James Bauer grew up during the war amidst paper drives, crushing saved tin cans while an uncle servived in the Pacific. After the war, the topic of conversation among adults was so often of wartime experiences that he wanted to study the war to put the stories in context. He found combat books from his parents Book of the Month Club to be his favorite reading -- "They Were Expendable", "Silversides", "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo", "Guadalcanal Diary" -- that inspired a lifetime of study of the Pacific War.
During the Cold War he served in the Navy first at New London Subase in Advanced Underwater Weapons and spent his sea duty aboard a destroyer escort chasing Russian sub contacts off the Atlantic Coast. He took an early out to go to Penn State and became a licensed Professional Engineer. When computers started to enter industry he moved into information systems by installing a shop floor control system that became the subject of his first published article. That got him recruited into aerospace where he designed manufacturing control systems. He is the senior Fellow of the American Production and Inventory Control Society of Iowa and holds certificates in Data Processing Management. He pursued studies
everywhere he worked attending seven undergraduate colleges and graduate universities with interests in a wide range of subjects. His masters work is in Manufacturing Systems with a thesis on shop floor control, which he then proceeded to install for a company in Iowa where his last corporate project was to introduce Internet Systems. The move to Iowa was with the intention to raise rabbits, but found hogs to be more profitable and has raised at least ten types of animals and fowl before renting out his land and concentrating on his internet sites. Upon retirement he founded the Basic English Institute, a virtual website devoted to a language that condenses the rich English language into only 850 words according to a system developed by C. K. Odgen.
While building and tending his rural home in Marshalltown, Iowa, he discovered the boyhood home of
Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher and soon developed a website about him. Combined with the early interest in WWII, that website has grown to many hundreds of pages with emphasis on the naval aspects of the early years of the Pacific War where Fletcher performed his most crucial work. This book is an outgrowth of that web site.
