"In this engaging narrative, brought to life by marine artist Ian Marshall's beautiful full-color paintings, historian Paul Kennedy grapples with the rise and fall of the Great Powers during World War II. Tracking the movements of the six major navies of the Second World War--the allied navies of Britain, France, and the United States and the Axis navies of Germany, Italy, and Japan--Kennedy tells a story of naval battles, maritime campaigns, convoys,...

In autumn 1941, a German U-boat commander and his crew set out on yet another hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. Over the coming weeks they brave the ocean's stormy waters and seek out British supply ships to destroy. But their targets travel in well-guarded convoys. When contact finally occurs, the hunter quickly becomes the hunted, and a cat-and-mouse game begins as the U-boat hides deep beneath the surface of the sea. Soon, claustrophobia...

Hunt the Bismarck tells the story of Operation Rheinübung, the Atlantic sortie of the Nazi Germany's largest battleship in May 1941. Bismarck entered service in the summer of 1940. She was well-armed, with eight 15-inch guns as well as a powerful array of lighter weapons, while her armored protection earned her the reputation of being unsinkable. This claim was finally put to the test in May 1941, when she sortied into the Atlantic and fought the...

"The best-selling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters reclaims the daring freelance sailors who proved essential to the winning of the Revolutionary War. The heroic story of the founding of the U.S. Navy during the Revolution has been told before, yet missing from most maritime histories of America's first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels, from 20-foot whaleboats to 40-cannon men-of-war, that truly revealed the new nation's character-above...

"On June 19, 1864, one of the most dramatic naval battles in history took place. The Confederate raider Alabama faced the Union warship Kearsarge in an all-or-nothing fight to the finish. Authors Phil Keith and Tom Clavin introduce some of the crucial players, including John Winslow, captain of the USS Kearsarge, as well as Raphael Semmes, captain of the CSS Alabama. Winslow pursued Semmes in a fourteen-month chase, culminating in what would become...

"A gripping tale of anti-submarine warfare in the World War II Pacific Theater, by a master of military adventure fiction. The Last Paladin by P.T. Deutermann is based on the true story of the USS Hayward (DE-24), a World War II Atlantic Fleet destroyer escort which has spent the past two years in the unforgiving battle for survival against the German U-boats of the North Atlantic. Summoned to relieve destroyers that are bogged down by escort duty...

This is the little-known story of how a newly independent nation was challenged by four Muslim powers and what happened when America's third president decided to stand up to intimidation. When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, America faced a crisis. The new nation was deeply in debt and needed its economy to grow quickly, but its merchant ships were under attack. Pirates from North Africa's Barbary coast routinely captured American sailors...

In a work of extraordinary narrative power, filled with brilliant personalities and vivid scenes of dramatic action, Robert K. Massie, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and Dreadnought, elevates to its proper historical importance the role of sea power in the winning of the Great War. The predominant image of this first World War is of mud and trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, poison gas, and slaughter....

German naval officer Karl Ehrlich loves his country and hates Hitler. As World War II erupts, Ehrlich defies orders and takes his freighter on a fox-and-hound pursuit from the Germans and the British.

Mathews County, Virginia, is a remote outpost on the Chesapeake Bay with little to offer except unspoiled scenery -- but it sent one of the largest concentrations of sea captains and U.S. merchant mariners of any community in America to fight in World War II. The Mathews Men tells that heroic story through the experiences of one family whose seven sons (and their neighbors), U.S. merchant mariners all, suddenly found themselves squarely in the cross-hairs...