Showing titles in Armed Forces

Entrepreneur Jesse Itzler chronicles his month of living and extreme fitness training with a Navy SEAL in the New York Times and #1 LA Times bestseller Living With a Seal, now with two bonus chapters. Entrepreneur Jesse Itzler will try almost anything. His life is about being bold and risky. So...

Fascinated by the expeditions of Sir Francis Drake and Captain James Cook? Then you’ll love this account of the Centurion’s circumnavigation of the globe, one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of maritime exploration and naval warfare. In 1740, George Anson and his fleet set off to harass Spanish commerce in the Pacific and attack towns on the coasts of Chile and Peru. Four years later, over half the men had died and of the seven ships which left Portsmouth only the Centurion had completed its objective of attacking Spanish possessions around the globe.

Brought to you by Penguin. Hear the enthralling story of the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Navy's largest ever warship. 65,000 tons. 280 metres long. A flight deck the size of sixty tennis courts. A giant piece of Sovereign British territory that's home to up to fifty Aircraft. HMS Queen...

Brought to you by Penguin. ‘This was a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned . . . But no act was ever more necessary for the life of Britain and for all that depended upon it.’ WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1949 Summer, 1940. Winston Churchill watches in...

Andrew Lambert, author of The Challenge - winner of the prestigious Anderson Medal - turns his attention to Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and Britain, examining how their identities as "seapowers" informed their actions and enabled them to achieve success disproportionate to their size. Lambert demonstrates how creating maritime identities made these states more dynamic, open, and inclusive than their lumbering continental rivals. Only when they forgot this aspect of their identity did these nations begin to decline.

In the spirit of previous volumes, Damien Lewis reveals the untold stories of the war's most daring and audacious escapes as executed by the world's most famous fighting force, the SAS. Reaching back into the earliest origins of the SAS legend, and Operation Colossus, the volume opens with a...

A groundbreaking history of the Black Joke, the most famous member of the British Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadron, and the long fight to end the transatlantic slave trade. Initially a slaving vessel itself, the Black Joke was captured in 1827 and repurposed by the Royal Navy to catch its former compatriots. Over the next five years, the vessel liberated more enslaved people than any other in Britain’s West Africa Squadron.

A group of U.S. soldiers emailed their observations and experiences from Iraq and their candid opinions on fighting an insurgency. This book is the result. This startling collection of emails is a thoughtful and compelling narrative that carries the reader from the alleys and city streets to the homes of long-suffering Iraqis, and from the soldiers’ concrete bunkers to the “majestic” army base.

Brandon Webb's experiences in the world's most elite sniper corps are the stuff of legend. From his grueling years of training in Naval Special Operations to his combat tours in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan, The Red Circle provides a rare and riveting look at the inner workings of the U.S. military through the eyes of a covert operations specialist. Yet it is Webb's distinguished second career as a lead instructor for the shadowy "sniper cell" that makes his story so compelling.

The astonishing untold story of the WWII airmen who risked it all in the deadly race to become the greatest American fighter pilot. "A heart-pounding narrative of the courage, sacrifice, and tragedy of America's elite fighter pilots." —James M. Scott, New York Times bestselling author of The...

On 27 October 1942, four "Long Lance" torpedoes fired by the Japanese destroyers Makigumo and Akigumo exploded in the hull of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8). Minutes later, the ship that had launched the Doolitte Raid six months earlier slipped beneath the waves of the Coral Sea 100 miles northeast of the island of Guadalcanal and just north of the Santa Cruz Islands, taking with her 140 of her sailors. With the loss of Hornet, the United States Navy now had one aircraft carrier left in the South Pacific.

Frank Luke, Jr., was an unlikely pilot. In the Great War, when fliers were still "knights of the air", Luke was an ungallant loner, a kid from Arizona who collected tarantulas, shot buzzards, and boxed miners. But during two torrid weeks in September 1918, he was the deadliest man on the Western Front. In only 10 missions, he destroyed 14 heavily defended German balloons and four airplanes, a rampage unequalled even by the dreaded von Richtofen, and the second highest American tally of the entire war.

From a veteran air-refueling expert who flew missions for over two decades during the Cold War, Gulf War, and Iraq War comes a thrilling eyewitness account of modern warfare, with inspirational stories and crucial lessons for people on the battlefield, in boardrooms, and in their everyday lives...

Only a boy when World War II broke out, E. C. R. Baker was gripped by the stories he heard of heroism in the skies as the Allies defeated the mighty Luftwaffe. But in the years after the war, he was struck by how few of the RAF's legendary fighter aces could be named by the general public.

July 1945. Eighteen daring young British, Australian and New Zealand special forces from a top-secret underwater warfare unit prepare to undertake three simultaneous and incredibly risky missions against the Japanese. Using four brilliantly conceived XE-craft midget submarines, the raiders will creep deep behind Japanese lines to sink two huge warships and sever two vitally important undersea communications cables.

He had to sit in a segregated rail car on the journey to army basic training in Mississippi in 1943. But two years later, the 20-year-old African American from New York was at the controls of a P-51, prowling for Luftwaffe aircraft at 5,000 feet over the Austrian countryside. This is the remarkable true story of Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr., one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. Award-winning aviation writer Philip Handleman re-creates the harrowing action and heart-pounding drama of Stewart's combat missions....

Despite the many films and television programmes over the decades since the end of the Second World War that portrays our allied heroes as grown-up men and women, the Battle of Britain was in the main actually fought and won by teenagers. The average age of an RAF fighter pilot was just 20 years old. Many of the men and women who designed and built their planes were even younger.

Captain Kidd has gone down in history as America's most ruthless buccaneer. However, Captain William Kidd was no career cut-throat; he was a tough, successful New York sea captain who was hired to chase pirates. Across the oceans of the world, the pirate hunter, Kidd, pursued the pirate, Culliford. One man would hang in the harbor; the other would walk away with the treasure. The Pirate Hunter is both a masterpiece of historical detective work and a page-turner.

The Royal Marines Commandos: Britain’s Amphibious Elite takes listeners deep inside one of the most formidable and respected fighting forces in the world. For more than 350 years, the Royal Marines have stood at the cutting edge of Britain’s military power, combining the traditions of naval service with the skill and ferocity of elite infantry. From their origins in the 17th century as “soldiers of the sea” to their modern role as expeditionary warriors, the Commandos have embodied adaptability, courage, and a relentless will to overcome.

The U.S. experienced its most harrowing military disaster of World War II not in 1941 at Pearl Harbor, but rather in the period from 1942 to 1943, in the frigid North Atlantic and American coastal waters from Newfoundland to the Caribbean. Nearly seven decades after the event, the Battle of the Atlantic still stands as the longest-running and most lethal clash of arms in naval history.