Showing titles in Naval Forces

"Find out what is happening in the Atlantic, find ways of getting the convoys through, and sink the U-boats!" (Prime Minister Winston Churchill) 1942. Liverpool. The war isn't going to plan. Distinguished admiral Sir Max Horton is in the game room on his knees commanding a fleet of toy German U-boats. Behind a curtain his unknown opponent is manoeuvring the toy British battleships. Five times the pair have played the game and five times Horton's U-boats have suffered defeat. Exasperated, he demands to know his enemy. And from behind the curtain steps a fresh-faced 17-year-old woman.

Alfred Thayer Mahan is arguably the most influential military strategist in American history, and one of the world’s most important naval theorists. After a lengthy naval career, Mahan had assignments at the Naval Academy and the Brooklyn Naval Yard. He was invited to lecture at the Naval War College, and it was there that he collected together his notes and wrote a book, The Influence of Naval Power upon History, which somehow became an international best seller in 1890. Mahan went on to write twenty books and hundreds of essays and articles, most related to naval affairs.

Whether you're an avid paranormal enthusiast or a curious listener seeking a thrilling adventure, Haunted Ships & Boats promises to captivate, entertain, and inspire your imagination. Each chapter offers a captivating exploration of a unique maritime haunting, complete with historical context, spine-tingling eyewitness accounts, and the eerie legends that persist to this day.

From the shelling of the fort at Westerplatte on the Polish coast on September 1, 1939, to the loss of thousands of German refugees at sea in May 1945, the Baltic witnessed continuous and ferocious fighting throughout World War II. In this new audiobook, Poul Grooss chronicles naval warfare in the region and covers such major events as the siege of Leningrad, the Soviet campaign against Sweden in 1942, the three wars in Finland (1939-44), the Soviet liberation of the Baltic states, and the German evacuation of two million people from the East.

This riveting World War II escape story was published in 1943. On 6 May, 1942, hours after US Army General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered all US and Filipino forces on the island of Corregidor in Manila Bay to the Imperial Japanese Army, 18 US Navy sailors from USS Quail set out on their adventurous escape to freedom. Led by Lieutenant Commander John Morrill, the 18 sailors began their 2000-mile journey to Darwin in Australia in a 36-foot gasoline boat. The narrative provides amazing detail of the people and places they encountered on the journey to freedom.

The Dirty Dozen meets Band of Brothers in this true story of how a rusty old New Orleans banana boat staffed with an unlikely crew of international merchant seamen, a gang of inmates from a local jail, and a French harbor pilot spirited out of Morocco by O.S.S. agents in the trunk of a Chevy, were drafted into service in WWII - and heroically succeeded in setting the stage for Patton's epic invasion of North Africa.

To most observers, it seemed clear that Japan and Russia were destined to come into conflict in Korea and Manchuria. However, Russia’s vastly larger population, army, and navy seemed to make it inevitable that Japan would lose if the conflict escalated into war. Few could have foreseen that when war came, it would reveal that Russian power was largely an illusion. That would be underscored by one of the war’s most famous events, a bizarre battle that involved a makeshift Russian fleet under the command of an irascible and unstable admiral sailing around the world to meet its fate.

Summer 1914: the high noon of Germany's colonial presence in the Far East. For the men of the Kaiser's navy the idyllic charm of life on the China station is soon to be abruptly shattered by war in Europe. Their commanding officer, the formidable Admiral Maximilian Graf von Spee, will then be compelled to lead his cruiser squadron across hostile oceans in a desperate attempt to evade pursuing Allied warships and rejoin the fleet back in German waters. Some of the men he must lead on this challenging mission are seasoned seamen; others are mere boy recruits sent out from the Fatherland. Yet ...

A lesser-known event during World War II, the sinking of the Blücher is key part of naval history that marked the beginning of the Norwegian Campaign. The Sinking of the Blücher is a comprehensive investigation into why the German cruiser, named for Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher (Prussian victor of the Battle of Waterloo), was approaching Oslo on the night of 9th April 1940, why and how she was sunk, and the ramifications and significance of the event.

The day that will live in infamy was just the beginning.... In 1940, still in high school, Henry P. Lawrence joined the Navy Reserves. Little did he know that a year later, in May of 1941, he'd be called to service and deployed to Hawaii. No one believed the Japanese would be aggressive enough to attack a US territory. Their plan...to cripple the United States military. The attack at Pearl came hard and fast. I Was Just a Radioman is a collection of the memoirs of ARM Henry P. Lawrence, a WWII Pearl Harbor survivor and decorated war veteran.

This is the extraordinary story of the mutiny aboard the frigate HMS Hermione in 1797 (eight years after the mutiny on the Bounty) - the bloodiest mutiny ever suffered by the Royal Navy, which led to the extradition from America, and the hanging by the British, of the martyred sailor Jonathan Robbins. This event plunged the two-decades-old American Republic into a constitutional crisis and powerfully contributed to the outcome of the US presidential election of 1800.

On January 24, 1915, a German naval force commanded by Admiral Franz von Hipper conducted a raid on British fishing fleets in the area of the Dogger Banks. The force was engaged by a British force, which had been alerted by a decoded radio intercept. The ensuing battle would prove to be the largest and longest surface engagement until the Battle of Jutland the following summer.

Authors Simon Reich and Peter Dombrowski challenge the common view of grand strategy as unitary. They eschew prescription of any one specific approach, chosen from a spectrum that stretches from global primacy to restraint and isolationism, in favor of describing what America’s military actually does, day to day. They argue that a series of fundamental recent changes in the global system, the inevitable jostling of bureaucratic politics, and the practical limitations of field operations combine to ensure that each presidential administration inevitably resorts to a variety of strategies.

On October 31, 1803, the frigate USS Philadelphia ran aground on a reef a few miles outside the harbor of Tripoli. After hours under fire, the Philadelphia, aground and defenseless, surrendered, and 307 American sailors and marines were captured. The bashaw ordered the crew moved into an old warehouse, and the officers were eventually moved to a dungeon beneath the Bashaw's castle. While the officers were treated as "gentlemen," although imprisoned, the sailors worked as enslaved laborers.

In the early morning of 20th April 1949, HMS Amethyst was fulfilling orders to travel to Nanking to stand guard for the British Embassy during the height of the Chinese Civil War when she was fired upon by guns from the riverbank. Shells pounded into the ship, killing the commanding officer and destroyed the bridge before the ship grounded on the bank. How did the Amethyst escape the battering of Chinese Communist guns?

The year is 1652. General George Monck has been through an awful lot since he sat as a prisoner in the Tower of London eight years before. He had led his men admirably through campaigns in Ireland and Scotland, but still storm clouds surround his future. He had been away from his beloved Anne for many months and had come to London to find whether Ratsford was alive, and still proving to be an obstacle to their proposed marriage, or dead.

El peligro merodeó bajo las aguas frías y grises del Mar del Norte y también bajo las brillantes olas azules del Atlántico tropical durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, cuando el Tercer Reich de Hitler intentaba estrangular las líneas de suministro de los Aliados con ataques de U-Boot.

The Mediterranean naval battles of 1940 initiated rapid developments that changed the face of naval warfare, yet also had echoes of a previous and less complicated era when gunnery, pure and simple, dominated warfare at sea. The actions were fought when the Royal Navy was still evolving its use of naval air power and when radar at sea was primitive and fitted to only a few ships, while Italy’s Regia Marina was handicapped by having access to neither. Bombastic assertions by Mussolini that the Mediterranean was ‘Our Sea’, preceded his declaration of war on 10th June, when Great Britain...

A hundred and fifty years ago, naval warfare entered a new phase with the introduction of ironclad vessels. On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor, prototype of this new class of warships, fought the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads, Virginia, after the Virginia had ravaged the Union fleet blockading the James River, sinking larger, seemingly more powerful wooden warships in a potent demonstration of the power of an armored, heavily-gunned, steam-powered warship.

World War II submariners rarely experienced anything as exhilarating or horrifying as the surface gun attack. As the submarine shot through the surface of the water, confined sailors scrambled through the hatches armed with large-caliber guns and met the enemy face-to-face. Surface and Destroy: The Submarine Gun War in the Pacific reveals the nature of submarine warfare in the Pacific Ocean during World War II and investigates the challenges of facing the enemy on the surface.