NCW Libraries

With a foreword by Senator John McCain. In 1967, U.S. Air Force fighter pilot James Shively was shot down over North Vietnam. After ejecting from his F-105 Thunderchief aircraft, he landed in a rice paddy and was captured by the North Vietnamese Army. For the next six years, Shively endured brutal treatment at the hands of the enemy in Hanoi prison camps. Back home his girlfriend moved on and married another man. Bound in iron stocks at the Hanoi...

"In 2008, John McCain ran for president against Barack Obama, becoming a well-known national figure. But his presidential campaign was only one of the many inspirational things John accomplished in his lifetime! John was a decorated member of the US Navy who survived being a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He served as an Arizona senator for thirty years, right up until his passing in 2018. Learn all about John McCain and his life as politician who always...

"This is the nonfiction love story of Elinor Powell, an African American army nurse, and Frederick Albert, a German prisoner of war. The two met when black army nurses were put in regular contact with German POWs who were detained in the United States during World War II, an unlikely and little-discussed circumstance during one of the most documented periods in history"--

Personal narratives of the eleven survivors of the Palawan massacre.

"Joe Johnson Jr. ran away from home at the age of 12, hopping a freight train at the height of the Great Depression. Two years later, he managed to talk his way into the U.S. Army. Seeking freedom and adventure, he was sent to the Philippines. After a misstep with a teenage prostitute, he vowed to right the wrongs he'd done and help the girl have a better life. Yet when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, his hopes of being with the girl had...

In 1943, while World War II raged on in the Pacific Theater, Lieutenant Louis Zamperini was the only survivor of a deadly plane crash in the middle of the ocean. Zamperini had a troubled youth, yet honed his athletic skills and made it all the way to the 1934 Olympics in Berlin. However, what lay before him was a physical gauntlet unlike anything he had encountered before: thousands of miles of open ocean, a small raft, and no food or water.

"[This book] is a rare gift detailing the experience of Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson, who was one of 32 Tuskegee Airmen from the 332nd Fighter Group to be shot down defending a country that considered them to be second-class citizens. In this vividly detailed, deeply personal story, Jefferson writes as a genuine American hero about what it meant to be an African American pilot in enemy hands, fighting to protect the promise of freedom. The book features...

""In the pursuit of authenticity, of accurate history and undeniable courage, no words matter more than, 'I was there.' Read Luck of the Draw and the life of Frank Murphy and ponder this: how did those boys do such things?" -Tom Hanks The epic true story of an American hero who flew during WWII, soon to be featured in the upcoming Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks TV Series, Masters of the Air. Beginning on August 17, 1942, American heavy bomber crews...

"In 1944, hundreds of Allied soldiers were trapped in POW camps in occupied France. The odds of their survival were long. The odds of escaping, even longer. But one-man had the courage to fight the odds. An elite British S.A.S. operative on an assassination mission gone wrong. A Jewish New Yorker injured in a Nazi ambush. An eighteen-year-old Gary Cooper lookalike from Mobile, Alabama. These men and hundreds of other soldiers found themselves in the...

"On April 9, 1942, thousands of U.S. soldiers surrendered as the Philippines island of Luzon fell to the Japanese. A few hundred Americans placed their faith in their own hands and headed for the jungles... one of them was Clay Conner Jr. -- a twenty-three year-old Army Air Force communications officer who had never even camped before... Connor showed himself to be a man of iron will, unbridled boldness, and endless perseverance. Inspired by an unlikely...