Books

December 1941. The Japanese strike force is already at sea.

But this time, America is ready.

When a brilliant young codebreaker at Station HYPO picks up a chilling pattern in Japan’s radio silence, his discovery reaches the Oval Office. President Roosevelt, haunted by a lifetime of political instinct, makes a fateful decision: fortify Hawaii,...

The war America won at Pearl Harbor is far from over.

December 7, 1941 was supposed to be Japan’s greatest victory. Instead, it became a trap. The Japanese fleet was expected. The American carriers were waiting. And when the smoke cleared over Pearl Harbor, Admiral Kimmel held the initiative—and Lieutenant Jack Gibson, the Ace of Pearl Harbor,...

The Philippine Sea is won. The carriers are gone, the supply lines are cut, and the Imperial Japanese Army is fighting a war it no longer knows how to win. But Japan has not surrendered. Jack Gibson commands the Lightning Squadron. Patton drives north through the mountains of northern Luzon. Yamamoto, in his cabin aboard Yamato, opens the...

Isoroku Yamamoto, on the bridge of the Nagato in December of 1941, told his staff he feared the strike at Pearl Harbor had done nothing but awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

He had been correct in every particular.

The giant is awake. The Combined Fleet has been destroyed in detail. The Philippines is American again....

Four hundred miles of cold water. That is all that stands between America and Tokyo now.

November 1943. The bargains struck with a Soviet Union fighting for its life have bought the United States something nobody expected: ground in the north. From the airfields of Karafuto, American fighters can reach the Japanese capital and come home.

In...

The Empire cannot win. It cannot be defended. And it will not stop.

1944. Japan is being taken apart in four places at once, by men with four different reasons.

In China, the largest army the Empire owns is still fighting and still winning ground in a war that stopped mattering a year ago, and nobody in Tokyo will order it home. In the hills of...

September 30, 1938. Neville Chamberlain steps off a plane at Heston Aerodrome waving a piece of paper signed by Adolf Hitler. “Peace for our time,” he tells the cheering crowd.

Four days later, his heart stops on a flight home from Paris. He is dead before the plane lands.

The Munich Agreement is signed. It is not ratified. Parliament has not...

ONE WAR HAS ENDED. ANOTHER HAS BEGUN. AND THE MEN WHO SURVIVED THE FIRST ARE ABOUT TO LEARN THAT FRANCE WAS THE EASY ONE.



Autumn 1939. France has fallen. Britain stands alone on an island that does not yet know how alone it is, with a Channel that is twenty-one miles wide and a navy that has to be everywhere at once.



In Berlin, a German general...

The Reich has won the continent. Now it has to hold it.

By the winter of 1940, Hitler commands more of Europe than Napoleon ever did. France is beaten. Moscow has fallen. Poland endures on borrowed time, and Britain stands alone behind a wall of grey Atlantic water, its lifeline being strangled one convoy at a time. In Berlin, they have started...

For a year the Germans have used it as a warning. In 1943 it stops being a warning and becomes a weather report.

On the fourth of August, 1942, the first American transports come out of the dark off Cap Blanc, and a captain named James Whitfield stands at the rail and does what four generations of his family have done at the start of every...

THE TIMES THAT TRY

The European War, Book Five

Baku is a funeral pyre. The Reich has one field left to reach, and two armies racing for it.

July 1943. Four hundred wells burn on the Caspian shore, lit by the Russians who left them, and the largest campfire in the world warms no engine in the German army. Rommel is going east, up the pipeline...