Military History

By Dwight S. Hughes, Savas Beattie, Barnsley, El Dorado Hills, CA, (2021.) Reviewed by Capt. Richard Dick, USN (RET). Dwight Hughes’ Unlike Anything That Ever Floated is an excellent overview of the conception, hurried development, and brief (but spectacular) service of the ironclads Monitor and Virginia and the men who built, directed, commanded, and sailed in them. While not the definitive history of either ship, the book covers the human, technical, strategic, and tactical aspects of their careers well and incorporates recent discoveries from ongoing work on the recovered portions of Monitor being preserved and studied at the USS Monitor Center at the Marin…

Reviewed by Lt. Col. Andrew D. Dausman, USMCR In Unsinkable, James Sullivan delivers a comprehensive account of USS Plunkett during World War II (WWII). A Gleaves-class destroyer, Plunkett saw action in North Africa, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, Omaha Beach, and the Allied invasion of Southern France. According to Sullivan, Plunkett is one of the few, perhaps only, warships to fight in every Navy-supported European invasion during WWII. While Sullivan is a seasoned writer for the New York Times and National Geographic Travel Magazine, Unsinkable is his first book. Sullivan tells Plunkett’s story through the wartime experiences of the ship’s crew members, one of which …

Our November Second Saturday webinar commemorating the Centennial of the World War I Unknown Soldier’s arrival at the Washington Navy Yard aboard USS Olympia. This program features Patrick K. O’Donnell, author of The Unknowns: The Untold Story of America’s Unknown Soldier and WWI’s Most Decorated Heroes Who Brought Him Home, and a panel including Naval Historical Foundation Staff Historian Dr. David Winkler with current Air Force and former Marine historian Kara Newcomer. The post Blog first appeared on Naval Historical Foundation. View the full article

Reviewed by Jon Mikolashek, Ph.D. When people think of World War II most recall black and white photos of momentous occasions or soldiers running into enemy fire. In Victory: World War II in Real Time, editor Alan Axelrod brings many of these images together in a collection of Associated Press (AP) photos and headlines from across the United States between 1939 and 1945. Axelrod is an established author with more than 150 published works spanning multiple decades, disciplines, and topics. David Eisenhower, the grandson of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, writes a brief foreword that perfectly encapsulates the need for works like Victory. While the wartime leaders have lo…

Reviewed by Jeff Schultz Charles Melson’s Vietnam 1972: Quang Tri – The Easter Offensive Strikes the South provides a concise look at the role played by the South Vietnamese Marine Corps (VNMC) and their US Marine Corps (USMC) advisors during Hanoi’s 1972 Easter Offensive. The South Vietnamese defenders, in particular the VNMC, alongside American air and naval support acted as a temporary validation of President Nixon’s Vietnamization policy and forestalled the catastrophic fall of Saigon for several years. Melson is a prolific author and the former Chief Historian for the U.S. Marine Corps, with many titles to his credit chronicling the U.S. Marine experience an…

By Pam Ribbey, Opus (2022) Rebuttal Review By Capt. J.R. Reddig, USN (Ret.) I read a review of this book and wanted to respond. By way of background, I served in three wars in uniform. Three that were declared, anyway. Others were undeclared, like the war in the Navy about communications intelligence. The issues were stark, and play out today in the review you published. Who owned the management of the radio intercept system that collected it? Who provided authoritative analysis of the material that was collected? I joined in 1977, when the lines had been drawn. SIGINT collection had been consolidated at NSA, and the old and sometimes bitter struggle betwe…

By Pam Ribbey, Washington, DC: Opus Self-Publishing, Politics and Prose Bookstore (2022) Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, Ph.D. This self-published booklet is, in the main, a biography of Pam Ribbey’s grandfather, focuses on her own research and discussions with him on his is role before, during, and immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Capt. Charles Hamilton Maddox, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Class of 1909, served as a United States naval officer and was a veteran of both World Wars. He had also attended the Harvard Graduate School of Applied Science and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Captain Maddox retired in 1946 and passed away …

By Pam Ribbey, Opus (2022) Rebuttal Review By Capt. J.R. Reddig, USN (Ret.) I read a review of this book and wanted to respond. By way of background, I served in three wars in uniform. Three that were declared, anyway. Others were undeclared, like the war in the Navy about communications intelligence. The issues were stark, and play out today in the review you published. Who owned the management of the radio intercept system that collected it? Who provided authoritative analysis of the material that was collected? I joined in 1977, when the lines had been drawn. SIGINT collection had been consolidated at NSA, and the old and sometimes bitter struggle betwee…

By Pam Ribbey, Washington, DC: Opus Self-Publishing, Politics and Prose Bookstore (2022) Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, Ph.D. This self-published booklet is, in the main, a biography of Pam Ribbey’s grandfather, focuses on her own research and discussions with him on his is role before, during, and immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Capt. Charles Hamilton Maddox, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Class of 1909, served as a United States naval officer and was a veteran of both World Wars. He had also attended the Harvard Graduate School of Applied Science and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Captain Maddox retired in 1946 and passed away u…

In this episode of Second Saturday, we commemorate the centennial of the signing of this monumental arms control treaty. U.S. Army Command and General Staff College professor Dr. John T. Kuehn, who has written extensively on the General Board of the Navy, will offer a brief of the conference proceedings. This will be followed by commentary and discussion with 2021 NHF Knox Medal recipient Dr. Tom Hone and Naval War College associate professor Dr. Ryan Wadle, author of Selling Seapower: Public Relations and the U.S. Navy, 1917-1941. The post Blog first appeared on Naval Historical Foundation. View the full article

Reviewed by Capt. Charles “Herb” Gilliland, USN (Ret.) Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Lafayette! Now keep it up if you’ve heard of Louis Duportail! I thought not. This reviewer knew nothing of Duportail either before reading this book, in which Prof. Norman Desmarais presents strong evidence that such obscurity is undeserved. As the back-cover claims, Duportail was indeed “instrumental in the American cause of independence.” To fight and win the Revolution, George Washington needed more than the colonies could provide: more troops, more weapons, more money, more ships. All these were generously provided by France. But America also needed military engineers, an…

By David F. Winkler, Ph.D. Staff Historian Ten years ago, delegations from the U.S. and Russian Federations met at the Naval Observatory to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Incidents at Sea Agreement (IncSea) on May 25, 1972, as part of the Nixon- Brezhnev Summit held in Moscow. After a historical overview provided by this author and reflections provided by the former Secretary of the Navy – John W. Warner – who negotiated the accord representing the United States, shot glasses were filled and gulps of vodka marked a festive occasion. Now with the fiftieth anniversary falling on the first anniversary of the passing of Warner, with a ground …

By Michael W. Shelton, Morley, Missouri: Acclaim Press, (2022). Reviewed by John E. Fahey, Ph.D. Rear Admiral (ret) Michael W. Shelton took an unusual path to the Navy. In West Point Admiral: Leadership Lessons from Four Decades of Military Service he recounts his time at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and Seabee assignments ranging from Vietnam to the Pentagon. The book grew in part from an essay Shelton wrote for Dan Rice’s West Point Leadership: Profiles of Courage and heavily emphasizes how to develop effective leadership, “based on ethical decision-making, mutual respect, shared risk, and empathy for the troops (10).” His career from Wes…

By Barrett Tillman, Osprey (2022) Reviewed by: Capt. Chuck Good, USN (Ret.) Much ink has been spilled over the years on how wars begin, and almost as much on the treaties and negotiations which formally signal their end and dictate their terms. At Dawn We Slept and The Guns of August remain classics on how things start. As to how the end is marked, thousands of pages have been compiled on the great peace treaties: Versailles, Vienna, Paris. But few authors and scholars choose to examine the implementation of these pieces of paper – how the killing actually stops “in the trenches” while conflicts still rage. The classic of this underrepresented genre is a litera…

Historian Dr. Craig Symonds breaks down the different personalities of fictional captains Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey. View our full Second Saturday Webinar HERE. The post Blog first appeared on Naval Historical Foundation. View the full article

Reviewed by Jon Middaugh, Ph.D. Donald Stoker, a Professor of Strategy and Policy for the U.S. Naval War College’s Monterey Program at the Naval Postgraduate School from 1999-2017, has written a tightly argued case for improving the approach American leaders use for fighting wars. The recommendations and insights in Why America Loses Wars deserve widespread circulation among strategists. But despite the author’s background, his focus falls on military and political considerations writ large and offers few insights tailored to the Navy. The work stems from a premise that American and Western leaders have, since World War II, failed to clarify when the country is at war…

Reviewed by Ingo Heidbrink, Ph.D. On the surface Robert M. Bunes new book Wind, Fire and Ice: The Perils of a Coast Guard Icebreaker in Antarctica is an autobiographical take on a young physician’s deployment on USCGC Glacier to Antarctica in the early 1970s. As such it is a welcome addition to the body of literature on the maritime history of the Antarctic region in particular as it covers a period seldom covered by polar or maritime historians who still tend to focus mainly on the so-called heroic age of Antarctic exploration. But reading deeper into the book, it becomes obvious that there is much more to the book and that it needs to be recommended not only to the …

Reviewed by Ed Calouro A long evolutionary arc traces the design and development of metal battleships. It generally dates to the Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862 between the ironclads USS Monitor and the CSS Merrimack (Virginia). Surely, the behemoth super dreadnoughts of the Yamato-class sit at the apogee of this arc. At 63,315 tons standard displacement (Jane’s Fighting Ships), the Yamato and Musashi were the biggest battleships ever built. Their 18.1-inch/45 caliber Type 94 guns were the largest ever mounted on a battleship, though the Royal Navy placed 18-inch/40 caliber guns on the large light cruiser HMS Furious and the monitors HMS General Wolf and Lord Clive du…

Added some inter-wars French destroyers guns: http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons_Source_Notes.htm

Navy Honors Submarine Hero Baltimore Sun - August 29, 2007 By Bradley Olson, Sun Reporter The nicknames of Rear Adm. Eugene B. Fluckey -- "The Galloping Ghost of the China Coast" and "Lucky Fluckey" -- meant to bring a little levity to the exploits of one of the most decorated sailors in history. But as loved ones and shipmates approached an urn on display under the vast dome of the Naval Academy chapel yesterday to say a few words, many stopped in awe, bowing slightly as a last homage to the man who sank 29 Japanese ships as a submarine commander in the Pacific on his way to receiving the Medal of Honor and four Navy Crosses. About 250 people gathere…