A stirring narrative of World War II’s final major battle–the Pacific war’s largest, bloodiest, most savagely fought campaign–the last of its kind.

On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, more than 184,000 US troops began landing on the only Japanese home soil invaded during the Pacific war. Just 350 miles from mainland Japan, Okinawa was to serve as a forward base for Japan’s invasion in the fall of 1945.

Nearly 140,000 Japanese and auxiliary soldiers fought with suicidal tenacity from hollowed-out, fortified hills and ridges. Under constant fire and in the rain and mud, the Americans battered the defenders with artillery, aerial bombing, naval gunfire, and every infantry tool. Waves of Japanese kamikaze and conventional warplanes sank 36 warships, damaged 368 others, and killed nearly 5,000 US seamen.

When the slugfest ended after 82 days, more than 125,000 enemy soldiers lay dead–along with 7,500 US ground troops. Tragically, more than 100,000 Okinawa civilians perished while trapped between the armies. The brutal campaign persuaded US leaders to drop the atomic bomb instead of invading Japan.

Utilizing accounts by US combatants and Japanese sources, author Joseph Wheelan endows this riveting story of the war’s last great battle with a compelling human dimension.

A unique and compelling examination of the Civil War’s “turning point”–forty crucial days in the spring of 1864 that turned the tide for the Union

In the spring of 1864, Robert E. Lee faced a new adversary: Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. Named commander of all Union armies in March, Grant quickly went on the offensive against Lee in Virginia. On May 4 Grant’s army struck hard across the Rapidan River into north central Virginia, with Lee’s army contesting every mile. They fought for forty days until, finally, the Union army crossed the James River and began the siege of Petersburg.

The campaign cost ninety thousand men–the largest loss the war had seen. While Grant lost nearly twice as many men as Lee did, he could replace them. Lee could not and would never again mount another major offensive. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox less than a year later was the denouement of the drama begun in those crucial forty days.

Two centuries ago, without congressional or public debate, Thomas Jefferson, a president who is thought of today as peaceable, launched America’s first war on foreign soil—a war against terror. The enemy was Muslim; the war was waged unconventionally, with commandos, native troops, and encrypted intelligence, and launched from foreign bases.

For nearly two hundred years, the Barbary pirates had haunted the Mediterranean, enslaving tens of thousands of Europeans and extorting millions of dollars from their countries in a mercenary holy war against Christendom. Sailing in sleek corsairs built for speed and plunder, the Barbary pirates attacked European and American merchant shipping with impunity, triumphing as much by terror as force of arms.

The author traces the events leading to Jefferson’s belief that peace with the Barbary States and respect from Europe could be achieved only through the “medium of war.”

A sweeping narrative history — the first in over twenty years — of America’s first major offensive of World War II, the brutal, no-quarter-given campaign to take Japanese-occupied Guadalcanal

From early August until mid-November of 1942, US Marines, sailors, and pilots struggled for dominance against an implacable enemy: Japanese soldiers, inculcated with the bushido tradition of death before dishonor, avatars of bayonet combat — close-up, personal, and gruesome. The glittering prize was Henderson Airfield. Japanese planners knew that if they neutralized the airfield, the battle was won. So did the Marines who stubbornly defended it.

The outcome of the long slugfest remained in doubt under the pressure of repeated Japanese air, land, and sea operations. And losses were heavy. At sea, in a half-dozen fiery combats, the US Navy fought the Imperial Japanese Navy to a draw, but at a cost of more than 4,500 sailors. More American sailors died in these battles off Guadalcanal than in all previous US wars, and each side lost 24 warships. On land, more than 1,500 soldiers and Marines died, and the air war claimed more than 500 US planes. Japan’s losses on the island were equally devastating — starving Japanese soldiers called it “the island of death.”

But when the attritional struggle ended, American Marines, sailors, and airmen had halted the Japanese juggernaut that for five years had whirled through Asia and the Pacific. Guadalcanal was America’s first major ground victory against Japan and, most importantly, the Pacific War’s turning point.

Published on the 75th anniversary of the battle and utilizing vivid accounts written by the combatants at Guadalcanal, along with Marine Corps and Army archives and oral histories, Midnight in the Pacific is both a sweeping narrative and a compelling drama of individual Marines, soldiers, and sailors caught in the crosshairs of history.

Alongside Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip H.
Sheridan is the least known of the triumvirate of generals most
responsible for winning the Civil War. Yet, before Sherman’s famous
march through Georgia, it was General Sheridan who introduced
scorched-earth warfare to the South, and it was his Cavalry Corps that
compelled Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Sheridan’s
innovative cavalry tactics and “total war” strategy became staples of
twentieth-century warfare.After the war, Sheridan ruthlessly
suppressed the raiding Plains Indians much as he had the Confederates-by killing warriors and burning villages-but he also defended
reservation Indians from corrupt agents and contractors. Sheridan, an
enthusiastic hunter and conservationist, later ordered the U.S. cavalry to
occupy and operate Yellowstone National Park to safeguard it from
commercial exploitation.

As the Confederacy steadily crumbled under the Union army’s relentless hammering, dramatic developments in early 1865 brought the bloody war to a swift climax and denouement. Their Last Full Measure relates these thrilling events, which followed one another like falling dominoes-from Fort Fisher’s capture to the burning of South Carolina’s capital to the fall of Petersburg and Richmond and, ultimately, to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and Lincoln’s assassination.
Acclaimed historian Joseph Wheelan braids the disparate events into a compelling, fast-paced account of powerful armies; civil and military leaders, both flawed and splendid; and ordinary people, black and white, struggling to survive the war’s wreckage in Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas.