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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Naval forces & warfare
This new book delivers a fascinating insight into China's strategic abilities and ambitions, probing the real depths of its plans for the twenty first century. world's largest operator of tactical submarines? Why is Beijing so intent on upgrading this fleet? Is the stage being set in East Asia for a contest for maritime supremacy pitting Chinese submarines against American aircraft carriers? Why does the U.S. Navy regard China's submarines as one of its most formidable weapons? China's strategic outlook today and that of earlier continental powers whose submarine fleets challenged dominant maritime powers for regional hegemony: Germany in two world wars and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Using insights from classical naval strategic theory it examines Beijing's strategic logic in making tactical submarines the keystone of China's naval force structure. It investigates the influence of Soviet naval strategy and ancient Chinese military thought on the PLA Navy's strategic culture. It contends that China's increasingly capable submarine fleet could play a key role in Beijing's use of force to resolve the Taiwan issue. With attention focused on China's missile build-up opposite Taiwan, it also warns that there is a danger of underestimating the potential of the PLA Navy's submarines to destabilise any future Taiwan Strait crisis. and strategic studies, Asian Politics, Geopolitics and Military (Naval) Strategy.
More than 16 million Americans served in the military during World War II - and nearly 3 million of them spent time in the Pacific theater. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States looked to graduates of the naval academy to fill its need for qualified officers. To supplement the number of academy graduates, new programs were created, including the Naval Reserve Officer Training Program, the Civilian Pilot Training Program, the Naval Aviation Cadet Program and what were later called ""V"" programs. Despite these efforts, the military buildup was slow. After Pearl Harbor, all branches of the military became dependent upon officers rushed through training programs, some of which hardly lasted longer than the enlisted men's boot camp - the so-called ""ninety day wonders"" are just such an example. Recruited and trained in a variety of ways, the officers came from varied backgrounds. From a Japanese language officer and a Marine Corps fighter pilot, to a master rigger and a navy weatherman, the author presents the tales of more than 20 navy and marine officers, offering the story of the war through their personal experiences.
This new collection of scholarly, readable, and up-to-date essays covers the most significant naval blockades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here the reader can find Napoleon's Continental Blockade of England, the Anglo-American War of 1812, the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the first Sino-Japanese War 1894-95, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the second Sino-Japanese War 1937-45, the Second World War in Europe and Asia, the Nationalist attempt to blockade the PRC, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the British blockade of Rhodesia, the Falklands War, the Persian Gulf interdiction program, the PRC "missile" blockade of Taiwan in 1996, and finally Australia's recent "reverse" blockade to keep illegal aliens out of the country. The authors of each chapter address the causes of the blockade in question, its long and short-term repercussions, and the course of the blockade itself. More generally, they address the state of the literature, taking advantage of new research and new methodologies to provide something of value to both the specialist and non-specialist reader. Taken as a whole, this volume presents fresh insights into issues such as what a blockade is, why countries might choose them, which navies can and cannot make use of them, what responses lead to satisfactory or unsatisfactory conclusions, and how far-reaching their consequences tend to be. This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of strategic studies, military history and maritime studies in particular.
An essential new account of how anti-submarine warfare is conducted, with a focus on both historic and present-day operations. This new book shows how until 1944 U-boats operated as submersible torpedo craft which relied heavily on the surface for movement and charging their batteries. This pattern was repeated in WWII until Allied anti-submarine countermeasures had forced the Germans to modify their existing U-boats with the schnorkel. Countermeasures along also pushed the development of high-speed U-boats capable of continuously submerged operations. This study shows how these improved submarines became benchmark of the post-war Russian submarine challenge. Royal Navy doctrine was developed by professional anti-submarine officers, and based on the well-tried combination of defensive and offensive anti-submarine measures that had stood the press of time since 1917, notwithstanding considerable technological change. This consistent and holistic view of anti-submarine warfare has not been understood by most of the subsequent historians of these anti-submarine campaigns, and this book provides an essential and new insight into how Cold War, and indeed modern, anti-submarine warfare is conducted.
This is the first major English-language study to explore the broad and longstanding connections between Japan's national security and the safety of its sea lanes. Tracing issues from pre-and post-1945 eras, the book explores how Japan's concerns with sea lane protection have developed across such diverse fields as military strategy, diplomacy, trade policy, energy security, and law enforcement. Drawing upon case study material and primary research including interviews with officials and security analysts, the book presents a chronological analysis of Japan's sea lane security. While Japan's security policies have recently undergone relatively rapid change, a historical treatment of sea lane security issues reveals long-term continuity in security policymakers' perceptions and responses regarding Japan's defence and foreign policy. Revealing a neglected but important aspect of Japan's military and economic security, the book investigates why officials and analysts continue to portray the defence of Japan's sea lanes as 'a matter of life and death'.
This is a naval history of Greece in the 1910s, a decade when the
geographic importance of the country and its naval capabilities
both increased considerably. The book's aim is to explain the
causes of these phenomena and their consequences in peace and war
with regard to the satisfaction of Greek national aims, the
Mediterranean naval situation and the Balkan balance of power. The
response of the great powers to the naval importance of Greece and
relations between Greece and those powers are also explored. This
is largely concerned with Anglo-Greek naval relations, an important
element of which was the activities of the British naval missions
to Greece. The competition between Britain, France, and Germany for
Greek naval procurements and naval influence, and Greek-Turkish
naval competition are also examined.
Gender isn't what it used to be. Categories are collapsing. What
was deviant for baby boomers has become mainstream for their
offspring: like the coed who realizes she's bisexual but, after a
period of adjustment, shrugs her shoulders and gets on with her
otherwise mundane life. Gender as we once understood it is over,
and gender-bending is the new beat. Men sport ponytails and
earrings and teach nursery school; women flaunt tatoos and biceps
and smoke cigars.
Gender isn't what it used to be. Categories are collapsing. What
was deviant for baby boomers has become mainstream for their
offspring: like the coed who realizes she's bisexual but, after a
period of adjustment, shrugs her shoulders and gets on with her
otherwise mundane life. Gender as we once understood it is over,
and gender-bending is the new beat. Men sport ponytails and
earrings and teach nursery school; women flaunt tatoos and biceps
and smoke cigars.
The first book by a former Indian naval intelligence officer on Sino-India relations, India's Maritime Strategy provides a unique insight into the Indian Navy, tracing its post-independence growth and discussing its transformation and future in the 21st century. In the context of the rise of China's maritime power in the Indian Ocean, this book provides a nuanced view of the extent and scope of India's maritime reach and the effect of this on Sino-Indian competition. Challenging the view that by developing a favourable environment alone, India could seek to maintain its balance of power with China, it is argued that despite durable bilateral security ties with most regional states, India's maritime aspirations to be the primary net security provider for the region are unsustainable in the long term. This book presents a comprehensive coverage of India's bilateral maritime security engagements with all the Indian Ocean regional states, as well as the US, France, UK and Russia. As such, it will be useful to students and scholars of Indian and South Asian politics, international relations and maritime security.
Featuring specially commissioned artwork and archive illustrations, this engrossing study describes the US Marine Corps’ early operations and illustrates its evolving uniforms and personal equipment. The US Marine Corps’ uniforms, personal equipment, insignia, and weaponry are all described and illustrated in this book, complemented by a succinct history of the Marines’ military record from their beginnings to the eve of the American Civil War, by which time the US Marine Corps had established itself as a small but vitally important part of the United States’ armed forces. Organized in 1775, the first American Marines distinguished themselves throughout the American Revolutionary War, and even raided mainland Britain before being disbanded in 1783. Reestablished in 1798, the US Marine Corps fought in the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812, both at sea and on land. The years after 1815 saw the Corps involved in a wide variety of conflicts, from the Seminole Wars to the Mexican–American War; Marines even reached China and Japan. As the prospect of civil war began to threaten the United States, a small battalion of Marines was responsible for the capture of abolitionist John Brown at Harper’s Ferry on October 18, 1859. The diverse operations and evolving appearance of the Marines are captured in this absorbing study from an acknowledged authority on US military costume.
This book, based on extensive work in Russian archives, investigates how strategy, organisational rivalry and cultural factors came to shape naval developments in the Soviet Union, up to the invasion of 1941. Focussing on the Baltic Fleet, the author shows how the perceived balance of power in northern Europe came to have a major influence on Soviet naval policy during the 1920s and 1930s. The operational environment of a narrow inland-sea like the Baltic would have required a joint approach to military planning, but the Soviet navy's weak position among the armed services made such an approach hard to attain. The Soviet regime also struggled against the cultural heritage of the tsarist navy and the book describes how this was overcome. In a special Appendix dedicated to the purges of 1937-38, surviving party records from the Baltic Fleet Intelligence Section are used to illustrate the mechanisms of the Great Terror at local level.
Following Israel's War of Independence in 1948-49, the anticipated
peace did not materialize and the new nation soon found itself
embroiled in protracted military conflict with neighboring Arab
states. Demobilization of its armed forces led to the formation of
special elite unit under the command of Ariel Sharon to cope with
cross-border infiltration, pillage and murder. A policy of
deterrence was governed by the tactic of retaliation, which
contained the seeds of escalation. At the same time, a military
dynamic unfolded in which the logic of field unit response dictated
both military and political policy and caught the imagination of a
demoralized and war-weary Israeli society.
This book adopts an innovative new approach to examine the role of
maritime power and the utility of navies. It uses a number of case
studies based upon key Royal Navy operations in the twentieth
century to draw out enduring principles about maritime power and to
examine the strengths and limitations of maritime forces as
instruments of national policy.
This new book explores innovation within the Royal Navy from the financial constraints of the 1930s to World War Two, the Cold War and the refocusing of the Royal Navy after 1990. Successful adaptation to new conditions has been critical to all navies at all times. To naval historians the significance and process of change is not new, but in recent years innovation has been increasingly studied within a number of other disciplines, providing new theoretical positions and insights. This study examines key case studies of change, some successful others less so, which place the experience of the Royal Navy within a variety of economic and strategic contexts. Together these studies provide excellent new insights against which to set recent ideas on innovation and provide a stimulus to more research by historians and scholars in other disciplines.
This book is a comparative study of the evolution of the German navy in the second half of the nineteenth century. It examines the development of strategy, especially commerce-raiding, in comparison to what other navies were doing in this era of rapid technological change. It is not an insular history, merely listing ship rosters or specific events; it is a history of the German navy in relation to its potential foes. It is also a look at a new military institution involved in an inter-service rivalry for funds, technology and manpower with the prestigious and well-established army.
Following the stranding of a Soviet Whiskey-class submarine in 1981
on the Swedish archipelago, a series of massive submarine
intrusions took place within Swedish waters.
This authoritative biographical guide presents the lives and
careers of over six hundred men and women who have made their mark
in the world's fighting navies, from the sixteenth century to the
present day.
During World War II, James Patric served for two years aboard the destroyer USS George E. Badger. The ship, launched in 1918, was one of several hundred mothballed World War I four-pipers. As American involvement in World War II drew closer, most of them were re-activated for service in the US Navy; four-pipers such as the Badger were involved in reporting and tracking ships and aircraft approaching American shores, seizing Axis ships in American ports,occupying Greenland, and relieving the British from the defense of Iceland. The Badger was involved in every stage of the conflict, from pre-war Neutrality Patrol, escorting convoys, anti-submarine warfare (a pioneer hunter/killer), carrying Underwater Demolition Team 8, and pre-invasion (Frogmen) reconnaissance of South Pacific invasion beaches. This memoir weaves together the oral and written memories of James Patric, a Connecticut farmboy who was drafted in early 1943, with those of his shipmates on the Badger, supporting them with documents and historical records. The book records the ships role in worldwide conflict and traces the authors evolution from raw peacetime civilian to veteran wartime sailor. Appendices list the muster rolls of the crew and commissioned officers.
On 3 July 1940, soon after the collapse of the French front and
France's request for an armistice, a reluctant Royal Navy commander
opened fire on the French Navy squadron at Mers-el-Kebir. Some
1,300 French sailors lost their lives. The late David Brown's detailed account finally conveys an objective understanding of the course of events that led up to this tragedy. This new book makes extensive use of primary sources such as correspondence, reports and signals traffic, from the British Cabinet to the admirals, the commanders-in-chief and the liaison officers. It shows how the driving force behind this extraordinary event
was the British government's determination that the French Fleet
would never fall into the hands of the Axis powers. A combination
of mistrust, dissembling, poor communications and outright enmity
over the preceding month had catastrophic results, both for the
individuals concerned and for the future of Franco-British naval
relations.
Great Britain's economic blockade of Germany in World War I was one
of the key elements to the victory of the Entente. Though Britain
had been the leading exponent of blockades for two centuries, the
World War I blockade was not effective at the outbreak of
hostilities. Pre-war changes had led to the Admiralty supplanting
the Royal Navy's leadership role in favor of direction from the
civilian branch of government on the basis of international law.
Between the ending of the Great War and the start of the Second World War in 1939, the Royal Navy remained the largest in the world. But with the League of Nations seeming to offer a solution to all future conflicts, a country weary of war and without an obvious enemy there seemed no need for a large battlefleet. The strategic focus shifted eastwards, to Japan, with its growing battlefleet as the new threat to the British Empire and to the Royal Navy's supremacy. From 1924 a strategic plan, War Memorandum (Eastern), was written and refined. The plan called for the Royal Navy, still the largest in the world, even after the Washington Naval Treaties, to move eastwards to a defended base at Singapore, cut off Japan and force her battlefleet into a decisive fleet battle. As a strategy War Memorandum (Eastern) had many flaws. Its real importance lay in the fact that it provided a justification for the Royal Navy to maintain its leading position in the world and to be in the forefront of the development of new tactical thinking. Through planning for a war with Japan the Royal Navy was able to test its readiness for a future war. Many of the lessons learnt during this period were ultimately put to good use against a different foe in 1939.
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.
Navies in Northern Waters is a collection of articles covering the
roles played by the secondary navies of northern European powers
and the United States within the maritime balance of power. The
contributions covering the 18th and 19th centuries focus on their
relations with each other as they sought to create a counterweight
to the dominant naval power of Britain.
This book suggests that institutional culture can account for a great deal of the activities and rationale of the Royal Navy. War highlights the role of culture in military organizations and as such acts as a spotlight by which this phenomenon can be assessed seperately and then in comparison in order to demonstrate the influence of institutional culture on strategy.
Arms and the State is a history of Britain's first and foremost modern armaments company, the Armstrong Whitworth Company, from its origins in 1854 to 1914. It focuses on the role of Sir William G. Armstrong, an engineer and entrepreneur who transformed his modest mechanical engineering business into a vast industrial enterprise which invented, developed, manufactured and sold heavy guns and warships throughout the world. Arms and the State reconstructs the global arms trade as it follows Armstrong's companies selling the latest weapons to both sides in the American Civil War, Egypt, Turkey and Italy in the 1860s, to China, Chile and Japan in the 1870s and 1880s, and became Britain's leading armaments company in the age of the naval arms races that preceded the First World War. In so doing, it discusses varied topics such as the social and political nature of technological innovation, the quality of Britain's late-Victorian entrepreneurs, and the impact of armaments on British politics, defence policies, the international arms trade and imperialism. Arms and the State situates the history of the company in its technological, political and international contexts, with particular attention given to the role of British Parliamentary politics and the inner workings of the War Office and Admiralty bureaucracies. The central narrative is Armstrong's role in the militarization of technology in the 1850s, the commercialization of the armaments trade on a global scale in the 1860s and 1870s, and the emergence of the British military-industrial state in the 1880s and 1890s. Arms and the State provides a history of the people, the technology and the business of the Arms trade. It is a fascinating story of the domestic politics, the foreign policy and strategic calculations, the manipulation of the press and the bureaucratic intrigues that lay behind the invention, production and proliferation of the first weapons of mass destruction. |
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