Summary of Larry Alexander's Shadows in the Jungle


Book Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The Alamo Scouts were America’s smallest elite fighting force, and their mission was to infiltrate Japanese lines and gather intelligence. They were trained to get the hell out of there in one piece. #2 The team’s first mission was to land on the coast of New Guinea and retrieve intelligence on the Japanese. They landed near a small glow, which was a Japanese signal fire. They waited for any sounds of alarm, and when none came, they began moving forward. #3 After a two-hour journey, the team arrived at their destination. They set up an observation post, and watched as Japanese soldiers passed by. Some without weapons and all looking exhausted and hungry. #4 The team had spent the afternoon hours slowly making their way through thick brush and muddy swamps. They were exhausted, but it was important to keep moving. They wanted to at least reach the Mabaf River, another three hours away.




Shadows in the Jungle


Book Description

Drawing on personal interviews with and recollections by veterans, the author of Biggest Brother chronicles the exploits of the Alamo Scouts, members of an elite Army reconnaissance unit during World War II, a group that spent weeks behind enemy lines to gather much needed intelligence for Allied forces in the Pacific.




Silent Warriors of World War II


Book Description

The Alamo Scouts, Sixth Army's Special Reconnaissance Unit of World War II, provided intelligence-gathering and tactical reconnaissance in the Pacific Theatre. During the war, they performed over 106 successful missions in the Admiralty Islands, New Guinea and the Philippines, most deep behind enemy lines. The Scouts took part in liberating two POW camps. The Scouts evolved from a simple reconnaissance unit to a sophisticated intelligence unit supplying and coordinating large-scale guerilla operations on Leyte and Luzon. They did this without losing a man, killed or captured. The Scouts are now recognised as forerunners of the modern Special Forces.




Lapham's Raiders


Book Description

On December 8, 1941, the day after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invaded the Philippine Islands, catching American forces unprepared and forcing their eventual surrender. Among the American soldiers who managed to avoid capture was twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Robert Lapham, who was to play a major role in the resistance to the brutal Japanese occupation. After emerging from the jungles of Bataan and in the face of daunting odds, Lapham built from scratch and commanded a devastating guerrilla force behind enemy lines. His Luzon Guerrilla Armed Forces (LGAF) evolved into an army of thirteen thousand men that eventually controlled the entire northern half of Luzon's great Central Plain, an area of several thousand square miles. This personal account of the Luzon guerrilla operations is woven into the larger context of the war. Lapham and Norling shed light on the clandestine activities of the LGAF and other guerrilla operations, assess the damages of war to the Filipino people, and discuss the United States' postwar treatment of the newly independent Philippine nation. They also offer a fuller understanding of Japan's wartime failures in the Philippines, the Pacific, and elsewhere in Asia, and of America's postwar failure to fully realize opportunities there.




American Amphibious Gunboats in World War II


Book Description

As the United States began its campaign against numerous Japanese-held islands in the Pacific, Japanese tactics required them to develop new weapons and strategies. One of the most crucial to the island assaults was a new group of amphibious gunboats that could deliver heavy fire close in to shore as American forces landed. These gunboats were also to prove important in the interdiction of inter-island barge traffic and, late in the war, the kamikaze threat. Several variations of these gunboats were developed, based on the troop carrying LCI(L). They included three conversions of the LCI(L), with various combinations of guns, rockets and mortars, and a fourth gunboat, the LCS(L), based on the same hull but designed as a weapons platform from the beginning. By the end of the war the amphibious gunboats had proven their worth.




Biggest Brother


Book Description

The New York Times bestseller that tells the true story of the life of Major Dick Winters, the man who led the Band of Brothers in World War II. Look for the Band of Brothers miniseries, now available to stream on Netflix! In every band of brothers, there is always one who looks out for the others. They were Easy Company, 101st Army Airborne—the World War II fighting unit legendary for their bravery against nearly insurmountable odds and their loyalty to one another in the face of death. Every soldier in this band of brothers looked to one man for leadership, devotion to duty, and the embodiment of courage: Major Dick Winters. This is the riveting story of an ordinary man who became an extraordinary hero. After he enlisted in the army’s arduous new Airborne division, Winters’s natural combat leadership helped him rise through the ranks, but he was never far from his men. Decades later, Stephen E. Ambrose’s Band of Brothers made him famous around the world. Full of never-before-published photographs, interviews, and Winters’s candid insights, Biggest Brother is the fascinating, inspirational story of a man who became a soldier, a leader, and a living testament to the valor of the human spirit—and of America.




A Higher Call


Book Description

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER: “Beautifully told.”—CNN • “A remarkable story...worth retelling and celebrating.”—USA Today • “Oh, it’s a good one!”—Fox News A “beautiful story of a brotherhood between enemies” emerges from the horrors of World War II in this New York Times bestseller by the author of Devotion, now a Major Motion Picture. December, 1943: A badly damaged American bomber struggles to fly over wartime Germany. At the controls is twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Charlie Brown. Half his crew lay wounded or dead on this, their first mission. Suddenly, a Messerschmitt fighter pulls up on the bomber’s tail. The pilot is German ace Franz Stigler—and he can destroy the young American crew with the squeeze of a trigger... What happened next would defy imagination and later be called “the most incredible encounter between enemies in World War II.” The U.S. 8th Air Force would later classify what happened between them as “top secret.” It was an act that Franz could never mention for fear of facing a firing squad. It was the encounter that would haunt both Charlie and Franz for forty years until, as old men, they would search the world for each other, a last mission that could change their lives forever.




The Scramble for the Amazon and the "Lost Paradise" of Euclides da Cunha


Book Description

The fortunes of the late nineteenth century’s imperial and industrial powers depended on a single raw material—rubber—with only one source: the Amazon basin. And so began the scramble for the Amazon—a decades-long conflict that found Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States fighting with and against the new nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil for the forest’s riches. In the midst of this struggle, Euclides da Cunha, engineer, journalist, geographer, political theorist, and one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers, led a survey expedition to the farthest reaches of the river, among the world’s most valuable, dangerous, and little-known landscapes. The Scramble for the Amazon tells the story of da Cunha’s terrifying journey, the unfinished novel born from it, and the global strife that formed the backdrop for both. Haunted by his broken marriage, da Cunha trekked through a beautiful region thrown into chaos by guerrilla warfare, starving migrants, and native slavery. All the while, he worked on his masterpiece, a nationalist synthesis of geography, philosophy, biology, and journalism he named the Lost Paradise. Da Cunha intended his epic to unveil the Amazon’s explorers, spies, natives, and brutal geopolitics, but, as Susanna B. Hecht recounts, he never completed it—his wife’s lover shot him dead upon his return. At once the biography of an extraordinary writer, a masterly chronicle of the social, political, and environmental history of the Amazon, and a superb translation of the remaining pieces of da Cunha’s project, The Scramble for the Amazon is a work of thrilling intellectual ambition.




Some Survived


Book Description

Manny Lawton was a twenty-three-year-old Army captain on April 8, 1942, when orders came to surrender to the Japanese forces invading the Philippine Islands. The next day, he and his fellow American and Filipino prisoners set out on the infamous Bataan Death March--a forced six-day, sixty-mile trek under a broiling tropical sun during which approximately eleven thousand men died or were bayoneted, clubbed, or shot to death by the Japanese. Yet terrible as the Death March was, for Manny Lawton and his comrades it was only the beginning. When the war ended in August 1945, it is estimated that some 57 percent of the American troops who had surrendered on Bataan had perished. But this is not a chronicle of despair. It is, instead, the story of how men can suffer even the most desperate conditions and, in their will to retain their humanity, triumph over appalling adversity. An epic of quiet heroism, Some Survived is a harrowing, poignant, and inspiring tale that lifts the heart.




Raider


Book Description

Raider is the true story of the legendary soldier who performed more POW raids than any other American in history. He went into battle as a boy. And on one of the most daring missions of World War II, he became a man-- and the perfect soldier for America's next wars... Galen Charles Kittleson was slight, modest, and born to wage war. The son of an Iowa farmer, Kittleson volunteered in 1943 and caught the eye of his commanders. By 1945, PFC Kittleson was selected for the Army's smallest elite unit, the Alamo Scouts. While U.S. forces were pushing back the Japanese in the Pacific, the Alamo scouts unleashed legendary raids deep behind enemy lines, including the liberation of over 500 starved, beaten prisoners of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines. For Kittleson, a career as a raider had just begun... Charles W. Sasser chronicles the remarkable journey that was Kit Kittleson's courageous life in the service of his country. Now a veteran after first going to war as a boy twenty-five years ago, Kittleson volunteered for one last mission-- the most extraordinary and daring POW raid ever attempted by secret American Special Forces in Vietnam...




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