Naval History

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.

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?

President Franklin D. Roosevelt described December 7, 1941, the date when the Japanese launched a surprise attack against the United States while the two countries were still officially at peace, as a day that would live in infamy. The action hurled the United States into the global conflict of World War II, a violent conflagration that the nation, fiercely isolationist, had intended to ignore. But the rising tide of militarism across the globe meant that American neutrality could not last. War was contagious, and sooner or later, no matter how a nation tried to quarantine itself, the infection would find it.

"Top Secret" mystery missions, many without other ships in support, were becoming uncomfortably familiar for the crew of the USS Nashville CL43. It started like a Hollywood thriller, secretly transporting from England $25 million in British gold bullion, delivered to the ship in unguarded bread trucks, a pre-war "Neutrality Patrol" that was really an unofficial hostile search for the far bigger and more powerful German battleship Prinz Eugen, and sneaking through the Panama Canal at night with the ship’s name and hull number covered for secrecy.

After the Battle of Midway, the Japanese were forced into the position of trying to defend the territory they had previously taken; their dreams of expanding their acquisitions and becoming the dominant power in the Pacific were gone. The tide of war in the Pacific had shifted.

As command module pilot of Apollo 17, the last crewed flight to the moon, Ron Evans combined precision flying and painstaking geological observation with moments of delight and enthusiasm. As a patriotic American in charge of command module America, Evans was nicknamed “Captain America” by his fellow crew members.

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.

These incredible memoirs began in 1899 by 15-year-old Gaither Stevens soon after he joined the Navy as an Apprentice Boy. It was a different world and a different Navy. His extraordinary experiences were captured in a typed manuscript kept safe and unpublished until now. In these writings, you’ll find adventures of a lifetime highlighting encounters with a grizzly bear, bar fights, a train robbery, murder, boxing, fiestas, abduction as a sex slave, turtle races, wild shipmates, an Eskimo prostitute, and other savory scenes. Gaither’s chronicles of fellow “blue-jackets” and places he...

As the 100th anniversary of the fateful night approaches, Palmer follows up innumerable conflicting stories and theories that still, to this day, surround the doomed liner. Charles Herbert Lightoller, Palmer’s great uncle, was the highest-ranking surviving officer from the disaster. It was only after the great man’s death in 1952 that his sister, Gertrude, Palmer’s eccentric grandmother, began to hint to her young grandson of the contradictory accounts of both her brother’s supposed heroism and his suspect testimonies at the investigations into the sinking.

In the darkness before moonrise on the Atlantic Ocean off the African coast on August 21, 1940, the night erupted in a fusillade of bullets and shells. The victim was a stalwart English tramp steamer, Anglo Saxon, part of the lifeline that was keeping besieged England in supplies. The attacker appeared to be a merchant ship from a neutral country.

While the Civil War is mainly remembered for its epic battles between the Northern and Southern armies, the Union was simultaneously waging another campaign - dubbed "Anaconda" - that was gradually depriving the South of industry and commerce, thus rendering the exploits of its field armies moot. When an independent Dixie finally met the dustbin of history, it was the North's coastal campaign, as much as the achievements of its main forces, that was primarily responsible.

In the early months of 1970, Lt. Thomas Medici, NILO Ha Tien, enters Cambodia on US Naval Intelligence missions and negotiates a secret weapons agreement with the Cambodian Navy, then thwarts the destruction of of the Port of Sihanoukville - for which he is tried at a Naval Board of Inquiry.

Submarines glide along on their dangerous missions, their crews performing difficult tasks under arduous conditions. The mystique associated with these boats is evidenced by the number of movies and television shows dedicated to the subject. But nowhere else will you find the lighter side of submarine operations - childish pranks, retrieving lost sailors, and even humorous episodes involving the father of the nuclear Navy, Admiral Rickover.

"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.

Have you ever served in the US Navy? Do you know someone who has? Have you ever wondered what shipboard life was like? Then this is the audiobook for you! The author served in the US Navy as a Surface Warfare Officer, in the waning days of the Cold War. In this series of 62 Sea Stories, he takes us on an enjoyable journey back to that very different time in US Navy history. He tells it like it was, and no one is spared. Some of the stories are hilarious. Some are tragic. Some are a sobering reminder of the dangers, difficulties, and stresses of naval sea service.

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.

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.

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.

This biography draws heavily on the personal diaries of the subject, Robert Hichens (or ‘Hitch’ as he was universally known). After a brief description of his early life, time at Oxford, his motor racing achievements (including trophies at Le Mans in his Aston Martin), and RN training, the book focuses on his exceptional wartime experiences. Hitch was the most highly decorated RNVR officer of the war with two DSOs, three DSCs and three Mentions in Despatches. He was recommended for a posthumous VC.

Americans had few things to celebrate during the Barbary Wars or the War of 1812, but one of them was the growing prestige of the US Navy, and among those who were instrumental in its development, few were as influential as Stephen Decatur. Jr. Decatur had an impact on nearly every war America fought between the 1780s until his death in 1820, and his stardom ensured that he was a fixture among Washington, DC’s elite in his own lifetime.