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Jutland, 1916.
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I grew up in the town of Yalta on the Black Sea. The sea had gotten its name because of its bad temper–storms, squalls, fogs. Warships never docked in Yalta, but passenger ships did. If the ship was a regular (and many were because people still used them to get from point A to point B), we recognized it by the sound of its horn. When passing by, the warships gave us a wide berth–dim silhouettes on the horizon on an unknown mission. I left Crimea for good many years ago, but I am still a sucker for bad-tempered seas and secretive navies.
The narrative is so vivid that it made me take sides, rooting for some characters and muttering something unprintable each time their nemeses did silly and/or ego-driven things. What I found astounding is that long after Pearl Harbor, U.S. Navy decision-making protocols remained confusingly tentative, and the chain of command was convoluted.
Only four men in American history have been promoted to the five-star rank of Admiral of the Fleet: William Leahy, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz and William Halsey. These four men were the best and the brightest the navy produced and together they led the U.S. navy to victory in World War II, establishing the United States as the world's greatest fleet.
In THE ADMIRALS, award-winning historian Walter R. Borneman tells their story in full detail for the first time. Drawing upon journals, ship logs, and other primary sources, he brings an incredible historical moment to life, showing us how the…
I grew up in the town of Yalta on the Black Sea. The sea had gotten its name because of its bad temper–storms, squalls, fogs. Warships never docked in Yalta, but passenger ships did. If the ship was a regular (and many were because people still used them to get from point A to point B), we recognized it by the sound of its horn. When passing by, the warships gave us a wide berth–dim silhouettes on the horizon on an unknown mission. I left Crimea for good many years ago, but I am still a sucker for bad-tempered seas and secretive navies.
I had often wondered how it felt to be a part of a big war on its periphery. This book gave me the answer: what happens is piecemeal disintegration of humanity, sparing no one.
I discovered that the book was a page-turner, but that, of course, should’ve been expected from a top novelist; what I had not expected–I realized I knew people in positions of authority who were exactly like the infamous Captain Queeq.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a perennial favorite of readers young and old, Herman Wouk's masterful World War II drama set aboard a U.S. Navy warship in the Pacific is "a novel of brilliant virtuosity" (Times Literary Supplement).
Herman Wouk's boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining novel of life--and mutiny--on a Navy warship in the Pacific theater was immediately embraced, upon its original publication in 1951, as one of the first serious works of American fiction to grapple with the moral complexities and the human consequences of World War II.
In the intervening half century, The Caine Mutiny has sold millions…
I grew up in the town of Yalta on the Black Sea. The sea had gotten its name because of its bad temper–storms, squalls, fogs. Warships never docked in Yalta, but passenger ships did. If the ship was a regular (and many were because people still used them to get from point A to point B), we recognized it by the sound of its horn. When passing by, the warships gave us a wide berth–dim silhouettes on the horizon on an unknown mission. I left Crimea for good many years ago, but I am still a sucker for bad-tempered seas and secretive navies.
I used to think there had been no epic naval battles during the Cold War, but this book made me reconsider: a decades-long battle, that’s what the cat-and-mouse game between U.S. and Soviet submariners appears to have been.
The intensity of the deadly contest played with very few rules is shocking, and I am still not sure what to make of all that recklessness. Perhaps great powers have a higher pain threshold than we tend to assume.
__________________________ Adventure, ingenuity, courage and disaster beneath the sea: the remarkable reality of Cold War submarine warfare
In Blind Mans Bluff, veteran investigative journalist Sherry Sontag and award-winning New York Times reporter Christopher Drew reveal an extraordinary underwater world. Showing for the first time how the American Navy sent submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables, Sontag and Drew unveil new evidence that the Navy's own negligence might have been responsible for the loss of the USS Scorpion, a submarine that disappeared with all hands at the height of the…
I grew up in the town of Yalta on the Black Sea. The sea had gotten its name because of its bad temper–storms, squalls, fogs. Warships never docked in Yalta, but passenger ships did. If the ship was a regular (and many were because people still used them to get from point A to point B), we recognized it by the sound of its horn. When passing by, the warships gave us a wide berth–dim silhouettes on the horizon on an unknown mission. I left Crimea for good many years ago, but I am still a sucker for bad-tempered seas and secretive navies.
This book demystified the aircraft carrier for me. I still love it when, in a thriller movie, POTUS frowns and asks the national security advisor, “Where are our aircraft carriers at the moment?” But Walter Lord persuaded me that our biggest warships are simply moveable airfields.
On the expertise I claim only a deep interest in history, leadership, and social history. After some thirty-six years in the fire and emergency services I can, I think, claim to have seen the best and the worst of human behaviour and condition. History, particularly naval history, has always been one of my interests and the Battle of Jutland is a truly fascinating study in the importance of communication between the leader and every level between him/her and the people performing whatever task is required. In my own career, on a very much smaller scale, this is a lesson every officer learns very quickly.
The Battle of Jutland has fascinated many people down the years. Who won? Some say it was a ‘draw’, others that in terms of ships lost, the Germans ‘won’, but in truth, though the British lost more ships, they ‘won’ a strategic victory in that the High Seas Fleet never again challenged the Royal Navy on the High Seas. As Churchill said, Admiral Jellico was the one man who could have lost the war in an afternoon.
Ever since the ‘inconclusive’ Battle of Jutland there has been a controversy over how it was fought and the outcome. The British media expected a new Trafalgar, or a new Glorious First of June, with the German High Seas Fleet annihilated in a great clash of arms in which ship matched ship and slugged it out. When that didn’t happen, they turned on the Royal Navy and the Commander in Chief of the…
More than one hundred years after the battle of Jutland, the first and largest engagement of Dreadnoughts in the twentieth century, historians are still fighting this controversial and misunderstood battle. What was in fact a strategic victory stands out starkly against the background of bitter public disappointment in the Royal Navy and decades of divisive acrimony and very public infighting between the camps supporting the two most senior commanders, Jellicoe and Beatty.
This book not only re-tells the story of the battle from both a British and German perspective based on the latest research, but it also helps clarify the…
I am a British naval historian and winner of the Sir Julian Corbett Prize for Naval History. My main area of interest is the Anglo-German naval race before the First World War. I have written numerous books on this topic including Rum, Sodomy, Prayers, and the Lash Revisited: Winston Churchill and Social Reform in the Royal Navy, 1900-1915 (2018);The Naval Route to the Abyss: The Anglo-German Naval Race, 1895-1914(2015); The Royal Navy and the German Threat, 1901-1914 (2012); Naval Intelligence from Germany(2007); andSpies in Uniform: British Military and Naval Intelligence on the Eve of the First World War (2006).
A lot of ink has been spilt on why the Royal Navy was unable to overpower the German fleet at the battle of Jutland. Some focus on flaws in equipment and ship design, others on flaws in leadership and tactics, others still on poor fighting methods. This book examines the subject in the round and shows, contrary to received wisdom, that in gunnery at least, the Royal Navy entered the battle with the instruments best suited to its needs. Such failures as there were – and there were many – were largely down to individual command decisions on the day.
This new book reviews critically recent studies of fire control, and describes the essentials of naval gunnery in the dreadnought era.
With a foreword by Professor Andrew Lambert, it shows how, in 1913, the Admiralty rejected Arthur Pollen's Argo system for the Dreyer fire control tables. Many naval historians now believe that, consequently, British dreadnoughts were fitted with a system that, despite being partly plagiarised from Pollen's, was inferior: and that the Dreyer Tables were a contributory cause in the sinking of Indefatigable and Queen Mary at Jutland.
This book provides new and revisionist accounts of the Dreyer/Pollen controversy, and…
I dig deep for research for my novels and am entranced by history. It is the soil we grow from; without a sense of history, we have shallow roots. Many history books, however, are academic and tedious. Accounts by living witnesses – from interviews, letters, diaries – bring the past to life with vivid detail.
My grandfather fought in the Battle of Jutland, as a young gunnery lieutenant; the hero of The Redeemed, Leo, would do likewise as a boy seaman. I needed insight into men’s experience and found it above all in this book (put together by two naval officers who’d themselves taken part.) It is composed of sixty personal accounts from men of all ranks and is edited to give a gripping chronology of what remains the largest naval battle in history.
At the end of the First World War there was a widespread feeling in the British fleet that the public's disappointment with the results of the Jutland battle was based on misunderstanding. From this grew a desire to set the record straight, and a pair of naval officers collected together some sixty personal accounts of what was the largest ever clash between dreadnought battleships. These came from men of all ranks, widely distributed throughout the British fleet, each only writing of what he had seen and how the experience affected him. These were edited and arranged to follow the chronology…
I’m Steve R Dunn, a naval historian and author of twelve books of naval history, with two more commissioned for 2024 and 2025. As a child I used to invent naval fleets and have always loved the water. Now, I write about little-known aspects of the First World War at sea, and try to demonstrate that, despite the mass slaughter and ultimate victory on the Western Front, if Britain had lost command of the sea, the war would have been lost. The combination of recognisably modern weapons with Nelsonian command and control systems renders the naval side of WW1 endlessly fascinating to me.
He shows how the baked in traditions of blind obedience to orders, together with the class-based culture and selection for command, hindered the actions of the Royal Navy during WW1. Not all of his statements are correct and sometimes his naval history is shaky but the tale is well told and it is an absorbing read.
Foreword by Admiral Sir John Woodward. When published in hardcover in 1997, this book was praised for providing an engrossing education not only in naval strategy and tactics but in Victorian social attitudes and the influence of character on history. In juxtaposing an operational with a cultural theme, the author comes closer than any historian yet to explaining what was behind the often described operations of this famous 1916 battle at Jutland. Although the British fleet was victorious over the Germans, the cost in ships and men was high, and debates have raged within British naval circles ever since about…
On the expertise I claim only a deep interest in history, leadership, and social history. After some thirty-six years in the fire and emergency services I can, I think, claim to have seen the best and the worst of human behaviour and condition. History, particularly naval history, has always been one of my interests and the Battle of Jutland is a truly fascinating study in the importance of communication between the leader and every level between him/her and the people performing whatever task is required. In my own career, on a very much smaller scale, this is a lesson every officer learns very quickly.
Of the many books available on the Battle of Jutland, this one is a very professional look at what went wrong.
It acknowledges the key issue that no one in either fleet had any experience of handling fleets of this size and type, or fighting a battle at the ranges their guns were capable of reaching. Admirals Harper and Bacon remain thoroughly professional in their analysis of the failings on the British side, identifying such things as poor communication of orders by signal, poor signal security—Beatty’s flagship signalled by lamp a request for the night’s challenge and reply and received them from Princess Royal. So did at least one of the German ships which later used the challenge to confuse a British cruiser…
A key finding was that many of the British admirals had no ‘staff’ trained to process information, draft orders in a sensible manner, and transmit them. Key…
Two high-ranking officers defied the British Admiralty to tell the tale of World War I's first naval battle against Germany.
The Royal Navy had ruled the sea unchallenged for one hundred years since Nelson triumphed at Trafalgar. Yet when the Grand Fleet faced the German High Seas Fleet across the grey waters of the North Sea near Jutland, the British battleships and cruisers were battered into a draw, losing far more men and ships than the enemy.
The Grand Fleet far outnumbered and outgunned the German fleet, so something clearly had gone wrong. The public waited for the official histories…
On the expertise I claim only a deep interest in history, leadership, and social history. After some thirty-six years in the fire and emergency services I can, I think, claim to have seen the best and the worst of human behaviour and condition. History, particularly naval history, has always been one of my interests and the Battle of Jutland is a truly fascinating study in the importance of communication between the leader and every level between him/her and the people performing whatever task is required. In my own career, on a very much smaller scale, this is a lesson every officer learns very quickly.
This is the ‘Appreciation’ that Admirals Harper and Bacon responded to. It was never published or edited for publication at the time it was written by Captains A C and G B Dewar in 1920-21.
Both were firmly in the Beatty “charge the guns and slug it out ship to ship” faction and even Admirals Chatham and Keys, both Beatty supporters found it far, far too one-sided and likely to divide the RN into factions (Jutland still does). Though it was never published, copies did circulate and Churchill obviously had a copy since he quotes it in his own book “The World Crisis”. Eventually, in 1928, orders were given that all copies were to be collected and destroyed…some survived.
This book is remarkable in that it is the work of two historians who reproduce the original text with explanatory notes, annotations, and additional material. Reading it soon leads the reader…
