Nicholas Roger, a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, is most recently known for his first two volumes of a projected history trilogy of Great Britain’s rise to naval power—The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, Volume 1: 660-1649 (1997) and The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, Volume 2: 1649-1815 (2004). The book under review, Essays in Naval History, from Medieval to Modern, a volume in … CONTINUE READING ❯

In Deciphering the Rising Sun, Roger Dingman has crafted an interesting and highly readable story concerning a little-known but important aspect of the intelligence war in the Pacific: the Navy’s recruitment, training, and employment of Americans as translators of the complex Japanese language. While the Army and Navy had been sending selected officers to Japan for years, by the period immediately before Pearl Harbor, there were only a handful of those officers on active duty. … CONTINUE READING ❯

Tides of History is a fascinating book, both a scientific history and a maritime one that demonstrates the close links between these two areas of historical investigation as it charts the development of scientific enquiries and methods into tides. In today’s information age of good charts, data and satellite navigation it is easy to forget the difficulties, dangers and risk that mariners once faced. While the development of accurate charts and the ability to calculate … CONTINUE READING ❯

In putting together The Navy and the Nation David Stevens and John Reeve have assembled something far more valuable than a mere narrative history of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). In many regards it is an historical argument against taking something of great value for granted. At a time when navies the world over are having their funding cut and their worth questioned, the editors of this volume have cobbled together a significant statement of … CONTINUE READING ❯

On April 9, 1940, forces of the German Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe, and Wehrmacht commenced Operation Weserübung, the invasion and occupation of neutral Norway in order to protect the Scandinavian ore resources and also deny them to Britain . This combined naval, amphibious, and airborne invasion surprised Norwegian and Allied forces, whose leaders did not believe Hitler would attempt a full-scale invasion and occupation. The German move signaled the last days of the “Phoney War” that had … CONTINUE READING ❯

The development of the locomotive torpedo in the mid nineteenth century provided a fundamental challenge for the dominant sea control navy of the era. Just as steam, armour, heavy rifled guns and rotating turrets provided the Royal, (and Union ) Navy with the means to transform sea control into strategic naval power projection, an English engineer quite literally knocked the bottom out of ironclad coast assault forces. The Royal Navy was among the first to … CONTINUE READING ❯

On opening Anthony Tully’s new book Battle of Surigao Strait one might be forgiven for asking oneself, why should I read yet another book about the series of naval battles around Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in late October 1944? A number of recent works, which Tully brings to the reader’s attention in his prologue and elsewhere, have come out that have greatly updated our understanding of these engagements: The Last Stand of the Tin … CONTINUE READING ❯

The relationship between public opinion, the mass media, and military power in a modern democracy is a particularly complex one, especially in the case of the United States, and is an understandable preoccupation among historians at present. Both in his title and his introduction, this author promises his readers some kind of discussion or analysis of this relationship and its associated issues. In fact he has produced a book on a quite different subject, although … CONTINUE READING ❯