Naval War

Surigao Strait in the Philippine Islands was the scene of a major battleship duel during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Because the battle was fought at night and had few survivors on the Japanese side, the events of that naval engagement have been passed down in garbled accounts. Anthony P. Tully pulls together all of the existing documentary material, including newly discovered accounts and a careful analysis of U.S. Navy action reports, to create a new and more detailed description of the action.

On the fourth of July, 1942, four Allied ships traversing the Arctic separated from their decimated convoy to head further north into the ice field of the North Pole, seeking safety from Nazi bombers and U-boats in the perilous white maze of ice floes, growlers, and giant bergs. Despite the risks, they had a better chance of survival than the rest of Convoy PQ-17, a fleet of 35 cargo ships carrying $1 billion worth of war supplies to the Soviet port of Archangel - the limited help Roosevelt and Churchill extended to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to maintain their fragile alliance.

Bismarck entered service in the summer of 1940. She was well-armed, with eight 15-inch guns as well as a powerful array of lighter weapons, while her armored protection earned her the reputation of being unsinkable. This claim was finally put to the test in May 1941, when she sortied into the Atlantic and fought the legendary battle of the Denmark Strait, destroying HMS Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy. Bismarck was now loose in the North Atlantic.

Dünkirchen 1940 is the first major history on what went wrong for the Germans at Dunkirk. As supreme military commander, Hitler had seemingly achieved a miracle after the swift capitulation of Holland and Belgium, but with just seven kilometres before the panzers captured Dunkirk – the only port through which the trapped British Expeditionary force might escape – they came to a shuddering stop. Only a detailed interpretation of the German perspective – historically lacking to date – can provide answers as to why.

On June 15, 1942, as thousands of vacationers lounged in the sun on Virginia Beach, a massive fireball erupted from a convoy of oil tankers steaming into Chesapeake Bay. By the next day, three ships lay at the bottom of the channel, victims of Lieutenant-Commander Horst Degen and his crew on the German submarine U-701. In The Burning Shore, acclaimed military reporter Ed Offley presents a thrilling account of Degen's rampage along the American coast and of US Lieutenant Harry J. Kane's quest to bring him down.

Coral Amherst is the middle child of a wealthy family, with fingers throughout the politics and laws of the magical Dalebloods and the Republic they lead. Skill and connections alike have propelled her to the highest ranks of the Republic’s Navy. Now, duty inexorably drags her into a mission to learn the fate of a long-lost magical city, once home to many of the people the Dalebloods rule. Storms of dark magic drove the Seablood from their ancient city and to the shores of the Republic—and those same storms now assail the Republic itself!

On June 19, 1864, just off the coast of France, one of the most dramatic naval battles in history took place. On a clear day with windswept skies, the dreaded Confederate raider Alabama faced the Union warship Kearsarge in an all-or-nothing fight to the finish, the outcome of which would effectively end the threat of the Confederacy on the high seas.

In March 1941, after a year of unbroken and devastating U-boat onslaughts, the British War Cabinet decided to try a new strategy in the foundering naval campaign. To do so, they hired an intensely private, bohemian physicist who was also an ardent socialist. Patrick Blackett was a former navy officer and future winner of the Nobel Prize; he is little remembered today, but he and his fellow scientists did as much to win the war against Nazi Germany as almost anyone else.

This memoir of James Stavridis' two years in command of the destroyer USS Barry (DDG-52) reveals the human side of what it is like to be in charge of a warship for the first time and in the midst of international crisis. From Haiti to the Balkans to the Arabian Gulf, the Barry was involved in operations throughout the world during his 1993-1995 tour. Drawing on daily journals he kept for the entire period, the author reveals the complex nature of those deployments in a 'real time' context and describes life on board the Barry and liberty ashore for sailors and officers alike.

Joe Owen tells it like it was in this evocative story of a marine rifle company in the uncertain, early days of the Korean War. His powerful description of close combat in the snow-covered mountains of the Chosin Reservoir and of the survival spirit of his Marines provide a gritty real-life view of frontline warfare.As a lieutenant who was with them from first muster in California, Owen was in a unique position to see the hastily assembled mix of some 200 regulars and raw reservists harden into a superb Marine rifle company. The action and narrative move fast as the company learns to fight under enemy fire, eat frozen rations, and keep pushing forward when its wounded and dead go down.

The Commonwealth’s legendary space battleship is rushed to reinforce Pacifica Sector, but Grand Admiral Yamamoto has laid a trap. The war takes an uneasy turn as the Giapan Imperial fleet moves into position. A strike against just the Commonwealth or the Titanian Union will not be enough. In one week the fleet will need to annihilate every capital ship in the Pacifica Sector. For this mission Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto assembles the greatest Imperial Fleet to ever leave the homeworld. Scouts confirm a significant Giapan Imperial navy buildup far from the frontlines. The Titanians have ...

From Brandon Webb, Navy SEAL sniper and New York Times best-selling author, comes his account of the eight friends and fellow SEALs who made the ultimate sacrifice. As a Navy SEAL, Webb rose to the top of the world's most elite sniper corps, experiencing years of punishing training and combat missions from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan. Along the way, Webb served beside, trained, and supported men he came to know not just as fellow warriors, but as friends and, eventually, as heroes.

The Ice Diaries tells the incredible true story of Captain William R. Anderson and his crew's harrowing top-secret mission aboard the USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine. Bristling with newly classified, never-before-published information, The Ice Diaries takes listeners on a dangerous journey beneath the vast, unexplored Arctic ice cap during the height of the Cold War.

Read the first English translation of the first-hand account of Zeppelin operations during World War One, written by Zeppelin commander Over-Lieutenant at Sea Treusch von Buttlar-Brandenfels, originally written and published in 1917. Procedes fund the building of airships.

Some of the greatest names in naval history, Admiral Horatio Nelson, commodore Stephen Decatur, Admiral Erich Raeder, and many others fill War at Sea in a way that not only educates but entertains any listener interested in the story of naval warfare. From the Chesapeake Bay to Jutland, from the River Plate to Guadalcanal, from Hampton Roads to Leyte Gulf, here are the most compelling and memorable accounts of the days of sail and steam, of wood and iron, and of duels to the death on the waters.

The Battle of the Atlantic, Canada’s longest continuous military engagement of the Second World War, lasted 2,074 days, claiming the lives of more than 4,000 men and women in the Royal Canadian Navy, the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Canadian merchant navy.

Commander Russell Stokes made a major mistake. Moonlighting as a private investigator he slept with his client's wife and now has to deal with the consequences. Blowback is one thing, but after a bar fight that leaves two people in the hospital, Stokes and his reputation are checkered at best. Forced to resign from the Navy for a different blunder, Stokes tries valiantly to find a way forward. When he can't get out of his own way a beautiful stranger crosses his path. That's when his life takes a real turn. Whether it's an improvement or downward spiral is up to him.

Three mismatched troop transports, lots of 29-foot barges, and an under-strength regiment of foot - a waste of Royal Navy money, a doomed experiment, or a new way to bedevil Napoleon's army in Italy? Either way, it's Capt. Sir Alan Lewrie's idea, and it seems to be working, with successful raids all along the coast of Calabria. But it depends on timely information, and Lewrie must trust Don Julio Caesare, a lord of a Sicilian criminal underworld, and his minions, or the amateur efforts of a disorganized network of Calabrian partisans.

Captain Kidd has gone down in history as America's most ruthless buccaneer. However, Captain William Kidd was no career cut-throat; he was a tough, successful New York sea captain who was hired to chase pirates. Across the oceans of the world, the pirate hunter, Kidd, pursued the pirate, Culliford. One man would hang in the harbor; the other would walk away with the treasure. The Pirate Hunter is both a masterpiece of historical detective work and a page-turner.

The Chamberlain Mandate... By the spring of 1941 Britain’s strategic situation was considerably improved, in no small part due to what sympathetic historians would call the ‘Chamberlain Mandate’. The Italians were heading for defeat in Africa, with their German allies distracted by their own preparations for Operation Barbarossa. The focus on Hitler’s dreams for a grand crusade in the east to sweep away Bolshevism and secure new lands for the Reich removed the threat of invasion from the British mainland for now, but threatened to magnify the power of Nazi Germany if the USSR proved...