MacArthur's Eagles

MacArthur's Eagles
Author: Lex McAulay
Publisher: US Naval Institute Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN:

The successful use of strategic U.S. air power in the South West Pacific during World War II enabled Gen. Douglas MacArthur to advance from Australia to Japan. This book examines the inexorable thrust of the general's U.S. Army's 5th Air Force, under air commander Gen. George C. Kenney, in the hard-hitting campaigns against the Japanese Army Air Force bases in New Guinea. During 1943 and 1944, the 5th Air Force destroyed its Japanese opponent three times, eventually opening the way for the advance--ahead of schedule--of MacArthur's Allied forces through New Guinea to the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. No other book describes these crucial operations in such breadth or detail. From the national level to the individual fighter pilot's level, the author chronicles what happened. Of particular merit is Lex McAuley's portrayal of the Japanese side of the conflict, including an inside look at the problems of the Japanese Air Force high command. The author explains the varying degrees of understanding the concept of air power exhibited by both Japanese and U.S. commanders, including not only the type of aircraft produced by each country but the ways in which the aircraft were used. Air combat missions come vividly and dramatically to life through the use of oral history interviews that lend an authoritative air to the book.

The Eagle and the Rising Sun

The Eagle and the Rising Sun
Author: Alan Schom
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 604
Release: 2004
Genre: Pacific Area
ISBN: 9780393049244

A history of World War II in the Pacific Ocean. Book contends that the conflict was not in the best interest of either side, discussing key military figures, America's ill-preparedness for the war, and Japan's knowledge that they could not win.

MacArthur's Airman

MacArthur's Airman
Author: Thomas E. Griffith, Jr.
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2017-01-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700624465

A fighter pilot who flew 75 combat missions in World War I, George C. Kenney was a charismatic leader who established himself as an innovative advocate of air power. As General MacArthur's air commander in the Southwest Pacific during World War II, Kenney played a pivotal role in the conduct of the war, but until now his performance has remained largely unexplored. Thomas Griffith offers a critical assessment of Kenney's numerous contributions to MacArthur's war efforts. He depicts Kenney as a staunch proponent of airpower's ability to shape the outcome of military engagements and a commander who shared MacArthur's strategic vision. He tells how Kenney played a key role in campaigns from New Guinea to the Philippines; adapted aircraft, pilots, doctrine, and technology to the demands of aerial warfare in the southwest Pacific; and pursued daring strategies that likely would have failed in the European theater. Kenney is shown to have been an operational and organizational innovator who was willing to scrap doctrine when the situation called for ingenuity, such as shifting to low-level attacks for more effective bombing raids. Griffith tells how Kenney established air superiority in every engagement, provided close air support for troops by bombing enemy supply lines, attacked and destroyed Japanese supply ships, and carried out rapid deployment by airlifting troops and supplies. Griffith draws on Kenney's diary and correspondence, the personal papers of other officers, and previously untapped sources to present a comprehensive portrayal of both the officer and the man. He illuminates Kenney's relationship with MacArthur, General "Hap" Arnold, and other field commanders, and closely examines factors in air warfare often neglected in other accounts, such as intelligence, training, and logistical support. MacArthur's Airman is a rich and insightful study that shows how air, ground, and marine efforts were integrated to achieve major strategic objectives. It firmly establishes the importance of MacArthur's campaign in New Guinea and reveals Kenney's instrumental role in turning the tide against the Japanese.

MacArthur's Airman

MacArthur's Airman
Author: Thomas E. Griffith
Publisher:
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN:

Thomas Griffith offers a critical assessment of George C. Kenney's numerous contributions to MacArthur's war efforts. He depicts Kenney as a staunch proponent of airpower's ability to shape the outcome of military engagement and a commander who shared MacArthur's strategic vision.

Eagle Against the Sun

Eagle Against the Sun
Author: Ronald H. Spector
Publisher: Free Press
Total Pages: 624
Release: 2020-11-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1982135239

“The best book by far on the Pacific War” (The New York Times Book Review), this classic one-volume history of World War II in the Pacific draws on declassified intelligence files; British, American, and Japanese archival material; and military memoirs to provide a stunning and complete history of the conflict. This “superbly readable, insightful, gripping” (Washington Post Book World) contribution to WWII history combines impeccable research with electrifying detail and offers provocative interpretations of this brutal forty-four-month struggle. Author and historian Ronald H. Spector reassesses US and Japanese strategy and shows that the dual advance across the Pacific by MacArthur and Nimitz was more a pragmatic solution to bureaucratic, doctrinal, and public relations problems facing the Army and Navy than a strategic calculation. He also argues that Japan made its fatal error not in the Midway campaign but in abandoning its offensive strategy after that defeat and allowing itself to be drawn into a war of attrition. Spector skillfully takes us from top-secret strategy meetings in Washington, London, and Tokyo to distant beaches and remote Asian jungles with battle-weary GIs. He reveals that the US had secret plans to wage unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan months before Pearl Harbor and shows that MacArthur and his commanders ignored important intercepts of Japanese messages that would have saved thousands of lives in Papua and Leyte. Throughout, Spector contends that American decisions in the Pacific War were shaped more often by the struggles between the British and the Americans, and between the Army and the Navy, than by strategic considerations. Spector vividly recreates the major battles, little-known campaigns, and unfamiliar events leading up to the deadliest air raid ever, adding a new dimension to our understanding of the American war in the Pacific and the people and forces that determined its outcome.

C-47/R4D Skytrain Units of the Pacific and CBI

C-47/R4D Skytrain Units of the Pacific and CBI
Author: David Isby
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2012-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782007636

From Pearl Harbor to VJ-Day, the humble Douglas C-47/R4D carried out missions every bit as strategically important, and as dramatic for the aircrew involved, as those of the fighters and bombers in the vast Pacific/CBI theatres. The C-47's wartime operations paved the way for post-war military and civil air transport, proving that aircraft could safely conduct routine flights from the USA, Australia and India throughout the Pacific and South-east Asia. The flights also demonstrated how the USAAF was able to invest in, and carry out, a mission that it had barely prepared for in terms of doctrine pre-war. In addition to linking theatres, the C-47 found itself in the vanguard of combat operations on virtually a daily basis in New Guinea, Burma, the Philippines, the SWPA and China. The importance of these missions, and the dangers faced by crews tasked with carrying them out, is chronicled in numerous first-hand accounts from the aircrew involved in this unique volume on the Allies' favourite transport aircraft of World War 2.

Flight of the Eagle

Flight of the Eagle
Author: Conrad Black
Publisher: Encounter Books
Total Pages: 739
Release: 2014-10-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1594037590

Like an eagle, American colonists ascended from the gulley of British dependence to the position of sovereign world power in a period of merely two centuries. Seizing territory in Canada and representation in Britain; expelling the French, and even their British forefathers, American leaders George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson paved their nation’s way to independence. With the first buds of public relation techniques—of communication, dramatization, and propaganda—America flourished into a vision of freedom, of enterprise, and of unalienable human rights. In Flight of the Eagle, Conrad Black provides a perspective on American history that is unprecedented. Through his analysis of the strategic development of the United States from 1754-1992, Black describes nine “phases” of the strategic rise of the nation, in which it progressed through grave challenges, civil and foreign wars, and secured a place for itself under the title of “Superpower.” Black discredits prevailing notions that our unrivaled status is the product of good geography, demographics, and good luck. Instead, he reveals and analyzes the specific strategic decisions of great statesmen through the ages that transformed the world as we know it and established America’s place in it.

The Dragon, the Lion & the Eagle

The Dragon, the Lion & the Eagle
Author: Qiang Zhai
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 1994
Genre: China
ISBN: 9780873384902

A study in international history and comparative analysis of the relations between China, Britain and America, in the period from 1949 to 1958. The author draws upon previously-classified documents and private papers to give a view of the Cold War from Chinese and Western standpoints.

The Eye of the Mammoth

The Eye of the Mammoth
Author: Stephen Harrigan
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1477320091

In four decades of writing for magazines ranging from Texas Monthly to the Atlantic, American History, and Travel Holiday, Stephen Harrigan has established himself as one of America’s most thoughtful writers. In this career-spanning anthology, which gathers together essays from two previous books—A Natural State and Comanche Midnight—as well as previously uncollected work, readers finally have a comprehensive collection of Harrigan’s best nonfiction. History—natural history, human history, and personal history—and place are the cornerstones of The Eye of the Mammoth. But the specific history or place varies considerably from essay to essay. Harrigan’s career has taken him from the Alaska Highway to the Chihuahuan Desert, from the casinos of Monaco to his ancestors’ village in the Czech Republic. Texas is the subject of a number of essays, and a force in shaping others, as in “The Anger of Achilles,” in which a nineteenth-century painting moves the author despite his possessing a “Texan’s suspicion of serious culture.” Harrigan’s deceptively straightforward voice, however, belies an intense curiosity about things that, by his own admission, may be “unknowable.” Certainly, we are limited in what we can know about the inner life of George Washington, the last days of Davy Crockett, or the motives of a caged tiger, but Harrigan’s gift—a gift that has also made him an award-winning novelist—is to bring readers closer to such things, to make them less remote, just as a cave painting in the title essay eerily transmits the living stare of a long-extinct mammoth.