In December 1941, the War Department sent two transports and a freighter carrying 103 P-40 fighters and their pilots to the Philipines to bolster Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Far East Air Force. They were then diverted to Australia, with new orders to ferry the P-40s to the Philippines from Australia through the Dutch East Indies. But on the same day as the second transport reached its destination on January 12, 1942, the first of the key refueling stops in the East Indies fell to rapidly advancing Japanese forces, resulting in a break in their ferry route and another change in their orders. This time the pilots would fly their aircraft to Java to participate in the desperate Allied defense of that ultimate Japanese objective. Except for the pilots from the Philippines, almost all of the other pilots eventually assigned to the five provisional pursuit squadrons ordered to Java were recent graduates of flying school with just a few hours on the P-40. Only forty-three of them made it to their assigned destination; the rest suffered accidents in Australia, were shot down over Bali and Darwin, or were lost in the sinking of the USS Langley as it carried thirty-two of them to Java. Even those who did reach the secret field on Java wondered if they had been sacrificed for no purpose. As the Japanese air assault intensified daily, the Allied defense collapsed. Only eleven Japanese aircraft fell to the P-40s. Author William H. Bartsch has pored through personal diaries and memoirs of the participants, cross-checking these primary sources against Japanese aerial combat records of the period and supplementing them with official records and other American, Dutch, and Australian accounts. Bartsch’s thorough and meticulous research yields a narrative that situates the Java pursuit pilots’ experiences within the context of the overall strategic situation in the early days of the Pacific theater.
Covering both the theoretical and practical aspects of critical care,Irwin & Rippe’s Intensive Care Medicine, Ninth Edition, provides state-of-the-art, evidence-based knowledge for specialty physicians and non-physicians practicing in the adult intensive care environment. Drs. Craig M. Lilly, Walter A. Boyle, and Richard S. Irwin, along with a team of expert contributing authors and education expert, William F. Kelly, offer authoritative, comprehensive guidance from an interprofessional, collaborative, educational, and scholarly perspective, encompassing all adult critical care specialties.
The year is 1939 and Canada has just entered the war against Germany. The Germans conquered almost all of Europe and were poised to invade France or Great Britain. America attempts to remain neutral amid a growing feeling that it needs to be involved. To avoid being implicated in armed robbery, Paul Fortier leaves New York to live with his relatives in Quebec. He joins the Royal Canadian Air Force when he turns eighteen and is loaned to the RAF as a gunner. In a bomber raid over Stuttgart, his plane is badly damaged. He parachutes into occupied France, damaging his leg in the landing. In his effort to reach Switzerland, he takes refuge in a barn near the border. His life is about to change in ways he cannot imagine once his presence is discovered.
Buck Jones was a high school student and athlete consumed with the patriotic desire to join the military to help defeat the enemy in World War II. Upon graduation in 1942 from Mineola High School on Long Island he enlisted in the marines. When his patrol plane was shot down over the Pacific, the family was notified that the entire crew was missing in action and presumed dead. One person refused to accept that determination as final. Bucks mother, Lena, told him before he left home that he would survive the war and return home safely. She continued to pray that he would live and not for an instant did her faith waver. Buck, using his intelligence and following an inner voice, not only survived on an island in the Pacific but dealt a severe blow to the Japanese war effort. He returned home to a few surprises.
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