Aces Against Japan

ACES AGAINST JAPAN The American Aces Speak

Eric Hammel In this superb, originally conceived offering, noted military historian, Eric Hammel brings us first-person accounts from thirty-nine American fighter aces who blasted their way across the skies of the Pacific and East Asia from December 7, 1941, until the final air battles over Japan in August 1945.



Coupled with a clear view of America's far-flung air war against Japan, Hammel's detailed interviews bring out the most thrilling in-the-cockpit experiences of the air combat that the Pacific War’s best Army, Navy, and Marine pilots have chosen to tell.



Meet Frank Holmes, who defied death in an outmoded P-36 while clad in a seersucker suit he had worn to mass earlier that morning. Fly with Scott McCuskey as he single-handedly takes out two waves of Japanese dive-bombers that are attacking his precious aircraft carrier off Midway. Sweat out the last drops of fuel in a defective Marine Wildcat fighter as Medal of Honor recipient Jeff DeBlanc bores ahead to his target to keep the faith with the bomber crews he has been assigned to protect.



Hammel has collected some of the very best air-combat tales from America's war with Japan. Combined with the four other volumes in The American Aces Speak series, this work will stand as an enduring testament to the brave men who fought the first and last air war in which high-performance, piston-engine fighters held sway.



These are stories of bravery and survival, of men and machines pitted against one another in heart-stopping, unforgiving high-speed aerial combat. The American Aces Speak is a highly-charged emotional rendering of what men felt in the now-dim days of personal combat at the very edge of our living national history. There was never a war like it, and there never will be again. These are America's eagles, and the stories are their own, in their very own words.

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