Download or read book Operation Iceberg written by Gerald Astor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-01-27 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gerald Astor, author of The Mighty Eighth, draws on the raw, first-hand accounts of marines, sailors, soldiers, and airmen under fire to recount the dramatic and gripping story of the last major battle of World War II. “[Astor] is a master… This is oral history at its best—direct, illuminating, capturing sights and sounds and feelings and actions that never make it into official reports or more formal military histories… I recommend this book without hesitation or reservation.”—Stephen E. Ambrose On the sea the Japanese rained down a deadly hail of kamikazes. On land the entrenched defenders had nowhere to retreat, and the US Army and Marines had nowhere to go but onward, into the thick of some of the of the most bloody close-quarters fighting in World War II. This was Okinawa, the savage pitched battle waged just months before the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Operation Iceberg, as it was known, saw the fiercest attack of kamikazes in the entire Pacific Theater of War. And here Gerald Astor lets the soldiers tell their stories firsthand: of flame-thrower attacks and hand-to-hand confrontations, of atrocities, deadly ambushes and brutal hilltop sieges that left entire companies decimated. Operation Iceberg is the raw, hard-edged account of war at its most brutal—and the last great battle of World War II.
Download or read book Operation Iceberg written by Daniel Wrinn and published by Ww2 Pacific Military History. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An unforgettable read about the Pacific War's bloodiest battle and the significance of Okinawa." - Reader A gripping account of the final campaign of World War II--the victory on Okinawa. The invasion of Okinawa was the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific Theater. Codenamed Operation Iceberg, it was also one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific, lasting ninety-eight days. After a long campaign of island hopping, the Allies planned to use Kadena Air Base on Okinawa as a base for Operation Downfall, the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. This battle was also known as "typhoon of steel" [English translation], because of the ferocity of the fighting, the intensity of kamikaze attacks and the sheer numbers of Allied ships and armored vehicles that assaulted the island. This narrative recounts the invasion of Okinawa in vivid, gritty detail. Explore the fascinating feats of strategy, planning, and bravery, handing the Allies what would eventually become a victory over the Pacific Theater and an end to Imperialist Japanese expansion.
Download or read book Okinawa written by R. E. Appleman and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book East China Sea 1945 written by Brian Lane Herder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study describes the air-sea offensive supporting the ground-force invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in February and April 1945, which led to the sinking of the Yamato and the onslaught of the Japanese kamikaze. During the Pacific War, the island invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were the last two major ground campaigns. By the time these took place in early 1945, the US Navy had reached an exceptional level of coordination in its amphibious operations, and was able to overrun and subdue Japanese territories efficiently. Faced with the increasing might of these forces and to prevent further defeat, Imperial Japan deployed its kamikaze aircraft and attacked many US heavy aircraft carriers and destroyers; several were sunk, while others were knocked out of the war. This superbly illustrated book explores the air–sea aspects of the pivotal battles that took place, and includes the “death ride” of the Japanese battleship Yamato (the largest ever built), and the mass kamikaze attacks off Iwo Jima and Okinawa, as well as the Iwo Jima and Okinawa amphibious invasions and the naval and air bombardments of the two islands. It also considers the contribution of the USAAF and the British Pacific Fleet to the eventual victory of US air and ground forces.
Download or read book History of United States Naval Operations in World War II written by Samuel Eliot Morison and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2002-02-05 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This final narrative volume of Morison's history recounts the infamous campaigns for Iwo Jima and Okinawa, two of the most bitterly contested campaigns of the war.When the U.S. Marines landed on Iwo Jima, they expected to secure it within a few days. No one had anticipated Japan's determination to defend the island to the last man. Morison describes the Japanese defense system of camouflaged rifle pits and fortified gunning positions that held the Allies at bay and the heavy and continuous cover of naval gunfire that prevented even greater losses. As it was, the securing of Iwo Jima cost the United States more casualties than had been incurred in taking any other island in the Pacific. On Okinawa, the conflict stretched over six long, bloody months.As land forces struggled for every inch they took on the islands, the U.S. Navy faced the desperate fury of the kamimaze corps and its harvest of flaming terror: explosions, burning and flooded ships, searing injuries and death. Fierce weather, logistical complexities, Japanese submarines, and the unexpected death of President Roosevelt also took their toll. Morison concludes his epic account with the final skirmishes of the war, the fateful decision to drop the atomic bomb, and the delicate negotiations leading to Japanese surrender."
Download or read book Okinawa The Last Naval Battle of WW2 written by John Grehan and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2022-11-23 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having all but swept the Japanese Imperial Navy from the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, the Allied forces stood on the brink of invading the Japanese Home Islands. The launching pad for the invasion was to be the island of Okinawa. Amid the terrible slaughter and the shocking casualty statistics of the US Tenth Army and the US Marines, as well as the unrelenting defiance of the Japanese defenders so often detailed in the many books on the battle, the vital part played by the Allied navies in transporting, landing and supporting the ground offensive is all too often overlooked. The naval forces involved included the US Task Force 58 and the British Pacific Fleet composed of ships from the Royal Australian Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy, and the Royal New Zealand Navy which together with those of the Royal Navy constituted the most powerful fleet Britain had ever put together. The total firepower of the Allied force was staggering, consisting of 18 battleships, 27 cruisers, 177 destroyers/destroyer escorts, 11 fleet carriers, 6 light carriers and 22 escort carriers and various support and troop transport ships. Pitted against this formidable array was the Japanese Combined Fleet, with just one super battleship, one light cruiser and eight destroyers. But the Japanese had one other fearful weapon – the kamikaze. The resultant battle saw the Japanese fleet wiped out, but the Allies lost twenty-four support vessels and a further 386 ships were damaged – many at the hands of the kamikaze pilots. After the fighting the Admiralty called for a summary of the battle to be written for internal Royal Navy consumption. It is that secret report, which it was never intended would be seen by the general public, that is published here for the first time.
Download or read book Military Government in the Ryukyu Islands 1945 1950 written by Arnold G. Fisch and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Military government on Okinawa from the first stages of planning until the transition toward a civil administration.
Download or read book Crucible of Hell written by Saul David and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning historian, Saul David, the riveting narrative of the heroic US troops, bonded by the brotherhood and sacrifice of war, who overcame enormous casualties to pull off the toughest invasion of WWII's Pacific Theater -- and the Japanese forces who fought with tragic desperation to stop them. With Allied forces sweeping across Europe and into Germany in the spring of 1945, one enormous challenge threatened to derail America's audacious drive to win the world back from the Nazis: Japan, the empire that had extended its reach southward across the Pacific and was renowned for the fanaticism and brutality of its fighters, who refused to surrender, even when faced with insurmountable odds. Taking down Japan would require an unrelenting attack to break its national spirit, and launching such an attack on the island empire meant building an operations base just off its shores on the island of Okinawa. The amphibious operation to capture Okinawa was the largest of the Pacific War and the greatest air-land-sea battle in history, mobilizing 183,000 troops from Seattle, Leyte in the Philippines, and ports around the world. The campaign lasted for 83 blood-soaked days, as the fighting plumbed depths of savagery. One veteran, struggling to make sense of what he had witnessed, referred to the fighting as the "crucible of Hell." Okinawan civilians died in the tens of thousands: some were mistaken for soldiers by American troops; but as the US Marines spearheading the invasion drove further onto the island and Japanese defeat seemed inevitable, many more civilians took their own lives, some even murdering their own families. In just under three months, the world had changed irrevocably: President Franklin D. Roosevelt died; the war in Europe ended; America's appetite for an invasion of Japan had waned, spurring President Truman to use other means -- ultimately atomic bombs -- to end the war; and more than 250,000 servicemen and civilians on or near the island of Okinawa had lost their lives. Drawing on archival research in the US, Japan, and the UK, and the original accounts of those who survived, Crucible of Hell tells the vivid, heart-rending story of the battle that changed not just the course of WWII, but the course of war, forever.
Download or read book The Final Campaign written by Joseph H. Alexander and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1996 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Beans Bullets and Black Oil written by Worrall Reed Carter and published by . This book was released on 1953 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Operation Iceberg written by Gerald Astor and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Battle of Okinawa 1945 written by Jon Diamond and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pictorial history of one of World War II’s most bitterly fought campaigns. The American campaign to capture Okinawa, codename Operation Iceberg, was fought from April 1 to June 22, 1945. Three hundred and fifty miles from Japan, Okinawa was intended to be the staging area for the Allied invasion of the Japanese mainland. The Japanese Thirty-second Army defenders were on land and the Imperial Navy at sea fought tenaciously. They faced the US Tenth Army, comprising the US Army XXIV Corps and the US Marines’ III Amphibious Corps. As this superb book reveals in words and pictures, this was one of the most bitterly fought and costly campaigns of the Second World War. Ground troops faced an enemy whose vocabulary did not include “surrender,” and at sea the US Fifth Fleet, supported by elements of the Royal Navy, had to contend with kamikaze attacks by air and over seven hundred explosive-laden suicide boats. The Okinawa campaign is synonymous with American courage and determination to defeat a formidably ruthless enemy.
Download or read book Carrying the War to the Enemy written by Michael R. Matheny and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-10-09 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Military commanders turn tactics into strategic victory by means of "operational art," the knowledge and creative imagination commanders and staff employ in designing, synchronizing, and conducting battles and major operations to achieve strategic goals. Until now, historians of military theory have generally agreed that modern operational art developed between the first and second world wars, not in the United States but in Germany and the Soviet Union, whose armies were supposedly the innovators and greatest practitioners of operational art. Some have even claimed that U.S. forces struggled in World War II because their commanders had no systematic understanding of operational art. Michael R. Matheny believes previous studies have not appreciated the evolution of U.S. military thinking at the operational level. Although they may rightly point to the U.S. Army's failure to modernize or develop a sophisticated combined arms doctrine during the interwar years, they focus too much on technology or tactical doctrine. In his revealing account, Matheny shows that it was at the operational level, particularly in mounting joint and combined operations, that senior American commanders excelled—and laid a foundation for their country's victory in World War II. Matheny draws on archival materials from military educational institutions, planning documents, and operational records of World War II campaigns. Examining in detail the development of American operational art as land, sea, and air power matured in the twentieth century, he shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, U.S. war colleges educated and trained commanders during the interwar years specifically for the operational art they employed in World War II. After 1945, in the face of nuclear warfare, the American military largely abandoned operational art. But since the Vietnam War, U.S. commanders have found operational art increasingly important as they pursue modern global and expeditionary warfare requiring coordination among multiple service branches and the forces of allied countries.
Download or read book Days of Steel Rain written by Brent E. Jones and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This intimate true account of Americans at war follows theepic drama of an unlikely group of men forced to work together in the face of an increasingly desperate enemy during the final year of World War II. Sprawling across the Pacific, this untold story follows the crew of the newly-built "vengeance ship" USS Astoria, named for her sunken predecessor lost earlier in the war. At its center lies U.S. Navy Captain George Dyer, who vowed to return to action after suffering a horrific wound. He accepted the ship's command in 1944, knowing it would be his last chance to avenge his injuries and salvage his career. Yet with the nation's resources and personnel stretched thin by the war, he found that just getting the ship into action would prove to be a battle. Tensions among the crew flared from the start. Astoria's sailors and Marines were a collection of replacements, retreads, and older men. Some were broken by previous traumatic combat, most had no desire to be in the war, yet all found themselves fighting an enemy more afraid of surrender than death. The reluctant ship was called to respond to challenges that its men never could have anticipated. From a typhoon where the ocean was enemy to daring rescue missions, a gallant turn at Iwo Jima, and the ultimate crucible against the Kamikaze at Okinawa, they endured the worst of the final year of the war at sea. Days of Steel Rain brings to life more than a decade of research and firsthand interviews, depicting with unprecedented insight the singular drama of a captain grappling with an untested crew and men who had endured enough amidst some of the most brutal fighting of World War II. Throughout, Brent Jones fills the narrative with secret diaries, memoirs, letters, interpersonal conflicts, and the innermost thoughts of the Astoria men—and more than 80 photographs that have never before been published. Days of Steel Rain weaves an intimate, unforgettable portrait of leadership, heroism, endurance, and redemption.
Download or read book Operation Highjump written by and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2011 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Serving on Admiral Byrd's team for the Antarctic Expedition at the end of WW II was a privilege that only a handful of sailors would enjoy. Experience first hand, through the eyes of 19 year old Dick Miller, the daily events aboard the S.S. Pine Island. The harsh conditions, the dangerous missions, the fun and friendships that occurred kept these men on their toes!
Download or read book Managing U S Nuclear Operations in the 21st Century written by Charles Glaser and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring how the United States manages its still-powerful nuclear arsenal Arms control agreements and the end of the Cold War have made the prospect of nuclear war a distant fear for the general public. But the United States and its principal rivals—China and Russia—still maintain sizable arsenals of nuclear weapons, along with the systems for managing them and using them if that terrible day ever comes. Managing U.S. Nuclear Operations in the 21st Century focuses on how theories and policies are put into practice in managing nuclear forces in the United States. It addresses such questions as: What have been the guiding priorities of U.S. nuclear strategy since the end of the Cold War? What nuclear attack options would the president have during a war? How are these war plans developed and reviewed by civilian and military leaders? How would presidential orders be conveyed to the uniformed men and women who are entrusted with U.S. nuclear weapons systems? And are these communications systems and supporting capabilities vulnerable to disruption or attack? The answers to such questions depend on the process by which national strategy for nuclear deterrence, developed by civilian leaders, is converted into nuclear war plans and the entire range of procedures for implementing those plans if necessary. The chapter authors have extensive experience in government, the armed forces, and the analytic community. Drawing on their firsthand knowledge, as well as the public record, they provide unique, authoritative accounts of how the United States manages it nuclear forces today. This book will be of interest to the national security community, particularly younger experts who did not grow up in the nuclear-centric milieu of the Cold War. Any national security analyst, professional, or government staffer seeking to learn more about nuclear modernization policy and the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be interested in this book. It should also be of interest to professors and students who want a deep understanding of U.S. nuclear policy.
Download or read book Operation Broken Reed written by Arthur L. Boyd and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2009-03-05 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the height of the Korean War, President Truman launched one of the most important intelligence -- gathering operations in history. So valuable were the mission's findings about the North Korean-Soviet-Chinese alliance that it is no stretch to say they prevented World War III. Only one man -- sworn to secrecy for a half-century -- survived Operation Broken Reed. Arthur Boyd recalls his role as cryptographer on a team of Army Rangers, Navy Frogmen, Air Force officers, and CIA operatives that posed as the captured crew of a B-29 bomber in January 1952. Given cover names and cyanide capsules in case of discovery, the men were transported by Chinese Nationalists wearing Communist uniforms across North Korea, where undercover allies delivered information about troop strengths, weaponry, and intention. Fraught with danger, the mission came apart on its last day when the Americans came under fire from Chinese forces wise to the operation. The members of Broken Reed supplied Truman with proof of massive Chinese and Soviet buildups and a heavy Soviet bomber group in Manchuria, fully loaded with atomic weapons. With the potential destruction of the world outlined in front of him, Truman chose not to escalate the Korean War, saving millions of lives.
