Military History Book Club

Please arrive by 7:30 a.m. to order from the menu.  Breakfast is $15.  Discussion starts at 7:30 and ends at 9:00 a.m.

The discussion will be moderated by Robert Epstein: Texas Guard- Military Police Brigade; Civil Air Patrol University Instructor and Marc Liebman, Captain, U.S. Navy (retired), Naval Aviator, award winning author and historian

In June 1944, the U.S. launched a crushing assault on the Japanese Navy in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The capture of the Marianas and the accompanying elimination of Japanese carrier air power marked a pivotal point in the Pacific War. No tactical masterstroke or blunder could reverse the increasingly lopsided balance of power between the two combatants. The War in the Pacific had entered is end game.

Beginning with the Honolulu Conference, when FDR met with Nimitz and MacArthur to plan the last phase of the campaign against Japan. Twilight of the Gods brings to life the last year of the war in the Pacific when the U.S. Navy won the largest naval battle in history. MacArthur made good his pledge to return to the Philippines; waves of Kamikazes attacked the Allied Fleets; the Japanese fought to the last man on one island after another; B-29s burned Japanese cities; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated.

Ian Toll’s narrative of combat in the air, at sea and on land are gripping as ever. He also reconstructs the Japanese and American home fronts and takes the reader into the halls of power in Washington and Tokyo where diplomacy and strategy were debated.

RSVP to Bob Epstein at: macabee1948@gmail.com