Showing titles in Armed Forces

A groundbreaking history of the Black Joke, the most famous member of the British Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadron, and the long fight to end the transatlantic slave trade. Initially a slaving vessel itself, the Black Joke was captured in 1827 and repurposed by the Royal Navy to catch its former compatriots. Over the next five years, the vessel liberated more enslaved people than any other in Britain’s West Africa Squadron.

This program includes a foreword written and read by Nicholas Irving. The thrilling combat memoir by special operations sniper Paul Martinez, who spent seven years in Special Operations and was a sniper assigned to 3rd Ranger Battalion. America has one force with the single mission of direct...

Only days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tapped Chester W. Nimitz to assume command of the Pacific Fleet. Nimitz transformed the devastated and dispirited Pacific fleet into the most powerful and commanding naval force in history. Facing demands from Washington to mount an early offensive, he had first to revive the depressed morale of the thousands of sailors, soldiers, and Marines who served under him. And of course, he also confronted a formidable and implacable enemy in the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Bloomsbury presents Tsushima 1905: Death of a Russian Fleet by Mark Lardas, read by Phillipe Bosher A highly illustrated study of the naval campaign of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, focusing on the decisive battle of Tsushima. Japan was closed to the world until 1854 and its technology...

At the beginning of the Second World War, a team of unlikely and ill-assorted characters assembled in their secret country headquarters. They had left their civilian roles as politicians, journalists, novelists and spies, advertisers, artists and even forgers, to work for a covert government organisation preparing to broadcast British propaganda into occupied territory. These men and women would become the Political Warfare Executive.

The definitive, myth-busting history of the wartime SAS – the real story behind the global BBC phenomenon Rogue Heroes, told by the only historian trusted by 75 original SAS veterans. This exciting new history reveals a story far more compelling and real than the dramatic liberties taken in...

The story of USS Phoenix, later known as ARA General Belgrano, is one of the most extraordinary naval odysseys of the twentieth century. From her birth in the shipyards of New Jersey to her fiery baptism at Pearl Harbour, from the island-hopping campaigns of the Pacific War to her second life under the Argentine flag, she lived two dramatic and contrasting existences. This book tells her complete story, exploring how a single warship came to embody the ambitions, tragedies, and controversies of two nations separated by oceans but linked by history.

In April 1975, the Vietnam War ended not with a treaty or a victory parade, but with helicopters lifting from a collapsing city. Operation Frequent Wind was the final evacuation of Saigon, carried out as South Vietnam disintegrated and the last American personnel prepared to leave a war that had exhausted political will, trust, and time. In Operation Frequent Wind, Miles Dunsford delivers a clear, human account of those final days. Moving from Washington’s political paralysis to the pressure inside the U.S.

Step aboard a wind-powered voyage through history—into the heart of one of the most influential, complex, and far-reaching colonial empires ever built. In The History of the Dutch Empire, discover how a small republic forged a global legacy through trade, naval dominance, and strategic colonial control. From the bustling canals of Amsterdam to the shores of Java, the plantations of Suriname, and the brief Dutch foothold in the Americas, this audiobook unpacks the intricate web of commerce, conquest, and governance that defined Dutch expansion.

Bloomsbury presents Operation Market-Garden 1944 (3): The British XXX Corps Missions by Ken Ford, read by Tom Alexander The final instalment in Osprey's trilogy on Operation Market-Garden, this is a fascinating account of the British XXX Corps assault towards the Rhine at Arnhem. Field Marshal...

On 6th June 1944, HMS Belfast supported troops in action on the beaches of Normandy in the campaign to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany. This audiobook recounts this extraordinary story, focusing on the dramatic events of 6th June but setting the context of the ship's history in the Arctic Convoy Service and Battle of North Cape. It describes the build-up to D-Day as seen and experienced by Belfast's people and explains her role in the longer Battle for Normandy. 

Sink 'Em All was originally published in 1951 by Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, the US Navy commander of the Pacific submarine fleet during World War II. Lockwood, in his leadership role, knew the skippers and crews of the submarines and retells their wartime successes and tragedies with an intimacy and realism often missing in second-hand accounts. 

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER"Absorbing history of an unlikely alliance.” - Kirkus Reviews From the New York Times bestselling authors of Ghosts of Honolulu comes their most harrowing true story yet. It's 1942, and New York City is at war. German U-boats are sinking ships just miles...

Here, in his own words, is the true story of America's wildest flying hero, of his extraordinary heroism, and of his greatest battle of all-the fight to survive. The World War II air war in the Pacific needed tough men like Colonel Pappy Boyington and his Black Sheep Squadron. The legendary Marine Corps officer and his bunch of misfits, outcasts, and daredevils gave a new definition to "hell-raising" - on the ground and in the skies.

Joe Pappalardo's Inferno tells the true story of the men who flew the deadliest missions of World War II, and an unlikely hero who received the Medal of Honor in the midst of the bloodiest military campaign in aviation history. There’s no higher accolade in the U.S. military than the Medal of...

Warship Builders is the first scholarly study of the US naval shipbuilding industry from the early 1920s to the end of World War II, when American shipyards produced the world's largest fleet that helped defeat the Axis powers in all corners of the globe. A colossal endeavor that absorbed billions and employed virtual armies of skilled workers, naval construction mobilized the nation's leading industrial enterprises in the shipbuilding, engineering, and steel industries to deliver warships whose technical complexity dwarfed that of any other weapons platform.

On the morning of June 4, 1942, doom sailed on Midway. Hoping to put itself within striking distance of Hawaii and California, the Japanese navy planned an ambush that would obliterate the remnants of the American Pacific fleet. On paper, the Americans had no chance of winning. They had fewer ships, slower fighters, and almost no battle experience. But because their codebreakers knew what was coming, the American navy was able to prepare an ambush of its own.

Bloomsbury presents Operation Market-Garden 1944 (1): The American Airborne Missions by Steven J. Zaloga, read by Tom Alexander Overshadowed by the dramatic British failure at Arnhem, the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were a vital component of Operation Market-Garden and succeeded in...

Jackie Moggridge was just nineteen when World War Two broke out. Determined to do her bit, she joined the Air Transport Auxiliary. Ferrying aircraft from factory to frontline was dangerous work, but there was also fun, friendship and even love in the air. At last the world was opening up to women... or at least it seemed to be.

Just days before Chad Williams was scheduled to report for basic training at the Great Lakes naval base, he turned on the television and was greeted with the horrifying image of his mentor and training partner, US Navy SEAL Scott Helvenston, being brutally murdered in a premeditated ambush on the streets of Fallujah, Iraq. Steeled in his resolve, Chad committed himself to completing the US military’s most difficult training to become a Navy SEAL - and avenge his friend’s death.