Silent Victory

Author : Captain John F. O'Connell, USN (RET.)
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2011-08-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9781462042616

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Submarine Operational Effectiveness in the 20th Century by Captain John F. O'Connell, USN (RET.) Pdf

The submarine emerged as a serious weapons system during the First World War (1914 - 1918). During that conflict Germany with its unrestricted submarine warfare campaign of 1917 nearly drove Great Britain to the negotiating table. Its U-boats sank 6,196 ships of 13,438,632 gross register tons. Despite post-war attempts to ban the submarine from warfare, it survived. Both Italy and Germany used submarines, covertly, during the Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939). This book, Part Two of a series, discusses the use of submarines during World War Two (1939 - 1945) and their effectiveness. It focuses principally on two strategic submarine campaigns. The first is about German U-boats against British and neutral commerce. That campaign finally failed during the Battle of The Atlantic in 1943. The second deals with American submarines against Japanese shipping from Southeast Asia to the home islands, a campaign that successfully isolated Japan from its sources of raw materials and foodstuffs during 1944 and effectively defeated Japan.

Author : Francis Hoffman
Publisher : Naval Institute Press
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2021-03-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781682475904

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Mars Adapting by Francis Hoffman Pdf

As Clausewitz observed, “In war more than anywhere else, things do not turn out as we expect.” The essence of war is a competitive reciprocal relationship with an adversary. Commanders and institutional leaders must recognize shortfalls and resolve gaps rapidly in the middle of the fog of war. The side that reacts best (and absorbs faster) increases its chances of winning. Mars Adapting examines what makes some military organizations better at this contest than others. It explores the institutional characteristics or attributes at play in learning quickly. Adaptation requires a dynamic process of acquiring knowledge, the utilization of that knowledge to alter a unit’s skills, and the sharing of that learning to other units to integrate and institutionalize better operational practice. Mars Adapting explores the internal institutional factors that promote and enable military adaptation. It employs four cases, drawing upon one from each of the U.S. armed services. Each case was an extensive campaign, with several cycles of action/counteraction. In each case the military institution entered the war with an existing mental model of the war they expected to fight. For example, the U.S. Navy prepared for decades to defeat the Japanese Imperial Navy and had developed carried-based aviation. Other capabilities, particularly the Fleet submarine, were applied as a major adaptation. The author establishes a theory called Organizational Learning Capacity that captures the transition of experience and knowledge from individuals into larger and higher levels of each military service through four major steps. The learning/change cycle is influenced, he argues, by four institutional attributes (leadership, organizational culture, learning mechanisms, and dissemination mechanisms). The dynamic interplay of these institutional enablers shaped their ability to perceive and change appropriately.

Author : Ronald H. Spector
Publisher : Free Press
Page : 624 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2020-11-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9781982135232

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Eagle Against the Sun by Ronald H. Spector Pdf

“The best book by far on the Pacific War” (The New York Times Book Review), this classic one-volume history of World War II in the Pacific draws on declassified intelligence files; British, American, and Japanese archival material; and military memoirs to provide a stunning and complete history of the conflict. This “superbly readable, insightful, gripping” (Washington Post Book World) contribution to WWII history combines impeccable research with electrifying detail and offers provocative interpretations of this brutal forty-four-month struggle. Author and historian Ronald H. Spector reassesses US and Japanese strategy and shows that the dual advance across the Pacific by MacArthur and Nimitz was more a pragmatic solution to bureaucratic, doctrinal, and public relations problems facing the Army and Navy than a strategic calculation. He also argues that Japan made its fatal error not in the Midway campaign but in abandoning its offensive strategy after that defeat and allowing itself to be drawn into a war of attrition. Spector skillfully takes us from top-secret strategy meetings in Washington, London, and Tokyo to distant beaches and remote Asian jungles with battle-weary GIs. He reveals that the US had secret plans to wage unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan months before Pearl Harbor and shows that MacArthur and his commanders ignored important intercepts of Japanese messages that would have saved thousands of lives in Papua and Leyte. Throughout, Spector contends that American decisions in the Pacific War were shaped more often by the struggles between the British and the Americans, and between the Army and the Navy, than by strategic considerations. Spector vividly recreates the major battles, little-known campaigns, and unfamiliar events leading up to the deadliest air raid ever, adding a new dimension to our understanding of the American war in the Pacific and the people and forces that determined its outcome.

Author : Craig L. Symonds
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 720 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2018-04-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9780190243692

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World War II at Sea by Craig L. Symonds Pdf

Author of Lincoln and His Admirals (winner of the Lincoln Prize), The Battle of Midway (Best Book of the Year, Military History Quarterly), and Operation Neptune, (winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature), Craig L. Symonds has established himself as one of the finest naval historians at work today. World War II at Sea represents his crowning achievement: a complete narrative of the naval war and all of its belligerents, on all of the world's oceans and seas, between 1939 and 1945. Opening with the 1930 London Conference, Symonds shows how any limitations on naval warfare would become irrelevant before the decade was up, as Europe erupted into conflict once more and its navies were brought to bear against each other. World War II at Sea offers a global perspective, focusing on the major engagements and personalities and revealing both their scale and their interconnection: the U-boat attack on Scapa Flow and the Battle of the Atlantic; the "miracle" evacuation from Dunkirk and the pitched battles for control of Norway fjords; Mussolini's Regia Marina-at the start of the war the fourth-largest navy in the world-and the dominance of the Kidö Butai and Japanese naval power in the Pacific; Pearl Harbor then Midway; the struggles of the Russian Navy and the scuttling of the French Fleet in Toulon in 1942; the landings in North Africa and then Normandy. Here as well are the notable naval leaders-FDR and Churchill, both self-proclaimed "Navy men," Karl Dönitz, François Darlan, Ernest King, Isoroku Yamamoto, Erich Raeder, Inigo Campioni, Louis Mountbatten, William Halsey, as well as the hundreds of thousands of seamen and officers of all nationalities whose live were imperiled and lost during the greatest naval conflicts in history, from small-scale assaults and amphibious operations to the largest armadas ever assembled. Many have argued that World War II was dominated by naval operations; few have shown and how and why this was the case. Symonds combines precision with story-telling verve, expertly illuminating not only the mechanics of large-scale warfare on (and below) the sea but offering wisdom into the nature of the war itself.

Author : Bruce A. Elleman,S. C. M. Paine
Publisher : Government Printing Office
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Naval strategy
ISBN : 1935352075

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Commerce Raiding by Bruce A. Elleman,S. C. M. Paine Pdf

Edited collection of 16 case studies of why and how nations have conducted commerce raiding in the 18th through 20th centuries.

Author : Robert Gannon
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 1996-01-01
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780271038407

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Hellions of the Deep by Robert Gannon Pdf

Ultimately, World War II was the first war won by technology, but within only a few weeks after the war began, the U.S. Navy realized its torpedo program was a dismal failure. Submarine skippers reported that most of their torpedoes were either missing the targets or failing to explode if they did hit. The United States had to work fast if it expected to compete with the Japanese Long Lance, the biggest and fastest torpedo in the world, and Germany's electric and sonar models. Hellions of the Deep tells the dramatic story of how Navy planners threw aside the careful procedures of peacetime science and initiated &"radical research&": gathering together the nation's best scientists and engineers in huge research centers and giving them freedom of experimentation to create sophisticated weaponry with a single goal&—winning the war. The largest center for torpedo work was a requisitioned gymnasium at Harvard University, where the most famous names in science worked with the best graduate students from all around the country at the business of war. They had to produce tangible weapons, to consider production and supply tactics, to take orders from the military, and, in many cases, also to teach the military how to use the weapons they developed. World War II grew into a chess match played by scientists and physicists, and it became the only war in history to be won by weapons invented during the conflict. For this book, Robert Gannon conducted numerous interviews over a twenty-year period with scientists, engineers, physicists, submarine skippers, and Navy bureaucrats, all involved in the development of the advanced weapons technology that won the war. While the search for new weapons was deadly serious, stretching imagination and resourcefulness to the limit each day, the need was obvious: American ships were being blown up daily just outside the Boston harbor. These oral histories reveal that, in retrospect, surprising even to those who went through it, the search for the &"hellions of the deep&" was, for many, the most exciting period of their lives.

Author : George J. Billy
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2020-01-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9781476636788

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The USS Swordfish by George J. Billy Pdf

Among the more than 260 American submarines that patrolled the Pacific during World War II, the USS Swordfish in 1941 was the first to sink a Japanese armed merchant ship, marking the beginning of the submarine's colorful history. A series of seven commanders led Swordfish's 13 war patrols. Each skipper had a distinct leadership style. Some were successful in sinking enemy ships; others returned to port empty-handed. Yet all patrols risked dangerously close encounters with the enemy and the unforgiving nature of the open sea. Drawing on archival sources and interviews with veteran sailors, this first full-length history of the Swordfish provides detailed accounts of each patrol and covers the mysterious disappearance of the legendary submarine on its final mission.

Author : Joel Ira Holwitt
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2009-04-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781603440837

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"Execute against Japan" by Joel Ira Holwitt Pdf

“ . . . until now how the Navy managed to instantaneously move from the overt legal restrictions of the naval arms treaties that bound submarines to the cruiser rules of the eighteenth century to a declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor has never been explained. Lieutenant Holwitt has dissected this process and has created a compelling story of who did what, when, and to whom.”—The Submarine Review “Execute against Japan should be required reading for naval officers (especially in submarine wardrooms), as well as for anyone interested in history, policy, or international law.”—Adm. James P. Wisecup, President, US Naval War College (for Naval War College Review) “Although the policy of unrestricted air and submarine warfare proved critical to the Pacific war’s course, this splendid work is the first comprehensive account of its origins—illustrating that historians have by no means exhausted questions about this conflict.”—World War II Magazine “US Navy submarine officer Joel Ira Holwitt has performed an impressive feat with this book. . . . Holwitt is to be commended for not shying away from moral judgments . . . This is a superb book that fully explains how the United States came to adopt a strategy regarded by many as illegal and tantamount to ‘terror’.”—Military Review

Author : Johnson Nwaubani
Publisher : AuthorHouse
Page : 130 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2011-05
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781425983437

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Poems of a Mediator and Poetic Quotable Quotes by Johnson Nwaubani Pdf

This book contains the poet's award winning poems, and his exceptional creativity in the world of poetry. Acrostic poems with lyrical insight are quite applausable. Poems about love, greed, hope, courage, nature, religion, maturity, humor, and etc, would challenge the reader to a pondering journey, mingled with academic and creative insight.

Author : Edward Finch
Publisher : Naval Institute Press
Page : 199 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2010-04-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781612514536

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Beneath the Waves by Edward Finch Pdf

Capt. Edward “Ned” Latimer Beach, Jr. USN is known primarily for his bestselling novel Run Silent, Run Deep, which was made into a film in 1958 with Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster and his record setting voyage as commanding officer of USS Triton (SSN(R) 586), that was the first submarine to circumnavigate of the globe while submerged. A highly-decorated United States Navy submarine officer, during World War II, he participated in the Battle of Midway as well as other 12 combat patrols, earning 10 decorations for gallantry, including the Navy Cross. His career also offers insights into the inner workings of power, from inside the Pentagon in the years right after World War II, to inside of the Eisenhower White House, to the politics of the Republican Party in the United States Senate in the 1970s,. In addition to serving as an officer aboard U.S. submarines in the Pacific during World War II, he was a prolific author publishing two novels in addition Run Silent, Run Deep, as well as numerous works on naval history. Ned Beach is a biography that weaves together the personal, professional and writing life of a man who for many was the public face of the submarine community in the years after the Second World War. With a father, who was a naval officer and the author of thirteen published novels in the 1910s & ‘20s, as the eldest son Ned Beach was greatly influenced to follow in his father’s footsteps and to become both an officer and a writer. From his youth in Palo Alto, California during the Great Depression to his service in the Pacific in the war against Japan to the epic submerged circumnavigation of the globe in early 1960 commanding one of the early nuclear powered submarines, Ned Beach’s career encompasses a revolutionary period in American naval history. Not only did he experience it, he wrote about it. This book tells the story of his remarkable life, career and writing.

Author : Josephine Elizabeth Grey Butler
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 1900
Category : Church work with veterans
ISBN : WISC:89003908852

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Silent Victories by Josephine Elizabeth Grey Butler Pdf

Author : John A. Adams
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 474 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2008-07-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780253000293

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If Mahan Ran the Great Pacific War by John A. Adams Pdf

Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1660--1783) was one of the most influential books on military strategy in the first half of the 20th century. A core text in the naval war colleges of the United States, Britain, and Japan, Mahan's book shaped doctrine for the conduct of war at sea. Adams uses Mahan's ideas to discuss the great Pacific sea battles of World War II and to consider how well they withstood the test of actual combat. Reexamining the conduct of war in the Pacific from a single analytic viewpoint leads to some surprising conclusions about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Doolittle Raid, the Battle of the Coral Sea, the recapture of the Philippines, and the submarine war. Naval historians and armchair strategists alike will find much food for thought in these engrossing pages.

Author : Gregory F Michno
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 403 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2016-01-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780806153902

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USS Pampanito by Gregory F Michno Pdf

Most World War II submarine stories are glorifications of war written by submarine captains about their own boats. But the USS Pampanito was not a typical submarine. The sub and its crew caused plenty of destruction, but they found the pinnacle of their honor and fame in a dramatic sea rescue. Gregory F. Michno relates the experiences of the crewmen—both enlisted men and officers—who served on the USS Pampanito. The Pampanito story begins with the boat's construction in 1943, continues through its six combat missions, and concludes with its decommissioning after the war in 1945. The heart of the book is the September 12, 1944, attack on a Japanese convoy carrying English and Australian POWs from the Burma-Siam Railway (of Bridge on the River Kwai fame) to prison camps in Japan. The Pampanito helped sink two of the prison ships, unwittingly killing hundreds of Allied soldiers, but then returned to rescue the survivors. The crew picked a record seventy-three men from the sea.

Author : Mary Lee Coe Fowler
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2008-04-29
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780817316112

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Full Fathom Five by Mary Lee Coe Fowler Pdf

Mary Lee Coe Fowler was a posthumous child, born after her father, a submarine skipper in the Pacific, was lost at sea in 1943. She set out to learn not only who her father was, but what happened to him and his crew, and why. This memoir reveals what she eventually learned, which includes the perils and hardships of submarine service in wartime.

Author : Michael Sturma
Publisher : Naval Institute Press
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2013-07-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9781612514321

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Death at a Distance by Michael Sturma Pdf

Only seven U.S. submariners earned the Medal of Honor in World War II. Sam Dealey, the USS Harder's commander, was one of them. His honor was awarded posthumously after the entire crew was lost off Bataan during a depth-charge attack in August 1944 by a Japanese convoy. The Harder's fighting spirit is legendary, and its record of sinking a total of eighteen enemy ships (with a tonnage in excess of 55,000) made Dealey one of the top five submarine skippers in the war. During a single patrol his crew sank five enemy destroyers in five short-range torpedo attacks —an unprecedented feat. In addition, the Harder played important roles in rescue missions, extracting secret operatives deep in enemy territory and saving downed pilots. Drawing on previously untapped sources, Michael Sturma, an Australian teaching at Murdoch University, details several daring missions, one that involved the heroic Australian commando Bill Jinkins, and puts the Harder's action in the context of the overall Pacific campaign. In do so, the author adds not only significant information to the Harder's story but also provides a fresh perspective on the submarine war.