Reviewed by RADM Edward Masso, USN (Ret.) Ambassador J William Middendorf II has written a clarion call to attention for all policy makers in his recently published book, “The Great Nightfall” How We Win the New Cold War. Drawing from his substantial career in public service where he served as a Naval Officer in World
Reviewed by LCDR David K. Sturges, USNR (Ret.) “Experience keeps a dear school.” Retired RADM Tom Jurkowsky’s new book gives fresh and useful meaning to that old saying of Benjamin Franklin. His “Secret Sauce for Organizational Success.” recounts his 45 years of exceptional communication and public affairs leadership within a rare, three-way panoply of military,
Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, Ph.D. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is one of the most written about military events in the history of the United States. For example, WorldCat lists 11,700 items in various formats, among these, as of February 2021, are 8,821 books and e-books, 2,604,articles and book chapters, and 1,759 videos
Reviewed by LCDR Brian Hayes, USNR In 2017, New York Times sports reporter Victor Mather wrote an article entitled “The Best College Football Team You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.” He was referring to Iowa Pre-Flight, one of dozens of armed forces football programs that competed against collegiate teams (and each other) during the world wars and
Reviewed by Charles H. Bogart Anyone who has studied the United States’ Antebellum period has, during the course of one’s reading, encountered snippets or lengthy excerpts from the Diary of Anton Reiff. Until now, if you wanted to read Reiff’s complete diary, you had to travel to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and make arrangements to visit
Reviewed by Jeff Schultz Abraham Rabinovich’s The Boats of Cherbourg: The Navy That Stole Its Own Boats and Revolutionized Naval Warfare takes the reader on a rollicking ride through an early Cold War techno-thriller which does not disappoint. A mixture of diplomacy, desperation, rank skullduggery, and above all clever statecraft; this timely nonfiction account sheds
Reviewed by Tyler Robinson In the decades since he worked as a consultant at the Historical Evaluation Research Organization under the esteemed military historian and theorist Colonel Trevor Dupuy (author of The Encyclopedia of Military History), James Bloom has contributed hundreds of shorter works to journals, encyclopedias, and books focused on ancient, maritime, and military
Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, Ph.D. During World War II, Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city – an industrial center with oil refineries, extensive shipyards, and U-boat pens — endured 115 British Royal Air Force strategic bombing raids (1939-1945), one of which in July 1943, code named Operation Gomorrah, created a huge firestorm killing an estimated
Reviewed by Ingo Heidbrink Maritime disasters are regularly topics catching the attention of maritime interested readers, authors, the media, historians and so on. The loss of HMS Thetis in 1939 was no exception to this rule. It had substantial coverage by the media in the immediate aftermath of the tragic event as well as a
Reviewed by Ingo Heidbrink. While marine painting was a fairly common artistic genre up to the 19th and early 20th century, ships of the second half of the 20th and the early decades of the 21st century only rarely caught the attention of professional artists, and the profession of the marine painter needs to be
Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, Ph.D. There has been a deluge of new books and recent articles focusing on American wartime shipbuilding, 1939-1945, witness Evan Mawdsley’s The War for the Seas: A Maritime History of World War II (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2019) and Jamie McGrath ‘s “Peacetime Naval Rearmament, 1933-39:
Reviewed by Admiral Walter F. Doran, USN (Ret.) Rear Admiral Michael McDevitt draws on his thirty-four year Naval career and a decades long involvement with National Security issues within the Department of Defense and with the Center for Naval Analysis to produce a timely and well written book. He chronicles the evolution of the PLA
Reviewed by ENS Sean Bland, USNR (Chaplain Candidate) I first encountered Alfred Thayer Mahan as an undergraduate student in Professor Paul Kennedy’s “Military History of the West Since 1500” course at Yale. Mahan was studied in-depth and championed as the premier naval historian and strategist of the modern world. Mahan’s personal, religious convictions were, unsurprisingly,
Reviewed by Dr. Charles C. Kolb, Ph.D. This innovative series of well-researched, highly-illustrated hardcover volumes provides detailed combat narratives of the 7 December 1941 Japanese attacks on United States military bases in Hawaii which would, within days, lead to American declarations of war against Axis powers and entry into both the Pacific and European Theaters
Reviewed by Col Jody Owens. The Allied forces began Operation Overlord on June 6, 1944. The battle continued until late August with the escape of German forces through the Falaise Gap. This roughly three-month clash became one of military history’s most famous battles. In the 76 years since the pitched battle occurred, countless historians, military
