naval history

Our generation would readily assume the cruiser is a naval fixture and fitting. In fact the cruiser as we know it only emerged in the late 1860s as iron hulls supplanted timber. Until then there were battleships of the line, frigates ,corvettes etc of various rates and a plethora of sloops...

In 1917 a German submarine torpedoed the HMS Laurentic in the Atlantic, near Fanad Head, just off the coast of Ireland. In 2017 people were still visiting the wreck site because of the story about the gold which was retrieved from the ship and the story of the bars which might still remain in...

Focusing on the big Pacific carrier battles of WW2, the author wanted to find out how they were fought, why particular methods and strategies were used, and whether the parties (particularly the USN) could have done better. He couldn't find a book that told him those things, so set about writing...

At last we have a proper biography of Admiral Sir Henry Harwood (1888-1950), who in 1939 drove the Nazi pocket battleship Graf Spee to an ignominious grave, the climax of over three years spent in Latin American waters studying just the raider problem he came to face - and in making himself...

Known to the British as the E-boat, the Schnellboot design work went back to the 1920s which shows that Germany, unchastened by defeat, was planning offensive warfare long before it acquired Hitler. In various forms these fast motor boats were used in the North Sea to mine our east coast convoy...

St George's Day 2018 marks the centenary of the attempt by a British force under Rear Admiral Roger Keyes to block the ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend. Britain was on the verge of starvation due to the depredations of Germany's submarines; her desperate situation called for desperate measures...

Alec Dennis joined Dartmouth as a cadet in 1931 and in 1939 was hauled off his sub lieutenants' courses to join the destroyer HMS Griffin, under the exemplary leadership of Lt Cdr Johnny Lee-Barber, under whom he progressed from sub lieutenant under training, to navigating officer, and then to...

In 1793 Republican France declared war on Britain. As usual we went to war in our socks and the Government dithering made that even worse. The need to service operations in Flanders, and on the French Atlantic coast, as well as in the West Indies, resulted in endless shuffling of what few...

This is four stories skilfully woventogether. The backdrop is the story of RN antisubmarine warfare inthe Western Approaches and Irish Sea during the First World War.Within this it is the biography of Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly who ranthe campaign from Queenstown (now Cobh), consolidating under his...

This is a technical (as opposed to operational) history of one of our most famous battleships, brought to us via the actual drawings used in the construction of the shipand the addition of her armament. It is grouped by the principal epochs of her life - initial construction; modernisation in...

This is a triple biography of three of the Royal Navy's fighting admirals, all of whom came from a small area on the north Norfolk coast, Christopher Myngs (1625–1666), John Narbrough (c. 1640–1688 ), and Cloudesley Shovell (1650-1707). Myngs (who died of wounds after the Four Days Battle) and...