On the night before his ship was sunk, Len Olson’s life jacket disappeared. “Somebody else must have needed it more than I did,” Olson said during an interview last week. “My gun crew told me I had ...

Few Americans living today would do better than return a blank stare if asked with whom they had breakfast on Nov. 25, 1944. But for Edward Coyne, a Plainview World War II veteran who was serving ...

On October 21, 1944, a Japanese pilot smashed his plane into the bridge of HMAS Australia. And so the suicide cult of the kamikaze pilots was born. Defeat seemed only a matter of time unless they ...

But seventy-two years ago, the U.S. Navy faced a similar threat. By late 1944, the U.S. Navy was the mightiest fleet on Earth. The Nazi U-boat threat had been mostly vanquished, the Japanese surface ...

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THE DIVINE WIND (240 pp.)—Rikihei Inoguchi, Tadashi Nakajima and Roger Pineau—U.S. Naval Institute ($4.50). It was 1050 Philippine time when a small flight of Japanese planes pierced the defenses of ...