Naval Forces

In 1991, acting on a tip from a local fisherman, two scuba divers discovered a sunken German U-boat, complete with its crew of 60 men, not too far off the New Jersey coast....

This is an unforgettable narrative that captures the essence of heroism, the power of loyalty, and the way in which the unadorned truth is more stirring than legend itself....

The story begins in 1629, when the pride of the Dutch East India Company, the Batavia, is on its maiden voyage en route from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies, laden down with the greatest treasure to leave Holland....

From the number-one New York Times best-selling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania....

From America's preeminent naval historian, the first full-length portrait in over fifty years of the man who won the war in the Pacific in World War Two....

The planning, the strategy, the sacrifices and heroics - on both sides - illuminating the greatest naval war in history....

The Barb sank the greatest tonnage of any American sub in World War II. This is a gripping adventure chock-full of "you-are-there" moments....

This landmark account of the US Navy in the Cold War, Who Can Hold the Sea combines narrative history with scenes of stirring adventure on—and under—the high seas. In 1945, at the end of World War II, the victorious Navy sends its sailors home....

The devastation of Pearl Harbor and the American victory at Midway were prelude to a greater challenge: rolling back the vast Japanese Pacific empire island by island....

There are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as at the Battle of Midway....

Blind Man's Bluff shows for the first time how the navy sent submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables....

Craig Symonds shows how any limitations on naval warfare would become irrelevant before the decade was up. World War II at Sea offers a global perspective, focusing on the major engagements and personalities and revealing both their scale and their interconnection....

With The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors and Ship of Ghosts, James D. Hornfischer created essential and enduring narratives about America’s World War II Navy....

The heroic story of the founding of the US Navy during the Revolution has been told many times, yet largely missing from maritime histories of America's first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels that truly revealed the new nation's character....

The incredible true story of nine Hellcat submarines assigned to penetrate the dense minefields protecting the sea of Japan.....

The predominant image of this first world war is of mud and trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, poison gas, and slaughter....

A riveting and wide-ranging story, full of dramatic, unexpected turns, In the Hurricane's Eye reveals that the fate of the American Revolution depended, in the end, on Washington and the sea....

From the seas of the Central Pacific to the shores of Japan itself, The Fleet at Flood Tide is a stirring and deeply humane account of World War II's world-changing finale....

On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China....

This is the little-known story of how a newly independent nation was challenged by four Muslim powers and what happened when America's third president decided to stand up....

Based on the author's exhaustive research, the incredible true story of the Greely Expedition, one of the most harrowing adventures in the annals of polar exploration....

In the early hours of February 25, 1968, a Russian submarine armed with three nuclear ballistic missiles set sail from its base in Siberia on a routine combat patrol to Hawaii. Then it vanished....

Following the disastrous Java Sea campaign, the Allies went on the offensive in the Pacific in a desperate attempt to halt the Japanese forces that were rampaging across the region. With the conquest of Australia a very real possibility, the stakes were high....

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, almost 300 miles from the nearest land, nearly 900 men battle injuries, sharks, dehydration, insanity, and eventually each other....

The Admirals tells the story of how history's only five-star admirals triumphed in World War II and made the United States the world's dominant sea power....

Admiral Hyman George Rickover (1899-1986) remains an almost mythical figure in the United States Navy. A brilliant engineer with a ferocious will and combative personality, he oversaw the invention of the world’s first practical nuclear power reactor. In this exciting biography, historian Marc Wortman explores the constant conflict Rickover faced and provoked, tracing how he revolutionized the navy and Cold War strategy.

For three millennia, the Mediterranean Sea served as the center of western civilization and the scene of many colossal wars and naval battles. In the early summer of 1940, this ancient body of water again played host to a new and extensive conflict as the Kingdom of Italy challenged Britain for dominance within the region. With France on the verge of collapse and Britain facing the prospect of imminent invasion, the Italians hoped to re-establish control over the Mediterranean. 

An extraordinary story of American can-do, an inside look at the building of the most dangerous aircraft carrier in the world, the USS John F. Kennedy. 

Only days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tapped Chester W. Nimitz to assume command of the Pacific Fleet. Nimitz transformed the devastated and dispirited Pacific fleet into the most powerful and commanding naval force in history. Facing demands from Washington to mount an early offensive, he had first to revive the depressed morale of the thousands of sailors, soldiers, and Marines who served under him. And of course, he also confronted a formidable and implacable enemy in the Imperial Japanese Navy.

The heroic story of the founding of the US Navy during the Revolution has been told many times, yet largely missing from maritime histories of America's first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels that truly revealed the new nation's character. In Rebels at Sea, Eric Jay Dolin corrects that significant omission, and contends that privateers, as they were called, were in fact critical to the American victory. Privateers were privately owned vessels that were granted permission by the new government to seize British merchantmen and men of war.

At the heart of Admiral James Stavridis’s training as a naval officer was the preparation to lead sailors in combat, to face the decisive moment in battle whenever it might arise. In To Risk It All, he offers up nine of the most useful and enthralling stories from the US Navy’s nearly 250-year history, and draws from them a set of insights that we can all put to use when confronted with fateful choices.     

January 1972: the tiny outpost of British Honduras is threatened with imminent invasion by battle-hardened, US-trained Guatemalan paratroopers. Britain's response must be immediate and decisive. But there is only one deterrent the government can offer: HMS Ark Royal, once the navy's most powerful warship, now a white elephant on the verge of being scrapped. To save the small colony, she must launch a pair of Buccaneer fighter bombers on an unprecedented long-range mission. But first the old carrier must make a high-speed 1,500-mile dash across the Atlantic.

A fascinating foray into British military history in two volumes, told entirely in the words of those who were there: The Army Gazette and The Navy Gazette.

This landmark account of the U.S. Navy in the Cold War, Who Can Hold the Sea combines narrative history with scenes of stirring adventure on—and under—the high seas. In 1945, at the end of World War II, the victorious Navy sends its sailors home and decommissions most of its warships. But this peaceful interlude is short-lived, as Stalin, America’s former ally, makes aggressive moves in Europe and the Far East.  

In its hunger to fill its decks and spars with the bodies of strong young sailors, the nineteenth-century US Navy and the commercial maritime industry welcomed eccentrics, criminals, outcasts, and misfits into a community of the marginalized, one that held very different values and expectations than the towns and villages from which the young men fled—a community that offered a tentative refuge to men who were sexually attracted to other men. Benemann provides an in-depth examination of nineteenth-century homosexual culture as it developed at sea and in America's port cities.

In December 1944, while supporting General MacArthur's invasion of the Philippines, Admiral William "Bull" Halsey neglected the Law of Storms, placing the mighty US Third Fleet in harm's way. Drawing on extensive interviews with nearly every living survivor and rescuer, as well as many families of lost sailors, transcripts and other records from naval courts of inquiry, ships' logs, personal letters, and diaries, Bruce Henderson finds some of the story's truest heroes exhibiting selflessness, courage, and even defiance.

St Nazaire, 1.22 a.m. 28th March 1942. HMS Cambeltown, supported by seventeen wooden motor launches, approached the German-held port intending to smash into the lock gates of the largest dock in the world; the Normandie Dock-Operation Chariot was in full swing. Against vicious Nazi gunfire, the commandos stormed the docks, and within half an hour, succeeded in their chief demolition objectives, but in the heat of battle, the Royal Navy had lost nearly all of its small vessels intended to carry them back to England.

In April 1943, Commander Peter Gretton was in charge of escorting a vital Allied trade convoy from New York to Great Britain across the North Atlantic. Over the course of the voyage, the sixty-one merchant ships of convoy HX231, along with the six ships of B7 Escort Group, were continuously shadowed and attacked by a German wolf pack of twenty U-boats. Drawing on reports from both sides, Gretton details the sequence of events as convoy HX231 battled its way through a large wolf pack and offers an authoritative post-battle analysis of the strategies, decisions, and actions taken.

On May 14-15, 1905, in the Tsushima Straits near Japan, an entire Russian fleet was annihilated, its ships sunk, scattered, or captured by the Japanese. In the deciding battle of the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese lost only three destroyers but the Russians lost twenty-two ships and thousands of sailors. It was the first modern naval battle, employing all the new technology of destruction. 

While some might think of the war as being a continuation of the feudal tradition of knights and peasants, the Hundred Years’ War revolutionized Western European warfare, and it truly helped to usher in the concept of nationalism on the continent. In England, it is remembered as a period of grandeur and success, even though the English lost the war and huge swathes of territory with it, while the French remember it as a strategic victory that ensured the continued independence of France and the denial of English hegemony.