In the three decades between 1946 and 1976, the Central Flying School which was based at Little Rissington, produced over 6000 fledgling Qualified Flying Instructors and continually endeavoured to monitor and improve the wider Royal Air Force's standards of flying, based on its sound, proven instructional methods and a wealth of tradition extending back to Upavon in 1912. With the cessation of hostilities in 1945, the station's role took on a new dimension with the arrival of the Central F...

In 1987, the hungry Atlantic Ocean broke the barrier beach protecting Chatham, swallowing a handful of shorefront houses. But in the last half century, most of the change that has come to this town on the elbow of Cape Cod has been more subtle. Historic houses gave way to hotels when Chatham became an attractive vacation destination for motorists, and then the hotels became homes again as summer visitors sought to have a place of their own for retirement. Amid real estate booms, Chathamite...

In 'This be the Verse', the poet Philip Larkin famously bemoans the impact parents have on their children. In ‘Philip and Sydney’, playwright, translator and screenwriter Alan Pollock uncovers some of the reasons why Larkin may have had such a profound sense of anguish. In 1937, Philip Larkin's father, Sydney, took him on holiday to Germany. Sydney was Coventry's City Treasurer and had a keen interest in the Nazi regime. It was a holiday that Philip never spoke of. But, taking inspiration ...

"Nobody describes a naval battle better than Taylor…a flawless demonstration of the biographer’s craft." —Jan Morris, The GuardianEdward Pellew, captain of the legendary Indefatigable, was quite simply the greatest British frigate captain in the age of sail. Left fatherless at age eight, with a penniless mother and five siblings, Pellew fought his way from the very bottom of the navy to fleet command. Victories and eye-catching feats won him a pub...

The cruiser HMAS Australia II and the Pacific War on JapanIn 1924, the grand old battle cruiser HMAS Australia I was sunk off Sydney Heads. Once she had been the pride of the navy and the nation. She had saved Australia from an attack by a German squadron in the Pacific in World War I.But after the war she was obsolete, and a victim in the race to disarm after WWI. It was a day of national mourning when they blew the bottom out of her; she...

A group of Internet aviation fans once debated the subject of the worst fighter of World War II. Their hands-down favorite: the Brewster Buffalo. Two books are titled The World's Worst Aircraft. The Buffalo is the only fighter from any era to have a chapter in both of them.The Royal Air Force fobbed the Brewster fighter onto the Fleet Air Arm and colonial squadrons; the U.S. Navy gave it to the Marines. Pilots thought it was a sweet plane to fly, but complained that the wh...

Sea of Thunder is a taut, fast-paced, suspenseful narrative of the Pacific War that culminates in the battle of Leyte Gulf, the greatest naval battle ever fought.Told from both the American and Japanese sides, through the eyes of commanders and sailors of both navies, Thomas's history adds an important new dimension to our understanding of World War II.Drawing on oral histories, diaries, correspondence, postwar testimony from both American and Japa...

Book describes technical aspects of the Russo-Japanese Naval War. Contains descriptions of all involved ships, Russian and Japanese ones. Maps, photos.

A history of two South American World War I naval battles between Germany and Great Britain.The defeat that Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock suffered at Coronel in 1914 at the hands of Maximilian Graf von Spee, one of Germany's most brilliant naval commanders, was the most humiliating blow to British naval prestige since the eighteenth century and a defeat that had to be avenged immediately.On 8 December 1914, the German squadron steamed towards Port Stan...

Culled from many never-before-published narratives and oral histories conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Naval Institute, Submarine Stories presents nearly five dozen first-person accounts from men who were involved with gasoline—and diesel-powered submarines during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The story of these boats, their technological evolution and tactical value, is also the story of the men who went to sea in them. The accounts illustrate the human aspects of serv...

Focusing on the oceanic war rather than on the war in the Great Lakes, this study charts the War of 1812 from the perspectives of the two opposing navies at sea, one the largest navies in the world, the other a small, upstart navy just three decades old. While American naval leadership searched for a means of contesting Britain’s naval dominance, the English sought to destroy the U.S. Navy and protect its oceanic highways. Instead of describing battles between opposing warships, Kevin McCr...

This commemorative volume produced on the occasion of the centennial of the Canadian Navy, 1910-2010, records a special kind of dual citizenship: Canadians exercising the profession of the sea in their nation’s service, while also living out the demands of their civilian occupations in their home communities. The perspectives of the part-time citizen-sailors who have made up Canada’s Naval Reserve over the past century provide an interesting, valuable, and timely alternative history of the...