Showing results by author "Don Keith" in All Categories

Bold, brash, and brimming with courage, Chuck Yeager burst onto the scene as a national hero in 1947, when he became the first to fly an airplane faster than the speed of sound. Yet even before his days as America’s most famous test pilot, Yeager was a young fighter ace in the US Army Air Force, flying a P-51 Mustang over Nazi-occupied Europe. His exploits are the stuff of legend.

On July 21, 1944, a US Marine division landed on the beaches of Guam, a once sleepy island in the Pacific that had been seized from the Americans by the Japanese in the hours after Pearl Harbor. The Japanese would not be giving Guam up easily. The large enemy force defended the island viciously, punching holes through the American lines, attacking from the flanks, and eventually resorting to banzai suicide attacks. The fighting was bloody and brutal, every bit as deadly as Iwo Jima or Okinawa would be.

The Archerfish, a diesel powered Balao-class submarine crafted in the 1940s, won a unique, heroic place in military history and the memories of her crew members. Here is her story: from her assembly in New England and her dedication by Eleanor Roosevelt's personal secretary, to her service in World War II, where she broke the back of the Japanese Navy, and her critical role in the Cold War.

At the top of the world… at the bottom of the sea… a war has begun. Below the polar ice cap, an American nuclear submarine moves quietly in the frigid water, tailing a new Russian sub. But the usual, unspoken game of hide-and-seek between opposing captains ends when the Americans hear sounds of disaster and flooding, and the Russian sub sinks at a depth of a thousand feet. The American sub rushes to help, only to join its former quarry in the deep. The situation ignites tensions around the world.

Admiral Juan Valdez is the puppet master behind Venezuela's dictatorship. He has spent years modernizing Venezuela’s military while the poor of his country starved. All the while, Valdez was working toward his grand vision of seizing much of Latin America. Now, Admiral Valdez is convinced that Bolivia, Columbia, and Peru are all well within his grasp. And when the time is right, he will strike.

The Sea of Okhotsk north of the Japanese Home Islands is a cold and unforgiving place. Its icy, dark waters can change from a glass-smooth calm into a raging maelstrom in a heartbeat. The shores surrounding the sea, home to Siberian tigers and prowling wolf packs, are equally forbidding. Far from Mother Russia, beyond Siberia, it is a mostly forgotten land—even though it is the home of the Russian Navy's Pacific Fleet.

When an unimaginable fortune is discovered at the bottom of the sea, the US Navy must navigate the treacherous waters of greed, corruption, and espionage to stop a worldwide catastrophe.

Biding its time for decades, China has patiently lain in wait for its chance at global dominance. Long content to needle the West while secretly amassing intelligence, technology, and resources, the war chest is now full, and the gears of the colossus are grinding into motion. New arenas of modern battle emerge as China wages an all-out cyber assault on the West. And the more familiar tactics of brute strength play out in its bold attacks against sovereign neighbors. The scope of the Chinese menace draws the US into the melee.

Over the course of five combat patrols during the Pacific War, Commander Fluckey reinvented submarine warfare, pioneering audacious strategies to hunt and sink Japanese warships and merchant vessels. At the helm of the USS Barb, he directed his boat to attack warship convoys - never mind the lop-sided odds - and to slip into heavily defended enemy harbors to launch torpedoes at unsuspecting targets.

A belligerent Russia seeks to reunite the Soviet Union - starting with Lithuania. But as the US sends military support, Russia’s navy forces a dangerous face-off in the Atlantic. Meanwhile, two US submarines become ensnared in a perilous game of cat and mouse with a mysterious Russian craft. When the US president orders all vessels back to port, Commander Joe Glass and his fast attack submarines find a way to remain at sea to engage the enemy. But not all aboard the submarines are who they seem...and with a threatening storm bearing down, the consequences of betrayal could be deadly.

The Ice Diaries tells the incredible true story of Captain William R. Anderson and his crew's harrowing top-secret mission aboard the USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine. Bristling with newly classified, never-before-published information, The Ice Diaries takes listeners on a dangerous journey beneath the vast, unexplored Arctic ice cap during the height of the Cold War.

A terrorist mastermind will start World War III...unless a US submarine crew and a crack team of Navy SEALs can stop him first.

Mush Morton was a warrior without peer. At the helm of the USS Wahoo he completely changed the way the submarines fought in the Pacific War. He would relentlessly attack the Japanese at every opportunity, burning through his supply of torpedoes in record time on every patrol. Over the course of only nine months and five patrols, Morton racked up an astounding list of achievements, including being the first American skipper to wipe out an entire enemy convoy single-handedly.

A DEA agent investigating the Asian drug trade stumbles upon a deadly plot. A Navy SEAL team is tasked with finding stolen Russian nuclear weapons in east Asia. And a young Naval Academy midshipman becomes trapped aboard a hijacked submarine. Together, this unlikely American team must battle radical terrorists and criminal drug syndicates in the deadliest waters on Earth.

As the winds of change sweep through South America, chaos and uncertainty reign. A radical political takeover looms, threatening to plunge the entire Western Hemisphere into turmoil. And the unrest doesn't stop there. Seeing the destabilization, China moves to exert its influence economically and politically—further threatening peace and freedom in the region. But hope is not lost-a team of elite Navy SEALs and one submarine race to determine and then confront the threat. With the fate of the region hanging in the balance, they embark on a dangerous—and likely impossible—mission.

Arriving as a fresh US Army Air Forces pilot in New Guinea in late 1942, Richard Bong wasted no time taking on the Japanese, shooting down two planes in an early skirmish—an action that earned him a Silver Star. Over the next two years, Bong would amass the US armed forces’ most impressive record of aerial victories of the entire war, surpassing even the great Eddie Rickenbacker’s World War I tally and notching forty kills. In December 1944, he was personally awarded the Medal of Honor by General Douglas MacArthur.

Juan de Santiago is not only a billionaire coca grower, he is also a deranged revolutionary; the commander of the most powerful private army in South America. Backed by power-hungry rogue nations who supply him with the latest weaponry, de Santiago devises a plan that will dishearten the American antidrug effort and make him El Jefe once and for all.

In November 1943, while on war patrol in the Makassar Strait, the USS Billfish submarine was spotted by the Japanese, who launched a vicious depth-charge attack. Explosions wracked the sub for 15 straight hours. With his senior officers incapacitated, diving officer Charlie Rush boldly assumed command and led key members of the crew in a heroic effort to keep their ship intact as they tried to escape.

In May 1942, Admiral Jack Fletcher's Task Force 17 closed in for the war's first major clash with the Japanese Navy. The Neosho, a vitally important tanker, was escorted by a destroyer, the Sims. The ships were attacked by Japanese dive bombers, and when the smoke cleared, the Sims had slipped beneath the waves. Scores of sailors were killed or wounded while hundreds bobbed in shark-infested waters.