In late January of 1945,with the Allied victory imminent,nearly 10,000 German refugees attempted to flee the advancing Red Army aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, a cruise liner-turned-escape ship. As the ship set sail in the dark of night, three torpedoes from a Soviet submarine struck the boat, causing catastrophic damage, and throwing women, children, the elderly, and wounded soldiers into the frigid waters of the Baltic Sea. When a few hours later first light broke,over 9,000 people had drowned in...
There is a saying in Russian jails. Ne ver ne boysya ne prosi: don't trust, don't fear, don't beg. Don't trust because life here will always disappoint you. Don't fear because whatever you're scared of, you are powerless to prevent it. And don't beg because nobody ever begged their way out of a Russian prison cell. The plan was to attach a Greenpeace pod to Gazprom's platform and launch a peaceful protest against oil being pumped from the icy waters of the Arctic. However, heavily armed comman...
This is a comprehensive study of Bronze Age ships and seafaring in the eastern Mediterranean, the principal means of contact between different cultures in this period. It deals with seagoing ships in the cultures bordering the eastern Mediterannean, starting with Egypt and following the trade routes. Seven primary aspects of seafaring are dealt with: ship construction, propulsion, anchors, navigation, sea trade, war and piracy and laws of the sea.
At the end of World War II, the Director of Naval Construction set the various design teams within his department the task of recording their wartime efforts, in an attempt to benefit from the experiences of the War while memories were still fresh. Chapters were commissioned on all the types, from the largest fleet carriers to the humblest tugs and tankers. These relatively short summaries set out all the principal achievements, distilled the essential lessons of combat and pointed the way towar...
Young Sea Officer's Sheet Anchor, The: Or a Key to the Leading of Rigging and to Practical Seamanship
by Darcy Lever
Despite decades of stiff competition, a few builders in Bath, Maine, the City of Ships, persisted in building wooden schooners, modifying and enlarging them to meet the changing times. Gardiner G. Deering (1833-1921) was one of these diehards. Genial and unaffected but driven to succeed, he started at the bottom of the trade and worked himself to the top, building ninety-nine vessels over his long life, dozens of which he personally managed. As this spirited, absorbing study reveals, Deering pro...
When the Dutch East Indiaman Batavia struck an uncharted reef off the new continent of Australia on her maiden voyage in 1629, 332 men, women and children were on board. While some headed off in a lifeboat to seek help, 250 of the survivors ended up on a tiny coral island less than half a mile long. A band of mutineers, whose motives were almost beyond comprehension, then started on a cold-blooded killing spree, leaving less than 80 people alive when the rescue boat arrived three months later. B...
In 2014 Pembroke Dock celebrates 200 years since its founding, when a Royal Dockyard - the only one ever to exist in Wales - was established here on the banks of Milford Haven. The dockyard was the reason for the rapid development of the town, with people from rural Pembrokeshire and from all around Britain moving to the area to work in the dockyard and the industries that serviced it. The closure of the dockyard in 1926 was a severe blow, and many families moved from the area to other docky...
This richly detailed tribute to the legendary Yamato is now back in print by popular demand. Equipped with the largest guns and heaviest armor and having the greatest displacement of any ship ever built, the Yamato proved to be a formidable opponent to the U.S. Pacific Fleet in World War II. This classic in the Anatomy of the Ship series contains a full description of the design and construction of the battleship including wartime modifications, and a career history. This is followed by a substa...
The Cutty Sark Pocket Manual
by National Maritime Museum, Arron Hewett, and Louise Macfarlane
Constructed on the Clyde in 1869 for the Jock Willis Shipping Line, Cutty Sark was one of the last tea clippers to be built and one of the fastest. Cutty Sark spent just a few years on the tea routes before the opening of the Suez Canal and the increasing use of steamships made clippers unprofitable on shorter routes. It was turned to the trade in wool from Australia, where for ten years she held the record time for a journey to Britain. After finishing her time in service as cargo ship, and the...
World War II interrupted Chauncey Del French's writing career when in 1942 he and his wife, Jessie, answered America's urgent need for workers in the shipyards. The Frenches were among the tens of thousands of workers recruited by Henry Kaiser under the U.S. Maritime Commission for the nation's wartime shipbuilding program. The memoir that Chauncey Del French began while working as a pipe fitter in the Kaiser shipyard in Vancouver, Washington, is a compelling firsthand account of how the war cha...