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Inside the Book
Table
of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Appendix C |
BLUEJACKET ODYSSEY, 1942–1946
Guadalcanal to Bikini, Naval Armed Guard in the Pacific
By William L. McGee
Foreword by C. A. Lloyd, Chairman, USN Armed Guard Veterans of WWII
546pp., 250 b&w photos, plus appendices, bibliography, index, 6”x9”,
ISBN 13: 978-0-9701678-0-4, Softcover: $29.95. BMC Publications (1997,
Revised Edition 2000).
“Little has been written about service in the Naval Armed Guard
in which nearly 145,000 men served….McGee remedies this with a book
that offers a clear picture of the duties and dangers of service
in the Armed Guard. The book has value for historians.”
—Naval
History Magazine
Description
In 1942, Montana cowboy Bill
McGee joined the U.S. Navy on his seventeenth birthday. He was
assigned to the Naval Armed Guard, the branch of the Navy that
protected merchant ships and their valuable cargo and crew from enemy
attacks. Within weeks, McGee was in the middle of two major enemy
attacks in the South Pacific. His “kid’s cruise” (as these minority enlistments
were called) ended in 1946 on the heavy cruiser USS Fall
River and
Operation Crossroads, the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. McGee
draws on his shipboard journal, exhaustive research, and interviews with
former shipmates and other survivors to produce an engrossing book that
has the inimitable mark of one who has “been
there, done that.”
McGee's enlisted man's perspective on the Bikini atomic bomb tests—by itself—makes this book worth owning. Serving aboard the heavy cruiser USS Fall
River, the author had a front row seat at the beginning of the atomic age. Operation Crossroads, the post-war atomic bomb tests, grew from a few thousand people into a mammoth operation of 150 ships, 75 aircraft and more than 42,000 men, including political observers, the media and scientists of every calling. The display of American power—the ability to blow up warships but also to dispose of them so readily—awed the world, especially the Soviet Union. Aided by personal interviews with others who were there, McGee covers the event in such complete and exciting detail, you’ll
almost believe you were there, too.
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