After being mined on the battleship Nelson in 1939, he served on Prince of Wales, during the Bismarck action, witnessing the destruction of Hood and Churchill and Roosevelt's historic meeting. He survived the disastrous sinking by Japanese aircraft in December 1941 but within two days of reaching Singapore, the island fell. Evacuated in a coastal steamer, only to be sunk the next morning, he was stranded on a deserted island for a week before setting out for Ceylon in a native boat. His epic journey covered 1660 miles and took 37 days. Thereafter his adventures continued, with the North African landings, Russian convoys and, returning to the Far East, he was aboard the carrier Formidable when she was hit twice by Japanese Kamikazes before VJ Day.

    naval history.Sailors to the End tells the dramatic and until now forgotten story of the 1967 fire on board the USS Forrestal during its time at Yankee Station off the coast of Vietnam. The aircraft carrier, the mightiest of the U.S. fleet, was preparing to launch attacks into North Vietnam when one of its jets accidentally fired a rocket across the flight deck and into an aircraft occupied by pilot John McCain. A huge fire ensued, and McCain barely escaped before a 1,000-pound bomb on his plane exploded, causing a chain reaction with other bombs on surrounding planes. The crew struggled for days to extinguish the fires, the five thousand men on board experiencing different kinds of hell -- some trapped in damaged compartments waiting to die, some battling rivers of flaming jet fuel in order to rescue their buddies. Almost all of them were innocent eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, but in an instant they were thrust into a tragedy that nearly destroyed the ship and took the lives of 134 men.Written with the intensity and excitement of a thriller, and based on never-before-disclosed information and extensive interviews with the fire's survivors, here is the first full, minute-by-minute account of the disaster. Told through the stories of a dozen sailors, including John Beling, the carrier's beloved captain who was made a scapegoat for the disaster, Sailors to the End follows the Forrestal from its home in Norfolk, Virginia, through its mission in Vietnam. Focusing on the fateful fire and its aftermath, this book provides a gripping tale of heartache and heroism as young men find themselves trapped on a burning ship with bombs exploding all around them.Sailors to the End also corrects the official view of the fire, providing evidence that the U.S. government compromised the ship's safety by insisting on increased bombing despite the shortage of reliable weapons. For thirty-five years, the terrible loss of life has been blamed on the sailors themselves, but this meticulously documented history shows that they were truly the victims and heroes, deserving recognition for their efforts during a sweeping tragedy that until now has been only a footnote in history. Gregory A. Freeman dramatically brings this story to life, creating a work that is both riveting and moving.

    Kernan served in many battles and was aboard the Hornet when it was sunk by torpedoes in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.“One of the most arresting naval autobiographies yet published.”—Sir John Keegan“An honest story of collective courage, evocative, well-written, and fixed before the colors fade.”—Kirkus Reviews“[Kernan] recounts a wonderful and exciting American story about a poor farm boy from Wyoming who enlisted in the Navy. . . .[He] has written eight other books. I will go back and read them all.”—John Lehman, Air & Space“Details . . . make the moment vivid; that is what it was like, on the Hornet in its last hours.”—Samuel Hynes, New York Times Book Review

    More than six million died there. In Eye-Deep in Hell, the author explores this unique and terrifying world—the rituals of battle, the habits of daily life, and the constant struggle of men to find meaning amid excruciating boredom and the specter of impending death.

    Understandable perhaps from the point of view of the poet: readers on the other hand might wish to demur. The poems gathered here and chronologically ordered, thereby tracing the course of the war, are an extraordinary testimony to the almost unimaginable experiences of a combatant in that bitter conflict. Moving from the patriotic optimism of the first few poems (" ... fighting for our freedom, we are free") to the anguish and anger of the later work (where "hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists / Flounders in mud ... "), there comes a point when the reality of trench-warfare and its aftershocks move beyond comprehension: Sassoon knows this, and it becomes a powerful element in his art. As a book, the images have a cumulative relentlessness that make it almost impossible to read more than a few poems in one sitting. Unlike the avant-garde experiments developing in Europe in the first decades of this century, Sassoon's verse is formally conservative--but this was perhaps necessary, for as one reads the poems, one feels that the form, the classically inflected tropes, the metre and rhyme, apart from ironising the rhetoric of glory and battle were necessary techniques for containing the emotion (and indeed, a tone of barely controlled irony may have been the only means by which these angry observations would have been considered publishable at the time). When Sassoon's line begins to fragment, as it does in several of the later poems, it is under the extreme pressure to express the inexpressible. Compassion and sympathy are omnipresent here, in their full etymological sense of suffering with or alongside others--something the higher echelons of command (those " ... old men who died / Slow, natural deaths--old men with ugly souls") were never able or willing to contemplate. But Sassoon intuited the future of warfare, could sense that this was not "the war to end all wars": the mock-religious invocation of the final poem prefigures the vicious euphemisms of more recent conflicts: "Grant us the power to prove, by poison gases, / The needlessness of shedding human blood." Sassoon's bile-black irony signals a deep-felt pessimism: it was with good reason. --Burhan Tufail

    This best-selling collection gathers 13 examples of such battles, which often influence entire campaigns. Alongside less well-known cases, appear some of the most unforgettable campaigns: Napoleon at Waterloo, the Alamo, Little Big Horn, Rorke's Drift, and Arnhem Bridge. "...part of the...Cassell Military Classics series...hair-raising stories of military skirmishes throughout history."--Library Journal.

    But in the aftermath of the assassination in Sarajevo, the powers of Europe were sliding inexorably toward war, and not even the Middle East could escape the vast and enduring consequences of one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. The Great War spelled the end of the Ottomans, unleashing powerful forces that would forever change the face of the Middle East.In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story of the region's crucial role in the conflict. Bolstered by German money, arms, and military advisors, the Ottomans took on the Russian, British, and French forces, and tried to provoke Jihad against the Allies in their Muslim colonies. Unlike the static killing fields of the Western Front, the war in the Middle East was fast-moving and unpredictable, with the Turks inflicting decisive defeats on the Entente in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Gaza before the tide of battle turned in the Allies' favor. The great cities of Baghdad, Jerusalem, and, finally, Damascus fell to invading armies before the Ottomans agreed to an armistice in 1918.The postwar settlement led to the partition of Ottoman lands between the victorious powers, and laid the groundwork for the ongoing conflicts that continue to plague the modern Arab world. A sweeping narrative of battles and political intrigue from Gallipoli to Arabia, The Fall of the Ottomans is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the Great War and the making of the modern Middle East.

    In Retreat from Moscow, a bold, gripping account of one of the seminal moments of World War II, David Stahel argues that instead it was its first strategic success in the East. The Soviet counteroffensive was in fact a Pyrrhic victory. Despite being pushed back from Moscow, the Wehrmacht lost far fewer men, frustrated its enemy's strategy, and emerged in the spring unbroken and poised to recapture the initiative.Hitler's strategic plan called for holding important Russian industrial cities, and the German army succeeded. The Soviets as of January 1942 aimed for nothing less than the destruction of Army Group Center, yet not a single German unit was ever destroyed. Lacking the professionalism, training, and experience of the Wehrmacht, the Red Army's offensive attempting to break German lines in countless head-on assaults led to far more tactical defeats than victories.Using accounts from journals, memoirs, and wartime correspondence, Stahel takes us directly into the Wolf's Lair to reveal a German command at war with itself as generals on the ground fought to maintain order and save their troops in the face of Hitler's capricious, increasingly irrational directives. Excerpts from soldiers' diaries and letters home paint a rich portrait of life and death on the front, where the men of the Ostheer battled frostbite nearly as deadly as Soviet artillery. With this latest installment of his pathbreaking series on the Eastern Front, David Stahel completes a military history of the highest order

    Blunden took part in the disastrous battles of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele, describing the latter as 'murder, not only to the troops, but to their singing faiths and hopes'. In his compassionate yet unsentimental prose, he tells of the heroism and despair found among the officers. Blunden's poems show how he found hope in the natural landscape; the only thing that survives the terrible betrayal enacted in the Flanders fields.

    In 1942, before El Alamein turned the tide of war, the German merchant fleet was re-supplying its war machine with impunity. So Operation Frankton, a daring and secret raid, was launched by Mountbatten's Combined Operations and led by the enigmatic 'Blondie' Hasler - to paddle 'Cockleshell' canoes right into Bordeaux harbour and sink the ships at anchor.

    For the group of ordinary men in the French Sixth Battalion, thrown together from all over France and longing for home, war is simply a matter of survival, lightened only by the arrival of their rations or a glimpse of a pretty girl or a brief reprieve in the hospital. Reminiscent of classics like Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Under Fire (originally published in French as La Feu) vividly evokes life in the trenches: the mud, stench, and monotony of waiting while constantly fearing for one's life in an infernal and seemingly eternal battlefield.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    Budiansky vividly demonstrates that far from an indecisive and unnecessary conflict--as historians have long dismissed the War of 1812--this "forgotten war" had profound consequences that would change the course of naval warfare, America's place in the world, and the rules of international conflict forever. Never again would the great powers challenge the young republic's sovereignty in the aftermath of the stunning performance of America's navy and privateersmen in sea battles that ranged across half the globe. Their brilliant hit-and-run tactics against a far mightier foe would pioneer concepts of "asymmetric warfare" that would characterize the insurgency warfare of later centuries. Above all, the War of 1812 would be the making of the United States Navy. Even as the war began, the nation was bitterly divided over whether it should have a navy at all: Jeffersonian Republicans denounced the idea as a dangerous expansion of government power, while Federalists insisted that America could never protect its burgeoning seagoing commerce or command respect without a strong naval force. After the war, Americans would never again doubt that their might, respect, and very survival depended upon a permanent and professional navy. Drawing extensively on diaries, letters, and personal accounts from both sides, Budiansky re-creates the riveting encounters at sea in bloody clashes of cannonfire and swordplay; the intimate hopes and fears of vainglorious captains and young seamen in search of adventure; and the behind-the-scenes political intrigue and maneuvering in Washington and London. Throughout, "Perilous Fight" proves itself a gripping and essential work of American naval history.

    Offering a record of one of the pivotal events of World War II, as told through the personal accounts of the German and Soviet soldiers who fought in it, this book features photographs from the Battle of Stalingrad, from both sides of the front.

    All of these conflicts, including the hostilities between Arabs and Israelis that have flared yet again, come down, in a sense, to the extent to which the Middle East will continue to live with its political inheritance: the arrangements, unities, and divisions imposed upon the region by the Allies after the First World War.In A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin reveals how and why the Allies came to remake the geography and politics of the Middle East, drawing lines on an empty map that eventually became the new countries of Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon. Focusing on the formative years of 1914 to 1922, when all-even an alliance between Arab nationalism and Zionism-seemed possible he raises questions about what might have been done differently, and answers questions about why things were done as they were. The current battle for a Palestinian homeland has its roots in these events of 85 years ago.

    In juxtaposing an operational with a cultural theme, the author comes closer than any historian yet to explaining what was behind the often described operations of this famous 1916 battle at Jutland. Although the British fleet was victorious over the Germans, the cost in ships and men was high, and debates have raged within British naval circles ever since about why the Royal Navy was unable to take advantage of the situation. In this book Andrew Gordon focuses on what he calls a fault-line between two incompatible styles of tactical leadership within the Royal Navy and different understandings of the rules of the games.