Showing results for "Peter James" in Military

In the great wars of modern history, maritime powers have always prevailed over land-based empires, whether Habsburg, Napoleonic, Nazi, or Soviet. In contrast to the rigid hierarchies and centralization of land-based empires, those nations attaining mastery at sea have been distinguished by liberty, flexibility, and enterprise. The 17th-century Dutch were the first to achieve naval and trading dominance.

Vice Admiral Sir Peter Gretton's book is a brilliant account of his career in the navy through World War Two: fighting in the Second Battle of the Narvik and guarding convoys in the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic, before being placed in charge of Escort Group B7. Convoy Escort Commander demonstrates how Allied commanders searched for new methods to repel U-boat assaults, including using direction-finding radio and radar, employing special tactical formations, coordinating with air cover, and endeavoring to keep the convoy together and prevent straggling.

Through a stellar cast of politicians, diplomats, spies and soldiers, including T. E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, A Line in the Sand vividly tells the story of the short but crucial era when Britain and France ruled the Middle East. It explains exactly how the old antagonism between these two powers inflamed the more familiar modern rivalry between the Arabs and the Jews and ultimately led to war between the British and the French in 1941 and between the Arabs and the Jews in 1948.

In April 1943, Commander Peter Gretton was in charge of escorting a vital Allied trade convoy from New York to Great Britain across the North Atlantic. Over the course of the voyage, the sixty-one merchant ships of convoy HX231, along with the six ships of B7 Escort Group, were continuously shadowed and attacked by a German wolf pack of twenty U-boats. Drawing on reports from both sides, Gretton details the sequence of events as convoy HX231 battled its way through a large wolf pack and offers an authoritative post-battle analysis of the strategies, decisions, and actions taken.

In this remarkable collection, ten premier scholars of nineteenth-century America address the epochal impact of the Civil War by examining the conflict in terms of three Americas - antebellum, wartime, and postbellum nations. Moreover, they recognize the critical role in this transformative era of three groups of Americans - white northerners, white southerners, and African Americans in the North and South.

Freedom of expression and individual enterprise have distinguished the societies of powers dominant at sea, and since supreme maritime nations have prevailed over their territorial rivals in the great wars of the modern era, it is they who have created today's world. In this final volume of his masterful trilogy, Padfield carries the theme through the terrible wars of the last century to the present, with vivid descriptions of the naval battles that have shaped our world.

In Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom, Peter Padfield presents a superb description and analysis of naval campaigns conducted between 1788 and 1851 that shaped the modern world. Winner of the Mountbatten Maritime Prize, this is the second of Padfield's masterful trilogy that traces the impact of naval power on modern history, and the means by which it has been enacted.

Doug Heywood was a teenager when he discovered, in a shoebox hidden in a wardrobe, hundreds of letters, all written by his father, Scott Heywood. As a POW on the infamous Burma Railway, Scott wrote almost daily to his young wife, Margery, on scraps of paper that had to be hidden from guards. These letters tell of an enduring love – and also, intriguingly, of how Scott dealt with the most brutally testing circumstances.

Peter Huchthausen, a river patrol officer on Vietnam's Mekong River Delta in 1967, rescued a badly wounded Vietnamese child, Nguyen Thi Lung. He and his men arranged for the girl's treatment and education, only to lose track of her when her town was overrun by the North Vietnamese during the Tet Offensive.