LITMIR.BIZ

The author examines the influence of the General Board of the U.S. Navy as an agent of innovation in the years between the world wars. A formal body established by the secretary of the Navy, the General Board served as the organizational nexus for the interaction between fleet design and the naval limitations imposed on the Navy by treaty. Particularly important, Kuehn argues, was the Board's role in implementing the Washington Naval Treaty, which limited naval armaments after 1922. Kuehn explains that the leadership of the Navy at large and the General Board in particular felt themselves especially constrained by Article XIX of the Washington Naval Treaty, which implemented a status quo on naval fortifications in the western Pacific.

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While America was preoccupied with the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, an even greater tragedy was unfolding across Southeast Asia. From Wake Island to Burma, the Empire of Japan opened the largest front in the history of warfare: an aircraft-driven invasion of colonial possessions throughout the Far East that crumbled the entire Western imperial legacy of the nineteenth-century. Events during the first two weeks of battle set the stage for the greatest military defeats America and Great Britain would suffer during any conflict.This book offers the first comprehensive overview of the collapse of Allied air forces during the period between December 8 and 24, 1941. Written for a wide audience, it gives readers both a cockpit view of the desperate actions that took place and an understanding of why such heavy losses occurred. The narrative account includes enough detail and analysis to hold the interest of serious students of Pacific War aviation and enough exciting descriptions of air combat to attract those with little knowledge of the subject.Explaining how and why the Japanese were able to win a quick victory, John Burton points to U.S. failures in the concepts for employment of airpower and a significant underestimation of Japanese «air-mindedness» and aviation capabilities, failures that resulted in the loss or surrender of more than 200,000 troops at Bataan and Singapore.

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For Love of Country is the second novel of the early American republic in the nautical series from William Hammond. Set in the early 1780s in the years following the American Revolution, it features the adventures of the seafaring Cutler family of Hingham, Massachusetts, and the supporting cast from the first novel of the series, A Matter of Honor.Hammond offers an exciting look at life in the young republic, a time when America remained a weak nation with no navy to protect its prosperous merchant fleet from Barbary pirates and European nations intent on crippling its shipping.The novel opens with the capture of the Cutler merchant brig Eagle by Barbary pirates. Young Caleb Cutler and his shipmates are taken as prisoners to Algiers. Richard, his brother, is then sent to North Africa to pay the ransom demanded by the Dey of Algiers to free them. When the dey rejects the offer, Richard must defend his ship and the ransom from attack by Algerian pirates. After repulsing the pirates in a fierce battle at sea , Richard travels to Paris to report to John Paul Jones, his former naval commander, who has been dispatched to serve as America’s emissary to the Barbary States. In Paris, amid the tumult of the French Revolution, Richard engages in a desperate attempt to save his former lover, the beautiful Anne-Marie Helvétian, and her two daughters from the guillotine.The author’s careful historical research and thorough knowledge of sailing and the ways of the sea bring authenticity to the novel without detracting from the entertaining storyline. Hammond’s focus on the American perspective of the Age of Fighting Sail in the years following the American Revolution adds a fresh dimension to historical novels of the period.

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The USS Rasher was one of America's most successful Word War II submarines, and her wartime exploits earned her three Presidential Unit Citations. Accordingly, the Rasher sank eighteen enemy ships and destroyed 99,901 tons, which was the second highest tonnage of the war. The Rasher's fifth war patrol is the stuff of legends: during a single night surface attack on a Japanese convoy off the Philippines in August 1944, she sank the escort carrier Taiyo and three maru Japanese warships, and later during the same patrol sank another ship. Rich in detail and entertaining to read, the book covers all aspects of the Rasher's combat history in a way that both the general reader and veteran submariner will appreciate. The author's father served aboard the Rasher for all eight of her war patrols, and this lively chronicle of events draws from his letters and papers as well as those of other crew members. In his examination of the factors that contributed to the Rasher's success, Peter Sasgen pays tribute to the skipper's daring and aggressive tactics.

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Caught off Okinawa in the fiercest typhoon in history at the end of World War II. Elmer Renner, then a young officer aboard a US minesweeper, recounts the horror of his ship sinking. Renner and eight other sailors clung to a small raft for days, battling thirst, hunger, shark attacks and, eventually, madness. Renner and co-author Ken Birks describe the men's panic as distant ships seemingly ignore their desperate calls, the sea turning blood red when one of the men loses his life to a shark, and how another slips silently away into the unforgiving Pacific.

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The Other Space Race is a unique look at the early U.S. space program and how it both shaped and was shaped by politics during the Cold War. Eisenhower’s “New Look” expanded the role of the Air Force in national security, and ultimately allowed ambitious aerospace projects, namely the “Dyna-Soar,” a bomber equipped with nuclear weapons that would operate in space. Eisenhower’s space policy was purely practical, creating a strong deterrent against the use of nuclear arms against the United States.With the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, the political climate changed, and space travel became part of the United States’ national discourse. Sambaluk explores what followed, including the scuttling of the “Dyna-Soar” program and the transition from Eisenhower’s space policy to John Kennedy’s. This well-argued, well-researched book gives much needed perspective on the Cold War’s influence on space travel and it’s relation to the formation of public policy.

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Burke's World War II heroics and unprecedented three terms as chief of naval operations are recounted in this stirring biography.

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The Battle of Tassafaronga, November 30, 1942, was the fifth and last major night surface action fought off Savo Island during World War II s Guadalcanal campaign. It ended a string of Japanese victories, but it was also a horrible embarrassment to the U.S. Navy, which had three heavy cruisers damaged and one sunk to enemy torpedoes. After the battle, American commanders erroneously reported that multiple enemy ships had been sunk or seriously damaged, leading Admiral Nimitz to focus on training as the missing ingredient. Not until more than half a century later did Captain Russell S. Crenshaw, Jr., the destroyer Maury s gunnery officer during the battle, discover that the outcome hinged instead on critical shortcomings that had been built into the U.S. Navy before the war defective torpedoes, poor intelligence, blinding gunfire, over-confidence, and a tendency to equate volume of fire with effectiveness of fire factors that turned the battle into a crucible in which the very nature of the U.S. Navy and its weapons was tested [and] a miniature of what might have been, under other circumstances, a truly devastating defeat.

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Nimitz called this book about the USS Aaron Ward on the radar picket line in the Pacific, «the finest story of the war that I have been privileged to read.»

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On May 7 and 8, 1942, fast carrier task forces from the United States and Imperial Japanese navies met in combat for the first time in the Battle of the Coral Sea. A strategic victory for the U.S. in spite of the loss of the carrier Lexington, the destroyer Sims and the fleet oiler Neosho, the battle blunted the Japanese drive on Port Moresby, a valuable Allied air and naval base controlling the western Coral Sea and northern Australia.John B. Lundstrom offers a detailed analysis of the fundamental strategies employed by Japan and the U.S. in the South Pacific from January to June 1942, including Japanese equivocation regarding advances in the South Pacific and the vigorous actions of Admiral Ernest J. King to reinforce the area in spite of the presidential decision to concentrate American efforts on Europe and the problem of Germany.Writing in a clear, concise, and readable style, Lundstrom combines strategic insight and careful scholarship with previously untapped source materials to present a book that provides a superb overview of the first six months of the naval war in the South Pacific. First published in 1976, The First South Pacific Campaign is essential reading for a full understanding of the Pacific Fleet’s strategy before the Battle of Midway.

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