The schooner America was a technological marvel and a child star. In the summer of 1851, just weeks after her launching at New York, shecrossed the Atlantic and sailed to an upset victory against a fleet of champions. The silver cup she won that day is still coveted by sportsmen. Almost immediately after that famous victory, she began a ......
Although naval development before World War II focused on aircraft carriers, the British nevertheless had seventy battleships--larger and more powerful than ever before--under construction when war broke out in 1939.
Submarines, Missiles, the US Navy and the Royal Navy
The atom bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War opened the door to the nuclear age. Seeing the potential for developing nuclear energy for the US Navy, Capt. Hyman Rickover initiated a research programme that culminated in the launch of USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine. Meanwhile, ballistic missile ......
As the world plunged into war in August 1914 two Kaiserliche Marine fleets and several detached cruisers lay beyond the North Sea. These vessels posed a serious threat to British merchant vessels and naval superiority. Beyond the British blockade there was little chance of reinforcement and resupply of ammunition-their commanders had to make some ......
On the Russian Arctic convoys in 1942, Leonard H. Thomas kept a secret notebook containing detailed observations of life aboard his ship, HMS Ulster Queen, including intense recollections of hours spent at action stations in the engine room, keeping the ship going while under fire from both the skies above and waters below. He tells of how, while ......
Before Raffles, before Rajah Brooke, there was Francis Light, the 18th-century trailblazer in the Malay Archipelago. His subsequent adventures as a naval officer and merchant sea captain take him from India to Sumatra, the Straits of Malacca to Siam, through shipwreck, sea battles, pirate raids and tropical disease.
From the author of We Die Alone, The Shetland Bus recounts the hundreds of crossings of small boats from the Shetland Islands to German-occupied Norway to supply arms to the Resistors and to rescue refugees--all under constant threat by German U-boats and winter storms.
This book charts the story of what is perhaps the Royal Navy's most famous warship. This book looks at the legacy of Jutland and how it played a part in the design of the Hood before looking at the career of his iconic warship-the highs and the lows from the world cruise of the early 1920s to the mutinies at Invergordon and at Christmas 1940.
Ocean-going U-boats, each one not much longer than four European articulated trucks with up to 60 men inside them, sailed the far-off seas to reap havoc in inhospitable waters. The book is based on previously unpublished documents from the German U-boat Museum, many of them written during or shortly after the war by men who survived the conflict.
