Although, even before firearms were available, soldiers such as archers were specially trained as elite marksmen, the focus of this book is on the history of sniping, mainly from distance, using firearms. The authors relate the fascinating and somewhat dark history of sniping and snipers t...

Even Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize winning survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, struggles with the question:  Why didn’t the Jews fight back?  And finally, in view of the circumstances--even now, who would believe what was happening?--he conc...

On September 17, 1944, in broad daylight, the Allies launched the largest airborne operation ever conducted. The objective: to secure a road in Nazi-occupied Holland and a bridge across the Rhine for ground troops to advance into Germany . . . a...

The Wilde Sau Geschwader JG 300 played a key role in the aerial defense of the Reich during the last two years of WWII but has never before been the subject of a serious and detailed study until now. This work thus fills a major void in the history of the war in the air. This chronicle has...

Perhaps more vexing than any part of the Vietnam War--Americas longest--was getting out. This book offers a chronicle of those last difficult years, 1972 and 1973, that is at once a detailed and thorough overview and at the same time a vividly p...

"Slaughter vividly conveys the reality of combat during World War II in his book with sweeping passages that literally place his reader on the battlefield beside him." Belvoir Eagle

The 82nd Airborne Division parachuted into history on 9 July 1943 when they led Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. Less than a year from their formation in Augus...

On the eve of the FBI's centenary, this book offers the first comprehensive illustrated account of the Bureaus 100-year history. Granted unprecedented access to the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and academy at Quantico,...

D-Day, June 6, 1944:  it was the biggest amphibious operation in history.  German Field Marshal Rommel, declared, “the enemy must be annihilated before he reaches our main battlefield,” the Allied Forces undertook a massive invasion of the...

For anyone who has ever wondered what its like to fly the SR-71 on a secret Mach 3 reconnaissance mission, this book has the answer. Flying the SR-71 Blackbird takes readers along on an operational mission that only a few Air Force pilots...

Our combat readiness to fight a conventional war is in freefall.  This is the alarm sounded with clarity, authority, and conviction in Victory at Risk, a veteran Army officer and policymaker’s deeply disturbing critique of today...

On the morning of March 1, 1942, the WWI-era destroyer USS Edsall--under orders to deliver some forty Army Air Force fighter crews to the beleaguered island of Java--split off from the USS Whipple and the tanker Pecos and was never s...

The Second Battle for Fallujah, dubbed Operation Phantom Fury, took place over an almost two-month period, from November 7 to December 23, 2004.  The Marine Corps’ biggest battle in Iraq to date, it was so prolonged and fierce that it has ente...

It was a tank battle exceeded in size and significance only by the famous defeat of Germany’s Panzer force near Kursk in 1943.  And yet, little is known about this weeklong clash of more than two thousand Soviet and German tanks in a stretch o...

          Like other volumes in the Spearhead series, this book takes readers to the cutting edge of warfare–for a close look at the make-up, operations, and performance of a military unit operating independently and forcefully at the ...

The first moon landing in July 1969 captured the imagination of the world as no subsequent “space spectacular” has.  Forty years later, space historian Piers Bizony has produced a stunning visual record of this unparalleled mission.   Draw...

In the aftermath of defeat in Vietnam, the American military cast about for answers--and, bizarrely, settled upon a view of warfare promulgated by a Prussian general in the 1830s, Carl von Clausewitz.  This doctrine was utterly inappropriate to ...

Some of the biggest battles fought by the Marines during World War II took place on tiny islands scattered throughout the western Pacific.  Among these, the battles for Tarawa and the Marshalls were some of the fiercest and most decisive of the ...

The legendary “band of brothers” in WWII in stirring words and pictures, from their historic landing in Normandy to the Allied victory in Europe.

Between late 1942 and early 1944, the Marines took part in a series of major campaigns in and around the Solomons--including New Georgia, Bougainville, and Cape Gloucester--all part of the effort to reach the Japanese at Rabaul. Eric Hammel has scoured the National Archives to unearth every...

Let one of the world's greatest aircraft artists shows you how to turn your airplane doodles into aviation masterpieces.   Whether you’re interested in limning the latest Dreamliner or Airbus A380 or depicting historic aircraft or dreaming up...

Commanded by Thomas J. Jackson and made up of the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 27th and 33rd Virginia Infantry Regiments, plus the Rockbridge Artillery Battery, the unit was officially Virginia's First Brigade.  This changed forever at the Battle of First Ma...

Once the stories have been told of battles won and lost, most of what happens in a war remains a mystery.  So it has been with accounts of World War II in the Pacific, a conflict whose nature is only obscured by the linear narrative.  In this b...

One of the bloodiest battles in Marine Corps history, Operation Stalemate, as Peleliu was called, was overshadowed by the Normandy landings.  It was also, in time, judged by most historians to have been unnecessary; though it had been conceived ...

Drawing recruits from all 48 states at the time of its inception, the 82nd Airborne earned the nickname “All American.”  And indeed, from its beginnings in 1917 to its service today in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 82nd has remained the nation...

John Crawford Vaughn was one of the most famous men in Tennessee in the mid-nineteenth century. He was the first man to raise an infantry regiment in the state--and one of the very last Confederate generals to surrender.  History has not...

The F-15A entered service in 1972 as "the first dedicated USAF air superiority fighter since the F-86 Sabre." More than three decades and myriad models and variants later, the F-15 is still the U.S. Air Force's premiere air superiority weapon, a ...

San Francisco Chronicle reporter and marine veteran Koopman was embedded in the Third Battalion, Fourth Marines, during the most recent war in Iraq. He enjoyed a close working relationship with the CO, the battalion sergeant major, and sev...

Among the most famous battles that American forces fought in World War II, the Battle of the Bulge helped define the U.S. soldier in the “Good War.” The sheer scale of destruction--with almost as many American soldiers killed during the battl...

This is a political history of nuclear weapons from the discovery of fission in 1938 to the nuclear train wreck that seems to loom in our future.  It is an account of where those weapons came from, how the technology surprisingly and covertly sp...

In 1967 Floyd Paseman joined the Central Intelligence Agency following successful service as an army officer in Germany. He was first stationed in the Far East, where he became fluent in Chinese language and culture, and then in Germany, at what ...

Descended from the F4F Wildcat (and sometimes called the Wildcat’s “big brother”), the Grumman F6F Hellcat debuted with the Pacific Fleet in mid-1943 and soon was taking on Japanese Zero fighters.  Over the next two years, the Hellcat pro...

Aside from nerves of steel, pinpoint precise targeting skills, and uncanny adaptability, what does it take to be a military sniper? This book lays out the details of training and traits of characte...