Browse Titles (click on the book cover for additional exploration)
Fortress Rabaul: The Battle for the Southwest Pacific, January 1942 - April 1943
Zenith Press, 2010; 416 pages, 32 black & white photographs.
For most of World War II, the mention of Japan's most notorious stronghold sent shudders through thousands of Allied airmen. Some called it “Fortress Rabaul,” an apt name for the headquarters of the Imperial Japanese forces in the Southwest Pacific. Award-winning historian Bruce Gamble chronicles the stronghold’s crucial role in Japanese operations during the first sixteen months of the war. Millions of square feet of housing and storage facilities supported a hundred thousand soldiers and naval personnel. Simpson Harbor and the airfields were the focus of hundreds of missions by Allied air forces. Fortress Rabaul details a critical and, until now, little understood chapter in the history of World War II.
Darkest Hour: The True Story of Lark Force at Rabaul - Australia's Worst Military Disaster of World War II
Zenith Press, 2006; 304 pages, 30 black & white photographs.
January 23, 1942, New Britain. It was 2:30 a.m., the darkest hour of the day and, for the defenders of this Southwest Pacific island, soon to be the war's darkest hour. Consisting of fifteen hundred soldiers and six nurses, Lark Force had been deployed to New Britain to fortify and defend Rabaul, capital of Australia's mandated territories. Darkest Hour is a gut-wrenching account of courage and sacrifice, folly and disaster, as seen through the eyes of the few who survived. Bruce Gamble, the critically acclaimed author of Black Sheep One, follows key individuals—soldiers and junior officers, an American citizen and an Army nurse among them—through their experiences in Lark Force. Their stories comprise a harrowing picture of the Australian forces overrun and driven into the jungle, prey to the unforgiving environment and a cruel enemy that massacred its prisoners—and tormented further by fate, when a Japanese ship transporting prisoners was torpedoed by an American submarine.
Black Sheep One: The Life of Gregory "Pappy" Boyington
Presidio Press, 2000; 440 pages, 32 black & white photographs.
Black Sheep One is the first biography of legendary warrior, lover, drinker, and World War II hero Gregory Boyington. Blessed with inveterate luck, the stubbornly independent Boyington lived a life that went beyond what one might expect in the most imaginative fiction. An exhaustively researched true story, Black Sheep One will amaze readers while standing as a cautionary tale.
The Black Sheep: The Definitive Account of Marine Fighting Squadron 214 in World War II
Presidio Press, 1998; 496 pages, 32 black & white photographs.
The first comprehensive account of VMF-214 in World War II, The Black Sheep is a detailed combat narrative filled with fascinating personal vignettes about the men who manned the most famous fighter squadron in American history.
