Naval category: 2015 books

Seventy years ago, more than six thousand Allied ships carried more than a million soldiers across the English Channel to a fifty-mile-wide strip of the Normandy coast in German-occupied France. It was the greatest sea-borne assault in human history. The code names given to the beaches where the ships...

On a late September day in 480 B.C., Greek warships faced an invading Persian armada in the narrow Salamis Straits in the most important naval battle of the ancient world. Overwhelmingly outnumbered by the enemy, the Greeks triumphed through a combination of strategy and deception. More than two millennia...

To read of sea roving's various incarnations - piracy, privateering, buccaneering, la flibuste, la course - is to bring forth romantic, and often violent, imagery. Indeed, much of this imagery has become a literary and cinematic clich?. And what an image it is! But its truth is by halves, and paradoxically...

For thousands of years pirates, privateers, and seafaring raiders have terrorized the ocean voyager and coastal inhabitant, plundering ship and shore with impunity. From the victim's point of view, these attackers were not the rebellious, romantic rulers of Neptune's realm, but savage beasts to be eradicated,...

The untold story of the fight for the Hudson River Valley, control of which, both the Americans and the British firmly believed, would determine the outcome of the Revolutionary War. No part of the country was more contested during the American Revolution than New York City, the Hudson River,...

Whenever sailors are confronted with 'unsolvable' problems--be it a fouled anchor or paint that won't dry--they often throw up their hands and exclaim, 'We'd better ask the Chief.' That refrain, heard for generations throughout the Navy, is the theme for Jack Leahy's newest book. Written at sea, his...

The Battle of Jutland was the greatest naval battle of World War I, representing the culmination of the war on the surface of the sea between Britain and Germany, and of the preparations for naval combat that began in 1897. There is controversy to this day over who really won the battle. The fighting...

Trafalgar’s Lost Hero introduces the man whose real-life exploits have been attributed to the likes of Horatio Alger and Jack Aubrey. Never seeking the public acclaim craved by his closest friend and comrade Horatio Nelson, Cuthbert Collingwood was instrumental in forcing the combined French and...

When legislation was passed in 1948 giving women permanent status in the regular and reserve Navy, it was largely due to the efforts of Joy Bright Hancock, the author of this revealing memoir. Her prominent role was acknowledged at the time by the secretary of the navy who credited her ideals, energy,...

The thrilling story of Britain's death-struggle with Revolutionary France, wherein Napoleon is checkmated by Nelson's brilliant naval exploits. In February 1793 France declared war on Britain, and for the next twenty-two years the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars raged. This was to be the...

The U.S. Navy against the Axis tells the story of the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet in World War II with an emphasis on ship-to-ship combat. It advances the thesis that the fleet’s role in America’s ultimate victory was more crucial than commonly realized and that it holds many lessons for today’s...

HMS Ramillies was the last battleship to join the Grand Fleet in 1917 and survived to fight in the Second World War. Although the ship did not make headlines, she was actively employed from start to finish, and even survived being torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. In this respect she was typical...

The splashdown and recovery of Apollo 11 on 24 July 1969 was a historic event, which fulfilled President John F. Kennedy s national goal of placing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth by the end of the 1960s. This book tells the dramatic story of the USS Hornet s recovery of the astronauts...

From the end of the 19th century through the first half of the 20th, most Western powers maintained a naval presence in China. These gunboats protected traders and missionaries, safeguarded national interests, and patrolled Chinese rivers in search of pirates. It was a wild, lawless time in China...