Naval History

Vice Admiral John L. McCrea worked with the president of the United States on difficult and unusual assignments, associated with royalty and world-famous political and military leaders, and he commanded the USS Iowa and a task force in the Pacific. Over the years, many urged him to write a book, and before his passing he finally recorded his reminiscences. Captain McCrea's War captures his amazing tales from the World War II years.

Wally Schirra was the only one of the original seven NASA astronauts to command a spacecraft in all three pioneering space programs - Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. This chronicle of his experiences takes us into space on Schirra's 1962 Mercury flight that orbited Earth six times and aboard Gemini for the first rendezvous of two manned craft in space.

Welcome to this tome of stories about the United States Marines. Members of the finest fighting force in the world. In this audiobook, we will look at their unique organization and the men and women who it is comprised of. Some stories are insightful, some funny—all are Marine.

When the US entered World War I in April 1917, America’s sailors were immediately forced to engage in the utterly new realm of anti-submarine warfare waged on, below and above the seas by a variety of small ships and the new technology of air power. The US Navy substantially contributed to the safe trans-Atlantic passage of a two million man Army that decisively turned the tide of battle on the Western Front even as its battleship division helped the Royal Navy dominate the North Sea.

Hugh Sebag-Montefiore's Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man tells the story of the rescue in May 1940 of British soldiers fleeing capture and defeat by the Nazis at Dunkirk. Dunkirk was not just about what happened at sea and on the beaches. The evacuation would never have succeeded had it not been for the tenacity of the British soldiers who stayed behind to ensure they got away. Men like Sergeant Major Gus Jennings, who died smothering a German stick bomb in the church at Esquelbecq in an effort to save his comrades.

On the morning of April 9, 1940, German forces occupied Denmark and invaded Norway, leaving Sweden as the only neutral country in Scandinavia. It was to this country, surrounded by Axis forces, that Captain H. M. Denham was posted as Naval Attaché, arriving after evading capture by the Nazi Wehrmacht in the summer. Over the course of the next five years Captain Denham used his position to covertly provide valuable intelligence to the British military. In Inside the Nazi Ring, Denham gives vivid accounts of his meetings with numerous important political and military figures.

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.

The US Navy's first planned battle of WWII is told through the extraordinary, little-known story of USS Duncan, the first Allied warship to penetrate a Japanese battle line. From their first encounter with their celebrated captain and tyrannical executive officer to a deadly night afloat in shark-infested waters to a homecoming turned into a PR campaign, The Gun Club is a vivid day-to-day account of life on a warship, told largely in the words of the survivors, and is one of the most detailed and compelling accounts of a war cruise ever written.

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.

War at Sea is a dramatic global tour of this remote museum and other formerly lost traces of humanity's naval heritage. It is also an account by the world's leading naval archaeologist of how underwater exploration has discovered these remains, thus resolving mysteries, adding to our understanding of the past, and providing intimate details of the experience of naval warfare.

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.

Here at last is the true story of the merchant fleet during World War II, the non-fighting service in which 32,000 men died yet whose essential role has never been fully appreciated. The author, himself a member of the service from 1941-47, relates the stories of merchantmen and their crews with unique insight. From the early days of the war to the day of victory on the Rhine, through combined operations in the Mediterranean and at Normandy, the complete operation of the fleet is examined, with vivid accounts of the horrific losses undergone, the heroism of the crews and the sacrifices ...

The Indian Ocean was the final battleground for Nelson's navy and France. At stake was Britain's commercial lifeline to India: and its strategic capacity to wage war in Europe.

During the night of February 3, 1943, a torpedo shattered the side of the SS Dorchester off the coast of Greenland. The 904 men aboard, who would certainly have drowned, were saved thanks to the tremendous bravery of the four chaplains aboard - the Rev. George L. Fox (Methodist), the Rev. Clark V. Poling (Dutch Reformed), Father John P. Washington (Roman Catholic), and Rabbi Alexander Goode (Jewish) - who distributed life jackets to the troops, including, in the end, their own.

5 August 2005. While conducting a secret mission thirty miles off the remote cost of Kamchatka, the Russian Navy submarine AS-28 became snared in the thick cables anchored to 60-tonne concrete blocks. Without power the stricken boat sunk to the seafloor. Trapped too deep to escape her crew now had just seventy two hours before the air onboard ran out. Twenty-four hours later - still haunted by the loss of the Kursk - the Russian Navy requested assistance.

Of all the threats that faced his country in World War II, Winston Churchill said, just one really scared him—what he called the "measureless peril" of the German U-boat campaign.

To Provide and Maintain a Navy, a succinct but encompassing treatise on sea power by Dr. Henry J. "Jerry" Hendrix, goes beyond the numbers to reveal the crucial importance of Mare Liberum (Free Sea) to the development of the Western thought and the rules based order that presently governs the global commons that is the high seas. Proceeding from this philosophical basis, Hendrix explores how a "free sea" gave way to free trade and the central role sea borne commercial trade has played in the overall rise in global living standards.

During the summer of 1940, Hitler's Germany appeared unstoppable. The Nazis were masters of mainland Europe, in alliance with Stalin's Russia, and only the English Channel prevented an immediate invasion. Britain stood alone. Operation Sealion examines just how realistic the German threat of invasion was. The author studies the plans, the available capability and resources, and the Germans' record in Norway and, later, Crete. The author weighs these against the state of Britain's defenses and the relative strengths of the land, air, and naval forces.

La historia de los saqueadores del mar. Hombres sin escrúpulos que, no obstante, ayudaron a crear imperios, construyeron ciudades portuarias y descubrieron rutas comerciales. La piratería es tan antigua como el comercio marino, y no ha habido pueblo en la historia que no la haya sufrido o la haya practicado.

18th and 19th CENTURY ENGLISH WOMEN AT SEA is a lively and entertaining account of the three types of women one would normally find, legally, or illegally, on board a ship during the 18th and early 19th Centuries—prostitutes, officer’s and midshipmen’s wives and other female passengers during wartime, and women masquerading as sailors or crewmen. Colorful but factual accounts of surprising and certainly, little-known, incidents are drawn from letters written by sailors and other men at sea, from diaries of such figures as Admiral Horatio Nelson, and autobiographies written in the late...