Timely and urgent, Mayday is a clarion call to action--before it's too late. As with other powerful nations throughout history, maritime supremacy has been the key to America's rise to superpower status and the relative peace of the postwar era. Over the past two decades, however, while Washington has been preoccupied with land wars in the Middle East and targeted drone-centric operations against emerging terrorist threats, the United States Navy's...

The American Revolution was a naval war of immense scope and variety, including no less than twenty-two navies fighting on five oceans - to say nothing of rivers and lakes. In no other war were so many large-scale fleet battles fought, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, French and American history. Simultaneous naval campaigns were fought in the English Channel, the North and Mid-Atlantic, the Mediterranean,...

"Craig L. Symonds' World War II at Sea offers a definitive naval history of the Second World War presenting the chronology of the naval war, from The London Conference of 1930 to the surrender in Tokyo Bay in 1945, on a global scale for the first time."--Provided by publisher.

Draws on eyewitness accounts and primary sources to describe the first months of World War II in the Pacific, after the U.S. Navy suffered the worst defeat in its history at Pearl Harbor.

"On the fourth of July, 1942, four Allied ships traversing the Arctic separated from their decimated convoy to head further north into the ice field of the North Pole, seeking safety from Nazi bombers and U-boats in the perilous white maze of ice floes, growlers, and giant bergs. Despite the risks, they had a better chance of survival than the rest of Convoy PQ-17, a fleet of thirty-five cargo ships carrying $1 billion worth of war supplies to the...

Cast out from their ship by Fletcher Christian and his rebel band, William Bligh and eighteen seamen were forced to journey thousands of miles to the nearest port in a small open boat, with inadequate supplies and without a compass or charts. This time-honored classic, written in 1790, is Bligh's personal account of an extraordinary feat of seamanship, in which he used a sextant, a pocket watch, and his own iron will to direct an ill-equipped vessel...

A portrait of a World War II admiral traces his pivotal role in commanding all U.S. and Allied air, land, and sea forces in the Pacific after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Just over a decade after the first successful powered flight, fearless pioneers were flying over the battlefields of France in flimsy biplanes. Though the infantry in their muddy trenches might see aerial combat as glorious and chivalric, the reality was very different and undeniably deadly: new Royal Flying Corps subalterns in 1917 had a life expectancy of 11 days. In 1915 the term "ace" was coined to denote a pilot adept at downing enemy aircraft,...