"On July 29, 1945, four days after delivering the atomic bomb destined for Hiroshima, the U.S.S. Indianapolis was torpedoed and sunk. of the 1,199 men on board, 883 perished. Culled from previously unavailable files, this is the chilling story of how the U. S. Navy left the crew in shark-infested waters for four days, and why only a fraction of the 800 men who safely abandoned the ship survived the ordeal. This is the true story of the massive thirty-year...

German soldiers assigned to guard the tiny Channel Island of Sark described it as a 'little Paradise' and, because it was never bombed by the RAF, the best air-raid shelter in all of Europe. But paradise for them came to a bloody end in October 1942 when a small group of British Commandos raided the island, capturing one German soldier and killing several others. Operation Basalt would have been a footnote in history but for the reaction of Hitler,...

"It is a story that many of us think we know but don?t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the...

"For men on destroyer-class warships during World War I and World War II, battles were waged "against overwhelming odds from which survival could not be expected." Those were the words Lieutenant Commander Robert Copeland calmly told his crew as their tiny, unarmored destroyer escort rushed toward giant, armored Japanese battleships at the Battle off Samar on October 25, 1944. This action-packed narrative history of destroyer-class ships brings readers...

This authoritative 1905 history, based on Mahan's lectures as president of the Naval War College, develop his still-influential ideas about the role navies play among modern nations. Volume One begins with the antecedents of the war, such as the conditions in the colonies-and ends in the thick of the war, describing ocean warfare in the fall of 1812.

Cast out from their ship by Fletcher Christian and his rebel band, William Bligh and eighteen seamen were forced to journey thousands of miles to the nearest port in a small open boat, with inadequate supplies and without a compass or charts. This time-honored classic, written in 1790, is Bligh's personal account of an extraordinary feat of seamanship, in which he used a sextant, a pocket watch, and his own iron will to direct an ill-equipped vessel...

S-51 sank almost immediately after it was rammed around 10:30 p.m. off Block Island Sound on Saturday evening, September 25, 1925. Her crew of 34 was in the water, sailors who begged for a line to save their lives. In a Boston courtroom the following December the steamship company that owned the ship City of Rome and the U.S. Navy battled it out. Company officials charged the Navy with having "rookies" manning the conning tower of S-51. The Navy shot...

Shipwrecked on a remote island in the Dutch East Indies, Captain Jack Aubrey, surgeon and secret intelligence agent Stephen Maturin, and the crew of the Diane fashion a schooner from the wreck. Though a vicious attack by Malay pirates is repulsed, the makeshift vessel burns, and Aubrey and his crew are truly marooned. Their escape from this predicament is one that only the whimsy and ingenuity of Patrick O'Brian—or Stephen Maturin—could

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This is the stirring and authoritative account of one of World War II's most highly decorated submarines “Find 'Em, Chase 'Em, Sink 'Em” is the first book to recount the tragic and mysterious loss of the World War II submarine USS Gudgeon. In April 1944, the highly decorated submarine USS Gudgeon slipped beneath the waves in one of the most treacherous patrol areas in the most dangerous military service during World War II. Neither the Gudgeon...

Examines the history of the Barbary pirates, and discusses their relationship with the United States Navy in the early years of the country's entry into the shipping trade.