The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean: The Ancient World Economy and the Kingdoms of Africa, Arabia and India By Raoul McLaughlin, Pen and Sword Maritime Books, Yorkshire and Philadelphia, (2018) Reviewed by Janet Nolan, Ph. D. A graduate of Lagan College, Northern Ireland’s first Integrated School, Raoul McLaughlin has written a remarkable book
White Water Red Hot Lead: On Board U.S. Navy Swift Boats in Vietnam By Dan Daly, Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia, (2017) Reviewed by Diana L. Ahmad, Ph.D., Missouri University of Science and Technology Approximately 3,500 men served in the Swift Boat units during the Vietnam War over a period of six years. Dan Daly’s excellent
Graf Zeppelin: The Only German Aircraft Carrier By Jürgen Prommersberger, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, (2017) Reviewed by Robert P. Largess “Graf Zeppelin” is a name to conjure with. Most people know it as the name of the pioneering passenger dirigible which made 143 Atlantic crossings, most on commercial service. Less know of her successor,
Warship 2018 John Jordan, Ed., Osprey Publishing, Oxford, UK and New York, NY, (2018) Reviewed by Capt. Howard R. Portnoy USN (Ret.) The first hardcover volume in the Warship series appeared in 1977. It was the follow-on to a successful quarterly magazine with the same title. New volumes would be issued annually and would
USN Battleship vs IJN Battleship: The Pacific 1942-44 By Mark Stille Osprey Publishing, Oxford, UK (2017) Reviewed by Ed Calouro Mark Stille has succeeded in squeezing significant information into a limited number of pages. Stille is a retired USN commander and a graduate of and former faculty member at the Naval War College.
Doomed Before the Start: The Allied Intervention in Norway 1940 Volume 2 – Evacuation and Further Naval Operations By Niall Cherry, Helion & Company, Gliwice, Poland, (2017) Reviewed by Jeffrey Schultz The final volume in Niall Cherry’s Norway 1940 campaign study, this cautionary work continues from the Narvik evacuation until the final departures.
Battle Briefings: D-Day and the Normandy Campaign By David Reisch Stackpole, (2018) 128 pp. $21.95 The historiography of the June 1944 Normandy Campaign, centering on the amphibious assault on 6 June, has been chronicled exhaustively in the literature of military history. Journalist and military historian David Reisch’s entry into the field, his second
British & German Battlecruisers: Their Development and Operations By Michele Cosentino and Ruggero Stanglini. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2016. HMS Dreadnought and the Invincible-class battlecruisers transformed naval warfare when they were laid down in 1905 and 1906. Dreadnought, the first all-big-gun battleship, made previous ships of the line obsolescent if not
Churchill’s Thin Grey Line: British Merchant Ships at War 1939 -1945 by Bernard Edwards 2018, Pen & Sword, Havertown, PA. 248 pp., $34.95. The United Kingdom has always considered its Merchant Marine to be part of its armed forces during wartime. Since time immortal, the White Ensign of the Royal Navy and the
Adrift: A True Story of Tragedy on the Icy Atlantic and the One Who Lived to Tell About It Brian Murphy with Toula Vlahou New York: Da Capo Press, 2018 240 pp., Bibliography, Map, and Illustrations If in the mid-19th century an ocean crossing wasn’t the blind leap into the unknown that it
Controlled Delivery: Covert Operations in the War on Drugs: Volume 1 & Volume 2, Nick Jacobellis, Senior Special Agent U.S. Customs Service (Ret.). 2018, www.badgepublishing.com. Volume 1, 328 pp. and Volume 2, 347 pp., $13.99 per volume. Within the pages of these two self-published volumes, the author provides a firsthand look at the interdiction by
Steam Titans: Cunard, Collins and the Epic Battle for Commerce on the North Atlantic. William M. Fowler, Jr., New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 358 pp., Illus., biblio., Index., $30. Dr. William Fowler, professor of history emeritus at Northeastern University, is primarily a naval and maritime historian. He is the author of Rebels
On Grand Strategy John Lewis Gaddis New York: Penguin Press, 2018 John Lewis Gaddis, an historian of the Cold War and a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, offers this book as a derivative or emulation of Carl von Clausewitz’s classic, On War. In fact, however, On Grand Strategy surpasses Clausewitz and stands
Our Little Monitor: The Greatest Invention of the Civil War By Anna Gibson Holloway and Jonathan W. White, Kent State University Press, Kent, OH (2018). 304 pp., $33.86 History is filled with pivotal moments in time when the tried and true is no longer sufficient and innovation both wins the day and points
Inspiring Innovation by LCDR Robert Crosby, USN is the first in what is intended to be The John A. van Buren Studies in Leadership and Ethics published by the Naval War College Press. 209 pp., $30.00 “The John A. van Buren studies was established to advance scholarship and publish thought-provoking works of analysis in the
