Told from the point of view of the men in the foxholes and tanks, outposts and command posts, this is the definitive account of the epic retreat under fire of the 1st Marine Division from the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War. The author first sketches in the errors and miscalculations on the part of the American high command that caused the Marines to be strung out at the end of a narrow road scores of miles from the sea. He then plunges right into the action: the massing of Chinese forces in about ten-to-one strength; the Marines' command problems due to the climate and terrain and high-level over confidence; and the onset of the overwhelming Chinese assault. With a wealth of tactical detail and small-unit action, Eric Hammel's masterful account of Chosin offers invaluable perspective on war at the gut level.

With his parting words “I shall return,” General Douglas MacArthur sealed the fate of the last American forces on Bataan. Yet one young Army Captain named Russell Volckmann refused to surrender. He disappeared into the jungles of north Luzon where he raised a Filipino army of over 22,000 men. For the next three years he led a guerrilla war against the Japanese, killing over 50,000 enemy soldiers. At the same time he established radio contact with MacArthur’s HQ in Australia and directed Allied forces to key enemy positions. When General Yamashita finally surrendered, he made his initial overtures not to MacArthur, but to Volckmann. This book establishes how Volckmann’s leadership was critical to the outcome of the war in the Philippines. His ability to synthesize the realities and potential of guerrilla warfare led to a campaign that rendered Yamashita’s forces incapable of repelling the Allied invasion. Had it not been for Volckmann, the Americans would have gone in “blind” during their counter-invasion, reducing their efforts to a trial-and-error campaign that would undoubtedly have cost more lives, materiel, and potentially stalled the pace of the entire Pacific War. Second, this book establishes Volckmann as the progenitor of modern counterinsurgency doctrine and the true “Father” of Army Special Forces - a title that history has erroneously awarded to Colonel Aaron Bank of the ETO. In 1950, Volckmann wrote two Army field manuals: Operations Against Guerrilla Forces and Organization and Conduct of Guerrilla Warfare, though today few realize he was their author. Together, they became the Army’s first handbooks outlining the precepts for both special warfare and counter-guerrilla operations. Taking his argument directly to the Army Chief of Staff, Volckmann outlined the concept for Army Special Forces. At a time when U.S. military doctrine was conventional in outlook, he marketed the ideas of guerrilla warfare as a critical force multiplier for any future conflict, ultimately securing the establishment of the Army’s first special operations unit—the 10th Special Forces Group. Volckmann himself remains a shadowy figure in modern military history, his name absent from every major biography on MacArthur, and in much of the Special Forces literature. Yet as modest, even secretive, as Volckmann was during his career, it is difficult to imagine a man whose heroic initiative had more impact on World War II. This long overdue book not only chronicles the dramatic military exploits of Russell Volckmann, but analyzes how his leadership paved the way for modern special warfare doctrine.

Champions of Flight celebrates the work of Clayton Joseph Knight (1891–1969) and William John Heaslip (1898–1970), the two preeminent American aviation artists of their time, who chronicled the golden age of aviation (1927–1945) – from Charles Lindbergh's epochal transatlantic flight through the most devastating war in world history. Knight and Heaslip were experienced military men and formally trained artists who, combining an authenticity of experience and an artistic mastery of illustration, produced powerful artwork that influenced a generation of Americans, creating air-minded adults and youngsters, many of whom flocked to US military service after Pearl Harbor. Aviation became deeply embedded into America’s culture during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Americans became fascinated by aviation celebrities, watched air spectacles, aviation movies and newsreels, and devoured books, aviation industry ads, magazine articles, and Sunday comics featuring pilot heroes. Artists Knight and Heaslip – both of whom were adept as draftsmen, painters and printmakers – fuelled the imagination of these Americans through prolific illustrations and artwork that appeared in many diverse publications of the time. Over a period of almost twenty years, Clayton Knight and William Heaslip championed their love of flight through their art, and they did so with enthusiasm, integrity, and generosity. This book, featuring over 400 illustrations and photos, is a tribute to their legacy.

When General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia in March 1942, having successfully left the Philippines to organize a new American army, he vowed, "I shall return!" More than two years later he did return, at the head of a large U.S. army to retake the Philippines from the Japanese. The place of his re-invasion was the central Philippine Island of Leyte. Much has been written about the naval battle of Leyte Gulf that his return provoked, but almost nothing has been written about the three-month long battle to seize Leyte itself.Originally intending to delay the advancing Americans, the Japanese high command decided to make Leyte the "Decisive Battle" for the western Pacific and rushed crack Imperial Army units from Manchuria, Korea, and Japan itself to halt and then overwhelm the Americans on Leyte. As were most battles in the Pacific, it was a long, bloody, and brutal fight. As did the Japanese, the Americans were forced to rush in reinforcements to compensate for the rapid increase in Japanese forces on Leyte.This unique battle also saw a major Japanese counterattack – not a banzai charge, but a carefully thought-out counteroffensive designed to push the Americans off the island and capture the elusive General MacArthur. Both American and Japanese battalions spent days surrounded by the enemy, often until relieved or overwhelmed. Under General Yamashita's guidance it also saw a rare deployment of Japanese paratroopers in conjunction with the ground assault offensive.Finally there were more naval and air battles, all designed to protect or cover landing operations of friendly forces. Leyte was a three-dimensional battle, fought with the best both sides had to offer, and did indeed decide the fate of the Philippines in World War II.

As part of the massive Allied invasion of Normandy, three airborne divisions were dropped behind enemy lines to sow confusion in the German rear and prevent panzer reinforcements from reaching the beaches. In the dark early hours of D-Day, this confusion was achieved well enough, as nearly every airborne unit missed its drop zone, creating a kaleidoscope of small-unit combat.Fortunately for the Allies, the 505th Regimental Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division hit on or near its drop zone. Its task was to seize the vital crossroads of Ste Mère Eglise, and to hold the bridge over the Merderet River at nearby La Fière. Benefiting from dynamic battlefield leadership, the paratroopers reached the bridge, only to be met by wave after wave of German tanks and infantry desperate to force the crossing.Reinforced by glider troops, who suffered terribly in their landings from the now-alert Germans, the 505th not only held the vital bridge for three days but launched a counterattack in the teeth of enemy fire to secure their objective once and for all, albeit at gruesome cost. In No Better Place to Die, Robert M. Murphy provides an objective narrative of countless acts of heroism, almost breathtaking in its 'you are there' detail.Robert M. (Bob) Murphy, a Pathfinder and member of A Company, 505th PIR, was wounded three times in action, and made all four combat jumps with his regiment, fighting in Sicily, Normandy, and Holland. He was decorated for valor for his role at La Fière, and is a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. After the war, he was instrumental in establishing the 505th RCT Association.

In the dark days of World War I, when flying machines, radio, and electronics were infant technologies, the first remotely controlled experimental aircraft took to the skies and unmanned radio controlled 40-foot high-speed Motor Torpedo Boats ploughed the seas in Britain. Developed by the British Army’s Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Navy these prototype weapons stemmed from an early form of television demonstrated before the war by Prof. A. M. Low. The remote control systems for these aircraft and boats were invented at RFC Secret Experimental Works commanded by Prof. Low, which was part of the organization of ‘back-room boys’ in the Munitions Inventions Department. These audacious projects of Low and his contemporaries led to the hundreds of remotely controlled Queen Bee aerial targets in the 1930s and hence to all the machines that we now call ‘drones'. Starting well before WWI and, for the lucky ones, extending well beyond it, the lives of Archibald Low and many of his contemporaries were extraordinary as were the times they lived through. They witnessed many dawns, the coming of the oil and plastics age and of domestic electricity. They experienced vast social improvements and the pasturing of the working horse in favor of motor transport. They were around for the first epic aircraft flights and with the aid of the very technologies that had enabled the development of drones, they saw air travel transformed from the precarious to the routine. It is astonishing that the origins of the first drones are not common knowledge in Britain and that the achievement of these maverick inventors is not commemorated.

Ask most combat veterans to name the worst experience of their lives, and they’ll probably tell you it was war. But confusingly, if you ask them to choose the best experience of their life, they’ll usually say it was war, too. This is nearly impossible for someone who has not been in war to understand. Contrary to the steady stream of Wounded Warrior Foundation commercials on TV, combat veterans are not broken, and they are not victims. Pitying them belittles their experiences and misrepresents the challenges they face after military life. Combat veterans have experienced a spectrum of emotions whose breadth supersedes by a number you cannot imagine the emotional fluctuations of civilian life. That’s why it’s hard to care about normal things when you come back. Ask a combat veteran about this, it’s a common feeling. What is it about war that soldiers miss? This is a question that every civilian should try to understand. This is a moving and insightful book, weaving stories from the flight deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier off Syria to climbing a forbidden Himalayan pass into Tibet to explain one of the most everlasting of human pursuits – war. It’s also about coming home and confronting another kind of struggle, which we all share – the search for happiness. In this collection, Peterson writes of war from the perspective of both a combatant and a witness, taking the reader from combat missions over Afghanistan as an Air Force special operations pilot to the front lines against ISIS in Iraq, and the trenches and tank battles of the war in Ukraine. Interweaving his front-line reports with a narrative about his own transformation from a combat pilot to a war journalist, Peterson explores a timeless paradox – why does coming home from war feel like such a disappointment?

As the newly appointed commander of the Southern Continental Army in December 1780, Nathanael Greene quickly realized victory would not only require defeating the British Army, but also subduing the region's brutal civil war. 'The division among the people is much greater than I imagined, and the Whigs and the Tories persecute each other, with little less than savage fury,' wrote Greene. Part of Greene’s challenge involved managing South Carolina's determined but unreliable Patriot militia, led by Thomas Sumter, the famed 'Gamecock'. Though Sumter would go on to a long political career, it was as a defiant partisan that he first earned the respect of his fellow backcountry settlers, a command that would compete with Greene for status and stature in the Revolutionary War's 'Southern Campaign'. Despite these challenges, Greene was undaunted. Born to a devout Quaker family, and influenced by the faith's tenets, Greene instinctively understood the war's Southern theater involved complex political, personal, and socioeconomic challenges, not just military ones. Though never a master of the battlefield, Greene's mindful leadership style established his historic legacy. The Quaker and the Gamecock tells the story of these two wildly divergent leaders against the backdrop of the American Revolution's last gasp, the effort to extricate a British occupation force from the wild and lawless South Carolina frontier. For Greene, the campaign meant a last chance to prove his capabilities as a general, not just a talented administrator. For Sumter, it was a quest of personal revenge that showcased his innate understanding of the backcountry character. Both men needed the other to defeat the British, yet their forceful personalities, divergent leadership styles, and opposing objectives would clash again and again, a fascinating story of the United States' bloody birth that still influences our political culture.

On the four sides of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, serried tablets display the names of 660 honoured commanders of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Most are those of generals and marshals of the French Army – but 26 are the names of admirals, commanders of the fleets of Republican and Napoleonic France. In Napoleon's Admirals, Richard Humble presents not only their individual stories, but an entirely new appraisal of the Anglo-French naval war of 1793–1814: the longest sea war in modern history, exploding many myths along the way. The aristocratic officers of the French Navy did not emigrate en masse when the Revolution came, leaving the Navy leaderless and doomed to repeated defeats at sea. Of the 26 ‘Admirals of the Arc,’ 23 had learned their trade in the French royal and merchant navies of the Ancien Régime. Republican France could call on a wide range of seasoned combat veterans from the American Revolutionary War (1778–83), whose stories are a revelation in themselves. These former King’s officers stayed, and loyally tried to serve their country as the Revolution pursued its wasteful and unpredictable course. Three of them paid for their loyalty under the guillotine. Contrary to popular British belief, the naval war did not end with Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in October 1805. Thanks to an energetic warship-building program, the French Navy recovered quickly from Trafalgar, and Napoleon’s conquests created an ever-widening network of new French naval bases for the British Admiralty to cover. Collingwood, Nelson’s deputy at Trafalgar, was still commanding in the Mediterranean four years later. The Admiralty had not dared to recall him and he died at sea, utterly exhausted, in March 1810. Four months later the French inflicted the greatest humiliation suffered by the Royal Navy in the entire naval war: the annihilation of an entire British frigate squadron in the battle of Grand-Port, Mauritius, in August 1810. In this account of the men who imposed such a strain on the world’s greatest navy for 21 years, Richard Humble has provided a remarkable addition to the well-worn pages of conventional naval history.

Keith Nightingale’s accomplishments in both military and civilian life largely contribute to the excellence of Living and Breathing as a memoir of unusual depth as well as breadth. Uniquely adopting a third-person omniscient point of view, Nightingale eschews the “I” of memoir in favour of multiple perspectives and a larger historical vision that afford equal time and weight to ally and enemy alike. Examples of the many perspectives based on real-life characters include: Hu, a VC 'informant' whose false information led the Rangers straight into the jaws of a ferocious ambush; General Tanh, the COSVN commander; Major Nguyen Hiep, the 52d Ranger Commander; and Ranger POWs later returned by the North. Nightingale moreover offers the point of view of an American advisor to elite Vietnamese troops, a vital perspective regrettably underrepresented in the literature of Vietnam, including Burns’ documentary. Added to this are well-informed conjecture of enemy psychology; insight into the dedication and often misunderstood role of the elite Vietnamese Ranger forces; the intelligence acquired from debriefing captured Rangers, whose captors had told them that the entire battle had been a carefully staged attack planned by COSVN as part of a larger Total War strategy developed by the leadership of the North Vietnamese Army; and an eye-witness account by a gifted author who is a rare survivor of one of the most vicious – and heretofore forgotten – battles of the war.

Julius Caesar has been the inspiration to countless military commanders over the last two millennia. Born into an aristocratic family, his early military campaigns, part of his progression along the cursus honorum, included campaigning in the east, Spain and in the early Roman civil wars. His participation in the Gallic Wars is known mainly through the commentary on the wars that he wrote and published, along with his incursions into Britain. This concise history details his military life, and how it impacted with his political career, from his youth through the civil wars that resulted in his becoming the dictator of Rome, and his legacy.

This book describes the wartime experiences of Reverend David Railton, MC, who was a chaplain on the Western Front during WWI. As a chaplain, Railton supported soldiers in their worst moments, he buried the fallen, comforted the wounded, wrote to the families of the missing and killed, and helped the survivors to remember and mark the loss of their comrades so that they were able to move on and do their job. He was present at many battles, and received the Military Cross for rescuing an officer and two men under heavy fire on the Somme. It was Railton’s idea to bring home the body of a fallen comrade, whose identity was unknown, from the battlefields of Belgium and France to be buried in Westminster Abbey. Although suffering from what was obviously Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, after the war he carried out his duties as the vicar of Margate and took on many philanthropic works on behalf of the poor, especially supporting ex-servicemen who came home and had to deal with the aftermath of a terrible war and crippling unemployment.The story of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior has been told several times, including the part played by the Reverend David Railton, M.C. However, this book – based on hundreds of Railton's original letters, notes, and writings – is the first book to tell the story of the man himself and his flag, which he used as an altar cloth and shroud throughout the war, was consecrated a year after the burial of the Unknown Warrior, and now hangs in Westminster Abbey.

At the beginning of 1942, the Tirpitz, the heaviest battleship ever built by a European navy was on the cusp of breaking out into the north Atlantic. The prospect of a huge German battleship patrolling the Atlantic posed a grave threat to the convoys that served as the lifeline for an embattled Britain. After attempted bombing raids failed, a new and far more daring plan was created; to ram a battleship loaded with explosives into St. Nazaire, the only dry dock capable of supporting this unstoppable juggernaut. This volume in the Casemate Illustrated series gives a clear overview of the planning and execution of the raid and its aftermath, accompanied by 125 photographs and images, including colour profiles and maps.

Airborne assault was one of the great innovations of the 1930s and 1940s, adding a new ‘vertical’ dimension to infantry warfare. By the onset of World War II in 1939, Germany, Italy, and Russia were already advanced in their development of paratrooper units. Germany in particular demonstrated the tactical shock of paratroopers in Western Europe in 1940 and, most spectacularly, in Crete in 1941, galvanizing the UK and the United States to expand and train their own airborne forces, which they unleashed in 1943–45. The Allied paratrooper drops on D-Day (6 June 1944) and those of Operation Market Garden (17–25 September 1944) were the stuff of legend, huge in scale and ambition, but both Allied and Axis paratroopers were deployed in numerous other actions, including special forces raids. It quickly became apparent that the physical and tactical demands placed upon paratroopers required men of exceptional stamina, courage and intelligence. To create these soldiers, levels of training were unusually punishing and protracted, and those who came through to take their ‘wings’ were a true elite. The Paratrooper Training Pocket Manual provides an unusually detailed insight into what it took to make a military paratrooper, and how he was then utilized in actions where expected survival might be measured in a matter of days. Using material from British, US, German archives and other primary sources, many never before published, the book explains paratrooper theory, training and practice in detail. The content includes details of the physical training, instruction in static-line parachute deployment, handling the various types of parachutes and harnesses, landing on dangerous terrain, small-arms handling, airborne deployment of heavier combat equipment, landing in hostile drop zones, tactics in the first minutes of landing, radio comms, and much more. Featuring original manual diagrams and illustrations, plus new introductory text explaining the history and context of airborne warfare, The Paratrooper Training Pocket Manual provides a detailed insight into the principles and practice of this unique type of combat soldier.

While small wars are not new, how they should be fought by a modern industrial nation is still very much a matter for debate. It is thus worth paying heed now, to the experiences of another power which once encountered the same problems. This pocket manual examines German analysis of the problem, covering experiences from the Napoleonic era to the Third Reich, based upon the historical analysis, Kleinkrieg, provided to the German High Command by Arthur Ehrhardt in 1935 (republished in 1942 and 1944), and the Bandenbekampfung (Fighting the Guerrilla Bands) document provided to Germany's OKW in 1944. In both, conditions that were specific to broader military operations were separated from circumstances in occupation campaigns, and the new background in the German experience in suppressing rebellion in World War II is presented.Avoiding ideological biases, this manual examines the purely military problem as seen by professionals. Rediscovered and presented in English, these German thoughts on how best to fight small wars have been edited and annotated by Charles D. Melson, former Chief Historian for the US Marine Corps.

The Partisan's Companion was produced by the Red Army to train partisans to fight the Nazi invader. Its usefulness outlived World War II, as it was later used to train Third World guerrillas in their wars of national liberation during the 1950s–70s, and even the Fedayeen guerrillas who fought US and coalition forces in Iraq. By the end of 1942, it was obvious that Germany was losing the war. The partisan ranks grew as did the training requirements for partisan commanders. The 1942 edition of The Partisan's Companion helped quickly train new guerrillas to a common standard. Besides field craft, it covers partisan tactics, German counter-guerrilla tactics, demolitions, German and Soviet weapons, scouting, camouflage, anti-tank warfare and anti-aircraft defense for squad and platoon-level instruction. It contains the Soviet lessons of two bitter years of war and provides a good look at the tactics and training of a mature partisan force. The partisans moved and lived clandestinely, harassed the enemy, and supported the Red Army through reconnaissance and attacks on German supply lines. They clearly frustrated German logistics and forced the Germans to periodically sideline divisions for rear-area security. The partisans and their handbook were clearly part of the eventual Soviet victory over Germany. This pocket manual puts The Partisan's Companion in context, explaining its importance.