Luxury Yachts For Sale

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"His monumental work...is the most thorough study of the U-boat campaign available."--Library JournalHitler's U-boat War is an epic sea story about the most arduous and prolonged naval battle in history. For a period of nearly six years, the German U-boat force attempted to blockade and isolate the British Isles in hopes of forcing the British out of the war, thereby thwarting both the Allied strategic air assault on German cities and Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Occupied France. Fortunately for the Allies, the U-boat force failed to achieve either of these objectives, but in the attempt they sank 2,800 Allied merchant ships, while the Allies sank nearly 800 U-boats. On both sides, tens of thousands of sailors perished.For decades, an authoritative and definitive history of the Battle of the Atlantic could not be attempted, since London and Washington agreed to withhold all official code-breaking and U-boat records in order to safeguard the secrets of code breaking in the postwar years. The accounts that did appear were incomplete and full of false conclusions and errors of fact, often leaving the entirely wrong impression that the German U-boats came within a whisker of defeating the Allies, a myth that is finally laid to rest in this account.Clay Blair, acclaimed author of the bestselling naval classic Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, has drawn from the official records as well as the work of German, British, American, and Canadian naval scholars. Never before has Hitler's U-boat war been chronicled with such authority, fidelity, objectivity, and detail. The result is this magnificent and monumental work, crammed with vivid and dramatic scenes of naval actions and dispassionate but startling new revelations, interpretations, and conclusions about all aspects of the Battle of the Atlantic.

A former infantryman, Adolf Hitler had little use for the German navy, which he considered inept and politically suspect. Still, through the skillful maneuverings of a young, up-and-coming naval officer named Karl Dönitz, Hitler eventually endorsed a costly program of shipbuilding. As a result, Dönitz was able to field a vast fleet of U-boats when Germany went to war against France and England in 1939. Although his enemies were initially better equipped, Dönitz was the craftier fighter, launching daring raids on shipping convoys and Allied harbors, and for a time, controlling the chief Atlantic sealanes. In this monumental history, Clay Blair analyzes the German U-boat campaigns from 1939 to 1942 (a companion volume continues his narrative to 1945), which, he writes, fall into three phases: one against England alone, another against the newly arrived American navy, and a furious third against the combined Allied forces. Blair argues, against other historians, that the "U-boat peril" has been overestimated. He holds that the American submarine campaign against Japan in the Pacific was far more effective, and observes that 99 percent of Allied merchant ships on transatlantic convoys reached their destinations. Even so, the U-boats introduced a powerful element of terror into an already horrific war, diverting Allied effort into antisubmarine campaigns and delaying the transport of much-needed materiel. Blair's outstanding work adds much to the naval history of World War II. Packed with detail, it is sure to become a standard work on the Battle of the Atlantic. --Gregory McNamee

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The definitive account of the German submarine war Blair has been at work on this history for 9 years since the British and American governments began to release official WWII records in the 1980's. Told chronically, it's subdivided into 2 sections, the war against Britain and it's Empire, and the war against the Americas. Blair himself served in submarines in combat in WW2. He chronicles the U-Boat war with authority, fidelity, objectivity and extroadinary detail. He also writes vivid and dramatic scenes of naval actions and dispassionate, but startling new revelations, interpretations and conclusions about all aspects of the battle of the Atlantic.

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Sixteen-year-old Peter Rogers is training to be a Royal Navy officer in 1939 when he hears that his father's ship has been torpedoed off the coast of Ireland. The survivors, including his father, have been captured by a German U-boat crew and treated cruelly some of them are shot dead. In 1940 Peter joins an escort flee in the North Atlantic where British convoys are suffering horrific losses from enemy U-boats. We share in the trials and tribulations of his duties, including the constant tension, the bitter cold, mountainous seas - and the moment when he and his father's captor come face to face...

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The hunters and the hunted on the high seas of warThis interesting book-containing two book length accounts-views the same conflict-the U-Boat War during the First World War in the North Atlantic, North Sea and English Channel-from both sides. The first, The U-Boat Hunters was written by a professional journalist reporting for Colliers Magazine as he accompanied the United States destroyer force in the final year of the war. The second account, The Diary of a U-Boat Commander, is an interesting insight into the world of a Kreigsmarine officer on active service. It is a traumatic story of battle and mental and physical suffering illuminated by periods of tragic romance making it a classic naval memoir of the German Navy at war in the early 20th century.

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Hunters in the Shallows examines the development of the small torpedo boat in U.S. naval history from Lt. William Cushing’s heroic Civil War attack on the Confederate ram Albemarle in 1864 in a forerunner of the PT to the type’s zenith in World War II. Curtis L. Nelson takes readers inside the scandalous 1939 Elco deal to manufacture PTs, describes Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s dramatic escape from Corregidor via PT in 1942, and assesses the sinking of John F. Kennedy’s PT-109 off the Solomon Islands in 1943.

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WITH ILLUSTRATIONS