As a young Royal Air Force technician stationed in Malaya in 1941, the author was ordered on a clandestine mission to Japanese-occupied Indo-China where he heard of the existence of a Japanese naval task force secretly on its way to Hawaii, intent on annihilating the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. He also learned of Japan's intentions to simultaneously decimate ...
In 1844 the USS Yorktown sailed from New York, as part of the U.S. Navy's newly established African Squadron, to interdict slave ships leaving the African coast. Aboard the sloop of war, Master's Mate John C. Lawrence, an educated New Yorker in his early twenties, kept a private journal describing what happened during the extraordinary two-year voyage and his reactions ...
Foreword by Richard Holbrooke
Five American and three Vietnamese participants in the early days of U.S. involvement in southeast Asia compellingly argue that the failure of American policy in Vietnam was not inevitable. The common theme of their individual essays suggests that the war in Vietnam might have had a much different—and far less tragic—outcome if U.S. policy makers had ...