Tommy Mcgee At War

Tommy McGee at War is set in the Port of Fremantle during WWII and shows how teenagers and adults interact during such times of stress. The characters in the story are Tommy McGee and his gang, the Holy Smokes, who are in constant war with the opposition gang, the Stinking Head Shea Gang, led by Stinking Head Shea himself. There is also Sergeant Major John Daly, who is known to Tommy as Uncle Jack and is the founder and leader of Z Force, which is based on the mysterious and forbidding Garden Island. Finally, there is Poacher Kenworthy, who, with his reputation of being a very bad man, strikes terror in the hearts of the boys. There are also general characters filling in the story to help create the atmosphere of wartime. The story starts out by establishing the area of operations, how the Holy Smokes got their name, and the details about their meeting place, the Place, which is a large flat rock on the edge of the Swan River and is overlooked by the lookout tree, which is strategically placed on the corner of Poacher Kenworthy's five-acre orchard; this enables the boys to keep tabs on the Stinking Heads and also on any ripening fruits in the orchard. There are skirmishes as the defences of the Place are tested and how, after retaliating by the Stinking Heads, a girl named Ingrid is inducted into the Holy Smokes. It is during one of their meetings at the Place that they discover that Poacher has found a way into the heavily defended Port of Fremantle. Uncle Jack, with Z Force, is having troubles when his navigator goes ack-willy (an army term for AWL) and puts in jeopardy an operation in Java to attack the Japanese-held Port of Padang. The navigator is caught by the civilian police and put into Fremantle Gaol. This sets in motion a series of events which leads to the discovery of a tunnel built by the original convicts, which leads directly to Fremantle Gaol, and with the help of the Holy Smokes, the navigator is retrieved. During this operation, they are seen, and because of a lack of communications, a battle between the home guard and the civil defence unit takes place almost on top of where they are all hiding. It would appear that it would be almost impossible to get the navigator back to Garden Island using existing transport. They decided to take him out through Fremantle Harbour, and much to the boys' horror, Poacher is co-opted to lead. The rescue is successful after a great deal of effort but with the loss of Tommy's dinghy, which was blown to bits by the defence guns. Some time later, Uncle Jack gathers all the Holy Smokes together and gives a very detailed description of the successful attack on Padang Harbour and how they had escaped back to Australia, hotly pursued by the Japanese all the way down the coast of Sumatra, through the Sunda Strait, and back to Broome, which had just been bombed by the Japanese. Finally, Tommy is presented with a dinghy which had been captured from a Japanese destroyer.

On December 7, 1864, just one week after the bloody battle of Franklin, Tennessee, William McGee, a drummer boy from Newark, New Jersey, was credited with leading a Federal force to a decisive victory over the Confederates in a clash just thirty miles from the carnage at Franklin. This 15-year-old Irish-American, on convalescent duty and acting as an orderly to General Lovell Rousseau, was recognized for the capture of two guns, several hundred prisoners, and the saving of Fortress Rosecrans in Murfreesboro from the famed Nathan Bedford Forrest. For his actions, young McGee would soon be awarded a Medal of Honor, written up in newspapers and books as a glorious New Jersey legend, be commissioned as a lieutenant in the United States Army at age 18, and then, inexplicably at the height of his notoriety, virtually disappear from history for more than 100 years. This is the story of a lost war hero, a man-child with the world at his feet, whose fall from grace is accelerated by fame, lies, alcohol, bigamy, and murder.

In the mid-1950s, to combat declining theater attendance, film distributors began releasing pre-packaged genre double-bills--including many horror and science fiction double features. Though many of these films were low-budget and low-end, others, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Horror of Dracula and The Fly, became bona fide classics. Beginning with Universal-International's 1955 pairing of Revenge of the Creature and Cult of the Cobra, 147 officially sanctioned horror and sci-fi double-bills were released over a 20-year period. This book presents these double features year-by-year, and includes production details, historical notes, and critical commentary for each film.

Tribesmen regarded Mingo Swamp as a rare wildlife haven and made it a favored hunting ground long before white settlers discovered it, but in even earlier times, the storied Mississippi River passed through it moving to Arkansas. The soggy countryside around it made a good part of the neighborhood virtually inaccessible and therefore sparsely settled at the time of the Civil War; but Mingo, nevertheless, became one of Missouri’s more hotly contested battlegrounds. Guerrillas fighting for the Lost Cause made its cypress and water tupelo forests their hideout, and it is identified to this day with one of the state’s bloodiest encounters, the Battle of Mingo Swamp. The treacherous swamp’s abundance of natural resources first attracted hardy backwoodsmen, but the entire countryside remained commercially undeveloped until arrival of the railroad and the founding in 1883 of Pucksekaw, now Puxico, which quickly became the base of a great logging and tie operation headed by newcomer Thomas J. Moss, the town’s esteemed merchant prince who quickly became the largest tie contractor in the state. After the great timber boom ended in the early 1900s, newly organized Mingo Drainage District, encompassing 39,786 acres in Stoddard and Wayne counties, sought to clear the stumpage and drain the swamp to enhance agricultural pursuits and control costly St. Francis River overflows. After that glorious adventure failed in the 1930s, the federal government stepped in to acquire land for construction of two ambitious projects that changed the countryside forever, the 21,676-acre Mingo National Wildlife Refuge and, just beyond it to the west, a dam on the St. Francis River that created sprawling Lake Wappapello, which, in both land and water, encompasses more than 44,000 acres. Shortly thereafter, in the early 1950s, the Missouri Conservation Commission acquired the rest of the swamp to establish what now is Duck Creek Conservation Area, which encompasses 6,234 acres in Wayne, Bollinger, and Stoddard counties. Though obviously vastly different now and managed today by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Mingo remains one of America’s premier wildlife havens. It is home to tens of thousands of waterfowl, three distinct ecosystems, and an incredible diversity of plants and animals. A great number of rare species, such as the swamp rabbit and the alligator snapping turtle, still strive at Mingo.

This is the most comprehensive compilation of West Virginia soldiers in the Revolution and other wars, containing rosters and, in many cases, service records of thousands of soldiers, with narratives on the various wars. The rosters and rolls, here collected for the first time, are drawn from both published and unpublished sources, the original records being in many cases in the Department of Archives and History of the State of West Virginia.

These poems tell the story of an Irish rebel who was a practical idealist of astounding energy. The verse, as well as being technically superb, simmers with indignation. The poet's attacks on privilege, defense of the poor, and vision of Canada as a champion of peace have recovered their timeliness today.