solo scout pilots. These stories, called TINS, an irreverent pilot acronym for this is no shit, allowed the solo pilots to learn from each others experiences and mistakes. The ......
The word Anzac has been the subject of a century of legal regulation in Australia and internationally. In Anzac: The Landing, The Legend, The Law, Catherine Bond interrogates the legal history of one of Australia and New Zealands most revered words and the restrictions on the acronym that still exist today.
This book ......
1918 was a year of triumph for the Australian Corps in France yet today this is seldom recognised by most Australians. Our perceptions have been clouded by legends, built up over the past century, that have trivialised their achievement. Here an ex-soldier, Pat Beale DSO MC, uses his military background to help re-discover why and how the Corps ......
The greatest air battle in history was fought in the skies over southern England between the RAF and the Luftwaffe in the high summer of 1940. Riding high on the success of their Blitzkrieg campaign that had steamrollered France and the Low Countries into defeat, by June 1940 the Nazi forces were poised on the Channel coast ready to invade ......
Douglas Bader was a legend in his lifetime and remains one today 100 years after his birth. A charismatic leader and fearless pilot he refused to let his severe disability (loss of both legs in a flying accident) ground him. He fought the authorities as ruthless as he did the enemy and not only managed to return to the front line but became a ......
In 1917, David Lloyd George declared that airmen were the cavalry of the clouds - the knighthood of this war. This romantic image was fostered post-war by writers of adventure stories and the stunts of Hollywood filmmakers, and yet it was far from the harsh reality of life of an airman. From their baptism of fire in 1914 ......
This is the story of Lincolnshire farmer David Cundalls quixotic quest to unearth dozens of Spitfire fighters he believes were buried at the end of WWII. Armed with a high-tech survey showing mysterious shapes under the sunbaked surface of Yangon Airport, Davids expedition is equipped with state of the art JCB excavators, supported by a crack ......
$6.95 flat rate Australia wide