Download or read book Summary of Peter Gretton s Convoy Escort Commander written by Everest Media, and published by Everest Media LLC. This book was released on 2022-06-22T22:59:00Z with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I was appointed First Lieutenant of the Vega, a World War I destroyer, which was being converted to anti-aircraft and antisubmarine escort duties. The start was in the best traditions. The commissioning ceremony went well, but the rain began to fall as soon as the official inspection of the ship was finished. #2 The ship’s company and the dockyard workers, who were aboard for the trials, were extremely busy. We had to prepare for sea in the short time available, and work was never finished before ten or eleven at night. #3 The first R. N. V. R. unit was raised as a complete team. The scheme was admirable, but it had little time to develop before the war came. We were constantly going to action stations before investigating ships sighted in the darkness. #4 The ship had a number of adventures while on the east-coast route. The merchant ships were not used to keeping station, and they would often slip away from convoys. The four-day passage to our base was more tiring than we expected.
Download or read book Convoy Escort Commander written by Peter Gretton and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Crisis convoy written by Peter Gretton and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Fighting Captain written by Alan Burn and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2006-07-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Captain F J Walker, RN, did more than any other man at sea to win the Battle of the Atlantic, a vicious and unrelenting struggle which Churchill described as the dominating factor throughout World War Two. He was a formidable figure and one of the greatest fighting captains in the Royal Navy, sinking twenty U-boats. For this he was awarded a CB and four DSOs. A month after D-Day, exhausted by his continuous actions at sea against the enemy and his successful exertions to keep the U-boats out of the English Channel to ensure the safe passage of the Allied landings at D-day, he went ashore in Liverpool after a patrol. His ships and the men he had trained and inspired were already back at sea when he died on the 9 July, 1944, aged 48. His ships went on to sink another nine U-boats, bringing his flotillas' total up to twenty-nine, before the U-boat fleet finally surrendered. Fifteen of which were sunk by Walkers own ship, HMS Starling.
Download or read book Forgotten Sacrifice written by Michael G. Walling and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-20 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning historian Mike Walling captures the essence of the Arctic Convoys of World War II. In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the largest offensive operation ever undertaken. Operation Barbarossa saw defeat after defeat heaped on the Soviet army. With Russia's forces left staggering under the strain and in desperate need of supplies, Britain and the United States launched an ambitious operation to resupply the Soviet Union using convoys sent through the Arctic. Their journey was punctuated by torpedo attacks in freezing conditions, Stuka dive bombers, naval gun fire, and weeks of total darkness in the Arctic winter, with ships disappearing below the waves weighed down by the ice and snow on their decks. Drawing on hundreds of oral histories from eyewitnesses and veterans of the convoys, plus original research into the Russian Navy archives at Murmansk, historian Michael G. Walling offers a fresh retelling of one of World War II's pivotal yet largely overlooked campaigns.
Download or read book Atlantic Escorts written by David Brown and published by Seaforth Publishing. This book was released on 2007-11-15 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winston Churchill famously claimed that the submarine war in the Atlantic was the only campaign of the Second World War that really frightened him. If the lifeline to north America had been cut, Britain would never have survived; there could have been no build-up of US and Commonwealth forces, no D-Day landings, and no victory in western Europe. Furthermore, the battle raged from the first day of the war until the final German surrender, making it the longest and arguably hardest-fought campaign of the whole war. The ships, technology and tactics employed by the Allies form the subject of this book. Beginning with the lessons apparently learned from the First World War, the author outlines inter-war developments in technology and training, and describes the later preparations for the second global conflict. When the war came the balance of advantage was to see-saw between U-boats and escorts, with new weapons and sensors introduced at a rapid rate. For the defending navies, the prime requirement was numbers, and the most pressing problem was to improve capability without sacrificing simplicity and speed of construction. The author analyses the resulting designs of sloops, frigates, corvettes and destroyer escorts and attempts to determine their relative effectiveness.
Download or read book Escort written by D. A. Rayner and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-02 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of one man’s war and of the Royal Navy’s escort vessels—trawlers, corvettes and destroyers—that guarded Britain’s ocean life-lines across the Atlantic against the ravaging forays of U-Boats and surface raiders. This highly acclaimed firsthand account of convoy escort operations in the North Atlantic from 1939 to 1945 is based on Rayner’s astonishing war record. Denys Arthur Rayner was a Royal Navy officer who fought throughout the Battle of the Atlantic. After intensive war service at sea, Rayner became a writer, a farmer, and a successful designer and builder of small sailing craft.
Download or read book The Fighting Tenth written by John Wingate and published by Periscope Publishing Ltd.. This book was released on 2003-06 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of the Tenth Submarine Flotilla and its part in the Second World War in the Mediterranean, told in the survivors' own words as well as by those British and Maltese civilians who obstinately fought the battle on shore.
Download or read book A Game of Birds and Wolves written by Simon Parkin and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As heard on the New Yorker Radio Hour: The triumphant and "engaging history" (The New Yorker) of the young women who devised a winning strategy that defeated Nazi U-boats and delivered a decisive victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. By 1941, Winston Churchill had come to believe that the outcome of World War II rested on the battle for the Atlantic. A grand strategy game was devised by Captain Gilbert Roberts and a group of ten Wrens (members of the Women's Royal Naval Service) assigned to his team in an attempt to reveal the tactics behind the vicious success of the German U-boats. Played on a linoleum floor divided into painted squares, it required model ships to be moved across a make-believe ocean in a manner reminiscent of the childhood game, Battleship. Through play, the designers developed "Operation Raspberry," a counter-maneuver that helped turn the tide of World War II. Combining vibrant novelistic storytelling with extensive research, interviews, and previously unpublished accounts, Simon Parkin describes for the first time the role that women played in developing the Allied strategy that, in the words of one admiral, "contributed in no small measure to the final defeat of Germany." Rich with unforgettable cinematic detail and larger-than-life characters, A Game of Birds and Wolves is a heart-wrenching tale of ingenuity, dedication, perseverance, and love, bringing to life the imagination and sacrifice required to defeat the Nazis at sea.
Download or read book The Royal Navy and Anti Submarine Warfare 1917 49 written by Malcolm Llewellyn-Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-12-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential new account of how anti-submarine warfare is conducted, with a focus on both historic and present-day operations. This new book shows how until 1944 U-boats operated as submersible torpedo craft which relied heavily on the surface for movement and charging their batteries. This pattern was repeated in WWII until Allied anti-submarine countermeasures had forced the Germans to modify their existing U-boats with the schnorkel. Countermeasures along also pushed the development of high-speed U-boats capable of continuously submerged operations. This study shows how these improved submarines became benchmark of the post-war Russian submarine challenge. Royal Navy doctrine was developed by professional anti-submarine officers, and based on the well-tried combination of defensive and offensive anti-submarine measures that had stood the press of time since 1917, notwithstanding considerable technological change. This consistent and holistic view of anti-submarine warfare has not been understood by most of the subsequent historians of these anti-submarine campaigns, and this book provides an essential and new insight into how Cold War, and indeed modern, anti-submarine warfare is conducted.
Download or read book Convoys written by Roger Knight and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first account of Britain's convoys during the Napoleonic Wars--showing how the protection of trade played a decisive role in victory During the Napoleonic Wars thousands of merchant ships crisscrossed narrow seas and wide oceans, protected by Britain's warships. These were wars of attrition and raw materials had to reach their shores continuously: timber and hemp from the Baltic, sulfur from Sicily, and saltpeter from Bengal. Britain's fate rested on the strength of its economy--and convoys played a vital role in securing victory. Leading naval historian Roger Knight examines how convoys ensured the protection of trade and transport of troops, allowing Britain to take the upper hand. Detailing the many hardships these ships faced, from the shortage of seaman to the vicissitudes of the weather, Knight sheds light on the innovation and seamanship skills that made convoys such an invaluable tool in Britain's arsenal. The convoy system laid the foundation for Britain's narrow victory over Napoleon and his allies in 1815 and, in doing so, established its naval and mercantile power at sea for a hundred years.
Download or read book Decision in the Atlantic written by Marcus Faulkner and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2019-05-17 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest campaign of the Second World War. This volume highlights the scale and complexity of this bitterly contested campaign, one that encompassed far more than just attacks by German U-boats on Allied shipping. The team of leading scholars assembled in this study situates the German assault on seaborne trade within the wider Allied war effort and provides a new understanding of its place within the Second World War. Individual chapters offer original perspectives on a range of neglected or previously overlooked subjects: how Allied grand strategy shaped the war at sea; the choices facing Churchill and other Allied leaders and the tensions over the allocation of scarce resources between theaters; how the battle spread beyond the Atlantic Ocean in both military and economic terms; the management of Britain's merchant shipping repair yards; the defense of British coastal waters against German surface raiders; the contribution of air power to trade defense; antisubmarine escort training; the role of special intelligence; and the war against the U-boats in the Arctic and Pacific Oceans.
Download or read book The Rescue Ships and the Convoys written by B.B. Schofield and published by Pen and Sword Maritime. This book was released on 2024-06-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rescue Ships and the Convoys tells the history of one of the least known aspects of Second World War maritime history. Despite the threat of heavy losses of ships and lives, no hospital ships, which had to be lit, could accompany the convoys as they would betray a convoy’s position. The solution was to create a fleet of 30 small Merchant Navy vessels of about 1,500 gross tons, mostly from coastal trade. These ‘Rescue Ships’, commanded and manned by Merchant Navy personnel, carried medical teams, and life-saving equipment including operating theaters, hospital beds, ‘Carley’ floats, and hoists. Undeterred either by either enemy action or atrocious weather conditions, these vessels accompanied close to 800 convoys and saved 4,194 lives from ships sunk in the North Atlantic and with the Arctic convoys. During their service, seven Rescue Ships were lost. This is a story packed with suspense, danger, achievement and tragedy. As the author, Vice Admiral Schofield, who was closely involved in the establishment of the fleet, writes, it is a record ‘of great humanitarian endeavour, of superb acts of courage, of a display of seamanship of the highest order, of a devotion to duty by medical officers under the most arduous conditions imaginable, of great deeds by men of the Merchant Navy in little ships on voyages they were never designed to undertake.’
Download or read book Defeating the U boat written by Jan S. Breemer and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Defeating the U-boat: Inventing Antisubmarine Warfare, Newport Paper 36, Jan. S. Breemer tells the story of the British response to the German submarine threat. His account of Germany's 'asymmetric' challenge (to use the contemporary term) to Britain's naval mastery holds important lessons for the United States today, the U.S. Navy in particular. The Royal Navy's obstinate refusal to consider seriously the option of convoying merchant vessels, which turned out to be key to the solution of the U-boat problem, demonstrates the extent to which professional military cultures can thwart technical and operational innovation even in circumstances of existential threat. Although historical controversy continues to cloud this issue ... Breemer ends his lively and informative study with some general reflections on military innovation and the requirements for fostering it."--Foreword.
Download or read book The Ampleforth Journal written by and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Battle of the Atlantic written by Jonathan Dimbleby and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril," wrote Winston Churchill in his monumental history of World War Two. Churchill's fears were well-placed-the casualty rate in the Atlantic was higher than in any other theater of the entire war. The enemy was always and constantly there and waiting, lying just over the horizon or lurking beneath the waves. In many ways, the Atlantic shipping lanes, where U-boats preyed on American ships, were the true front of the war. England's very survival depended on assistance from the United States, much of which was transported across the ocean by boat. The shipping lanes thus became the main target of German naval operations between 1940 and 1945. The Battle of the Atlantic and the men who fought it were therefore crucial to both sides. Had Germany succeeded in cutting off the supply of American ships, England might not have held out. Yet had Churchill siphoned reinforcements to the naval effort earlier, thousands of lives might have been preserved. The battle consisted of not one but hundreds of battles, ranging from hours to days in duration, and forcing both sides into constant innovation and nightmarish second-guessing, trying desperately to gain the advantage of every encounter. Any changes to the events of this series of battles, and the outcome of the war-as well as the future of Europe and the world-would have been dramatically different. Jonathan Dimbleby's The Battle of the Atlantic offers a detailed and immersive account of this campaign, placing it within the context of the war as a whole. Dimbleby delves into the politics on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the role of Bletchley Park and the complex and dynamic relationship between America and England. He uses contemporary diaries and letters from leaders and sailors to chilling effect, evoking the lives and experiences of those who fought the longest battle of World War Two. This is the definitive account of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Download or read book The Curiosities of Ale Beer written by John Bickerdyke and published by . This book was released on 1886 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
