F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

— Details the multinational history of close-quarter combat

— Covers trench warfare, urban fighting, night fighting, ambushes, and hostage rescue

— Extensively illustrated

Despite the development of deadly long-range weapons during the twentieth century and a substantial increase in the killing power of all weapons, modern soldiers have continued to fight the enemy at close range. Here is an anecdotal history that brings to life the fear, intensity, and raw courage of close-quarter combat in chilling detail, including first-hand accounts of waging war among the ruins of Stalingrad, fighting in tunnels during the Vietnam War, springing an ambush, and even fighting with axes on the eastern front during World War II.

The Whites of Their Eyes contains accounts from U.S., British, German, and French servicemen and covers both world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Falklands campaign.

Review: So, Close You Can Smell His Breath…

“The Whites of Their Eyes: Close Quarter Combat” by Roger Ford and Tim Ripley is an excellent historical introduction to hand-to-hand combat, despite the one-star review. This book provides various historical vignettes from the 1900s up to the Mogadishu “Black Hawk down” incident. This book draws on personal accounts from the Germans, Americans, French and the British; from infantryman to special forces operators. I personally enjoyed chapter 4, which covered the evolution in training commandos in World War II to fight in close quarters combat. This chapter thoroughly covered all the personalities of the era from Sykes and Fairbairn to Applegate. Overall, do you want to understand the horrors of close combat and understand the human courage and survival instinct of men in combat, then this is the book for you. Additionally, if you are a student of modern combative, you will also find this book interesting.

CONTENTS:

-introduction

Chapters;

1. Fifty-two months in hell

2. a violent entr’acte: rearmament and civil war in Europe

3. blitzkrieg!

4. Commandos and special forces

5. Britain’s brushfire wars: the end of the Empire

6. America’s Asian wars

7. through tribal war to techno war

-sources

-index

(Hardcover, 298 pages, 6.5″x9.5″)