Purchase
The Epic Story of America's Most Legendary Warship
Broadway
October 2008
On Sale: September 30, 2008
368 pages ISBN: 0767929896 EAN: 9780767929899 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The USS Intrepid is a warship unlike any other. Since her
launching in 1943, the 27,000-ton, Essex-class aircraft
carrier has sailed into harm’s way around the globe. During
World War II, she fought her way across the
Pacific—Kwajalein, Truk, Peleliu, Formosa, the Philippines,
Okinawa—surviving kamikaze and torpedo attacks and covering
herself with glory. The famous ship endured to become a Cold
War attack carrier, recovery ship for America’s first
astronauts, and a three-tour combatant in Vietnam.
In a riveting narrative based on archival research and
interviews with surviving crewmen, authors Bill White and
Robert Gandt take us inside the war in the Pacific. We join
Intrepid’s airmen at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, in October
1944, as they gaze in awe at the apparitions beneath them:
five Japanese battleships, including the dreadnoughts Yamato
and Musashi, plus a fleet of heavily armored cruisers and
destroyers. The sky fills with multihued bursts of
anti-aircraft fire. The flak, a Helldiver pilot would write
in his action report, “was so thick you could get out and
walk on it.” Half a dozen Intrepid aircraft are blown from
the sky, but they sink the Musashi. A few months later, off
Okinawa, they again meet her sister ship, the mighty Yamato.
In a two-hour tableau of hellfire and towering explosions,
Intrepid’s warplanes help send the super-battleship and
3,000 Japanese crewmen to the bottom of the sea. We’re next to nineteen-year-old Alonzo Swann in Gun Tub 10
aboard Intrepid as he peers over the breech of a 20-mm
anti-aircraft gun. He’s heard of kamikazes, but until today
he’s never seen one. Swann and his fellow gunners are among
the few African Americans assigned to combat duty in the
U.S. Navy of 1944. Blazing away at the diving Japanese Zero,
Swann realizes with a dreadful certainty where it will
strike: directly into Gun Tub 10. The authors follow Intrepid’s journey to Vietnam. “MiG-21
high!” crackles the voice of Lt. Tony Nargi in his F-8
Crusader. It is 1968, and Intrepid is again at war.
Launching from Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf, Nargi and
his wingman have intercepted a flight of Russian-built
supersonic fighters. Minutes later, after a swirling
dogfight over North Vietnam, Nargi—and Intrepid—have added
another downed enemy airplane to their credit. Intrepid: The Epic Story of America’s Most Legendary
Warship brings a renowned ship to life in a stirring tribute
complete with the personal recollections of those who served
aboard her, dramatic photographs, time lines, maps, and
vivid descriptions of Intrepid’s deadly conflicts. More than
a numbers-and-dates narrative, Intrepid is the story of
people—those who sailed in her, fought to keep her alive,
perished in her defense—and powerfully captures the human
element in this saga of American heroism.
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