82 Days On Okinawa by Art Shaw (Ret.) with Robert L. Wise

 

Fast, furious, and mesmerizing.

Japanese military leaders engineered a ferocious finale that accounted for more combat fatigue cases than anywhere else in the Pacific. The Japanese didn't defend the beaches as they had so many times before. They dug deep into the ground, making conquest very difficult for the soldiers and marines. Hit and run tactics in-and-out of caves lessened chances for inflicting heavy Japanese casualties. It wasn't any better on the numerous support ships around the island with kamikaze flights striking American vessels, and taking many lives there and several ships, too.

Invading land combatants suffered visually, and subsequently mentally from the too many mangled and unburied bodies their eyes and minds captured. Many of those grizzly images followed them into mental wards, and stayed with them for the rest of their lives,

Author Art Shaw was an Army artillery officer, and often serving as a forward observer, but he survived. and eventually wrote his account of that battle with the help of author Robert L. Wise. They worked well together. Shaw's story added human sight to one of the most inhuman events on the planet. 

Content was largely limited to what Shaw saw and could remember. His memory was good, but some crucial battle moments, such as Army Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner's death from Japanese artillery was left out.

Spain and the American Revolution by the Charles River Editors

 

There's something big our historians forgot. The colonies had more than one ally in the revolution against Great Britain -- Spain, and it mattered, In fact, without Spain there might not have been a United States.

Spain was already in the region, maintaining its empire against the British while handing them plenty  of headaches. Spanish victories over England came to be ignored by U.S. historians in their state approved textbooks, but it's one small way that Spanish influence was already here without any immigration problems.

Spain took six English forts under General Bernardo de Galvez.

"Few Americans are aware of who Galvez was, and what he achieved, and only historians are aware of  the difference between East and West Florida. There was a Battle of Mobile before the Civil War, and the battle between the Spanish and British at Pensacola had a major impact on the outcome of the Revolutionary War." The text goes on to note, "Not even many Texans aware that Galveston is named after Bernardo de Galvez."

Galvez and his troops defeat of the English when it took Pensacola, served to deny Cornwallis relief troops at Yorktown against Washington. Thee French fleet, of course, kept the British navy off the backs of the colonists there.

"The Spanish were inclined to think the Americans were ungrateful. The Count of Aranda wrote to Carlos III in 1783: This federal republic was born a pygmy, as such it needed the aid of two powerful states like Spain and France to accomplice its independence. The day will come when it will grow up, become a giant, and greatly feared in the Americas. Then it will forget the benefits it received from the two powers and only think of its own aggrandizement.

"Over a century later, the Spanish-American War would prove the count prescient."

This book was only 38 pages, and a quick one-day read. It was worth waiting for in the mail.