Naval History

On the afternoon of January 16, 1942, three men boarded a TBD Devastator aircraft - a low-wing, single-engine torpedo-bomber - for an antisubmarine patrol flight. Although it was to be a relatively short flight, they became lost...

Although previously undervalued for their strategic impact because they represented only a small percentage of total forces, the Union and Confederate navies were crucial to the outcome of the Civil War. In War on the Waters, James M. McPherson has crafted an enlightening, at times harrowing, and ultimately thrilling account of the war’s naval campaigns and their military leaders. McPherson recounts how the Union navy’s blockade of the Confederate coast, leaky as a sieve in the war’s early months, became increasingly effective as it choked off vital imports and exports.

On 27 October 1942, four "Long Lance" torpedoes fired by the Japanese destroyers Makigumo and Akigumo exploded in the hull of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8). Minutes later, the ship that had launched the Doolitte Raid six months earlier slipped beneath the waves of the Coral Sea 100 miles northeast of the island of Guadalcanal and just north of the Santa Cruz Islands, taking with her 140 of her sailors. With the loss of Hornet, the United States Navy now had one aircraft carrier left in the South Pacific.

Ranging from the Vikings and Wako pirates in the Middle Ages to modern day Somali pirates, Lehr delves deep into what motivates pirates and how they operate. He also illuminates the state's role in the development of piracy throughout history: from privateers sanctioned by Queen Elizabeth to pirates operating off the coast of Africa taking the law into their own hands. After exploring the structural failures which create fertile ground for pirate activities, Lehr evaluates the success of counter-piracy efforts - and the reasons behind its failures.

Edward Pellew, captain of the legendary Indefatigable, was quite simply the greatest British frigate captain in the age of sail. Left fatherless at age eight, with a penniless mother and five siblings, Pellew fought his way from the very bottom of the navy to fleet command. Victories and eye-catching feats won him a public following. Yet he had a gift for antagonizing his better-born peers, and he made powerful enemies. Redemption came with his last command, when he set off to do battle with the Barbary States and free thousands of European slaves.

Elliot Carlson's biography of Captain Joe Rochefort is the first to be written of the officer who headed the U.S. Navy's decrypt unit at Pearl Harbor and broke the Japanese Navy's code before the Battle of Midway. Listeners will share Rochefort's frustrations as he searches in vain for Yamamoto's fleet prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and share his joy when he succeeds in tracking the fleet in early 1942 and breaks the code that leads him to believe Yamamoto's invasion target is Midway.

Admiral Hyman George Rickover (1899-1986) remains an almost mythical figure in the United States Navy. A brilliant engineer with a ferocious will and combative personality, he oversaw the invention of the world’s first practical nuclear power reactor. In this exciting biography, historian Marc Wortman explores the constant conflict Rickover faced and provoked, tracing how he revolutionized the navy and Cold War strategy.

From the time of the Greeks and the Persians clashing in the Mediterranean, sea power has determined world power. To an extent that is often underappreciated, it still does. No one understands this better than Admiral Jim Stavridis. In Sea Power, Admiral Stavridis takes us with him on a tour of the world's oceans from the admiral's chair, showing us how the geography of the oceans has shaped the destinies of nations and how naval power has in a real sense made the world we live in today and will shape the world we live in tomorrow.

More than 800 sailors served aboard the Sterett during her hazardous and demanding duties in World War II. This is the story of those men and their beloved ship, recorded by a junior officer who served on the famous destroyer from her commissioning in 1939 to April 1943, when he was wounded at the Battle of Tulagi. Peppered with the kind of vivid, authentic details that could only be provided by a participant, the book is the saga of a gallant fighting ship that earned a Presidential Unit Citation for her part in the Third Battle of Savo Island, where she took on a battleship.

William Halsey was the most famous naval officer of World War II. His fearlessness in carrier raids against Japan, his steely resolve at Guadalcanal, and his impulsive blunder at the Battle of Leyte Gulf made him the "Patton of the Pacific" and solidified his reputation as a decisive, aggressive fighter prone to impetuous errors of judgment in the heat of battle.

Holding the Line chronicles the carrier war in Korea from the first day of the war to the last, focusing on frontline combat while also describing the technical development of aircraft and shipboard operations and how these all affected the broader strategic situation on the Korean Peninsula.

No part of the country was more contested during the American Revolution than the Hudson River. In 1776 King George III sent the largest amphibious force ever assembled to seize Manhattan and use it as a base from which to push up the Hudson River Valley for a rendezvous at Albany with an impressive army driving down from Canada. George Washington and other patriot leaders shared the king's fixation with the Hudson.

When Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, the US and NATO were losing the Cold War. The USSR had superiority in conventional weapons and manpower in Europe and had embarked on a massive program to gain naval preeminence. But Reagan already had a plan to end the Cold War without armed conflict.

Samuel Leech provides a fascinating account of life as a sailor in the War of 1812 and through early 19th century. It is a remarkable account of a man who, until the conflict with the USS United States, had fought British Navy but after that battle changed allegiance to the United States and continued sailing with her navy for a further four years. A perfect addition to any sailor's library, A Voice from the Main Deck is a vivid account of life at sea in the early 19th century.

Initially a slaving vessel itself, the Black Joke was captured in 1827 and repurposed by the Royal Navy to catch its former compatriots. Over the next five years, the vessel liberated more enslaved people than any other in Britain’s West Africa Squadron. As Britain attempted to snuff out the transatlantic slave trade by way of treaty and negotiation, enforcing these policies fell to ships such as the Black Joke as they battled slavers, weather disasters and interpersonal drama among captains and crew that reverberated across oceans.

In the tradition of Shadow Divers, the story of the courageous men who dived on the last sunken U-Boat off the Eastern Seaboard. On April 16, 1944, the tanker SS Pan Pennsylvania was torpedoed and sunk by the U-550. In return the sub was sent to the bottom by three destroyer escorts that were guarding the convoy. For more than 60 years the location of the U-boat's wreck eluded divers. In 2012 a team found it.

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic.

Admittedly small and vulnerable, PT boats were, nevertheless, fast - the fastest craft on the water during World War II - and Dick Keresey's account of these tough little fighters throws new light on their contributions to the war effort. As captain of PT 105, the author was in the same battle as John F. Kennedy when Kennedy's PT 109 was rammed and sunk. The famous incident, Keresey says, has often been described inaccurately and the PT boat depicted as unreliable and ineffective.

Russell Crenshaw's riveting account of the savage night battle for the Solomon Islands in early 1943 offers listeners a unique insider's perspective from the decks of one of the destroyers that bore the brunt of the struggle.

No single sea battle has had more far-reaching consequences than the one fought in the harbor at Hampton Roads, Virginia, in March 1862. The Confederacy, with no fleet of its own, built an iron fort containing 10 heavy guns on the hull of a captured Union frigate named the Merrimack. The North got word of the project when it was already well along, and, in desperation, commissioned an eccentric inventor named John Ericsson to build the Monitor, an entirely revolutionary iron warship.