This book, first published in 1986, argues that there is a special category of medium powers in the world - such as Britain, France, India, Brazil, Japan, China and others - which have sufficient military power to do something to protect their interests but which are not a match for the superpowers. It surveys the whole range of naval warfare - equipment, operations, organisation and deployment - and discusses how each item should be tailored by the recognition of the position of the medium power. It considers alliances, a key element for medium powers, and explores how these should be handled and what use they may be expected to fulfil. The book argues that the concept of medium power, here developed thoroughly for the first time, will be extremely useful to many countries in defining their strategic role in a purposeful way.

The captivating individual stories of 17 U.S. Navy corpsmen who served in Vietnam, told in their own words. Their accounts relate why they joined the Navy in wartime, why they became corpsmen--the enlisted medical specialists of the Navy and Marine Corps--along with many day-to-day, sometimes minute-to-minute recollections of caring for both the wounded and the dead under fire. They also reflect on the long-term effects the war had on them and their families.

Asia is headed toward an uncertain and potentially volatile future in the maritime arena. The two rising Asian powers, China and India, dependent as they are on seaborne commerce for their economic well-being, have clearly set their eyes on the high seas. Yoshihara and Holmes offer a stark warning that many strategists in Beijing and New Delhi appear spellbound by the more militant visions of sea power. Indeed, both powers appear poised to develop the capacity to control the sea lanes through which the bulk of their commerce flows. If they enter the nautical environment with such a martial mindset, Asia could very well fall victim to regional rivalries that give rise to a vicious cycle of competition. Yoshihara and Holmes provide the first examination of the simultaneous rise of two naval powers and the potential impact that such an oceanic reconfiguration of power in Asia could have on long-term regional stability. Their study analyzes the maritime interests and strategies of the littoral states in Asia as they prepare for the expected reordering of nautical affairs. This long-overdue assessment revisits underlying assumptions that have prevailed among strategy-makers and provides a concrete policy framework for reducing the risk of confrontation in Asian waters.

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.

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the technology employed by the British navy changed not just the material resources of the British navy but the culture and performance of the royal dockyards. This book examines the role of the Inspector General of Naval Works, an Admiralty office occupied by Samuel Bentham between 1796 and 1807, which initiated a range of changes in dockyard technology by the construction of experimental vessels, the introduction of non-recoil armament, the reconstruction of Portsmouth yard, and the introduction of steam-powered engines to pump water, drive mass-production machinery and reprocess copper sheathing. While primarily about the technology, this book also examines the complementary changes in the industrial culture of the dockyards. For it was that change in culture which permitted the dockyards at the end of the Wars to maintain a fleet of unprecedented size and engage in warfare both with the United States of America and with Napoleonic Europe.

This book focuses on the theory and practice of maritime strategy and operations by the weaker powers at sea. Illustrated by examples from naval and military history, the book explains and analyzes the strategies of the weaker side at sea in both peacetime and wartime; in defense versus offense; the main prerequisites for disputing control of the sea; and the conceptual framework of disputing control of the sea. It also explains and analyzes in some detail the main methods of disputing sea control - avoiding/seeking decisive encounters, weakening enemy naval forces over time, counter-containment of enemy naval forces, destroying the enemy's military-economic potential at sea, attacks on the enemy coast, defense of the coast, defense/capturing important positions/basing areas, and defense/capturing of a choke point. A majority of the world's navies are currently of small or medium-size. In the case of a war with a much stronger opponent, they would be strategically on the defensive, and their main objective then would be to dispute control of the sea by a stronger side at sea. This book provides a practical guide to such a strategy. This book would be of much interest to students of naval power, maritime security, strategic studies and military/naval history.

During the American Civil War, more than one hundred thousand men fought on ships at sea or on one of America's great inland rivers. There were no large-scale fleet engagements, yet the navies, particularly the Union Navy, did much to define the character of the war and affect its length. The first hostile shots roared from rebel artillery at Charleston Harbor. Along the Mississippi River and other inland waterways across the South, Union gunboats were often the first to arrive in deadly enemy territory. In the Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic seaboard, blockaders in blue floated within earshot of gray garrisons that guarded vital ports. And on the open seas, rebel raiders wreaked havoc on civilian shipping. In Faces of the Civil War Navies, renowned researcher and Civil War photograph collector Ronald S. Coddington focuses his considerable skills on the Union and Confederate navies. Using identifiable cartes de visite of common sailors on both sides of the war, many of them never before published, Coddington uncovers the personal histories of each individual who looked into the eye of the primitive camera. These unique narratives are drawn from military and pension records, letters, diaries, period newspapers, and other primary sources. In addition to presenting the personal stories of seventy-seven intrepid volunteers, Coddington also focuses on the momentous naval events that ushered in an era of ironclad ships and other technical innovations. The fourth volume in Coddington's series on Civil War soldiers, this microhistory will appeal to anyone with an interest in the Civil War, social history, or photography. The narratives and photographs in Faces of the Civil War Navies shed new light on a lesser-known part of our American story. Taken collectively, these "snapshots" remind us that the history of war is not merely a chronicle of campaigns won and lost, it is the collective personal odysseys of thousands of individual life stories.

Developed specifically for the Vietnam War (and made famous by the 2004 presidential campaign), Swift Boats were versatile craft "big enough to outrun anything they couldn't outfight" but too small to handle even a moderate ocean chop, too loud to sneak up on anyone, and too flimsy to withstand the mildest of rocket attacks. This made more difficult an already tough mission: navigating coastal waters for ships and sampans smuggling contraband to the Viet Cong, disrupting enemy supply lines on the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta, and inserting SEALs behind enemy lines. The stories in this book cover the Swift Boats' early years, which saw search-and-inspect operations in Vietnam's coastal waters, and their later years, when the Swift Boats' mission shifted to the Mekong Delta's labyrinth of 3,000 miles of rivers, streams, and canals. This is an intimate, exciting oral history of Swift Boats at war in Vietnam.

The latest edition of Warship, the celebrated annual publication featuring the latest research on the history, development, and service of the world's warships.

For over 45 years, Warship has been the leading annual resource on the design, development, and deployment of the world's combat ships. Featuring a broad range of articles from a select panel of distinguished international contributors, this latest volume combines original research, new book reviews, warship notes, an image gallery, and much more, maintaining the impressive standards of scholarship and research with which Warship has become synonymous. Detailed and accurate information is the keynote of all the articles, which are fully supported by plans, data tables, and stunning photographs.

This year's Warship includes features on the secret battleship design that Mussolini's Fascist Italy sold to Stalin's USSR, the little-known German flak ships of World War II, the French aircraft carriers Clemenceau and Foch, and the development of electronic warfare in the Royal Navy.

With a heritage dating back to the mid-seventeenth century, the Royal Marines have accrued a rich history of rituals, artefacts and material culture that is consciously deployed in order to define and shape the institution both historically and going forward into an uncertain future. Drawing upon this heritage, Mark Burchell offers a unique method of understanding how the Royal Marines draw upon this material culture in order to help transform ordinary labour power to political agency comprising acts of controlled and sustained violence. He demonstrates how a barrage of objects and items - including uniforms, weapons, landscapes, architecture, personal kit, drills, rituals, and iconography - are deployed in order successfully to integrate the recruits into the Royal Marines' culture. It is argued that this material culture is a vital tool with which to imprint the military's own image on new recruits as they embark on a process of de-individualisation. Having been granted unprecedented access to the Commando Training Centre at Lympstone as an anthropologist, Burchell observed an intake of recruits throughout their demanding and exhausting year-long training programme. The resulting book presents to the academic community for the first time, a theorised in-depth account of a relatively unexplored social community and how its material culture creates and reifies new military identities. This path-breaking interdisciplinary analysis provides fresh understanding of the multiple processes of military enculturation through a meticulous revision of the relationships that exist between disciplinary and punishment practices; violence and masculinity; narratives and personhood; and will explore how these issues are understood by recruits through their practical application of body to physical labour, and by the cues of their surrounding material culture.

This book examines how the expansion of a steam-powered Royal Navy from the second half of the nineteenth century had wider ramifications across the British Empire. In particular, it considers how steam propulsion made vessels utterly dependent on a particular resource - coal - and its distribution around the world. In doing so, it shows that the 'coal question' was central to imperial defence and the protection of trade, requiring the creation of infrastructures that spanned the globe. This infrastructure required careful management, and the processes involved show the development of bureaucracy and the reliance on the 'contractor state' to ensure this was both robust and able to allow swift mobilisation in war. The requirement to stop regularly at foreign stations also brought men of the Royal navy into contact with local coal heavers, as well as indigenous populations and landscapes. These encounters and their dissemination are crucial to our understanding of imperial relationships and imaginations at the height of the imperial age.

Interpreting Naval History at Museums and Historic Sites demonstrates the broad appeal of naval themed commemoration, centering on military aspects from both times of war and peace. Transcending place and time, naval history is shaped into public forums for modern day consumption. These occurrences are not limited to just recent history, as can be seen in the celebration of man's long history of transforming bodies of water from barriers into opportunities. In addition, with the modern day nation-state naval history is not just limited to areas near large bodies of water, as seen with landlocked states in the United States sharing in a proud naval tradition. Examples of this included in the book are USS Arizona, BB-39, and USS Missouri, BB-63.) Naval history is just one avenue, with sites marking the history of immigration, engineering technology, and architecture.. Naval history also extends into lighthouses and port facility construction which are the background of a host of U.S. Generals in the U.S. Army with the Army Corps of Engineers, which includes the Robert E. Lee. Using an international approach, the book illustrates the intersection of the historical understanding of one's place and naval traditions. Locating the boundaries, one finds both the depth and breath of the topics linking (and dividing) water and man.

Jack Tar to Union Jack examines the intersection between empire, navy, and manhood in British society from 1870 to 1918. Through analysis of sources that include courts-martial cases, sailors' own writings, and the HMS Pinafore, Conley charts new depictions of naval manhood during the Age of Empire, a period which witnessed the radical transformation of the navy, the intensification of imperial competition, the democratisation of British society, and the advent of mass culture. Jack Tar to Union Jack argues that popular representations of naval men increasingly reflected and informed imperial masculine ideals in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Conley shows how the British Bluejacket as both patriotic defender and dutiful husband and father stood in sharp contrast to the stereotypic image of the brave but bawdy tar of the Georgian navy. This book will be essential reading for students of British imperial history, naval and military history, and gender studies. -- .

"Aircraft Carriers" is the definitive history of world aircraft carrier development and operations. Norman Polmar's revised and updated, two-volume classic describes the political and technological factors that influenced aircraft carrier design and construction, meticulously records their operations, and explains their impact on modern warfare. Volume I provides a comprehensive analysis of carrier developments and warfare in the first half of the twentieth century, and examines the advances that allowed the carrier to replace the battleship as the dominant naval weapons system. Polmar gives particular emphasis to carrier operations from World War I, through the Japanese strikes against China in the 1930s, to World War II in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Arctic, and Pacific theatres. It begins with French inventor Clement Ader's remarkably prescient 1909 description of an aircraft carrier. The book then explains how Britain led the world in the development of aircraft-carrying ships, soon to be followed by the United States and Japan. While ship-based aircraft operations in World War I had limited impact, they foreshadowed the aircraft carriers built in the 1920s and 1930s. The volume also describes the aircraft operating from those ships as well as the commanders who pioneered carrier aviation. "Aircraft Carriers"has benefited from the technical collaboration of senior carrier experts Captain Eric M. Brown and General Minoru Genda as well as noted historians Robert M. Langdon and Peter B. Mersky. "Aircraft Carriers" is heavily illustrated with more than 400 photographs-some never before published-and maps. Volume II, which is forthcoming from Potomac Books in the winter 2006-2007 (ISBN 978-1-57488-665-8), will cover the period 1946 to the present.

Before there was a U.S. Navy, several Colonial navies were all-volunteer--both the crews and the vessels. From its beginnings through World War II, the Navy has relied on civilian sailors and their fast vessels to fill out its ranks of small combatants. Beginning with the birth of the yacht in 17th century Netherlands, this illustrated history traces the development of yacht racing, the advent of combustion-engine power and the contribution privately owned vessels have made to national defense. Vessels conscripted during the Civil War served both the Union and Confederacy--sometimes changing sides after capture. The first USS Wanderer saw the slave trade from both sides of the law. Aboard the USS Sylph, Oscar-winning actor Ernest Borgnine fought the Third Reich's U-boats under sail. USS Sea Cloud made history as the first racially integrated ship in the Navy, three years before President Truman desegregated the military.

A vital component of the interdependent global economy, maritime transit routes are nowhere more critical than those traversing the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. Previously, areas of the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific have been viewed as separate and discrete political, economic, and military regions. In recent years, however, a variety of economic, political, and military forces have created a new understanding of these maritime expanses as one zone of global interaction. This book complements the material presented in its companion volume, Maritime Security in the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific, by analysing the perceptions, interests, objectives, maritime capabilities, and policies of the major maritime powers operating in the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. In addition, the book also assesses the contemporary maritime challenges and opportunities that confront the global community within what is rapidly becoming recognised as an integrated zone of global interaction. A valuable study for researchers and policymakers working in the fields of maritime security; military, security and peace studies; conflict resolution; and Asian affairs.

This book explains both the strategic and the operational aspects of exercising control of the sea. The struggle for sea control consists of three mutually related and overlapping phases: obtaining, maintaining and exercising sea control. It is in the phase of exercising sea control when one's strategic or operational success is exploited; otherwise, the fruits of victories achieved would be wasted. This work describes the strategy of a stronger side in wartime after a desired degree of control has been obtained, which is followed by a discussion on the objectives and main methods used in exercising sea control. The remaining chapters explain and analyze in some detail each of the main methods of exercising sea control: defence and protection of one's own and destruction/neutralization of the enemy's military-economic potential at sea, capturing the enemy's operationally important positions ashore, destroying/weakening the enemy's military-economic potential ashore and supporting one's ground forces in their offensive and defensive operations on the coast. This book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, sea power and naval history.

This new book reveals the part played by the eight Bustler Class Rescue Tugs built at the Henry Robb Shipyard during the Second World War and will shed more light on the almost-forgotten part played by this country's mariners. The men and women who were rescued under the most trying of times and dreadful weather conditions would no doubt have felt immense gratitude to the brave souls who formed part of the huge maritime effort, both in war and peacetime. This is the story of the small force of much-needed rescue tugs that were built during the dark forbidding days of the Second World War, when Great Britain had only the ships and men to bring in the raw materials that were required to fight against the might of Nazi Germany and its Allies. This compelling story shines a spotlight on the small, but very significant work done over many years by His and Her Majesty's Rescue Tugs in defence of the realm, and which benefited seafarers all over the world. The author's very detailed account of the contribution made by HMRT in general, and the Bustler Class in particular, is an excellent read, and has brought to life the immense impact that these rescue tugs have had over many years, usually in dire circumstances, and especially during the Second World War. Many of these ships also served with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) and this story recognises the part played by these heroic rescue tugs in accounts of many convoys that crossed the seas and were attacked by hostile forces. This fine volume will help to raise the profile of these magnificent small and immensely powerful vessels, and of course their highly-skilled crews without whom these heroic achievements would not have been possible.

Clash of Fleets is an operational history that records every naval engagement fought between major surface warships during World War I. Much more than a catalog of combat facts, Clash of Fleets explores why battles occurred; how the different navies fought; and how combat advanced doctrine and affected the development and application of technology. The result is a holistic overview of the war at sea as it affected all nations and all theaters of war. A work of this scope is unprecedented. Organized into seven chapters, the authors first introduce the technology, weapons, ships, and the doctrine that governed naval warfare in 1914. The next five chapters explore each year of the war and are subdivided into sections corresponding to major geographic areas. This arrangement allows the massive sweep of action to be presented in a structured and easy to follow format that includes engagements fought by the Austro-Hungarian, British, French, German, Ottoman, and Russian Navies in the Adriatic, Aegean, Baltic, Black, Mediterranean, and North Seas as well as the Atlantic, India, and Pacific Oceans. The role of surface combat in the Great War is analyzed and these actions are compared to major naval wars before and after. In addition to providing detailed descriptions of actions in their historical perspectives, O'Hara and Heinz advance several themes, including the notion that World War I was a war of navies as much as a war of armies. They explain that surface combat had a major impact on all aspects of the naval war and on the course of the war in general. Finally, Clash of Fleets illustrates that systems developed in peace do not always work as expected in war, that some are not used as anticipated, and that others became unexpectedly important. There is much for today's naval professional to consider in the naval conflict that occurred a century ago.

This new handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the issues facing naval strategy and security in the twenty-first century. Featuring contributions from some of the world's premier researchers and practitioners in the field of naval strategy and security, this handbook covers naval security issues in diverse regions of the world, from the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean to the Arctic and the piracy-prone waters off East Africa's coast. It outlines major policy challenges arising from competing claims, transnational organized crime and maritime terrorism, and details national and alliance reactions to these problems. While this volume provides detailed analyses on operational, judicial, and legislative consequences that contemporary maritime security threats pose, it also places a specific emphasis on naval strategy. With a public very much focused on the softer constabulary roles naval forces play (such as humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, naval diplomacy, maintenance of good order at sea), the overarching hard-power role of navies has been pushed into the background. In fact, navies and seapower have been notably absent from many recent academic discussions and deliberations of maritime security. This handbook provides a much-desired addition to the literature for researchers and analysts in the social sciences on the relationship between security policy and military means on, under, and from the sea. It comprehensively explains the state of naval security in this maritime century and the role of naval forces in it. This book will be of much interest to students of naval security and naval strategy, security studies and IR, as well as practitioners in the field.

Over the last 30 years, hydrographical marine surveys in the English Channel helped uncover the potential wreck sites of German submarines, or U-boats, sunk during the conflicts of World War I and World War II. Through a series of systemic dives, nautical archaeologist and historian Innes McCartney surveyed and recorded these wrecks, discovering that the distribution and number of wrecks conflicted with the published histories of U-boat losses. Of all the U-boat war losses in the Channel, McCartney found that some 41% were heretofore unaccounted for in the historical literature of World War I and World War II. This book reconciles these inaccuracies with the archaeological record by presenting case studies of a number of dives conducted in the English Channel. Using empirical evidence, this book investigates possible reasons historical inconsistencies persist and what Allied operational and intelligence-based processes caused them to occur in the first place. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the fields of nautical archaeology and naval history, as well as wreck explorers.