LITMIR.BIZ

More a book about Coast Guard heritage than an academic history, this book focuses on a variety of relatively unknown Coast Guardsmen who personify the service's core values. The author highlights the contributions of a variety of individuals, from seamen to admirals on active duty, as well as Reserves, Auxiliarists, and civilian members of Team Coast Guard. These heroes, representing a great diversity in age, sex, race, and ethnicity, set an example worthy of emulation and serve as role models for today's Coast Guard men and women.

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J. F. Leahy chronicles the transition of eighty-one men and women from civilians to sailors at the U.S. Navy Recruit Training Command in Great Lakes, Illinois. Granted unlimited and unprecedented access to the recruits during the fall of 2000, his examination of the unique American institution – popularly known as boot camp – offers a look into the hearts and minds of a group of young people who are a cross section of the nation. The work offers a unique view into the training experience of all recruits and sheds light on the differences between those entering the military services and the society they serve.

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The intimate view of the U.S. Coast Guard’s dramatic World War II record has long been considered a classic. First published in 1957 and out of print for years, it is now available in paperback. Handsomely illustrated with more than 200 photographs, the book serves as a unique memento of one of the most illustrious periods in the Coast Guard’s 200-year history.The author offers a story replete with incidents of devotion far beyond the call of duty?daring rescues, adventurous high-sea missions, heroic combat action?to clearly demonstrate the vital role the service played in the Allied war effort. A seasoned World War I veteran who joined the Coast Guard Temporary Reserve in 1942, Malcolm Willoughby draws not only from firsthand experience but fro years of research and writing as a Coast Guard historian.His narrative covers every aspect of the Coast Guard’s involvement in the warat sea, in the air, and at home. From the invasion of Normandy, where Coast Guardsmen landed thousands of Americans and rescued some 1,500 stranded in the surf, to Guadalcanal, where they rescued three companies of Marines trapped on the beach, this chronicle vividly recounts these well-documented operations and little-known stories of individual triumphs and tragedies as well.

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So perfectly executed was the mission to rescue Capt. Scott O'Grady that it amazed even the men responsible. Just five hours after radio contact was first made with Basher 52 – O'Grady's call sign the Air Force captain was safely on board the USS Kearsarge. The downed F-16 fighter pilot's rescue from a Bosnian mountainside by Col. Martin Berndt's 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit electrified the nation in June 1995 and renewed many Americans' faith in the military. This book tells the story of the mission in the words of the men who commanded, planned, and carried it out. To get the inside account, Mary Pat Kelly traveled throughout Europe to conduct more than one hundred interviews, visiting U.S. ships and bases and UN posts in Croatia and Bosnia where participants were stationed. Admiral Leighton W. Smith Jr., commander in chief of U.S. naval forces in Europe and head of NATO forces in the Southern European theater, provides the framework with his day-to-day commentary on the efforts to find Captain O'Grady and a nearly minute-by-minute record of the rescue itself. In concert with Lt. Gen. Michael E. Ryan, commander of U.S. and NATO air forces, the admiral reveals the decision-making process that led to the «Good to Go» order. Readers then hear from the Tactical Recovery of Aircraft and Personnel (TRAP) team-the Navy and Marine Corps commanders, pilots, crew chiefs, and grunts who made it happen. Speaking for the Navy are Capt. Christopher Cole, skipper of the Kearsarge, Commo. Jerome Schill, and their staffs, from the intelligence officers to the grapes who fueled the aircraft. Captain O'Grady puts his own experiences in the context of overall events.

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In the mid-1950s a small group of overworked, underpaid scientists and engineers, working on a remote base in the Mojave Desert, developed a weapon no one had asked for but that everyone was looking for. Sidewinder is the story of how that unorthodox team at China Lake, lead by the visionary Bill McLean, overcame Navy bureaucracy and more heavily funded projects to develop the world's best air-to-air missile. Based on years of research and hundreds of interviews, Westrum’s study examines the unique military-civilian cult of creativity that helped Mclean and his China Lake team produce an amazing array of technological and engineering marvels. In the intellectual pressure cooker provided by the desert isolation, the scientists dreamed and tinkered while test pilots such as Wally Schirra and Glenn Tierney took to the air, often risking life and limb to test a fledgling system. Against the ongoing story of billion-dollar weapons development contracts, astronomical cost overruns, and defense acquisitions scandals, this revealing, highly readable account of the development of one of the most successful weapons in history provides an instructive contrast.

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“Wheel books” were once found in the uniform pockets of virtually all junior officers and many senior petty officers. Each small notebook was unique to the Sailor carrying it, but all had in common a collection of data and wisdom that the individual deemed useful in the effective execution of his or her duties. Often used as a substitute for experience among neophytes and as a portable library of reference information for more experienced personnel, those weathered pages contained everything from the time of the next tide, to leadership hints from a respected chief petty officer, to the color coding of the phone-and-distance line used in underway replenishments.In that same tradition, the Naval Institute has created and aptly named the Wheel Book series, portable libraries culled from USNI’s vast array of information that has accumulated for more than a century. Articles from the Institute’s flagship publication Proceedings are combined with selections from USNI’s oral history program and from Naval Institute Press books to create unique guides on a wide array of relevant professional subjects.Just as the “wheel books” of yesterday served the fleet well, the Naval Institute Wheel Books of today provide supplemental information, pragmatic advice, and cogent analysis on topics important to modern naval professionals. The late Vice Admiral A.K. Cebrowski—well known as a brilliant thinker on the subject of naval warfare—once described naval tactics as “the sum of the art and science of the actual application of combat power.” Renowned naval tactician Captain Wayne Hughes adds that the study of naval tactics “strives to bring whatever order and understanding is possible out of the chaos of battle.” With those words of wisdom serving as “commander’s intent,” this collection sheds a bright light on this sometimes dark and mysterious but unquestionably essential realm, illuminating the principles and concepts that serve the warrior at the most critical moments in his or her profession.

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The mission of the U.S. Navy's fast attack submarines during the Cold War was a closely guarded secret for many years, but this look back at the period and the part played by those submarines in winning the war gives readers a close-up view of life in one of those subs, USS Sturgeon (SSN637). McHale's memoir covers the years from 1967 to 1970, when as a teenager he was assigned to the nuclear submarine. Readers come to understand how those years profoundly affected the way he lived the rest of his life. The book focuses on McHale's experiences and those of other men with whom he served who have remained his lifelong friends.

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Since its capture from Spain in 1704, Gibraltar has been one of Great Britain’s most legendary citadels. As the gatekeeper of the Mediterranean Sea, its commanding position has shaped the history of the region and surrounding nations, including modern Britain. The fortress, its garrison, and its leaders were witness to and participant in both the rise and the fall of the first emperor of France, whose attempt at European conquest gave birth to the ascendancy of Gibraltar’s true importance and its position in world affairs. However, despite its 2,500 year old history, no study has existed that examines the role of the fortress during the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815). It was during that important period that the well-known defensive might of Gibraltar was converted to offensive potential for the British army and was united with the previously under appreciated strategic value of the Rock for the Royal Navy. That combination of military and naval might transformed Gibraltar into a base capable of meeting the various demands in the Mediterranean for many years to come. Nelson’s Refuge examines Gibraltar’s growth during the two decade struggle with Napoleonic France. As a forward base for the operations of the Royal Navy and Army, the peninsula allowed Horatio Nelson to achieve his victories at the Nile and at Trafalgar. The book also describes how Gibraltar served as the base of secret negotiations that brought Spain to the British side during the Peninsular War and further served as the most forward operations base for the British in that war.

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By the summer of 1915, Germany was faced with two related, but somewhat dissimilar problems; how to break the British blockade and how to stop or seriously disrupt the British supply line across the Atlantic. The solution to breaking the blockade was to find a way over it, through it, or under it. Aircraft in those days were too primitive, underpowered, and short range to accomplish the first and Germany lacked the naval strength to force a passage through the blockade. But if a fleet of cargo U-boats could be built that were large enough to carry meaningful loads and had the range to make a round trip between Germany and the United States without having to refuel, the blockade might be successfully broken. Responsibility for implementing this solution rested with a section of German Navy Intelligence known as the Etappendienst.The Germans also lacked the naval strength to effect the solution to the other problem; cutting Britain's supply line to America. The German Navy could not defeat the Royal Navy in a slug-fest and there were not enough U-boats to effectively block Britain's cross-Atlantic sea trade. The answer lay in sabotage–blowing up the munitions factories, the depots, and the ships, and infecting the remounts–horses and mules–with Anthrax and Glanders at the western end of the supply line. Responsibility for carrying out sabotage of all types in the United States rested with a newly established subsection of the German Army Intelligence called the Sektion Politik that sent trained saboteurs to the United States beginning in 1915. German agents, together with American sympathizers, carried out more than fifty successful attacks involving fire and explosion before America's entry into the war on 6 April 1917, in addition to spreading Anthrax and Glanders on the East Coast.Of the two solutions to those problems, sabotage was incompatible with Germany's primary diplomatic goal to keep the United States out of the war, while the other, breaking the blockade with a fleet of cargo U-boats, provided the least danger of bringing the United States into the war. The two solutions were widely dissimilar, but the fact that the cargo U-boat project and the sabotage campaign were run by intelligence agencies–the Etappendienst (Navy) and the Geheimdienst (Army), through the agency of one man–Paul Hilken, in one US city–Baltimore, make them inseparable. Those separate solutions created the dichotomy that produced the U-Boat Deutschland and the Baltimore Sabotage Cell.

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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.

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