Naval Military History

In Beyond the Blue Horizon, best-selling science historian Brian Fagan tackles his richest topic yet: the enduring mystery of the oceans, the planet’s most forbidding terrain. This is not a tale of Columbus or Hudson, but of much earlier mariners. From the moment when ancient Polynesians first dared to sail beyond the horizon, Fagan vividly explains how our mastery of the oceans has changed history, even before history was written.

On the fourth of July, 1942, four Allied ships traversing the Arctic separated from their decimated convoy to head further north into the ice field of the North Pole, seeking safety from Nazi bombers and U-boats in the perilous white maze of ice floes, growlers, and giant bergs. Despite the risks, they had a better chance of survival than the rest of Convoy PQ-17, a fleet of 35 cargo ships carrying $1 billion worth of war supplies to the Soviet port of Archangel - the limited help Roosevelt and Churchill extended to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to maintain their fragile alliance.

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.

Danger prowled under both the cold gray waters of the North Sea and the shimmering blue waves of the tropical Atlantic during World War II as Adolf Hitler's Third Reich attempted to strangle Allied shipping lanes with U-boat attacks. German and British submarines combed the vast oceanic battlefield for prey, while scientists developed new technologies and countermeasures.

Commander Edward Young (RNRV, DSO, DSC and Bar) started the war as an amateur yachtsman and finished it as a highly decorated submarine commander. Indeed, he was the first RNVR officer to hold independent command of a warship. One of Our Submarines is his gripping and thrilling biography of his adventures below the waves, showing how officers had to transform themselves from amateurs into the equals and, at times, the superiors of the professionals in meeting the demands imposed upon them by war.

In its voracious hunger to fill its decks and spars with the bodies of strong young sailors, the nineteenth century US Navy and the commercial maritime industry welcomed eccentrics, criminals, outcasts, and misfits into a community of the marginalized, one that held very different values and expectations than the towns and villages from which the young men fled, a community that offered a tentative refuge to men who were sexually attracted to other men. Benemann provides an in-depth examination of nineteenth century LGBTQ culture as it developed at sea and in America's port cities.

In Tin Cans and Greyhounds, author Clint Johnson brings listeners inside the quarter-inch hulls of destroyers to meet the men who manned the ships' five-inch guns and fought America's wars from inside a "tin can" - risking death by cannon shell, shrapnel, bomb, fire, drowning, exposure, and sharks.

Douglas Webster was a young pilot from Ohio, newly married and with 17 combat missions under his belt. On December 5, 1965 he strapped into an A-4 Skyhawk bomber for a routine weapons loading drill and simulated mission. After mishandling the maneuver, the plane and its pilot sunk to the bottom of the South China Sea, along with a live B43 one-megaton thermonuclear bomb. A cover-up mission began.

In August of 1588, a Spanish fleet of 130 ships departed from La Coruña under the command of the Duke of Medina Sidonia. Its purpose was to rendezvous with the Spanish army at the Dutch port of Sluys. At this point, the fleet was to act as a screen while the Spanish army was shuttled across the English Channel in barges. But there was one problem: the English fleet. Though much smaller than the Spanish fleet, it was a demonstrably superior fighting force of sailors, ships, naval technology, and guns.

In the late 18th century, it was widely thought that to be a sailor was little better than to be a slave. "No man will be a sailor," wrote Samuel Johnson, "who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail. A man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company." If that were true, historian Nathan Miller suggests, then the record of sailing in the age of tall ships would likely be distinguished by few heroes and fewer grand narratives.

On October 12, 2000, at 11:18 a.m., an 8,400-ton destroyer, the USS Cole, was rocked by an enormous explosion. The ship’s commander, Kirk Lippold, watched as tiles tumbled from the ceiling, mugs of coffee tumbled to the floor, and everything not bolted down seemed to float in midair. Lippold knew in a matter of moments that the Cole had been attacked. What he didn’t know was how much the world was changing around him.

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.

“AIR RAID, PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NOT DRILL.” At 7:58 a.m. on December 7, 1941, an officer at the Ford Island Command Center frantically typed what would become one of the most famous radio dispatches in history as the Japanese navy launched a surprise aerial assault on the American navy stationed in Hawaii. In a little over two hours, the Japanese killed more than 2,400 Americans and propelled the US’s entry into World War II. Dead Reckoning is the story of the mission to avenge that devastating strike.

This audiobook is a detailed and comprehensive account of the fighting from both sides. It provides the context of the battle, most obviously in terms of Japanese calculations and the search for "a fitting place to die" and "the chance to bloom as flowers of death."

A detailed and comprehensive study of the carrier formations of the Pacific War, including their origins, development, and key battles from the Coral Sea, through Midway and Guadalcanal to the battle of the Philippine Sea.

Published on the 75th anniversary of the battle and utilizing vivid accounts written by the combatants at Guadalcanal, along with marine corps and army archives and oral histories, Midnight in the Pacific is both a sweeping narrative and a compelling drama of individual marines, soldiers, and sailors caught in the crosshairs of history.

In October 1941, the British Admiralty based a surface strike force in Malta to attack Axis sea lanes between Italy and Africa. Aided by Ultra intelligence, submarines, and bombers based in Malta, this force dominated the Central Mediterranean. From the end of October through the middle of December 1941, less than a third of the supplies shipped from Italian ports arrived in Libya. Shortages of ammunition and fuel finally compelled the Afrika Korps to retreat 400 miles. Then, in the space of 30 hours, this all changed.

Orphaned at five, nothing held Whidden back from embarking on sea life seven years later. Serving as an apprentice, he quickly proved his worth and earned himself a mate's position by his early 20s. Graduating to third, second, and first office, he ended his career in command of, and having part-ownership of, his own vessel. Ocean Life in the Old Sailing Ship Days records a series of real events from his childhood impressions of rough and ready seamen to his thrilling and brutal experiences of war.

St Nazaire, 1.22 a.m. 28th March 1942. HMS Cambeltown, supported by seventeen wooden motor launches, approached the German-held port intending to smash into the lock gates of the largest dock in the world; the Normandie Dock-Operation Chariot was in full swing. Against vicious Nazi gunfire, the commandos stormed the docks, and within half an hour, succeeded in their chief demolition objectives, but in the heat of battle, the Royal Navy had lost nearly all of its small vessels intended to carry them back to England.

A fascinating personal memoir of underwater combat in World War II, told by a man who played a major role in those dangerous operations. Frank and beautifully written, this book will be of lasting value as a submarine history by an expert and as an enduring military and political analysis.