Although raised on a farm in southwest Arkansas during the Great Depression, Doy Duncan, like many young boys of that time, dreamed of flying. Through hard work and perseverance, Duncan went to college, where he took primary Civilian Pilot Training. He then joined the U.S. Navy and completed secondary CPT in Conway, Arkansas, while waiting to be called to active duty. In November of 1942 he reported to the Naval Preflight School at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. After months of training, Doy Duncan was assigned to the USS Kadashan Bay, CVE-76, to fly the FM-2 Wildcat fighter plane. He saw his first combat in September 1944 as he flew support for the First Marine Division's invasion of the Palau Islands in the Pacific. He would be shot down a month later in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Abandoned at Leyte is Duncan's story of courage and survival as a World War II Wildcat pilot.

With the Leyte Campaign the War in the Pacific entered a decisive stage. The period of limited offensives, bypassing, and island hopping was virtually over. American troops in greater numbers than ever before assembled in the Pacific Theater, supported by naval and air forces of corresponding size, fought and overcame Japanese forces of greater magnitude than any previously met. Though the spotlight is on the front-line fighting, the reader will find in this volume a faithful description of all arms and services performing their missions. The account is not exclusively an infantry story. It covers as well the support of ground fighting on Leyte by large-scale naval operations and by land-based air power under the most adverse conditions. In addition, careful attention to logistical matters, such as the movement of supplies and the evacuation of the wounded, gives the reader a picture of the less spectacular activities of an army in battle.

"Sunken Ships of World War II" is truly one of the greatest compendiums of naval history that has ever been put together. Not only does it give an exhaustive chronology of events and actions of the United States Navy, it also contains listings of the Allies (American and English) and of the Axis (Japanese, German and Italian) naval losses wherever they took place. Each of the pages of this book is packed with minute information on each sunken vessel. Entries also include the most available information on the commanders, crews, size, displacement and location in degrees of each vessel, the battles, the forces, and just about any other particular information of interest on each vessel. By any measurement, "Sunken Ships of World War II" stands alone for its depth and breath of the information revealed in its detailed pages.

Cracking the enemy's radio code is a task so urgent and so difficult that it demands the military's best minds and most sophisticated technology. But when the coded messages are in a language as complex as Japanese, decoding problems multiply dramatically.

“[The Rising Sun] is quite possibly the most readable, yet informative account of the Pacific war.”—Chicago Sun-Times This Pulitzer Prize–winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, “a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened—muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox.” In weaving together the historical facts and human drama leading up to and culminating in the war in the Pacific, Toland crafts a riveting and unbiased narrative history. In his Foreword, Toland says that if we are to draw any conclusion from The Rising Sun, it is “that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.” “Unbelievably rich . . . readable and exciting . . .The best parts of [Toland’s] book are not the battle scenes but the intimate view he gives of the highest reaches of Tokyo politics.”—Newsweek