Download or read book Sacred Vessels written by Robert L O'connell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing critically about something you have come to regard with affection must provoke mixed emotions. As I learned more and more about the modern battleship's shortcomings, I found myself, like so many before me, falling under its spell. I have traveled hundreds of miles to visit these wonderful ships, reverently preserved like a necklace of talismans around our nation's coasts. I have stood in awe under the great guns, wondering what it must have been like to hear them fire. Perhaps it is true that their sound and fury signified very little in terms of actual destructive power. But most people thought they did, and that was and still is important. Besides, for the most part, we were proud of those ships. Now we live in a time of weapons so terrible that we must actually hide them-beneath the ground and below the surface of the sea. But, like battleships, they keep the peace precisely because of what others think they can do. All things being equal, who would not prefer the dreadnoughts?

Download or read book Dreadnought written by Roger Parkinson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The years leading to World War I were the 'Age of the Dreadnought'. The monumental battleship design, first introduced by Admiral Fisher to the Royal Navy in 1906, was quickly adopted around the world and led to a new era of naval warfare and policy. In this book, Roger Parkinson provides a re-writing of the naval history of Britain and the other leading naval powers from the 1880s to the early years of World War I. The years before 1914 were characterised by intensifying Anglo-German naval competition, with an often forgotten element beyond Europe in the form of the rapidly developing navies of the United States and Japan. Parkinson shows that, although the advent of the dreadnought was the pivotal turning-point in naval policy, in fact much of the technology that enabled the dreadnought to be launched was a continuity from the pre-dreadnought era. In the annals of the Royal Navy two names will always be linked: those of Admiral Sir John 'Jacky' Fisher and the ship he created, HMS Dreadnought. This book shows how the dreadnought enabled the Royal Navy to develop from being primarily the navy of the 'Pax Britannica' in the Victorian era to being a war-ready fighting force in the early years of the twentieth century. The ensuing era of intensifying naval competition rapidly became a full-blooded naval arms race, leading to the development of super-dreadnoughts and escalating tensions between the European powers. Providing a truly international perspective on the dreadnought phenomenon, this book will be essential reading for all naval history enthusiasts and anyone interested in World War I.

Download or read book The Development of British Naval Aviation 1914 1918 written by Alexander Howlett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) revolutionized warfare at sea, on land, and in the air. This little-known naval aviation organization introduced and operationalized aircraft carrier strike, aerial anti-submarine warfare, strategic bombing, and the air defence of the British Isles more than 20 years before the outbreak of the Second World War. Traditionally marginalized in a literature dominated by the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force, the RNAS and its innovative practitioners, nevertheless, shaped the fundamentals of air power and contributed significantly to the Allied victory in the First World War. The Development of British Naval Aviation utilizes archival documents and newly published research to resurrect the legacy of the RNAS and demonstrate its central role in Britain’s war effort.

Download or read book Navies and Foreign Policy Routledge Revivals written by Ken Booth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-27 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1977, this study offers a comprehensive, systematic and integrated survey of the important relationship between navies and the making and execution of foreign policy. Ken Booth explains the functions navies can perform in both war and peace, the influence they have on particular situations, and how the relevant organisations can affect the character of naval actions. Ultimately, navies are regarded as indispensable instruments of the state by a number of countries, whilst all countries with a coast find some need to threaten a degree of force at sea. This book provides students and academics with the intellectual framework with which to assess the changing character of the navy.

Download or read book Navies in Multipolar Worlds written by Paul Kennedy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent challenges to US maritime predominance suggests a return to great power competition at sea, and this new volume looks at how navies in previous eras of multipolarity grappled with similar challenges. The book follows the theme of multipolarity by analysing a wide range of historical and geographical case studies, thereby maintaining the focus of both its historical analysis and its policy implications. It begins by looking at the evolution of French naval policy from Louis XIV through to the end of the nineteenth century. It then examines how the British responded to multipolar threat environments, convoys, the challenges of demobilization, and the persistence of British naval power in the interwar period. There are also contributions regarding Japan’s turn away from the sea, the Italian navy, and multipolarity in the Arctic. This volume also addresses the regional and global distribution of forces; trade and communication protection; arms races; the emergence of naval challengers; fleet design; logistics; technology; civil-naval relations; and grand strategy, past, present, and future. This book will be of much interest to students of naval history, strategic studies and international relations history, as well as senior naval officers.

Download or read book Preparing for Blockade 1885 1914 written by Stephen Cobb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, the First World War is remembered chiefly for the carnage of the Western Front, but at the time the Royal Navy's blockade of Germany was a more frequent source of debate. For, even at a time of war, there were influential voices in Britain who baulked at a concept of economic warfare that hindered the free passage of goods on the high seas, and brought German society to the brink of famine. To further our understanding of these issues, this book looks at the background to the blockade, and the effects of its implementation in 1914. It argues that there was a widely shared, but largely unwritten, strategic culture within British naval circles which accepted that in a war with a major maritime power the British response would be to attack enemy trade. This is demonstrated by the fact that from at least the late 1880s the Royal Navy planned for the use of armed merchantmen to enforce an economic blockade of an enemy. This it did by entering into detailed arrangements with major British shipping companies for the design and subsidy of liners with the potential for use as merchant cruisers, and stockpiling their prospective armament. In line with the contemporary, Corbettian, view that seapower depends upon free communications, the book concludes by asserting that the primary role of the Grand Fleet in the First World War was to guarantee the ability of the merchant cruisers on the Northern Patrol to interdict German seaborne trade, rather than to engage in large set-piece battles.

Download or read book Lusitania written by Diana Preston and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 787 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Lusitania shocked the world. It also jolted the United States out of its neutrality and hastened the nation's entry into World War I. In her riveting account of this enormous and controversial tragedy, Diana Preston recalls both a pivotal moment in history and a remarkable human drama. The story of the Lusitania is a window on the maritime world of the early twentieth century: the heyday of the luxury liner, the first days of the modern submarine, and the climax of the decades-long German-British rivalry for supremacy of the Atlantic. Above all, it is the story of the passengers and crew on that fateful voyage-a story of terror and cowardice, of self-sacrifice and heroism, of death and miraculous survival.

Download or read book The Naval War in the Mediterranean written by Paul G. Halpern and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 778 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, originally published in 1987, fills a gap in a neglected area. Looking at the entire war in the Mediterrean, the volume examines the war from the viewpoint of all the important participants, making full use of archives and manuscript collections in Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Austria and the United States. A fascinating mosaic of campaigns emerges in the Adriatic, Straits of Otranto and the Eastern Aegean. The German assistance to the tribes of Libya, the threat that Germany would get her hands on the Russian Black Sea Fleet and use it in the Mediterreanean, and the appearance and influence of the Americans in 1918 all took place against a background of rivalry between the Allies which frustrated the appointment of Jellicoe in 1918 as supreme command at sea in a role similar to that of Foch on land.

Download or read book Through a Canadian Periscope written by Julie H. Ferguson and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2014-03-10 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A colourful and well-researched account of Canada's submarine service, from its beginnings on the first day of the First World War to its uncertain future today. Ferguson details the careers of the Canadians who served in British submarines in all theatres of the Second World War then goes on to examine the modern era.

Download or read book Prolonging the Agony written by Jim Macgregor and published by TrineDay. This book was released on 2018-01-12 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fact that governments lie is generally accepted today, but World War I was the first global conflict in which millions of young men were sacrificed for hidden causes. They did not die to save civilization; they were killed for profit and in the hopes of establishing a one-world government. By 1917, America had been thrust into the war by a President who promised to stay out of the conflict. But the real power behind the war consisted of the bankers, the financiers, and the politicians, referred to, in this book, as The Secret Elite. Scouring government papers on both sides of the Atlantic, memoirs that avoided the censor's pen, speeches made in Congress and Parliament, major newspapers of the time, and other sources, Prolonging the Agony maintains that the war was deliberately and unnecessarily prolonged and that the gross lies ingrained in modern "histories" still circulate because governments refuse citizens the truth. Featured in this book are shocking accounts of the alleged Belgian "outrages," the sinking of the Lusitania, the manipulation of votes for Herbert Hoover, Lord Kitchener's death, and American and British zionists in cahoots with Rothschild's manipulated Balfour Declaration. The proof is here in a fully documented exposé—a real history of the world at war.

Download or read book Before Jutland written by James V Goldrick and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before Jutland is a definitive study of the naval engagements in northern European waters in 1914–15 when the German High Sea Fleet faced the Grand Fleet in the North Sea and the Russian Fleet in the Baltic. Author James Goldrick reexamines one of the key periods of naval operations in the First World War, arguing that a focus on the campaign on the western front conceals the reality that the Great War was also a maritime conflict. Combining new historical information from primary sources with a comprehensive analysis of the operational issues, this book is an extensive revision of The King’s Ships Were at Sea, Goldrick’s earlier work on this naval campaign. In all, Before Jutland shows not only what happened, but how the various navies evolved to meet the challenges that they faced during the Great War and whether or not that evolution was successful.

Download or read book Lloyd George at War 1916 1918 written by George H. Cassar and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2011-07 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Lloyd George at War, 1916–1918’ refutes the traditional view that Lloyd George was the person most responsible for winning the Great War. Cassar’s careful analysis shows that while his work on the home front was on the whole good, he was an abysmal failure as a strategist and nearly cost Britain the war.

Download or read book The Dreadnought and the Edwardian Age written by Andrew Lambert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HMS Dreadnought (1906) is closely associated with the age of empire, the Anglo-German antagonism and the naval arms race before the First World War. Yet it was also linked with a range of other contexts - political and cultural, national and international - that were central to the Edwardian period. The chapters in this volume investigate these contexts and their intersection in this symbolically charged icon of the Edwardian age. In reassessing the most famous warship of the period, this collection not only considers the strategic and operational impact of this 'all big gun' battleship, but also explores the many meanings Dreadnought had in politics and culture, including national and imperial sentiment, gender relations and concepts of masculinity, public spectacle and images of technology, and ideas about modernity and decline. The volume brings together historians from different backgrounds, working on naval and technological history, politics and international relations, as well as culture and gender. This diverse approach to the subject ensures that the book offers a timely revision of the Dreadnought and the Edwardian Age.'

Download or read book The Origins of the First World War written by James Joll and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Joll's study is not simply another narrative, retracing the powder trail that was finally ignited at Sarajevo. It is an ambitious and wide-ranging analysis of the historical forces at work in the Europe of 1914, and the very different ways in which historians have subsequently attempted to understand them. The importance of the theme, the breadth and sympathy of James Joll's scholarship, and the clarity of his exposition, have all contributed to the spectacular success of the book since its first appearance in 1984. Revised by Gordon Martel, this new 3rd edition accommodates recent research and an expanded further reading section.

Download or read book The Secret World written by Christopher M. Andrew and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 993 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first-ever detailed, comprehensive history of intelligence, from Moses and Sun Tzu to the present day The history of espionage is far older than any of today's intelligence agencies, yet the long history of intelligence operations has been largely forgotten. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park, the most successful World War II intelligence agency, were completely unaware that their predecessors in earlier moments of national crisis had broken the codes of Napoleon during the Napoleonic wars and those of Spain before the Spanish Armada. Those who do not understand past mistakes are likely to repeat them. Intelligence is a prime example. At the outbreak of World War I, the grasp of intelligence shown by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was not in the same class as that of George Washington during the Revolutionary War and leading eighteenth-century British statesmen. In this book, the first global history of espionage ever written, distinguished historian Christopher Andrew recovers much of the lost intelligence history of the past three millennia--and shows us its relevance.

Download or read book The Guns of the Northeast written by Joe Foster and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2005-02-19 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A graphic account of the defence of Hartlepool, Whitby and Scarborough against German seaborne raiders in 1914 and a detailed history the coastal defences that confronted the German navy. For the first time the author relates the wider story of the batteries of the Northeast of England and of the gunners who manned them in times of war and peace. His study covers all the coastal batteries from Northumberland and the Tyne, south through Wearside and Durham, Hartlepool and the Tees, to North Yorkshire and the Humber. Information on all the sites of the gun batteries along the coast is included. Published in association with the Heugh Battery Restoriation Trust.

Download or read book Balfour written by Sydney H. Zebel and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1973-05-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography analyses the long political career of Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), the Conservative politician who became the first Earl of Balfour. Professor Zebel stresses the extraordinary nature of Balfour's career, divided as it was into two specific periods. The first, dating from his entry into Parliament in 1874, and his rapid advancement as a result of family connections, comprised his period as Chief Secretary for Ireland in which he distinguished himself with his policy of 'killing Home Rule with kindness' - his leadership of the Unionists in the House of Commons, and his premiership from 1902 to 1905 in succession to his uncle, Lord Salisbury. The second, beginning in 1914, followed the period of political retirement which resulted from his party's defeat in the 1906 elections and his own loss of the party leadership in 1911. It was the more constructive.