Kirjahaku

The aircraft carrier USS Forrestal was preparing to launch attacks into North Vietnam when one of its jets accidentally fired a rocket into an aircraft occupied by pilot John McCain. A huge fire ensued, and McCain barely escaped before a 1,000-pound bomb on his plane exploded, causing a chain reaction with other bombs on surrounding planes. The crew struggled for days to extinguish the fires, but, in the end, the tragedy took the lives of 134 men. For thirty-five years, the terrible loss of life has been blamed on the sailors themselves, but this meticulously documented history shows that they were truly the victims and heroes.

In 1972, the U.S. was embroiled in an unpopular war in Vietnam, and the USS Kitty Hawk was headed to the gulf of Tonkin. Its five thousand men, cooped up for the longest at-sea tour of the war rioted - or, as this book suggests, mutinied. Disturbingly, the lines were drawn racially, black against white. By the time order was restored, careers were in tatters. Although the incident became a turning point for race relations in the Navy, this story remained buried within U.S. Navy archives for decades. With action pulled straight from a high seas thriller, Gregory A. Freeman uses eyewitness accounts and a careful and unprecidented examination of the Navy's records to refute the official story of the incident, make a convincing case for the U.S. Navy's first mutiny, and sheds light on this seminal event in American history.

Published to glowing reviews, The Last Mission of the Wham Bam Boys tells the riveting story of a nine-man American bomber crew after they were forced to bail out over Germany in August, 1944. Quickly taken prisoner by a mob of angry farmers, shopkeepers, railroad workers, women, and children, the soldiers were marched into the nearby town of Russelsheim and assaulted with stones, bricks, and wooden clubs before being left for dead at the nearby cemetery. Drawing from trial records, government archives, interviews with family members, and personal letters, author Gregory A. Freeman follows two army officers charged with investigating the murders, and brings to life the dramatic story of how the depravations of war led the citizens of a sleepy German village to commit horrific acts.