Julesburg Public Library

On a May afternoon in 1943, an American military plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane���s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary sagas of the Second World War. The lieutenant���s name...

The story of how the U.S. Air Force, a service damaged by the Vietnam experience, reinvented itself through vision, determination, and hard work, and of how war itself has changed fundamentally in the last decade of this century, not only in the new dominance of air power but in all its aspects.

"Masters of the Air is a narrative history of the bomber war in World War Two. The U.S. had two air forces conducting strategic bombing in Europe during the war, the Eighth and the Fifteenth. The Eighth was the more powerful and was the one that bombed Germany. Masters of the Air is the story of the Eighth Air Force. The American bomber war began in the summer of 1942 with a strike by a dozen Flying Fortresses (B-17s), or "Forts," as they were called,...

Following 9/11, a small band of Special Forces soldiers secretly entered Afghanistan and rode to war on horseback against the Taliban. Outnumbered forty to one, they pursued the enemy across the mountainous terrain and captured the strategic city of Mazari-Sharif. The bone-weary Americans were welcomed as liberators, and overjoyed Afghans thronged the streets. Then the action took an unexpected turn: the Horse Soldiers were ambushed.

They were called Easy Company, but their mission was never easy. Immortalized as the Band of Brothers, they suffered 150% casualties while liberating Europe, an unparalleled record of bravery under fire. Dick Winters was their commander, and this is his story based on his wartime diary. Only Winters was present from the activation of Easy Company until the war's end. On D-Day, Dick Winters parachuted into France and assumed leadership of the company...

"In 1942, America's deadliest fighter pilot, or "ace of aces" -- the legendary Eddie Rickenbacker -- offered a bottle of bourbon to the first U.S. fighter pilot to break his record of twenty-six enemy planes shot down. Seizing on the challenge to motivate his men, General George Kenney promoted what they would come to call the "race of aces" as a way of boosting the spirits of his war-weary command. What developed was a wild three-year sprint for...

In 1943, while World War II raged on in the Pacific Theater, Lieutenant Louis Zamperini was the only survivor of a deadly plane crash in the middle of the ocean. Zamperini had a troubled youth, yet honed his athletic skills and made it all the way to the 1934 Olympics in Berlin. However, what lay before him was a physical gauntlet unlike anything he had encountered before: thousands of miles of open ocean, a small raft, and no food or water.

Traces the story of a daredevil bomber pilot and his misfit crew who in 1943 engaged the Japanese in what became history's longest dogfight, changing the course of the war through their heroic acts of sacrifice.