From the author of Pacific Payback, the true story of how a patchwork band of aviators saved Guadalcanal during WWII. November 1942: Japanese and American forces fight for control of Guadalcanal, a small but pivotal island in the South Pacific. The Japanese call it Jigoku no Shima—Hell's Island. Amid a seeming stalemate, a small group of U.S. Navy dive-bombers is called upon to help determine the island’s fate. When their carriers are lost, they are forced to operate from Henderson Field, a small dirt-and-gravel airstrip on Guadalcanal. They help form the Cactus Air Force, tasked with making dangerous flights from their jungle airfield while holding the line against Japanese air assaults, warship bombardments, and sniper attacks from the jungle. When the Japanese launch a final offensive to take the island, these dive-bomber jocks answer the call of duty—turning back an enemy warship armada, fighter planes, and a convoy of troop transports. The Battle for Hell's Island reveals how command of the South Pacific, and the outcome of the Pacific War, depended on control of a single dirt airstrip—and the small group of battle-weary aviators sent to protect it with their lives. INCLUDES PHOTOS

Presents battlefield accounts and first-person narratives from over 200 Allied and Japanese veterans of the battle on Guadalcanal Island between August 1942 and February 1943.

A Scarecrow novella from Australia's favourite novelist, author of the Jack West Jr series and new novel The One Impossible Labyrinth out now. It is an island that doesn't appear on any maps. A secret place, where classified experiments have been carried out. Experiments that have gone terribly wrong. Four crack special forces units are dropped in. One of them is a team of Marines, led by Captain Shane Schofield, call-sign: SCARECROW. Nothing can prepare Schofield's team for what they find there. You could say they've just entered hell. But that would be wrong. This is much, much worse. Fans of Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton will love Matthew Reilly. GET MORE SCARECROW IN: ICE STATION, AREA 7, SCARECROW AND SCARECROW AND THE ARMY OF THIEVES

From the award-winning historian, Saul David, the riveting narrative of the heroic US troops, bonded by the brotherhood and sacrifice of war, who overcame enormous casualties to pull off the toughest invasion of WWII's Pacific Theater -- and the Japanese forces who fought with tragic desperation to stop them. With Allied forces sweeping across Europe and into Germany in the spring of 1945, one enormous challenge threatened to derail America's audacious drive to win the world back from the Nazis: Japan, the empire that had extended its reach southward across the Pacific and was renowned for the fanaticism and brutality of its fighters, who refused to surrender, even when faced with insurmountable odds. Taking down Japan would require an unrelenting attack to break its national spirit, and launching such an attack on the island empire meant building an operations base just off its shores on the island of Okinawa. The amphibious operation to capture Okinawa was the largest of the Pacific War and the greatest air-land-sea battle in history, mobilizing 183,000 troops from Seattle, Leyte in the Philippines, and ports around the world. The campaign lasted for 83 blood-soaked days, as the fighting plumbed depths of savagery. One veteran, struggling to make sense of what he had witnessed, referred to the fighting as the "crucible of Hell." Okinawan civilians died in the tens of thousands: some were mistaken for soldiers by American troops; but as the US Marines spearheading the invasion drove further onto the island and Japanese defeat seemed inevitable, many more civilians took their own lives, some even murdering their own families. In just under three months, the world had changed irrevocably: President Franklin D. Roosevelt died; the war in Europe ended; America's appetite for an invasion of Japan had waned, spurring President Truman to use other means -- ultimately atomic bombs -- to end the war; and more than 250,000 servicemen and civilians on or near the island of Okinawa had lost their lives. Drawing on archival research in the US, Japan, and the UK, and the original accounts of those who survived, Crucible of Hell tells the vivid, heart-rending story of the battle that changed not just the course of WWII, but the course of war, forever.

From August 1942 until February 1943, two armies faced each other amid the malarial jungles and blistering heat of Guadalcanal Island. The Imperial Japanese forces needed to protect and maintain the air base that gave them the ability to interdict enemy supply routes. The Allies were desperate to halt the advance of a foe that so far had inflicted crippling losses on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, then seized the Philippines, Wake Island, the Dutch East Indies, Guam, and other Allied territory. After months of relentless battle, the U.S. troops forced back the determined Japanese, providing what many historians believe was the decisive turning point in the Pacific theater of operations. Stanley Coleman Jersey, a medical air evacuation specialist in the South Pacific during World War II, has spent countless hours combing Australian, Japanese, and U.S. documents and interviewing more than 200 veterans of the Guadalcanal campaign, both Allied and Japanese. Beginning with the events that preceded the battle for Guadalcanal during the Australian defense of the southern Solomon Islands in late 1941, Jersey details the military preparations made in response to intelligence describing the creation of an enemy air base within striking distance of American supply lines and recounts the civilian evacuation that followed the Japanese arrival in New Guinea. With the stage set, he turns to the campaign itself, with particular emphasis on the combat during the critical period of August to December 1942. While Guadalcanal is his primary focus, Jersey also covers the roles played by forces occupying the other Solomon Islands, including the plight of construction laborers, air crews, and ground units. This book, chock-full of gripping battlefield accounts and harrowing first-person narratives, draws together for the first time Allied and Japanese perspectives on the bloody contest. It is certain to become an indispensable asset to historians of World War II.

For Dutton Caliber's American War Heroes series, the riveting true account of the Battle of Tarawa, an epic World War II clash in which the U.S. Marines fought the Japanese nearly to the last man. In November 1943, the men of the 2d Marine Division were instructed to clear out Japanese resistance on the Pacific island of Betio, a speck at the end of the Tarawa Atoll. When the Marines landed, the Japanese poured out of their underground bunkers—and launched one of the most brutal and bloody battles of World War II. For three straight days, attackers and defenders fought over every square inch of sand in a battle with no defined frontlines, and where there was no possibility of retreat—because there was nowhere to retreat to. It was a struggle that would leave both sides stunned and exhausted, and prove both the fighting mettle of the Americans and the fanatical devotion of the Japanese. Drawn from new sources, including participants’ letters and diaries and exclusive firsthand interviews with survivors, One Square Mile of Hell is the true story of a battle between two determined foes, neither of whom would ever look at the other in the same way again.

This gritty oral chronicle records with poignant and often disturbing immediacy both the bloody sixteen-day Battle of Wake Island and the forty-four months of hell that followed it. One of the first military engagements in World War II, the battle for this tiny, strategically located atoll in the Pacific began on December 8, 1941, just five hours after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. It ended on December 23, when the marines—despite diminished forces, incapacitated fighter planes, and no communications—strove to stem an overwhelming Japanese invasion until their commanding officers ordered them to surrender. No sooner had the surviving marines—the author’s eighteen-year-old brother among them—laid down their arms than they were stripped and bound. For two days they sat naked in the hot sun; at night they shivered in the cold. For the next three weeks they slogged in the ruins of their bombed-out camp. They were then jammed into the hold of the ship that would take them to prison camps in China and Japan, where they would endure the cruelest indignities and grimmest tortures until their liberation in August 1945. Hell Wouldn’t Stop tells their often horrific, frequently heroic, and unforgettable if long-forgotten World War II story.

In September 1944, to prevent Japanese air interdiction against General MacArthur's planned invasion of the Southern Philippines, the Americans attacked Peleliu and Angaur in the Palau group of the Western Caroline Islands. Admiral Halsey, commanding the US Third Fleet, feared the heavily defended Palaus would be costly for his III Amphibious Corps comprising the 1st Marine Division and the 81st Infantry Division.While Angaur fell in four days, on Peleliu the Japanese resisted tenaciously using their underground fortifications on the Umurbrogel Ridge overlooking the airfield. It was only after over two months' bitter fighting that the Americans finally controlled the Island. Despite the heavy cost, the benefits of this hard fought and costly victory were doubtful. In the event, Mindanao and other Southern Philippine Islands were bypassed by MacArthur in favour of a direct assault on Leyte on 20 October. But, as the graphic images and well researched text bear witness, there is no denying the courage and determination shown by the attacking US forces.

Relates the details of the Battle of Morris Island during the Civil War.