Warbird Books: 27 books

When Japanese planes laid waste to Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, the United States had just one air combat unit on the continent of Asia. That was the 1st American Volunteer Group - sponsored by the White House, equipped and paid by a U.S. loan, but officially part of the Chinese...

The Second World War -- the worst thing that ever happened! For Poland, the War began in September 1939 when Germany invaded from the west, and Russia from the east. Among their victims was a five-year-old named Basia Deszberg, whose father and brother were shot in the Katyn Forest massacres. Meanwhile...

In 1941, Glen Edwards learned to fly in a fabric-covered biplane. Seven years later, he died in the crash of the Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing, the Air Force’s most advanced jet warplane and forerunner of the B-2 Stealth bomber of today. As a combat pilot in North Africa and Italy during World War...

John Boyd was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, an instructor at the US Air Force Fighter Weapons School, and arguably America's greatest military thinker of the 20th Century. His concept of the OODA Loop helped guide the US military during two wars against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. This 4000-word 'long...

When young Eddie Gillespie discovers a World War II airplane in the jungle, with a grinning skeleton at the controls, he sets a story in motion. Two American fighter pilots in the Chinese Air Force, with their English and Burmese girlfriends, and a Japanese suicide pilot whose name happens to mean...

In June 1940, the U.S. Coast Guard set out to survey the coast of Greenland, the largest island in the world--and the coldest. A year and a half before the country entered the Second World War, the United States was looking for a place to put an airfield that would serve as a bridge to Europe. (For...

The Flying Tigers were the most famous fighter pilots ever to fly for the United States, yet officially they part of the Chinese Air Force. Who were these men, where did they come from, and what happened to them after their service with the American Volunteer Group? Novelist (and prize-winning...

In December 1941, the Japanese Imperial Army came ashore on the British colony of Malaya. In support of that invasion, its air arm soon began to raid neighboring Burma and especially its seaport and capital city of Rangoon, protected by a weak squadron of Royal Air Force Brewster Buffaloes and an...

Cowboy was handsome, flamboyant, courageous, clever, and cruel. He got his nickname from the Green Berets who worked with him in the Highlands of South Vietnam in the 1960s. "You've got to take the bad with the good," one Special Forces captain explained. "And Cowboy is a good interpreter."...

Olga Greenlaw kept the War Diary of the American Volunteer Group--the Flying Tigers--while those gallant mercenaries defended Burma and China from Japanese aggression during the opening months of the Pacific War. Returning to the United States in 1942, she wrote The Lady and the Tigers, which war...

"The High Country Illuminator created Avalon by climbing to the fourth tower of old Number One lift and crying: 'Lest there be light!'" Thus begins the madcap adventure of a ski-bum winter toward the end of the 1960s. HCI is otherwise known as George Togalok, a Native American from the...

"A richly colorful novel," said the New York Times, but in the author's home town, the bookstore manager kept it under the counter and sold it only to those who dared ask for it. Woodstock was still four years in the future, and American students were more concerned about nuclear weapons...

In the spring of 1942, Noel Bacon returned from China, one of Claire Chennault's "Flying Tigers" who had won fame as the defenders of Burma. He had been credited with three air-to-air victories over Rangoon, and shared the credit for another Japanese fighter destroyed on the ground during...