I love falling asleep to the sound of rain

Unknown

 
The Joy of Hate

Tác giả: Greg Gutfeld
Thể loại: Non-Fiction
Language: English
Giới thiệu

The Twilight Warriors, winner of the 2011 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature, is the engrossing, page-turning saga of a tightly knit band of naval aviators who are thrust into the final—and most brutal—battle of the Pacific war: Okinawa.

April 1945. The end of World War II finally appears to be nearing. The Third Reich is collapsing in Europe, and the Americans are overpowering the once-mighty Japanese Empire in the Pacific. For a group of young pilots trained in the twilight of the war, the greatest worry is that it will end before they have a chance to face the enemy. They call themselves Tail End Charlies. They fly at the tail end of formations, stand at the tail end of chow lines, and now they are catching the tail end of the war. What they don’t know is that they will be key players in the bloodiest and most difficult of naval battles—not only of World War II but in all of American history.

The Twilight Warriors relives the drama of the world’s last great naval campaign. From the cockpit of a Corsair fighter we gaze down at the Japanese task force racing to destroy the American amphibious force at Okinawa. Through the eyes of the men on the destroyers assigned to picket ship duty, we experience the terror as wave after wave of kamikazes crash into their ships. Standing on the deck of the legendary superbattleship Yamato, we watch Japan’s last hope for victory die in a tableau of gunfire and explosions.

Among the Tail End Charlies are men such as a twenty-two-year-old former art student who grows to manhood on the day of his first mission over Japan and his best friend, a ladies’ man and intrepid fighter pilot whose life abruptly changes when his Corsair goes down off the enemy shore. Another is a young Texan lieutenant who volunteers for the most dangerous flying job in the fleet—intercepting kamikazes at night over the blackened Pacific. Their leader is a charismatic officer who rises to greatness in the crucible of Okinawa. Directing the vast armada of sea, air, and land forces is a cast of brilliant and flawed commanders—from the imperturbable admiral and master of carrier warfare to the controversial soldier assigned to command the land forces.

The fate of the Americans at Okinawa is intertwined with the lives of the “young gods”— the honor-bound Japanese airmen who swarm like killer bees toward the U.S. ships. The kamikazes are dispatched on their deadly one-way missions by a classic samurai warrior who vows that he will follow them to a warrior’s grave.

The ferocity of the Okinawa fighting stuns the world. Before it ends, the long battle will cost more American lives, ships, and aircraft than any naval engagement in U.S. history. More than simply the account of a historic battle, The Twilight Warriors brings to life the human side of an epic conflict. It is the story of young Americans at war in the air and on the sea—and of their enigmatic, fanatically courageous enemy.

From the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Former navy pilot and military historian Gandt (Season of Storms) is a first-rate storyteller, and here he focuses on an aspect of the Battle of Okinawa sometimes overshadowed by the bitter fighting on land: Okinawa was the most expensive naval battle in American history, with almost 10,000 American casualties. Thirty ships were lost, and over 350 more were damaged, many beyond repair. Gandt uses operational history to structure the naval campaign's human dimensions. He describes Japan's development of a kamikaze force so effective that American admirals deployed picket lines of small, expendable warships to absorb the attacks' initial impact. The author portrays senior officers aged beyond their years by the unending stresses of command. He recreates fighter cockpits as carrier pilots tackle the kamikazes and the escorts determined to bring them through. He boards ships desperately fending off attackers no less determined to make their dying count. On the waters off Okinawa it was kill or be killed. As Gandt ably shows, Okinawa taught President Truman a grim lesson: "any weapon," even an atomic bomb, "was preferable to an invasion" of Japan. B&w photos, maps. (Nov.) (c)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Its context the Okinawa battle of 1945, Gandt’s latest aviation history fits in with his Intrepid (2008), an account of the aircraft carrier that survived kamikaze strikes to become the museum today moored at New York City. He zeroes in on one of the ship’s squadrons, VFB-10 in naval jargon, and follows its pilots from training through their experiences of combat. From interviews he conducted with veterans of the squadron, Gandt derives great immediacy about their experiences in the war and their recollections of comrades who died in the Okinawa campaign. Integrating the eyewitness testimony into an overall battle narrative clearly synthesized from extant works about Okinawa, Gandt changes scene from the Intrepid to the headquarters of American and Japanese commanders to show VFB-10’s place in the larger picture of the brutal, merciless battle. Gandt’s focus on aviation detail, such as specifications of the squadron’s warplane, the Corsair, and the exact maneuvers the pilots flew in dogfights and bombing runs, is exactly the wide-eyed action his audience expects from this type of work, the unit-level military history. --Gilbert Taylor

Epub Format
File format: EPUB
File size: 2.0 M
No of Page: 1
Mobi Format
File format: MOBI
File size: 679.1 k
No of Page: 1