The Great War at Sea


Book Description

New naval history of the First World War which reveals the contribution of the war at sea to Allied victory.




Fighting the Great War at Sea


Book Description

While the overriding image of the First World War is of the bloody stalemate on the Western Front, the overall shape of the war arose out of its maritime character. It was essentially a struggle about access to worldwide resources, most clearly seen in Germany’s desperate attempts to counter the American industrial threat, which ultimately drew the United States into the war. 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 the First World War from a fresh perspective and demonstrates how its perceived lessons dominated the way navies prepared for the Second World War.




War at Sea


Book Description

This atlas shows the global war at sea, with 225 maps and detailed charts and visualizes the great campaigns and major battles as well as the the smaller operations, amphibious landings, convoys, sieges, skirmishes and sinkings.




To Crown the Waves


Book Description

The only comparative analysis available of the great navies of World War I, this work studies the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom, the German Kaiserliche Marine, the United States Navy, the French Marine Nationale, the Italian Regia Marina, the Austro-Hungarian Kaiserliche und Königliche Kriegsmarine, and the Imperial Russian Navy to demonstrate why the war was won, not in the trenches, but upon the waves. It explains why these seven fleets fought the way they did and why the war at sea did not develop as the admiralties and politicians of 1914 expected. After discussing each navy’s goals and circumstances and how their individual characteristics impacted the way they fought, the authors deliver a side-by-side analysis of the conflict’s fleets, with each chapter covering a single navy. Parallel chapter structures assure consistent coverage of each fleet—history, training, organization, doctrine, materiel, and operations—and allow readers to easily compare information among the various navies. The book clearly demonstrates how the naval war was a collision of 19th century concepts with 20th century weapons that fostered unprecedented development within each navy and sparked the evolution of the submarine and aircraft carrier. The work is free from the national bias that infects so many other books on World War I navies. As they pioneer new ways of viewing the conflict, the authors provide insights and material that would otherwise require a massive library and mastery of multiple languages. Such a study has special relevance today as 20th-century navies struggle to adapt to 21st-century technologies.




Britain's War At Sea, 1914-1918


Book Description

In Britain, memory of the First World War remains dominated by the trench warfare of the Western Front. Yet, in 1914 when the country declared war, the overwhelming expectation was that Britain’s efforts would be primarily focussed on the sea. As such, this volume is a welcome corrective to what is arguably an historical neglect of the naval aspect of the Great War. As well as reassessing Britain’s war at sea between 1914 and 1918, underlining the oft neglected contribution of the blockade of the Central Powers to the ending of the war, the book also offers a case study in ideas about military planning for ’the next war’. Questions about how next wars are thought about, planned for and conceptualised, and then how reality actually influences that thinking, have long been - and remain - key concerns for governments and military strategists. The essays in this volume show what ’realities’ there are to think about and how significant or not the change from pre-war to war was. This is important not only for historians trying to understand events in the past, but also has lessons for contemporary strategic thinkers who are responsible for planning and preparing for possible future conflict. Britain’s pre-war naval planning provides a perfect example of just how complex and uncertain that process is. Building upon and advancing recent scholarship concerning the role of the navy in the First World War, this collection brings to full light the dominance of the maritime environment, for Britain, in that war and the lessons that has for historians and military planners.




Castles of Steel


Book Description

On the eve of the war in August 1914, Great Britain and Germany possessed the two greatest navies the world had ever seen: two fleets of dreadnoughts – gigantic 'castles of steel' able to hurl massive shells at an enemy miles away – were ready to test their terrible power against each other. They skirmished across the globe before Germany, suffocated by an implacable naval blockade, decided to definitively strike against the British ring of steel. The result was Jutland, a titanic clash of fifty-eight dreadnoughts, each holding of a thousand men. When the German High Seas Fleet retreated, the Kaiser unleashed unrestricted U-boat warfare, which, in its indiscriminate violence, brought a reluctant America into the war: the German effort to "seize the trident" led to the fall of the German empire. Massie's portrayals of Winston Churchill, the British admirals Fisher, Jellicoe, and Beatty, and the Germans Scheer, Hipper, and Tirpitz are stunning in their veracity and artistry.




The Great Sea War: The Story Of Naval Action In World War II


Book Description

A brilliant, concise and, perhaps, best single volume history of the Second World War at Sea. Written by veteran historian E. B. Potter during his time as resident historian at the United States Naval Academy this history is filled with action and analysis. As the conflict raged from the Pacific to the North Sea the author takes the action in each theater for the purposes of clarity but masterfully links the actions and events together to preserve the historical integrity of the work. A classic of Naval History.




World War II at Sea


Book Description

Author of Lincoln and His Admirals (winner of the Lincoln Prize), The Battle of Midway (Best Book of the Year, Military History Quarterly), and Operation Neptune, (winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature), Craig L. Symonds has established himself as one of the finest naval historians at work today. World War II at Sea represents his crowning achievement: a complete narrative of the naval war and all of its belligerents, on all of the world's oceans and seas, between 1939 and 1945. Opening with the 1930 London Conference, Symonds shows how any limitations on naval warfare would become irrelevant before the decade was up, as Europe erupted into conflict once more and its navies were brought to bear against each other. World War II at Sea offers a global perspective, focusing on the major engagements and personalities and revealing both their scale and their interconnection: the U-boat attack on Scapa Flow and the Battle of the Atlantic; the "miracle" evacuation from Dunkirk and the pitched battles for control of Norway fjords; Mussolini's Regia Marina-at the start of the war the fourth-largest navy in the world-and the dominance of the Kidö Butai and Japanese naval power in the Pacific; Pearl Harbor then Midway; the struggles of the Russian Navy and the scuttling of the French Fleet in Toulon in 1942; the landings in North Africa and then Normandy. Here as well are the notable naval leaders-FDR and Churchill, both self-proclaimed "Navy men," Karl Dönitz, François Darlan, Ernest King, Isoroku Yamamoto, Erich Raeder, Inigo Campioni, Louis Mountbatten, William Halsey, as well as the hundreds of thousands of seamen and officers of all nationalities whose live were imperiled and lost during the greatest naval conflicts in history, from small-scale assaults and amphibious operations to the largest armadas ever assembled. Many have argued that World War II was dominated by naval operations; few have shown and how and why this was the case. Symonds combines precision with story-telling verve, expertly illuminating not only the mechanics of large-scale warfare on (and below) the sea but offering wisdom into the nature of the war itself.




The Great War at Sea


Book Description

In the vast literature of the First World War there has never been a naval atlas that depicts graphically the complexities of the war at sea, and puts in context the huge significance of the naval contribution to the defeat of Germany. With more than 125 beautifully designed maps and charts, the atlas sets out to visualise the great sea battles as well as the smaller operations, convoys, skirmishes and sinkings. As well as the well known set pieces such as the battles of Coronel, Heligoland, Dogger Bank and Jutland, the Dardenelles campaign, the North Sea and Channel operations, and the responses to merchant ship losses, the atlas looks at the many significant events at sea which impacted on the land war and which have had scant coverage in much of the naval literature of the era. The distant waters defence of trade routes, the impact of the United States navy in Europe, operations in the Baltic and northern Russia, and Japanese naval contributions in the Middle East are just some of the themes given a new and exciting presentation No other work has attempted such an ambitious coverage of the naval war in this period and it will become the definitive reference work for enthusiasts and historians as well as general readers fascinated by the naval war that extended across all the world's oceans and had such a significant impact on the outcome of the war.




Naval Weapons of World War One


Book Description

An in-depth reference to the naval weapons used by Britain, Germany, the US, and the other combatants in the Great War, with photos: “Superb…invaluable.”—History of War Although the Great War might be regarded as the heyday of the big-gun at sea, it also saw the maturing of underwater weapons, the mine and torpedo, as well as the first signs of the future potency of air power. Between 1914 and 1918 weapons development was both rapid and complex, so this book has two functions: on the one hand it details all the guns, torpedoes, mines, aerial bombs and anti-submarine systems employed during that period; but it also seeks to explain the background to their evolution: how the weapons were perceived at the time and how they were actually used. This involves a discussion of tactics and emphasizes the key enabling technology of fire control and gun mountings. In this respect, the book treats the war as a transition from naval weapons which were essentially experimental at its outbreak to a state where they pointed directly to what would be used in World War II. Based largely on original research, this sophisticated book is more than a catalogue of the weapons, offering insight into some of the most important technical and operational factors influencing the war at sea.