Naval War

A detailed and comprehensive study of the carrier formations of the Pacific War, including their origins, development, and key battles from the Coral Sea, through Midway and Guadalcanal to the battle of the Philippine Sea.

This landmark study was first published in English by the Naval Institute in 1955. Widely acknowledged for its valuable Japanese insights into the battle that turned the tide of war in the Pacific, the book has made a great impact on American readers over the years. Two Japanese naval aviators who participated in the operation provide an unsparing analysis of what caused Japan's staggering defeat.

A new history of the war that toppled the French Empire, unified Germany, and set Europe on the path to World War I Among the conflicts that convulsed Europe during the nineteenth century, none was more startling and consequential than the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. Deliberately...

In the tradition of Antony Beevor's Stalingrad, Nelson's Trafalgar presents the definitive blow-by-blow account of the world's most famous naval battle, when the British Royal Navy, under Lord Horatio Nelson, dealt a decisive blow to the forces of Napoleon. The Battle of Trafalgar comes boldly to life in this definitive work that recreates those five momentous, earsplitting hours with unrivaled detail and intensity.

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.

Under the leadership of her fearless skipper, Captain Gene Fluckey, the Barb sank the greatest tonnage of any American sub in World War II. At the same time, the Barb did far more than merely sink ships-she changed forever the way submarines stalk and kill their prey.

This is a gripping adventure chock-full of "you-are-there" moments. Fluckey has drawn on logs, reports, letters, interviews, and a recently discovered illegal diary kept by one of his torpedomen.

This highly regarded war memoir was a best seller in both Japan and the United States during the 1960s and has long been treasured by historians for its insights into the Japanese side of the surface war in the Pacific. The author was a survivor of more than one hundred sorties against the Allies and was known throughout Japan as the Unsinkable Captain.

This memoir adventure takes the listener through a twenty year career in naval aviation that included flying attack jets from aircraft carriers, flight instructing, Naval Test Pilot School, experimental and operational flight test, engineering management for F/A-18 aircraft, initial flight test of the Super Hornet aircraft and overseas aircraft maintenance after 11 September 2001. NASA was the start of David's career while working with astronauts and engineers.

Command of the oceans was crucial to winning World War II. By the start of 1942 Nazi Germany had conquered mainland Europe, and Imperial Japan had overrun Southeast Asia and much of the Pacific. How could Britain and distant America prevail in what had become a "war of continents"? In this definitive account, Evan Mawdsley traces events at sea from the first U-boat operations in 1939 to the surrender of Japan. He argues that the Allied counterattack involved not just decisive sea battles, but a long struggle to control shipping arteries and move armies across the sea.

The greatest naval conflict in history occurred during World War II from 1939 to 1945. Author Vince O'Hara offers a truly global perspective of WWII at sea that captures every aspect of a vast naval conflict that involved dozens of nations, more than 15,000 ships, and 43.7 million tons of shipping. Approximately 570,000 lives were lost at sea in those six years. Here, the naval action begins in the Baltic Sea before dawn on September 1, 1939, when a German battleship opened fire on Polish troops barricaded in a fortress in the port city of Danzig, Poland.

On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed in the South Pacific by a Japanese submarine. An estimated 300 men were killed upon impact; close to 900 sailors were cast into the Pacific Ocean, where they remained undetected by the navy for nearly four days and nights. Battered by a savage sea, they struggled to stay alive, fighting off sharks, hypothermia, and dementia. By the time rescue arrived, all but 317 men had died. The captain's subsequent court-martial left many questions unanswered

The best-selling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters tells the story of a wild encounter between an American sealing vessel, a shipwrecked British brig, and a British warship in the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812. Fraught with misunderstandings and mistrust, the incident left three British sailors and two Americans including the captain of the sealer, Charles H. Barnard abandoned in the Falklands for eighteen months.

A “splendid” (The Wall Street Journal) account of one of history’s most important and yet little-known wars, the campaign culminating in the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, whose outcome determined the future of the Roman Empire. Following Caesar’s assassination and Mark Antony’s defeat of...

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. At dawn of June 4, 1942, a rampaging Japanese navy ruled the Pacific. By sunset, their vaunted carrier force (the Kido Butai) had been sunk and their grip on the Pacific had been loosened forever. In this absolutely riveting account of a key moment in the history of World War II, one of America's leading naval historians, Craig L. Symonds, paints an unforgettable portrait of ingenuity, courage, and sacrifice.

A decade after the Cold War, a violent explosion sent the Russian submarine Kursk to the bottom of the Barents Sea. The Russians claimed an outdated torpedo caused the incident and refused help from the West while 23 survivors died before they could be rescued. When Russian naval officers revealed evidence of a collision with a US spy sub, Vladimir Putin squelched the allegations and fired the officers. In Spies of the Deep, W. Craig Reed shatters the lies told by both Russian and US officials and exposes several shocking truths.

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. Their target: the Japanese-held Soloman Islands, in particular the southern island of Guadalcanal. Hamstrung by arcane pre-war thinking and a bureaucratic mind-set, the US Navy had to adapt on the fly in order to compete with the mighty Imperial Japanese Navy, whose ingenuity had fostered the creation of its Pacific empire.

Six months after Pearl Harbor, the seemingly invincible Imperial Japanese Navy prepared a decisive blow against the United States. After sweeping through Asia and the South Pacific, Japan's military targeted the tiny atoll of Midway, an ideal launching pad for the invasion of Hawaii and beyond. But the United States Navy was waiting for them. Thanks to cutting-edge code-breaking technology, tactical daring, and a huge stroke of luck, the Americans under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz dealt the Japanese navy its first major defeat of the war.

From Martin Dugard, #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Bill O'Reilly's Killing series, comes a fast-paced, dramatic account of the famous yet little-understood battle that turned the tide of World War II. 1942. Everywhere around the world, the Allies are losing the war. Nowhere is this...

The career of the USS Wahoo in sinking Japanese ships in the farthest reaches of the Empire is legendary in submarine circles. Christened three months after Pearl Harbor, Wahoo was commanded by the astonishing Dudley W. "Mush" Morton, whose originality and daring new techniques led to results unprecedented in naval history; among them, successful "down the throat" barrage against an attacking Japanese destroyer, voracious surface-running gun attacks, and the sinking of a four-ship convoy in one day.

World War II is usually seen as a titanic land battle, decided by mass armies, most importantly those on the Eastern Front. Phillips Payson O'Brien shows us the war in a completely different light. In this compelling new history of the Allied path to victory, he argues that in terms of production, technology, and economic power, the war was far more a contest of air and sea than of land supremacy.