This book is based upon a Ph. D. dissertation written by an Air Force officer who studied at the University of Denver. Currently an Associate Professor of History at the Air Force Academy, Major Osur's account relates how the leadership in the War Department and the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) tried to deal with the problem of race and the prejudices which were reflected in the bulk of American society. It tells a story of black racial protests and riots which such attitudes and discrimination provoked. The author describes many of the discriminatory actions taken against black airmen, whose goal was equality of treatment and opportunities as American citizens. He also describes the role of black pilots as they fought in the Mediterranean theater of operations against the Axis powers. In his final chapters, he examines the continuing racial frictions within the Army Air Forces which led to black servicemen protests and riots in 1945 at several installations.

Following the raid on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt identified the European theatre as his country's priority. Their first joint operation with the British was an amphibious invasion of French North Africa, designed to relieve pressure on their new Soviet allies, eliminate the threat of the French navy joining the Germans, and to shore up the vulnerability of British imperial possessions and trade routes through the Mediterranean. Operation Torch was the largest and most complex amphibious invasion of its time. In November 1942, three landings took place simultaneously across the French North African coast in an ambitious attempt to trap and annihilate the Axis' North African armies between the invading forces under General Eisenhower and British Field-Marshall Montgomery's Eighth Army in Egypt. Using full colour artwork, maps and contemporary photographs, this is the thrilling story of this complex operation.

The first comprehensive biography of unjustly forgotten war hero Ben Kuroki, a Japanese American farm boy from Nebraska who flew fifty-eight combat missions, fighting the Axis powers during World War II and battled racism, injustice, and prejudice on the home front. Ben Kuroki was a twenty-four-year-old Japanese American farm boy whose heritage was never a problem in remote Nebraska—until Pearl Harbor. Among the millions of Americans who flocked to military stations to enlist, Ben wanted to avenge the attack, reclaim his family honor, and prove his patriotism. But as anti-Japanese sentiment soared, Ben had to fight to be allowed to fight for America. And fight he did. As a gunner on Army Air Forces bombers, Ben flew fifty-eight missions spanning three combat theaters: Europe, North America, and the Pacific, including the climactic B-29 firebombing campaign against Japan that culminated with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He flew some of the war’s boldest and bloodiest air missions and lived to tell about it. In between his tours in Europe and the Pacific, he challenged FDR’s shameful incarceration of more than one hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry in America, and he would be credited by some with setting in motion the debate that reversed a grave national dishonor. In the euphoric wake of America’s victory, the decorated war hero used his national platform to carry out what he called his “fifty-ninth mission,” urging his fellow Americans to do more to eliminate bigotry and racism at home. Told in full for the first time, and long overdue, Ben’s extraordinary story is a quintessentially American one of patriotism, principle, perseverance, and courage. It’s about being in the vanguard of history, the bonding of a band of brothers united in a just cause, a timeless and unflinching account of racial bigotry, and one man’s transcendent sense of belonging—in war, in peace, abroad, and at home.