Naval War

On the night of August 13, 1944, the U.S. submarine Flier struck a mine in the Sulu Sea in the southern Philippines as it steamed along the surface. All but fifteen of the more than eighty-strong crew went down with the vessel. Of those left floating in the dark, eight survived by swimming for seventeen hours before washing ashore on an uninhabited island. The story of the Flier and its eight survivors is wholly unique in the annals of U.S. military history.

Although previously undervalued for their strategic impact because they represented only a small percentage of total forces, the Union and Confederate navies were crucial to the outcome of the Civil War. In War on the Waters, James M. McPherson has crafted an enlightening, at times harrowing, and ultimately thrilling account of the war’s naval campaigns and their military leaders. McPherson recounts how the Union navy’s blockade of the Confederate coast, leaky as a sieve in the war’s early months, became increasingly effective as it choked off vital imports and exports.

Pacific War expert Mark Stille examines the key aspects of battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval encounter in history and probably the most decisive naval battle of the entire Pacific War, with new and insightful analysis and dismantles the myths surrounding the respective actions and overall performances of the two most important commanders in the battle, and the “lost victory” of the Japanese advance into Leyte Gulf that never happened.

When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, America faced a crisis. The new nation was deeply in debt and needed its economy to grow quickly, but its merchant ships were under attack. Pirates from North Africa's Barbary coast routinely captured American sailors and held them as slaves, demanding ransom and tribute payments far beyond what the new country could afford.

An unforgettable and moving story of tragedy, heroism, resilience, and redemption that is sure to become an enduring document of American history, All the Brave Men is a sailor's moment-by-moment eyewitness account of the Japanese surprise attack that decimated the US Pacific Fleet in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and his inspiring return to active duty to carry on the Allied fight in the Pacific.

In the early morning hours of October 24, 1944, the legendary U.S. Navy submarine Tang was hit by one of its own faulty torpedoes. The survivors of the explosion struggled to stay alive one hundred-eighty feet beneath the surface, while the Japanese dropped deadly depth charges. As the air ran out, some of the crew made a daring ascent through the escape hatch. In the end, just nine of the original eighty-man crew survived. But the survivors were beginning a far greater ordeal.

The book focuses on four naval commanders, two American, two Japanese, whose lives collided at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 - a clash involving more ships (almost 300), more men (nearly 200,000) and covering a larger area (more than 100 thousand square miles, roughly the size of the British Isles) than any naval battle in recorded history.

Roy Adkins, with his wife, Lesley, returns to the Napoleonic War in The War for All the Oceans, a gripping account of the naval struggle that lasted from 1798 to 1815, a period marked at the beginning by Napoleon's seizing power and at the end by the War of 1812. In this vivid and visceral account, Adkins draws on eyewitness records to portray not only the battles but also the details of a sailor's life: shipwrecks, press-gangs, prostitutes, spies, and prisoners of war.

April 1945. The end of World War II finally appears to be nearing. The Nazis are collapsing in Europe, and the Americans are vastly overpowering the Japanese in the Pacific. For a group of pilots in their early 20s who were trained during the twilight of the war, the biggest concern is that they'll never actually see real action and will go home without having a chance to face the enemy.

The Mediterranean naval battles of 1940 initiated rapid developments that changed the face of naval warfare, yet also had echoes of a previous and less complicated era when gunnery, pure and simple, dominated warfare at sea. The actions were fought when the Royal Navy was still evolving its use of naval air power and when radar at sea was primitive and fitted to only a few ships, while Italy’s Regia Marina was handicapped by having access to neither. Bombastic assertions by Mussolini that the Mediterranean was ‘Our Sea’, preceded his declaration of war on 10th June, when Great Britain...

Regarded as the standard biography of World War II naval hero Adm. Raymond A. Spruance. Spruance, victor of the battles of Midway and the Philippine Sea and commander of the Fifth Fleet in the invasions of the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Marianas, and Okinawa, is one of the towering figures in American naval history. Yet his reserved, cerebral personality did not make "good copy" for correspondents, and until the publication of The Quiet Warrior he remained an elusive figure.

Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis is sailing alone in the Philippine Sea when she is sunk by two Japanese torpedoes. For the next five nights and four days, almost 300 miles from the nearest land, nearly 900 men battle injuries, sharks, dehydration, insanity, and eventually each other. Only 316 will survive. Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic tell the complete story of the ship, her crew, and their final mission to save one of their own.

This radical new book concentrates on the way in which each side tried to use or deny the sea to the other, and in so doing describes rapid wartime changes not only in ship and weapons technology but also in the way naval warfare was envisaged and fought. Melding strategic, technical, and tactical aspects, Friedman approaches World War I from a fresh perspective and demonstrates how its perceived lessons dominated the way navies prepared for World War II.

U.S. planning for the invasion and military occupation of Imperial Japan began two years before the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hell to Pay brings to light the political and military ramifications of the enormous casualties and loss of material projected by both sides in the climatic struggle to bring the Pacific War to a conclusion through a brutal series of battles on Japanese soil.

In his new audiobook Ships of Oak and Guns of Iron: The War of 1812 and the Birth of the American Navy, author Dr. Ronald Utt not only sheds new light on the naval battles of the War of 1812 and how they gave birth to our nation's great navy, but tells the story of the War of 1812 through the portraits of famous American war heroes.

A fighter, rogue, and ladies man, Alan Lewrie has done the unthinkable and gotten himself hitched--to a woman and a ship! The woman is the lovely Caroline Chiswick. The ship is the gun ketch, Alacrity, bound for the Bahamas and a bloody game of cat and mouse with the pirates who ply the lunatic winds there. But while war comes naturally to the young husband, politics doesn't.

In late 1944, as a precursor to the invasion of the Philippines, U.S. military analysts decided to seize the small island of Peleliu to ensure that the Japanese airfield there could not threaten the invasion forces. This important new book explores the dramatic story of this ‘forgotten’ battle and the campaign’s strategic failings. Bitter Peleliu reveals how U.S. intelligence officers failed to detect the complex network of caves, tunnels, and pillboxes hidden inside the island’s coral ridges.

Told from the point of view of the men who waged this steel-shattering battle, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors captures Navy pilots attacking enemy battleships with makeshift weapons and sacrificial valor, a veteran commander improvising tactics never taught in Annapolis, and young crews from across America rising to an impossible challenge.

When Admiral William Halsey selected Destroyer Squadron 21 to lead his victorious ships into Tokyo Bay to accept the Japanese surrender, it was the most battle-hardened US naval squadron of the war. But it was not the squadron of ships that had accumulated such an inspiring résumé; it was the people serving aboard them. Through diaries, personal interviews with survivors, and letters written to and by the crews during the war, preeminent historian of the Pacific theater John Wukovits brings to life the human story of the squadron and its men.

So Others May Live: Coast Guard Rescue Swimmers: Saving Lives, Defying Death is the award-winning untold story of the US Coast Guard's quiet but resolute rescue swimmers. From deep ocean caves on the Oregon coast to the panicked and chaotic streets of post-Katrina New Orleans, here are their stunningly heroic stories.