I spent more than five years researching and writing a book about the Japanese submarine force during World War II—a topic virtually untouched by western historians. My research took me to Japan where I interviewed surviving members of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Sixth Fleet—its submarine branch. These men told incredible stories of what it was like to serve aboard a Japanese sub during World War II; stories filled with courage, fear, pathos, and humor revealing the universality of the human condition. I remained moved by them to this day.
Undersea Victory is the definitive history of submarine warfare in the Pacific during World War II. Holmes was a giant in the field and really knows his stuff. You’ll come away having a much greater appreciation for how sub combat operations were conducted both by the U.S. and Japan. Importantly, Holmes doesn’t hesitate to tell you the good and the bad regardless of which side he’s writing about. No sub enthusiast’s library is complete without it.
The two constants in my life to date have been ocean exploration by day and reading epic adventures by night. As a Ph.D. marine scientist, I’ve had the incredible good fortune to travel the world conducting marine science research, work which to date has resulted in forty-two research articles and a textbook. But as much as I’ve enjoyed conducting the research, communicating about the sea has been even more engaging, taking me to the White House, both houses of Congress, and many countries around the world. And perhaps best of all, I’ve been able to couple my love of stories with my own research experience to produce four adventure novels.
I love this book despite the incredible discomfort I experience every time I read it.
Diving in the cold waters of the North Atlantic on a good day is no picnic. But diving deep into the wreck of a mystery U-boat, not knowing if you are going to come out? Epic.
I just recently listened to the Audible book while driving back from an undersea research project in a van filled with young scientific divers. The climax had us all squirming in our seats!
In the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventure in which two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a great historical mystery–and make history themselves.
For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was more than a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents, braving depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigating through wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselves to their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than once in the rusting hulks of sunken ships. But in the…
I spent more than five years researching and writing a book about the Japanese submarine force during World War II—a topic virtually untouched by western historians. My research took me to Japan where I interviewed surviving members of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Sixth Fleet—its submarine branch. These men told incredible stories of what it was like to serve aboard a Japanese sub during World War II; stories filled with courage, fear, pathos, and humor revealing the universality of the human condition. I remained moved by them to this day.
This is the first book I’ve ever read written by a Japanese sub commander that describes submarine warfare from the Japanese point of view. Few Japanese sub commanders survived the war, so how Orita lived to tell the tale is just one of the many remarkable stories he recounts in his book. Not only does it read like a suspense thriller, you’ll have newfound respect for the suffering he and his crews went through. Bottom line: The Japanese version of Das Boot!
I spent more than five years researching and writing a book about the Japanese submarine force during World War II—a topic virtually untouched by western historians. My research took me to Japan where I interviewed surviving members of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Sixth Fleet—its submarine branch. These men told incredible stories of what it was like to serve aboard a Japanese sub during World War II; stories filled with courage, fear, pathos, and humor revealing the universality of the human condition. I remained moved by them to this day.
Few people understand just how lousy the East Coast of the United States was with U-boats during the opening months of World War II. Operating with virtual impunity, they sank tankers and merchant ships up and down the coast for nearly a year before the U.S. finally organized an effective defense. Gannon does an excellent job both setting the scene and relating the history of the U-boat war—a story that few people know but will keep you riveted.
Operation Drumbeat is the story of Germany's first deliberate attacks against the United States in World War II. The attacks took the form of torpedo launchings, and deck-gun actions by submarines, called U-boats, against American and Allied freighters and tankers steaming with war cargoes along the U.S. Atlantic Coast, in the Caribbean, and across the Gulf of Mexico during the first eight months of 1942.
By August, the number of sinkings reached nearly 400, with loss of over 5,000 U.S. and Allied merchant seamen and sailors-twice the number of fatal casualties at Pearl Harbor the preceding December. In his magisterial…
I have always been a fan of history. As a journalist by education and an investigator by trade, I love to carefully research my settings and weave original fictional plots through actual history in a seamless manner that both entertains and informs the reader. I also appreciate the need for compelling characters, page-turning plots, conflict, and tension to keep readers engaged. I have a long-term fascination with piracy, privateering, and exploration during the early age of sail. I am also attracted to Elizabethan England and the Renaissance period with its ideological struggles. I really love a good sea story, and who doesn’t? Enjoy my reading list!
This book is a gritty, realistic fiction novel about a WWII German U-boat captain and crew facing immense challenges from the elements and the enemy while attempting to sink as many allied merchant ships as possible before running out of torpedoes or being destroyed. I particularly appreciated a view of war from “the other side” and details of life aboard a cramped submarine in wartime. The book is a timeless exploration of the privations faced by seamen who dare to wage war at sea. The tragic ending mirrors reality and adds irony and pathos to the story. I found this to be a page-turner that was very hard to put down once started.
Filled with almost unbearable tension and excitement, DAS BOOT is one of the best stories ever written about war, a supreme novel of the Second World War and an acclaimed film and TV drama.
It is autumn 1941 and a German U-boat commander and his crew set out on yet another hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. Over the coming weeks they must brave the stormy waters of the Atlantic in their mission to seek out and destroy British supply ships. But the tide is beginning to turn against the Germans in the war for the North Atlantic.…
I am a passionate, long-time collector of Ocean Liner material. I am recognized as a Member of the Board of The Ephemera Society of America, the Board of The Friends of Fort George, the Council of the British Ephemera Society and other historical and collector organizations. I was thrilled to be Recipient of the 2017 Award of Merit by The Ephemera Society of America, I was engaged by The Bodleian Library at Oxford University to author a book which captured some of the highlights of my extensive 60-year collection of Ocean Liner material which has been donated to the University. This book, sold globally, is the result of that work.
This is not a biography of a ship, but rather a focus on the tragedy of the loss of the Lusitania, torpedoed by a German submarine in 1915. This book is heavily textual, as would be expected, so if you like lots of pictures to accompany a story, this is not the book for you.
It was published in 2002, well before the deluge of books produced in 2015, the centenary of the Lusitania tragedy. Those books speculated regarding her loss, attempting to pin the tragedy on a ‘bad guy’. Not so Ms. Preston. Timing-wise, Diana Preston’s book fortunately precedes the rush to speculate. Although she looks at the possible wartime undercurrents, she puts the event in the historical context of the time.
So, if you’re going to read the various 2015 era books about the tragedy, read Diana’s book first.
On May 7, 1915, toward the end of her 101st eastbound crossing, from New York to Liverpool, England, R.M.S. Lusitania-pride of the Cunard Line and one of the greatest ocean liners afloat-became the target of a terrifying new weapon and a casualty of a terrible new kind of war. Sunk off the southern coast of Ireland by a torpedo fired from the German submarine U-20, she exploded and sank in eighteen minutes, taking with her some twelve hundred people, more than half of the passengers and crew. Cold-blooded, deliberate, and unprecedented in the annals of war, the sinking of the…
I have been writing non-fiction Second World War history books since 2000 and just recently had my twenty-first published by Osprey. Most deal with aspects of the history of Germany’s U-boats. Though I have had a lifelong interest in military history, the desire to write about this topic began while living near Brest in Brittany, France. I am a scuba diving instructor and spent a great deal of time diving on wrecks left behind by the Kriegsmarine, all in the shadow of the huge U-boat bunkers created in Brest’s military harbour. Encouraged by authors Jon Gawne and Robert Strauss I submitted the proposal for the First U-Boat Flotilla to Pen & Sword in 2000…and it went from there.
Hadley’s book examines the popular image of the U-boats and their crews through an examination of their portrayal in film and books as well as any other applicable medium. A brilliantly written analysis of how perceptions towards the subject have been manipulated both positively and negatively, dependent on the period or any intended bias of the creator.
Written examinations of elements of the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS can frequently be coloured by either an intrinsic dislike of the subject or, by contrast, an almost messianic apologist's belief in the infallibility of the German military. Hadley deftly and dispassionately separates fact from fiction and highlights the pitfalls of believing too much in the popular portrayal of a complex subject.
In Count Not the Dead Michael Hadley explores the complex relationships between political reality and cultural myth, and draws important conclusions about the way Germans have interpreted their past and how present concerns are changing these views. Basing his study on some two-hundred-and-fifty German novels, memoirs, fictionalized histories, and films (including Das Boot), Hadley examines the popular image of the German submarine and weights the values, purposes, and perceptions of German writers and film makers. He considers the idea of the submarine as a war-winning weapon and the exploits of the "band of brothers" who made up the U-boat crews.…
I have had the opportunity to write (I have written over 30 college textbooks on technology, most of them in the area of cybersecurity), study (my PhD dissertation was on cybersecurity), teach (I have taught at colleges and universities my entire career about technology, networking, and cybersecurity), and research (I have published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles) on the topic of cybersecurity. But I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the average computer user who struggles with how to protect their technology devices. This has helped drive my passion to focus on practical cybersecurity for everyone.
David Kahn explains the most widely-known effort (widely-known today but in complete secrecy then) to decipher messages sent by the Germans using their Enigma machines during World War II. This book looks at the groundbreaking work done by Polish mathematicians in the 1930s, how Enigma machines were rescued from sinking German U-boats, and how Bletchley Park in Britain became the focal point of breaking these transmissions. Much of the book focuses on how Enigma machines, rotors, and codebooks were confiscated from German submarines and surface vessels, and how these were then used to allow the Allies, by the war's end, to read German messages almost as quickly as the Germans could send them.
Seizing the Enigma tells the thrilling story of the Royal Navy's battle to crack the Germans' supposedly unbreakable U-boat Enigma code, which would allow the vital Allied convoys in the North Atlantic to be routed away from Doenitz's wolfpacks. This battle was fought both on shore and at sea: by an assortment of scientists, chess champions and linguists, including Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer, who struggled to crack Enigma at Bletchley Park, and in the Atlantic by sailors and intelligence officers, such as Ian Fleming, the future creator of James Bond, who undertook dangerous and often fatal…
My great interests have been ships and space travel, and if one takes time to consider the similarities the parallels stand out. Ships, especially submarines, travel in a medium and through an environment that is hostile to human life. In space travel, the ‘ship’ becomes the only habitat in which we can survive for any extended period, leaving it without a space suit is a fatal move. I cannot claim to be an expert in closed environments, but it's a subject that has fascinated me throughout my life. Every ‘biosphere’ is unique and incredibly complex and depends on the symbiosis of an enormous number of living creatures right down to bacteria and even viruses.
This is the story that first got me interested in science fiction. Of course, we now recognise some of the flaws in the science, but consider that at the time of its writing steam propulsion was still in its infancy, most ships were still built of timber, and Verne envisaged a ship capable of indefinite travel beneath the ocean surface – something not even possible until the advent of nuclear power almost a century later. Even today Verne’s vision and the story he wove around it can inspire.
First serialized in a French magazine from 1869-1870, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is an incredible adventure story that popularized science fiction throughout the world.
Professor Aronnax, a marine biologist, joins harpoonist Ned Land in search of a mysterious sea creature in the open ocean, only to discover that the beast is actually a submarine piloted by the enigmatic Captain Nemo. They are taken captive, thus beginning a strange undersea voyage from Antarctic ice shelves to the subterranean city of Atlantis, hunting sharks along the way.
With its sprawling, exotic plot and vivid descriptions, Jules Verne's epic underwater adventure…
Inspired by my dad–a fan of Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean, and the like–and two older brothers, I discovered Desmond Bagley as a teenager. My passion for his style of action-adventure has never dwindled. As the crime thriller genre appears to move relentlessly in the direction of dark, gritty, serial-killer territory, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t something to be said for the now less-fashionable escapist worlds these writers created. Thanks to HarperCollins, I was given the chance to work on Bagley’s last posthumous novel, Domino Island, and my own original books inevitably followed.
MacLean was a contemporary of Desmond Bagley, so a natural candidate when it came to following up potential leads in the Bagley vein. He’s better remembered than Bagley, possibly because quite a few of his books were made into films, but he always acknowledged Bagley as the superior writer.
This book is a good example of classic MacLean–raw action in a location that plays as much a part as any of the living characters–and his ability to create a claustrophobic atmosphere is simply terrific.
A classic thriller from the bestselling master of action and suspense.
The atomic submarine Dolphin has impossible orders: to sail beneath the ice floes of the Arctic Ocean, and somehow locate and rescue the men of weather-station Zebra, gutted by fire and drifting with the ice-pack somewhere north of the Arctic Circle.
But the orders do not say what the Dolphin will find if she succeeds - that the fire at Ice Station Zebra was sabotage, and that one of the survivors is a killer.
