John W. Lambert worked in Minnesota in the barge manufacturing industry but also wrote more than a dozen books on military aviation.

John William “Jack” Lambert was born in 1929 and raised in Minnesota. He spent four years in the U.S. Air Force, serving in Japan and Korea from 1948 to 1952, rising to the rank of Technical Sergeant. He later graduated from the University of Minnesota. Lambert started working for the Twin Cities Barge and Towing Company. This became a diversified company manufacturing barges, towboats and other types of marine equipment. It also engaged in the development and marketing of coal, operating a major river terminal with a complete intermodal exchange between rail, truck, barge and pipeline, and served as a carrier of dry and liquid bulk commodities. Its operations extended from the Twin Cities and Chicago throughout the inland river system of the United States. Lambert worked for the company for thirty years, rising to the position of President, and later Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer. Lambert later wrote a book, Troubled Waters: 30 Years in the River Business, about his career working for Twin City Barge and Towing and the river shipping industry.

Alongside his career in the shipping industry, Lambert developed a long-standing interest in the history of World War II aviation and began researching and writing on the topic. Lambert’s primary interest was in the history of the Seventh Air Force and the campaign in the Central Pacific during World War II, although he also covered the 14th Fighter Group in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations. Most of the books he wrote were compilations of photographs illustrating various aspects of the air war, such as anti-submarine operations in the Atlantic, and campaign histories of the war in the Pacific. He collected photographs from the National Archives and from Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps archives, and from veterans of the war.

Lambert’s first book, The Long Campaign: the History of the 15th Fighter Group in World War II, covered the 15th Fighter Group, a unit of the Seventh Air Force that fought from Hawaii to Iwo Jima, and was published by Sunflower University Press in 1982. In 1990, a few years after the collapse of Twin City Bridge and Towing Company, Lambert started Phalanx Publishing Company to publish books on some of the lesser known aspects of World War II aviation. Between the date of its incorporation and 1996 Phalanx published twenty titles. Through Phalanx Lambert published his own writing, beginning with Pineapple Air Force: Pearl Harbor to Tokyo, a history of the Seventh Air Force, then Wildcats Over Casablanca about the U.S. Navy fighter squadrons that supported the invasion of North Africa in November 1942, and Sortie: A Bibliography of American Combat Aviation Unit Histories, a comprehensive listing of Army Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps unit histories published after World War II.

In 1997 Lambert stopped publishing books through Phalanx Publishing and began working with Specialty Press, a publishing company located north of St. Paul, Minnesota that published titles on aviation history. He worked with Specialty Press for several years as an editor and author, writing a series of illustrated books on air combat in World War II. Beginning in 2005, Lambert wrote several books for Schiffer Publishing, completing a history of the 14th Fighter Group, and illustrated histories of the 8th Air Force and the air war in the Pacific from 1944 to 1945, his last title coming out in 2008.

Lambert passed away sometime around 2010.