Air War

Trapped inside a burning Lancaster bomber, 20,000 feet above Berlin, airman John Martin consigned himself to his fate and turned his thoughts to his fiancee back home. In a miraculous turn of events, however, the 21-year-old was thrown clear of his disintegrating airplane and found himself parachuting into the heart of Nazi Germany. He was soon to be captured and began his period as a prisoner of war.

Near the end of World War II, in an attempt to attack the United States mainland, Japan launched its fu-go campaign, deploying thousands of high-altitude hydrogen balloons armed with incendiary and high-explosive bombs designed to follow the westerly winds of the upper atmosphere and drift to the west coast of North America. After reaching the mainland, these fu-go, the Japanese hoped, would terrorize American citizens and ignite devastating forest fires across the western states, ultimately causing the United States to divert wartime resources to deal with the domestic crisis.

It was the evening of 16 May 1943. Nineteen modified Lancaster bombers from 617 Squadron RAF, under the command of youthful Wing Commander Guy Gibson, roared into the night sky from their Lincolnshire base. They were on a top-secret Bomber Command mission, codenamed Operation Chastise, now regarded as one of the most dangerous and audacious bombing raids of World War II - an attack on the formidable, well-defended dams of Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Slung beneath the belly of each aircraft was one of the war’s greatest secrets - a bouncing bomb.

In Barren SEAD, award-winning historian James L. Young, Jr., propagates a different theory: Instead of being a sign of what the Air Force was capable of, Linebacker II was a bitter failure that starkly outlined the USAF's limitations. Furthermore, instead of the meddling of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, this defeat was brought about by Air Force leaders' refusal to develop a Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) doctrine from 1953-1972.

With the epic blockbuster film Dunkirk, to be released in July, 2017, directed by Christopher Nolan and starring, amongst others, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy, and Mark Rylance, this reissue has never been more timely. "Where is the RAF?" was the oft-quoted question asked by soldiers waiting on the beach at Dunkirk, to where they had retreated following the German blitzkrieg through northern France, and where they were now being pounded by the Luftwaffe. The air forces were there, as Norman Franks proves, detailing the outstanding achievements of the Allied pilots.

Simultaneous release of the thrilling new volume of true stories from airmen of the Second World War, from the author of Flak (also available in audio by Bolinda). Michael Veitch's life-long obsession with the aircraft of the Second World War led him to conclude that every single person who flew, or flew in them, has at least one extraordinary story to tell. With most of these veterans in their 80's, he knew that it was a matter of urgency to find them now, before their personal stories disappear forever.

A heart-warming, exhilarating novel about one young woman's determination to follow her dreams of becoming a pilot in the early 20th century. In Edwardian England, aeroplanes are a new, magical invention, while female pilots are rare indeed. When shy Della Dobbs meets her mother's aunt, her life changes forever. Great Auntie Betty has come home from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, across whose windswept dunes the Wright Brothers tested their historic flying machines.

The term fighter ace grew in prominence with the introduction and development of aerial combat in the First World War. The actual number of aerial victories required to officially qualify as an "ace" has varied but is usually considered to be five or more. For the Luftwaffe, a number of its fighter pilots, many of whom had fought with the Legion Condor in Spain, had already gained their Experte, or ace, status in the Battle of France.

After the Second World War, many of the men and women who had worked at Bletchley Park moved on to GCHQ: the British government's new facility established to fight the KGB. The Spies of Winter explores the early years of GCHQ as it navigated its way through a tumultuous era - from the defection of the Cambridge Five and the treachery of atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs to the collapse of the British Empire and the emergence of the US as a superpower.

The General’s dysfunctional home life drove him to apply to the Air Force Academy almost 40 years ago, where he was provided with a new family and sense of worth he had never gotten from his own father. This purpose has driven the General throughout his remarkable career, taking him to Alaska, the Pentagon, and Germany; to Florida during Hurricane Opal, and has also allowed him to work alongside Presidents Bush and Obama and Secretaries of Defense Leon Panetta and Ashton Carter. Journey is a book about leadership. It is packed with the General’s lessons from life in the military.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Johns was commissioned at the RAF College Cranwell in 1959 after completing flying training on Piston Provost and Meteor aircraft. Following 9 years service as an operational fast-jet pilot, primarily on the Harrier, he commanded both a Harrier squadron and the Harrier Force in Germany, then became a qualified flying instructor during which time he taught The Prince of Wales to wings standard. A succession of national and NATO senior appointments followed, culminating in his promotion to Chief of the Air Staff and Air ADC to the Queen.

Fred Tomasello Jr. served three years as an officer in the U. S. Marine Corps. He earned two Purple Hearts, five Air Medals and a heavy dose of Post Traumatic Stress. Born and raised in West Tampa, Florida, Fred graduated from the University of South Florida and worked 27 years at the Tampa Postal Service. Retiring in 1999, he and his wife Kathy Blair sold their home, bought a truck and trailer, and traveled cross-country for five years as full-time RV'ers before settling in Cheektowaga, NY, a suburb of Buffalo. Soon after September 11, 2001 Fred started writing and discovered the spiritual...

At the end of August 2012, BBC ran a report about the commemoration of a young man who had been killed more than 70 years earlier. Just 12 days before Oswald St John Pigg’s death, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had already immortalized the men of the Royal Air Force with one of the West’s most famous war-time quotes. But the sentiment and gratitude Churchill expressed back in 1940 is very much alive today. The sacrifice made by “The Few”, the British and Allied fighter pilots who won the Battle of Britain in 1940, remains close to the hearts of the British public.

The incredible untold World War II story of Australian hero Barney Greatrex - from Bomber Command to French Resistance fighter. A high school and university cadet in Sydney, Barney Greatrex signed up for Bomber Command in 1941, keen to get straight into the very centre of the Allied counterattack. The RAF's strategic bombing missions faced the deadliest and most dangerous fighting imaginable as they attempted to break the will of the German people and destroy its industrial might.

December, 1944: The Nazi supervillains in the SS Occult Bureau have learned that Glen Miller's horn is actually an ancient Instrument of Power... and Hitler wants it badly. Now, as Captain Miller flies to a USO concert in France in the same plane as stage magicians Tazara and Magerock, piloted by Commander Harry Bailey, a nefarious spell is cast to take mystical remote control of that plane and divert it to Berlin. But the ghost of Amelia Earhart has overheard this evil plot and carried a warning to the Allies, specifically to a former German pilot from WWI now incarnate as a shambling ...

Chris Burwell charts one man's career in aviation from joining the RAF in 1969 aged eighteen, to having responsibility for training pilots for the world's major airlines nearly fifty years later. After training at RAF Cranwell and RAF Valley and a tour as a flying instructor on Jet Provosts, he joined the Harrier Force, flying on front-line squadrons in the United Kingdom and Germany during the Cold War and as an instructor on the Harrier Conversion Unit.

General Leemy's Circus is an account of the air war in the Pacific. It tells of the men who flew the B-29 Superfortresses of General Curtis LeMay’s XXI Bomber Command during World War II. The author was a navigator on the B-29 Umbriago - Dat’s My Boy and took part in the first B-29 raid on Tokyo. The navigator's role was crucial and involved making complex calculations in the heat of battle.

Mine has been a journey of close family ties, of spiritual and personal growth. I'd reshaped foolishness into discipline, developed character, found relationships, and made commitments. For the most part it had been an adventurous, swash-buckling path that unfolded before me. The best part is - I lived through it and can share the highlights with you. We corkscrewed downward as the nose snapped toward the earth below us and everything abruptly twisted 120 degrees to the left. If felt like we'd tumbled - my first helicopter flight.

An untold tale of Australians at war: the first ABC war correspondents and how radio broadcast from the battlefields to those at home waiting for news. With the outbreak of the Second World War, a new breed of reporters joined the ranks of war correspondents - and through the reach and power of radio, Australians back home heard their voices and their stories shaped from the sounds of battle, out of the white noise of the ether.

The Pathfinders were ordinary men and women from a range of nations who revolutionised the efficiency of the Allies' air campaign over mainland Europe. They elevated Bomber Command—initially the only part of the Allied war effort capable of attacking the heart of Nazi Germany—from an impotent force on the cusp of disintegration in 1942 to one capable of razing whole German cities to the ground in a single night, striking with devastating accuracy, inspiring fear and loathing in Hitler's senior command.