One of the last, great untold stories of World War II—kept hidden for decades—even after most of the World War II records were declassified in 1972, many of the files remained untouched in various archives—a gripping true tale of courage and adventure from Bruce Henderson, master storyteller, historian, and New York Times best-selling author of Sons and Soldiers—the saga of the Japanese American U.S. Army soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater, in Burma, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, with their families back home in America, under U.S. Executive Order 9066, held behind barbed wire in government internment camps.

 After Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military was desperate to find Americans who spoke Japanese to serve in the Pacific war. They soon turned to the Nisei—first-generation U.S. citizens whose parents were immigrants from Japan. Eager to prove their loyalty to America, several thousand Nisei—many of them volunteering from the internment camps where they were being held behind barbed wire—were selected by the Army for top-secret training, then were rushed to the Pacific theater. Highly valued as expert translators and interrogators, these Japanese American soldiers operated in elite intelligence teams alongside Army infantrymen and Marines on the front lines of the Pacific war, from Iwo Jima to Burma, from the Solomons to Okinawa.
 
Henderson reveals, in riveting detail, the harrowing untold story of the Nisei and their major contributions in the war of the Pacific, through six Japanese American soldiers. After the war, these soldiers became translators and interrogators for war crime trials, and later helped to rebuild Japan as a modern democracy and a pivotal U.S. ally.

This epic story opens at the hour the Greatest Generation went to war on December 7, 1941, and follows four US Navy ships and their crews in the Pacific until their day of reckoning three years later with a far different enemy: a deadly typhoon. In December 1944, while supporting General MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey neglected the Law of Storms, placing the mighty US Third Fleet in harm’s way. Drawing on extensive interviews with nearly every living survivor and rescuer, as well as many families of lost sailors, transcripts and other records from naval courts of inquiry, ships’ logs, personal letters, and diaries, Bruce Henderson finds some of the story’s truest heroes exhibiting selflessness, courage, and even defiance.

It began as President Ulysses S. Grant’s bid for international glory after the Civil War-America’s first attempt to reach the North Pole. It ended with Captain Charles Hall’s death under suspicious circumstances, dissension among sailors, scientists, and explorers, and the ship’s evacuation and eventual sinking. Then came a brutal struggle for survival by thirty-three men, women, and children, stranded on the polar ice. When news of the disastrous expedition and accusations of murder reached Washington D.C., it led to a nationwide scandal, an official investigation, and a government cover-up.
The mystery of the captain’s death remained unsolved for nearly 100 years. But when Charles Hall’s frozen grave in northern Greenland was opened, forensic scientists were finally able to reach a shocking conclusion.
Now, telling the complete story for the first time, bestselling author Bruce Henderson has researched original transcripts of the U.S. Navy inquests, personal papers of Captain Hall, autopsy and forensic reports relating to the century-old crime, the ship’s original log, and personal journals kept by crewmen to bring to life one of the most mysterious tragedies of American exploration.

In February 1966, U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler was shot down over “neutral Laos.” He crashed deep in territory controlled by North Vietnamese army regulars and the communist Pathet Lao, who would eventually capture him and hold him prisoner in a fortified jungle prisoner-of-war camp.
But German-born Dengler was no ordinary prisoner. Already a legend in the Navy for his escape and evasion skills-amply demonstrated during training in the California desert-he would initiate, plan, and lead an organized escape from the POW camp, becoming the longest-held American to escape captivity during the Vietnam War. Caught in a most desperate situation, imprisoned not only by the enemy but by the jungle itself, Dengler’s heroic impulse was to not only get himself out but to free all the other POWs-Americans, Thai, and Chinese-some of whom had been held for years.
In a surreal scene of brotherhood and celebration, Dengler returned to his aircraft carrier, the USS Ranger, six months after being shot down-emaciated and ravaged with strange tropical illnesses, but very much alive and joyous to be so-only two weeks before the ship was due to leave the Gulf of Tonkin and return home.
Bruce Henderson served with Dengler aboard Ranger off the coast of Vietnam and here tells Dengler’s complete story for the first time, drawing on extensive interviews with the intrepid pilot, his squadron mates, friends, and family, as well as declassified military archival materials, some now available for the first time, and personal letters and journals. Henderson’s riveting account amply demonstrates why Dengler’s story of unending optimism, innate courage, loyalty, and survival against overwhelming odds remains for his fellow flyers and shipmates the best and brightest memory of their generation’s war.

From the bestselling author of Hero Found comes the incredible true story of one of the greatest military rescues of all time, the 1945 World War II prison camp raid at Los Banos in the Philippines–a tale of daring, courage, and heroism that joins the ranks of Ghost Soldiers, Unbroken, and The Boys of Pointe du Hoc.

In February 1945, as the U.S. victory in the Pacific drew nearer, the Japanese army grew desperate, and its soldiers guarding U.S. and Allied POWs more sadistic. Starved, shot and beaten, many of the 2,146 prisoners of the Los Banos prison camp in the Philippines–most of them American men, women and children–would not survive much longer unless rescued soon.

Deeply concerned about the half-starved and ill-treated prisoners, General Douglas MacArthur assigned to the 11th Airborne Division a dangerous rescue mission deep behind enemy lines that became a deadly race against the clock. The Los Banos raid would become one of the greatest triumphs of that war or any war; hailed years later by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell: “I doubt that any airborne unit in the world will ever be able to rival the Los Banos prison raid. It is the textbook operation for all ages and all armies.”

Combining personal interviews, diaries, correspondence, memoirs, and archival research, Rescue at Los Banos tells the story of a remarkable group of prisoners–whose courage and fortitude helped them overcome hardship, deprivation, and cruelty–and of the young American soldiers and Filipino guerrillas who risked their lives to save them.

Joining the ranks of Unbroken, Band of Brothers, and Boys in the Boat, the little-known saga of young German Jews, dubbed The Ritchie Boys, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, came of age in America, and returned to Europe at enormous personal risk as members of the U.S. Army to play a key role in the Allied victory.

In 1942, the U.S. Army unleashed one of its greatest secret weapons in the battle to defeat Adolf Hitler: training nearly 2,000 German-born Jews in special interrogation techniques and making use of their mastery of the German language, history, and customs. Known as the Ritchie Boys, they were sent in small, elite teams to join every major combat unit in Europe, where they interrogated German POWs and gathered crucial intelligence that saved American lives and helped win the war.

Though they knew what the Nazis would do to them if they were captured, the Ritchie Boys eagerly joined the fight to defeat Hitler. As they did, many of them did not know the fates of their own families left behind in occupied Europe. Taking part in every major campaign in Europe, they collected key tactical intelligence on enemy strength, troop and armored movements, and defensive positions. A postwar Army report found that more than sixty percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from the Ritchie Boys.

Bruce Henderson draws on personal interviews with many surviving veterans and extensive archival research to bring this never-before-told chapter of the Second World War to light. Sons and Soldiers traces their stories from childhood and their escapes from Nazi Germany, through their feats and sacrifices during the war, to their desperate attempts to find their missing loved ones in war-torn Europe. Sons and Soldiers is an epic story of heroism, courage, and patriotism that will not soon be forgotten.

For ten years, the California Interstate 5 highway was haunted by a dangerous serial killer. Incredibly skilled at staying ahead of the investigators as the bodies started to pile up, there wasn’t enough evidence to charge the culprit with murder even once he’d been identified. Instead, they had to build a first-degree murder case in a few months while the killer was locked up on an assault conviction. Key to this was a cast of four: Vito Bertocchini, the burly ex-street cop who took the killing of a beautiful young woman personally; Kay Maulsby, the rookie homicide detective who helped unmask the killer; Ray Biondi, who fought severe budget cuts that threatened to derail the investigation; and criminalist Faye Springer, who attempted to tie the suspect to his victims through subtle but persuasive microscopic evidence.
Drawing on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with these investigators, as well as other important figures such as the killer’s reclusive wife, #1 New York Times bestselling author Bruce Henderson builds a fascinating portrait of this unrepentant murderer.