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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Naval forces & warfare
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.
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.
The latest edition of Warship, the celebrated annual publication
featuring the latest research on the history, development, and service
of the world's warships.
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.
The nineteenth-century Royal Navy was transformed from a fleet of sailing wooden walls into a steam powered machine. Britain's warships were her first line of defence, and their transformation dominated political, engineering and scientific discussions. They were the products of engineering ingenuity, political controversies, naval ideologies and the fight for authority in nineteenth-century Britain. Shaping the Royal Navy provides the first cultural history of technology, authority and the Royal Navy in the years of Pax Britannica. It places the story firmly within the currents of British history to reconstruct the controversial and high-profile nature of naval architecture. The technological transformation of the Navy dominated the British government and engineering communities. This book explores its history, revealing how ship design became a modern science, the ways that actors competed for authority within the British state and why the nature of naval power changed. -- .
The further adventures of a famous American seaman
This unique reference presents 59 biographies of people who were key to the sea services being reasonably prepared to fight the Japanese Empire when the Second World War broke out, and whose advanced work proved crucial. These intelligence pioneers invented techniques, procedures, and equipment from scratch, not only allowing the United States to hold its own in the Pacific despite the loss of most of its Fleet at Pearl Harbor, but also laying the foundation of today's intelligence methods and agencies. One-hundred years ago, in what was clearly an unsophisticated pre-information era, naval intelligence (and foreign intelligence in general) existed in rudimentary forms almost incomprehensible to us today. Founded in 1882, the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)-the modern world's "oldest continuously operating intelligence agency"-functioned for at least its first forty years with low manning, small budgets, low priority, and no prestige. The navy's early steps into communications intelligence (COMINT), which included activities such as radio interception, radio traffic analysis, and cryptology, came with the 1916 establishment of the Code and Signals Section within the navy's Division of Communications and with the 1924 creation of the "Research Desk" as part of the Section. Like ONI, this COMINT organization suffered from low budgets, manning, priority, and prestige. The dictionary focuses on these pioneers, many of whom went on, even after World War II, to important positions in the Navy, the State Department, the Armed Forces Security Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency. It reveals the work and innovations of well and lesser-known individuals who created the foundations of today's intelligence apparatus and analysis.
Naval intelligence is one of the most vital, and sometimes decisive, forms of intelligence. Over the centuries, and with particular velocity over recent decades, the techniques of detecting and destroying military (and commercial) shipping have improved, leapfrogging the equally frantic race to keep ahead of them and safeguard the huge investments involved. Today the new challenges range from an increasingly aggressive strategy adopted by Pyongyang's submarine fleet and the exclusion of illegal immigrants heading for Australia and southern Europe to the capture of cocaine-laded submarines in the Caribbean and the interdiction of Somali pirates off the Gulf of Aden. Any accurate assessment of the comparative threat these activities pose is just as dependent on good intelligence today as it was to Admiral Lord Nelson in the days of sail. The Historical Dictionary of Naval Intelligence relates the long and fascinating history of naval intelligence through a chronology, an introduction, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the organizations, operations, and events that made Naval intelligence what it is today.
The intense rivalry in battleship building that took place between Britain and Germany in the run up to the First World War is seen by many as the most totemic of all armaments races. Blamed by numerous commentators during the inter-war years as a major cause of the Great War, it has become emblematic of all that is wrong with international competitions in military strength. Yet, despite this notoriety, 'the Great Naval Race' has not received the attention that this elevated status would merit and it has never been examined from the viewpoint of both of its participants simultaneously and equally. This volume, which contains a comprehensive survey of the existing scholarship on this topic, both English-language and German, as well as important primary source materials from a range of archives in both Britain and Germany, fills this gap. By putting the actions of the British Admiralty side-by-side with those of its German counterparts, it enables the naval race to be viewed comparatively and thereby facilitates an understanding of how the two parties to this conflict interacted. By offering a comprehensive range of German documents in both their original text and in English translation, the book makes the German role in this conflict accessible to an English speaking audience for the first time. As such, it is an essential volume for any serious student of naval policy in the pre-First World War era.
Few subjects in naval history have elicited as much romance and disdain as the battlecruiser. And few subjects have gone so grossly misunderstood. Fundamental errors regarding the battlecruiser's origins and the technology of the times continue to distort hindsight, obscuring the historical context of these powerful, majestic ships. Thunder in Its Courses clears away the misconceptions, with essays establishing the basic facts of the capital-ship cruiser as well as thorny issues regarding individual designs. Richard Worth writes for the Warship and Warship International journals. His book titles include In the Shadow of the Battleship, Raising the Red Banner (with Vladimir Yakubov), On Seas Contested (edited with Vincent P. O'Hara and W. David Dickson), and Fleets of World War II.
Ships have been part of military campaigns since the Ancient world, and this expertly illustrated and detailed Spotter's Guide offers a look at the 40 most iconic and recognizable ships throughout history. From the Viking longship through to the powerful modern aircraft carriers, and from the ironclads of the American Civil War to the awesome fighting ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Each ship is beautifully illustrated and is accompanied by a brief history. A perfect gift, this book is a must-have for any naval enthusiast and historian.
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.
A roadmap for US military innovation based on the Navy's history of success through civilian-military collaborations The US military must continually adapt to evolving technologies, shifting adversaries, and a changing social environment for its personnel. In American Defense Reform, Dave Oliver and Anand Toprani use US naval history as a guide for leading successful change in the Pentagon. American Defense Reform provides a historical analysis of the Navy during four key periods of disruptive transformation: the 1940s Revolt of the Admirals, the McNamara Revolution in systems analysis, the fallout from the Vietnam War, and the end of the Cold War. The authors draw insights from historical documents, previously unpublished interviews from four-star admirals, and Oliver's own experiences as a senior naval officer and defense industry executive. They show that Congress alone cannot effectively create change and reveal barriers to applying the experience of the private sector to the public sector Ultimately, Oliver and Toprani show that change can only come from a collaborative effort between civilians, the military, and industry, each making vital contributions. American Defense Reform provides insights and practical recommendations essential to reforming national defense to meet future demands.
Histories of all important and historically significant overseas U.S. naval and Marine Corps bases and facilities are presented alphabetically in this work. Those bases within a geographic area that permits (or permitted) overflight rights, port visits, and the use of offshore anchorages and including Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam are included. Each entry discusses the form and function of the base or facility and gives something of its history and development. Bibliographies at the end of each entry provide sources for further research.
This book presents a comprehensive history of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN). It traces the origins of the RIN to the East India Company, as early as 1612, and untangles the institution's complex history. Capturing various transitional phases of the RIN, especially during the crucial period of 1920-1950, it concludes with the final transfer of the RIN from under the British Raj to independent India. Drawn from a host of primary sources-personal diaries and logs, official reports and documents-the author presents a previously unexplored history of colonial and imperial defence policy, and the contribution of the RIN during the World Wars. This book explores several aspects in RIN's history such as its involvement in the First World War; its status in policies of the British Raj; the martial race theory in the RIN; and the development of the RIN from a non-combat force to a full-fledged combat defence force during the Second World War. It also studies the hitherto unexplored causes, nature and impact of the 1946 RIN Revolt on the eve of India's independence from a fresh perspective. An important intervention in the study of military and defence history, this will be an essential read for students, researchers, defence personnel, military academy cadets, as well as general readers.
The surrender of the German U-boat fleet at the end of World War II was perhaps the principal event in the war's endgame which signified to the British people that peace really had arrived. This revised, updated and expanded new edition gives career details of not only the 33 commanders who accompanied their boats to Loch Eriboll but also of a further 23 previous commanders of those U-boats, including four who might be considered 'Aces' because of the damage they inflicted, sinking and disabling Allied shipping. The book also features an analysis of the Allied naval operation under which the surrendering U-boats were assembled in Scotland and Northern Ireland; asks who first contacted those U-boats after the capitulation - armed British trawlers, frigates of the Allied navies or aircraft of the Royal Air Force; and discloses how U-boats spared destruction were distributed to the navies of the USA, France, USSR and the Royal Navy. Also revealed are more unpublished recollections of British and German naval personnel present at the Loch Eriboll surrenders and how 116 surviving U-boats came to be sunk in the waters of the Western Approaches in the winter of 1945/46.The Grey Wolves of Eriboll includes a wealth of historical insights including the German Surrender Document; detailed descriptions of the construction, service careers and circumstances of each surrendered U-boat; details of the frigates that supervised the surrenders, contemporary newspaper reports and descriptions of the naval Operations Pledge, Commonwealth, Cabal, Thankful and Deadlight, each of which involved Eriboll U-boats. The mysteries surrounding Hitler's yacht and the alleged 'Norwegian Royal Yacht' (which did not exist at the time) are also explored. The pivotal role played by Loch Eriboll in ending the U-boat menace is little-known and lesser celebrated - this book rights that wrong.
This book analyses China's maritime strategy for the 21st century, integrating strategic planning, policy thinking and strategic prediction. This book explains the construction and application of China's military, political, economic and diplomatic means for building maritime power, and predicts the future of China's maritime power by 2049, as well as development trends in global maritime politics. It explores both the strengths and the limitations of President Xi's 'Maritime Dream' and provides a candid assessment of the likely future balance at sea between China and the United States. This volume explains and discusses China's claims and intentions in the East and South China Seas and makes some recommendations for China's future policy that will lessen the chance of conflict with the United States and its closer neighbors. This book will be of much interest to students of maritime strategy, naval studies, Chinese politics and International Relations in general.
This volume examines the transformation of British and US naval policy from 1870 to 1889, which resulted in the British Naval Defence Act (1889), the construction of the first modern US battleships, and began the naval arms race which culminated in World War One. In examining the development of strategic thinking in the Royal and US Navies, it overturns conventional wisdom regarding genesis of the Naval Defence Act and the US Navy's about-face from a defensive to an offensive strategic orientation. It pays particular attention to activities of the key individuals in both countries' navies, who were instrumental in transforming their respective services' organizational culture. This study will be of interest not only to historians but to political scientists, sociologists, and others working in the fields of international relations, strategic studies, policy analysis, and military learning, adaptation and innovation. It is also essential reading for those interested in the naval arms race during this period.
Those in peril on the waves
This is the most comprehensive bibliography of the Spanish Armada of 1588 in recent years and the only up-to-date reference which provides a critical assessment of important source materials and an annotated bibliography of all genres of literature in Western languages. Eugene Rasor describes 1114 titles and is the first to assess the vast collection of writings that have accompanied the recent 400th anniversary of the Armada campaign. Cross-references from the narrative to bibliographical entries and a full index make the guide easy for researchers at all levels to use in their study of naval and European history. This authoritative reference covers one of the most important campaigns in naval history. The first part of the book consists of a narrative assessing the literature on the Spanish Armada in terms of background, history, leaders, preparations and tactics, and the consequences of the conflict. Source materials include all published books, monographs, official histories, government publications, dissertations, bibliographies, pertinent journals and periodicals and related articles, collections of archival and research sources and their locations, other significant holdings, published and broadcasted interviews, fiction, drama, and art. English, Spanish, French, Dutch and other Western languages are covered in a comprehensive manner, and both English and Spanish perspectives are presented carefully. The book also offers a short chronology. The index cites authors and subjects both.
From the stunning victory at Pearl Harbor to its dramatic reversal
at Midway, the Imperial Japanese Navy swept all before it in its
numerous victories in the Pacific and Far Eastern waters. "The
Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific War "pulls from many of
Osprey's bestselling books on the subject in addition to the most
recent research on the subject, including many sources from Japan,
and is the most recent and accurate book on this fascinating force.
Was he a far-sighted war hero, or an ambitious networker promoted well above his natural talent? Admired as a modernising chief of staff, a timely decoloniser, and a genuine player on the world stage, Mountbatten nevertheless continues to attract fierce criticism. In this timely new biography, Adrian Smith offers a fresh and convincing perspective, depicting Mountbatten as a quintessentially modern, highly professional figure within the Royal Navy, and at Combined Operations and SE Asia Command, a hands-on officer who enthusiastically embraced new technology; someone who, although an aristocrat, was by instinct a progressive, innovative in his approach to man management. Smith brings Mountbatten to life, acknowledging the essential qualities as well as the obvious weaknesses. Beneath the rich, vain, often ruthless, embodiment of power and privilege could be found a very human, even vulnerable, character - the complex personality of a pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century Britain and her empire.
Rigidly organised and harshly disciplined, the Georgian Royal Navy was an orderly and efficient fighting force which played a major role in Great Britain's wars of the 18th and early 19th centuries. This concise book explores what it was like to be a sailor in the Georgian Navy - focusing on the period from 1714 to 1820, this book examines the Navy within its wider historical, national, organisational and military context, and reveals exactly what it took to survive a life in its service. It looks at how a seaman could join the Royal Navy, including the notorious 'press gangs'; what was meant by 'learning the ropes'; and the severe punishments that could be levied for even minor misdemeanours as a result of the Articles of War. Military tactics, including manning the guns and tactics for fending off pirates are also revealed, as is the problem of maintaining a healthy diet at sea - and the steps that sailors themselves could take to avoid the dreaded scurvy. Covering other fascinating topics as wide-ranging as exploration, mutiny, storms, shipwrecks, and women on board ships, this 'Sailor's Guide' explores the lives of the Navy's officers and sailors, using extracts from contemporary documents and writings to reconstruct their experiences in vivid detail.
Surgeon's Mate-The Diary of John Knyveton, Surgeon In The British Fleet During The Seven Years War 1756-1762. A detailed and bloody eye-witness account of a Naval Surgeon in the thick of military action. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Obscure Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork. |
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