From December 7, 1941, until the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the war with Japan was a losing one. It was to be the darkest period of the almost four-year war. During those days, no times were more trying than the final hours for the men trapped on Wake Island, Bataan, Corregidor, Hong Kong and Singapore. This book, outlining the bitter end to their ordeals, covers the crucial days and final hours that led to their surrender, a capitulation that would shock the free world.

"Last Men Out" tells the riveting story of the last 11 United States soldiers to escape South Vietnam on April, 30, 1975, the day America ended its combat presence.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER With the war in Europe winding down in the spring of 1945, the United States turns its vast military resources toward a furious assault on the last great stepping-stone to Japan—the heavily fortified island of Okinawa. The three-month battle in the Pacific theater will feature some of the most vicious combat of the entire Second World War, as American troops confront an enemy that would rather be slaughtered than experience the shame of surrender. Meanwhile, stateside, a different kind of campaign is being waged in secret: the development of a weapon so powerful, not even the scientists who build it know just what they are about to unleash. Colonel Paul Tibbets, one of the finest bomber pilots in the U.S. Army Air Corps, is selected to lead the mission to drop the horrific new weapon on a Japanese city. As President Harry S Truman mulls his options and Japanese physician Okiro Hamishita cares for patients at a clinic near Hiroshima, citizens on the home front await the day of reckoning that everyone knows is coming.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.” In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.” Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers “a lesson that the postwar generations need most ... with eloquence, crushing detail, and power.”

The story of an uncovered voyage as colorful and momentous as any on record for the Age of Discovery--and of the Black mariner whose stunning accomplishment has been until now lost to history It began with a secret mission, no expenses spared. Spain, plotting to break Portugal's monopoly trade with the fabled Orient, set sail from a hidden Mexican port to cross the Pacific--and then, critically, to attempt the never-before-accomplished return, the vuelta. Four ships set out from Navidad, each one carrying a dream team of navigators. The smallest ship, guided by seaman Lope Martín, a mulatto who had risen through the ranks to become one of the most qualified pilots of the era, soon pulled far ahead and became mysteriously lost from the fleet. It was the beginning of a voyage of epic scope, featuring mutiny, murderous encounters with Pacific islanders, astonishing physical hardships--and at last a triumphant return to the New World. But the pilot of the fleet's flagship, the Augustine friar mariner Andrés de Urdaneta, later caught up with Martín to achieve the vuelta as well. It was he who now basked in glory, while Lope Martín was secretly sentenced to be hanged by the Spanish crown as repayment for his services. Acclaimed historian Andrés Reséndez, through brilliant scholarship and riveting storytelling--including an astonishing outcome for the resilient Lope Martín--sets the record straight.

Historian Harry Gailey offers a fresh one-volume treatment of the vast Pacific theater in World War II, examining in detail the performance of Japanese and Allied naval, air, and land forces in every major military operation. The War in the Pacific begins with an examination of events leading up to World War II and compares the Japanese and American economies and societies, as well as the chief combatants' military doctrine, training, war plans, and equipment. The book then chronicles all significant actions - from the early Allied defeats in the Philippines, the East Indies, and New Guinea; through the gradual improvement of the Allied position in the Central and Southwest Pacific regions; to the final agonies of the Japanese people, whose leaders refused to admit defeat until the very end. Gailey gives detailed treatment to much that has been neglected or given only cursory mention in previous surveys. The reader thus gains an unparalleled overview of operations, as well as many fresh insights into the behind-the-scenes bickering between the Allies and the interservice squabbles that dogged MacArthur and Nimitz throughout the war. NOTE: This edition does not include a photo insert.

Winner of the Northern California Book Award for Nonfiction "Both a serious work of history…and a marvelously readable dramatic narrative." —San Francisco Chronicle On the first Sunday in December 1941, an armada of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Six months later, in a sea fight north of the tiny atoll of Midway, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent into the abyss, a blow that destroyed the offensive power of their fleet. Pacific Crucible—through a dramatic narrative relying predominantly on primary sources and eyewitness accounts of heroism and sacrifice from both navies—tells the epic tale of these first searing months of the Pacific war, when the U.S. Navy shook off the worst defeat in American military history to seize the strategic initiative.

Fontenoy follows Across the Savage Sea (2005), the account of her solo row across the Atlantic with a new challenge: crossing the Pacific along the "Kon-Tiki" route from Peru to the...