Naval Ships

Reeling from her last knock-down, drag-out with Japan’s mighty combined fleet – the Kido Butai – USS Enterprise limps back to Pearl Harbor for repairs and refitting. And like the battle-hardened warriors who live and work inside her, this gallant lady will return to the fight even stronger… but it can’t happen too soon.

There’s a super storm brewing out in the Pacific… one that will change the course of history forever… After three successful raids on Japanese outposts, the men and pilots of USS Enterprise are ready to get out there and hit Tojo once more. However, something dark and dangerous lies on the horizon… but before they face that storm, the U.S. Navy and Army has a delivery to make… right to Hirohito’s front porch!

America’s most decorated warship of World War II, Enterprise was constantly engaged against the Japanese Empire, earning the title “the fightingest ship” in the navy. Her career was eventful, vital, and short. Commissioned in 1938, her bombers sank a submarine just ten days after the Pearl Harbor attack, claiming the first Japanese vessel lost in the war.

The South found itself in an uneven struggle against the industrial might of the North. The odds were stacked against the southern agrarian states. And with only half the population of the North, southerners were at a disadvantage, having only a fraction of the manpower of the federal Army. As the conflict erupted, the North boasted a fleet of warships. The South was severely lacking. It was the age of ironclad vessels, but there was a scarcity of iron ore in the south. The odds seemed insurmountable. "The Confederate Navy" thrusts you headlong into the war's naval confrontations. It's a ...

Using just a few of the chapters of The Evolution of Naval Gunnery and the Evolution of the Ironclad Battleship of The British Navy Book, by Cyril Field in 1915, and combined with additional material from The Evolution of Naval Armament by Frederick Leslie Robertson from 1921, which were published without illustrations, Captain Mark Parsons and illustrator Thaddeus Black have updated these classic ironclad chapters into modern print, formatting, and color for the digital age. Also included is additional information about America’s Ironclad ship era. These additions make those old Public ...

When Admiral William Halsey selected Destroyer Squadron 21 to lead his victorious ships into Tokyo Bay to accept the Japanese surrender, it was the most battle-hardened US naval squadron of the war. But it was not the squadron of ships that had accumulated such an inspiring résumé; it was the...

In the year 1794, an East Indiaman is taken in the Strait of Sunda by French warships that knew her name, and knew exactly where to wait. The war of the French Revolution has reached the farthest ocean. Fresh from the Glorious First of June, Captain Nicholas Cruwys of the Royal Navy and the frigate Topaze are ordered east — to waters he last sailed as a young officer bound for Canton, a decade and a war ago. The harbours are the ones he remembers. Nothing else is. For this is the Company's ocean now: the East India Company, a power greater than most kingdoms, with its own armies, its own ...

Four ships. Two centuries. One extraordinary story of American sea power. In 1797, a graceful new frigate called Constellation was launched at Baltimore. More than a century and a half later, a submarine called Nautilus slid beneath the Arctic ice powered by nothing but the atom. Between them lies the story of how America learned to fight, and win, at sea. The Ships That Shaped America's Navy brings together four gripping narrative histories in a single volume. Each ship tells a different chapter of the same story: how a young republic's small navy grew into the most powerful fleet in the ...

PELLEW: FLEET ACTION Midshipman Gerry Pellew escaped a French prison with nothing but the clothes on his back and a debt to the men who didn't make it out. Now, aboard HMS Lark, he's determined to become the officer his late father would have been proud of — if the war doesn't take him first. The blockade off Brest is a slow grind of fog, storms, and waiting — until Lark crosses paths with the Junon, a French frigate captained by a man as skilled and honorable as any Gerry has faced. Twice they meet, first in the fog and then in a squall. The third time, there will be nowhere left to ...

Award-winning author, Thomas J. Cutler offers an in-depth and inspiring look at the truly heroic story of Ernest Evans and the crew of USS Johnston during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. The term “hero” is overused today, but the story of Ernest Evans and the crew of USS Johnston...

They survived capture—only to be imprisoned aboard ships designed for death. During the Second World War, tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees were transported across the Japanese Empire aboard vessels that became known as hell ships. Packed into dark, airless cargo holds, the prisoners endured suffocating heat, starvation, disease, dehydration, beatings, and conditions so overcrowded that men could barely sit or breathe. There were few toilets, almost no medical supplies, and little hope of escape. Yet the greatest danger often came from above. Because many...

John Wukovits tells of the most dramatic naval battle of the Pacific War and the incredible sacrifice of the USS Samuel B. Roberts. On October 25, 1944, the Samuel B. Roberts, along with the other twelve vessels comprising its unit, stood between Japan's largest battleship force ever sent to sea...

Warship Builders is the first scholarly study of the US naval shipbuilding industry from the early 1920s to the end of World War II, when American shipyards produced the world's largest fleet that helped defeat the Axis powers in all corners of the globe. A colossal endeavor that absorbed billions and employed virtual armies of skilled workers, naval construction mobilized the nation's leading industrial enterprises in the shipbuilding, engineering, and steel industries to deliver warships whose technical complexity dwarfed that of any other weapons platform.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The shocking true story of the USS Houston, FDR’s legendary lost cruiser, and the epic saga of the survivors who faced one of World War II’s most brutal ordeals—from the acclaimed author of The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors “Captivating [and]...

Portsmouth, England. A ten-year-old boy. A British warship. The boy already knows what hunger can make someone do. When he is caught stealing food for his family, prison should end his troubles. Instead, it is only the beginning. Taken from his cell and forced aboard the British warship HMS Progress, the boy becomes a cabin boy under a brutal captain. Trapped at sea and subjected to unimaginable cruelty, he learns one lesson above all others: survive. Three years later, Boston changes everything. Then the ship reaches Boston. When fire tears through the city, the boy sees his chance. He ...

A Ship Was Lost. Her Name Endures Forever... On April 18, 1942, sixteen Army bombers roared off the deck of a brand-new aircraft carrier and flew straight into legend. USS Hornet had been at sea for barely six months. She would be on the ocean floor within a year and a half. In between, she helped turn the tide of the Pacific War—not once, but twice. The Carrier That Struck First tells the extraordinary story of the two ships that carried the name Hornet through the twentieth century's most consequential conflict. The first Hornet launched the Doolittle Raid, fought at the Battle of ...

Michael Palin brings the fascinating story of the Erebus and its occupants to life, from its construction as a bomb vessel in 1826 through the flagship years of James Clark Ross’s Antarctic expedition and finally to Sir John Franklin’s quest for the holy grail of navigation - a route through the Northwest Passage, where the ship disappeared into the depths of the sea for more than 150 years. It was rediscovered under the arctic waters in 2014.

In November 1972, the Coast Guard Cutter Jarvis ran aground during a violent storm in Alaska, puncturing its hull, with a temporary patch applied to stop the flooding. The following day, enroute back to Honolulu, another, more vicious, storm struck; Jarvis now struggled with over 13 feet of water in their engine room and no power. The nearest ship that volunteered to assist was scheduled to arrive 30 minutes after the Jarvis officers estimated the ship would be destroyed on the rocky coastline. This is the true story of the heroic efforts by the crew that saved the ship.

The Frigate That Made a Navy - and the Mystery That Nearly Erased Her In 1794, the United States Congress voted to build a navy it hoped it would never have to finish. Three years later, launched from a Baltimore shipyard amid live oak, iron, and endless political argument, the frigate Constellation slid into the water — and went on to prove that a fledgling republic could out-sail, out-gun, and out-fight the world's great naval powers. Under the relentless Captain Thomas Truxtun, Constellation became the first American warship to defeat a French frigate in open battle, chasing down ...

He had spent thirty years learning to command a wooden ship. In one afternoon, the war made that knowledge obsolete. March 1862. In the cold gray water of Hampton Roads, fifty-one-year-old Captain Elias Cord holds his sloop-of-war on station and watches the future arrive. When the ironclad CSS Virginia comes out of the Elizabeth River and tears the Union's wooden fleet apart, Cord understands what he is seeing: the end of everything he was trained to be. His guns cannot reach her. His seamanship cannot save the men dying half a mile away. And the next morning, when a strange iron raft ...