Wake Island Wildcat by William L. Ramsey (.ePUB)
File Size: 4 MB
Wake Island Wildcat: A Marine Fighter Pilot’s Epic Battle at the Beginning of World War II by William L. Ramsey
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 4 MB
Overview: When the Japanese attacked Wake Island in December 1941—the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor—Marine pilot Henry T. Elrod took to the skies in his F4F Wildcat fighter to defend the American military base on the tiny Pacific atoll, battling swarms of enemy planes and ships with rare courage and skill for the next two weeks. Captain Elrod, who had attended Yale and spent his freshman year playing football at the University of Georgia, had arrived mere days before as part of a fighter squadron of twelve pilots. On December 10 and 11, Elrod had two of the most remarkable days of the war for any pilot in any theater: he took on a group of twenty-two Japanese planes—shooting down two—and then bombed and strafed the destroyer Kisaragi, sinking the vessel with all hands and becoming the first American pilot to sink a warship with small caliber bombs delivered by a fighter plane in World War II. Then, once American aircraft were too damaged to fly, the pilots joined the ground defense against Japanese invasion forces. Elrod assumed command of one sector of the beach and led the repulse of repeated enemy assaults until he was killed on the last day of the battle, just before the American surrender.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History
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