Product Description: Nineteen-Gun Salute: Case Studies of Operational, Strategic, and Diplomatic Naval Leadership during the 20th and Early 21st Centuries, edited by John B. Hattendorf and Bruce A. Elleman. This collection of brief biographies of nineteen U.S. Navy admirals, from W. S. Sims, to Joseph W. Preuher, with conclusions by the editors focusing particularly on leadership skills in the operational and strategic arenas, is sponsored by the Naval War College’s College of Operational and Strategic Leadership and has been jointly produced by the Naval War College Press and the Government Printing Office.
An important book, presenting the latest insights by the leading world authorities on naval history. This book presents a wide range of new research on many aspects of naval strategy in the early modern and modern periods. Among the themes covered are the problems of naval manpower, the nature of naval leadership and naval officers, intelligence, naval training and education, and strategic thinking and planning. The book is notable for giving extensive consideration to navies other than those of Britain, its empire and the United States. It explores a number of fascinating subjects including how financial difficulties frustrated the attempts by Louis XIV's ministers to build a strong navy; how the absence of centralised power in the Dutch Republic had important consequences for Dutch naval power; how Hitler's relationship with his admirals severely affected German naval strategy during the Second World War; and many more besides. The book is a Festschrift in honour of John B. Hattendorf, for more than thirty years Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the US Naval War College and an influential figure in naval affairs worldwide. N.A.M. Rodger is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. J. Ross Dancy is Assistant Professor of Military History at Sam Houston State University. Benjamin Darnell is a D.Phil. candidate at New College, Oxford. Evan Wilson is Caird Senior Research Fellow at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Contributors: Tim Benbow, Peter John Brobst, Jaap R. Bruijn, Olivier Chaline, J. Ross Dancy, Benjamin Darnell, James Goldrick, Agustín Guimerá, Paul Kennedy, Keizo Kitagawa, Roger Knight, AndrewD. Lambert, George C. Peden, Carla Rahn Phillips, Werner Rahn, Paul M. Ramsey, Duncan Redford, N.A.M. Rodger, Jakob Seerup, Matthew S. Seligmann, Geoffrey Till, Evan Wilson
Maritime powers dominate the planet, from the British empire of the 19th century, to the American post-World War II domination of global affairs. To a large degree their control of the globe is based on control of the seas. This book seeks to examine the strengths and weaknesses of maritime power, including specific chapters on mutiny, blockades, coalitions, piracy, expeditionary warfare, commerce raiding, and soft power operations, but with larger discussion of such sea power characteristics as sea control, sea denial, and the competition between land powers and sea powers. The conclusions will discuss how many other countries, including Russia during the Cold War and the PRC today, have or are seeking to use sea power to claim regional and then eventually global hegemony.
This book examines the origins of the US Navy’s 2007 Maritime Strategy, the formation of the US government’s “Pivot to Asia” strategy, and the most recent revisions to this strategy that focus more specifically on China. Besides examining the details of this strategy formulation, the book explores the internal and external repercussions on the US Navy of the Pivot to Asia. It discusses the “Fat Leonard” scandal, which involved bribery and corruption in contracts for the maintenance of the US fleets in the region, and considers the sharp decrease in training and readiness of the Pacific fleet to support the pivot, which in turn led to serious maritime collisions. It also assesses the impact of the pivot on other countries in the region, engaging in the debate as to whether the pivot was necessary in order to convince the countries of the region that the United States had not lost its staying power, or whether the pivot managed to make tensions in the Asia-Pacific worse even while allowing the strategic situation in the Middle East and Europe to worsen as a result of neglect.
East Asia was a major focus of struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War of 1945 to 1991, with multiple "hot" and "cold" conflicts in China, Korea, and Vietnam. The struggle for predominance in East Asia, however, largely predated the Cold War, as this book shows, with many examples of the United States and Russia/the Soviet Union working to exercise and increase control in the region. The book focuses on secret treaties, 26 of them, signed from the mid-1890s through 1950, when secret agreements between China and the USSR, including several concerning the Chinese Eastern Railway, gave Russia greater control over Manchuria and Outer Mongolia. One of the most important was negotiated in 1945, when Stalin signed the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty with Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists, that included a secret protocol granting the Soviet Navy sea control over the Manchurian littorals. This secret protocol excluded the US Navy from landing Nationalist troops at the major Manchurian ports, thereby guaranteeing the Chinese Communist victory in Northeast China; from Manchuria, the Chinese Communists quickly spread south to take all of Mainland China. To a large degree, therefore, this formerly undiscussed secret diplomacy set the underlying conditions for the Cold War in East Asia.
This essential companion provides a comprehensive study of the literature on the causes, course, and consequences of the Korean War, 1950-1953. Aimed primarily at readers with a special interest in military history and contemporary conflict studies, the authors summarize and analyze the key research issues in what for years was known as the 'Forgotten War.' The book comprises three main thematic parts, each with chapters ranging across a variety of crucial topics covering the background, conduct, clashes, and outcome of the Korean War. The first part sets the historical stage, with chapters focusing on the main participants. The second part provides details on the tactics, equipment, and logistics of the belligerents. Part III covers the course of the war, with each chapter addressing a key stage of the fighting in chronological order. The enormous increase in writings on the Korean War during the last thirty years, following the release of key primary source documents, has revived and energized the interest of scholars. This essential reference work not only provides an overview of recent research, but also assesses what impact this has had on understanding the war.
This “uncommonly astute study” examines the early development of the US-UK military alliance that would eventually lead to victory in WWII (Paul Miles, author of FDR’s Admiral). On December 12, 1937, Japanese aircraft sank the American gunboat Panay outside Nanjing, China. Although the Japanese apologized, President Roosevelt set Captain Royal Ingersoll to London to begin conversations with the British admiralty about Japanese aggression in the Far East. While few Americans remember the Panay Incident, it was the start of what would become the “Special Relationship” between the United States and Great Britain. In The Origins of the Grand Alliance, William T. Johnsen provides the first comprehensive analysis of Anglo-American military collaboration before the Second World War. He sets the stage by examining Anglo-French and Anglo-American coalition military planning from 1900 through World War I and the interwar years. Johnsen also considers the formulation of policy and grand strategy, operational planning, and the creation of the command structure and channels of communication. He addresses vitally important logistical and materiel issues, particularly the difficulties of war production. Drawn from extensive sources and private papers held in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, Johnsen’s exhaustively researched study casts new light on the twentieth century’s most significant alliance.
Only the best officers are given command of U.S. Navy ships, and only the elite of these are selected for aircraft carriers. The USS America was the third of four Kitty Hawk-class super-carriers. Commissioned in 1965, decommissioned in 1996, she served three times in Vietnam, and once each in Libya, the Persian Gulf and Bosnia. This book profiles the 23 men who commanded the America and her crew of 5,000 during 31 years. Most of them were combat veterans--World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Mayaguez Rescue Operations, Lebanon, Haiti, Libya, Bosnia, and Desert Storm. Four were Naval Academy graduates; seven were test pilots; one became Inspector General of the Navy; one wore both Navy wings and submariner dolphins; and one was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for nearly six years. Two retired as admirals--one was Chief of Naval Operations--five as vice admirals, and 11 as rear admirals. Each profile gives a career account based on official biographies, published memoirs, and interviews with the commanders or their families.
it ensured that friction over the Taiwan Strait did not escalate into a full-blown war. In fact, the Taiwan Patrol Force did its job so well that virtually nothing has been written about it. U.S. Navy ships acted both as a buffer between the two antagonists and as a trip wire in case of aggression. The force fulfilled the latter function twice in the 1950s -- during the first (1954-55) and second (1958) Taiwan Strait crises --
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The extraordinary story of the World War II air, land, and sea campaign that brought the U.S. Navy to the apex of its strength and marked the rise of the United States as a global superpower Winner, Commodore John Barry Book Award, Navy League of the United States • Winner, John Lehman Distinguished Naval Historian Award, Naval Order of the United States With its thunderous assault on the Mariana Islands in June 1944, the United States crossed the threshold of total war. In this tour de force of dramatic storytelling, distilled from extensive research in newly discovered primary sources, James D. Hornfischer brings to life the campaign that was the fulcrum of the drive to compel Tokyo to surrender—and that forever changed the art of modern war. With a close focus on high commanders, front-line combatants, and ordinary people, American and Japanese alike, Hornfischer tells the story of the climactic end of the Pacific War as has never been done before. Here are the epic seaborne invasions of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, the stunning aerial battles of the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, the first large-scale use of Navy underwater demolition teams, the largest banzai attack of the war, and the daring combat operations large and small that made possible the strategic bombing offensive culminating in the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the seas of the Central Pacific to the shores of Japan itself, The Fleet at Flood Tide is a stirring, authoritative, and cinematic portrayal of World War II’s world-changing finale. Illustrated with original maps and more than 120 dramatic photographs “Quite simply, popular and scholarly military history at its best.”—Victor Davis Hanson, author of Carnage and Culture “The dean of World War II naval history . . . In his capable hands, the story races along like an intense thriller. . . . Narrative nonfiction at its finest—a book simply not to be missed.”—James M. Scott, Charleston Post and Courier “An impressively lucid account . . . admirable, fascinating.”—The Wall Street Journal “An extraordinary memorial to the courageous—and a cautionary note to a world that remains unstable and turbulent today.”—Admiral James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander, NATO, author of Sea Power “A masterful, fresh account . . . ably expands on the prior offerings of such classic naval historians as Samuel Eliot Morison.”—The Dallas Morning News
