This is the forgotten story of the American World War II dead. Told from personal family letters, official documents, contemporary magazine and newspaper articles, historical research, and previously unpublished photographs, this is the first book to fully describe the return of the valiant dead to America after World War II, in tribute to those who gave their lives, as well as to those who mercifully brought them home. Few people know that the United States was the only nation to bring home our war dead after World War II. The bodies of America's fallen were removed from foreign graves across the globe, often years after they died. More than 280,000 were recovered, leaving that number of American families with an agonizing choice: return their beloved sons to the homeland, or let them rest in military cemeteries overseas in the countries they died to liberate. Some of our allies were strongly against the idea, fearing their citizens' reactions to not being able to bring home their own sons. But it was done because American families demanded it: not as a collective, organized effort, but one family - one father, mother, widow, or sibling - at a time.

Brought to life by the personal accounts of six Navy pilots and one British POW, this is the history of the U.S. Navy airstrikes on Japanese-held Hong Kong. Commander John Lamade started the war in 1941 a nervous pilot of an antiquated biplane. Just over three years later he was in the cockpit of a cutting-edge Hellcat about to lead a strike force of 80 aircraft through the turbulent skies above the South China Sea. His target: Hong Kong. As a storm of antiaircraft fire darkened the sky, watching from below was POW Ray Jones. For three long years he and his fellow prisoners had endured near starvation conditions in a Japanese internment camp. Did these American aircraft, he wondered, herald freedom? Trawling through historic records, Steven K. Bailey discovered that the story of the U.S. Navy airstrikes on Japanese-held Hong Kong during the final year of World War II had never been told. Operation Gratitude involved nearly 100 U.S. Navy warships and close to a thousand planes. Target Hong Kong brings this massive operation down to a human scale by recounting the air raids through the experiences of seven men whose lives intersected at Hong Kong in January 1945: Commander John D. Lamade, five of his fellow U.S. Navy pilots and the POW Ray Jones. Drawing upon oral histories, diary transcripts, and U.S. Navy documents, this book expertly narrates the intertwined experiences of these servicemen to bring the history to life.

"My first telegram came Sep. 3 1942 that my son was missing in action. And the next telegram came Aug. 18 1943 that he was Declared Dead. Till this day I do not know what happened to him." Mrs. Ann M. Lyons, August 7, 1957. Between 1942 and 1944, nearly four hundred Marines virtually vanished in the jungles, seas, and skies of Guadalcanal. They were the victims of enemy ambushes and friendly fire, hard fighting and poor planning, their deaths witnessed by dozens or not at all. They were buried in field graves, in cemeteries as unknowns, or left where they fell. They were classified as "missing," as "not recovered," as "presumed dead." And in the years that followed, their families wondered at their fates and how an administrative decision could close the book on sons, brothers, and husbands without healing the wounds left by their absence. 'Leaving Mac Behind' reconstructs the lives, last moments, and legacies of some of these men. Original records, eyewitness accounts, and recent discoveries shed new light on the lost graves of Guadalcanal's missing Marines--and the ongoing efforts to bring them home.

When noted English author Rudyard Kipling pulled strings at the beginning of World War I to get his son a commission in the Irish Guards, he little realized that he was sending the young man to his death. John Kipling's death was made even more tragic by the fact that his burial place could not be identified. Rudyard Kipling's life-long quest to find his son's resting place had not been achieved by the time of his death and John Kipling's grave was not positively identified until 1992.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.