The story of HMS Venomous told by its officers and crew.
Venomous fought in the 1919 “forgotten war” which gained
independence for the Baltic states. In 1940 she rescued thousands
of troops from Boulogne and, on Convoy duty in the Atlantic kept
Britain from starvation. She served in Arctic convoys to north
Russia and was then deployed to the Mediterranean. Here Venomous
fought the U-boat which sank HMS Hecla, rescued survivors and took
part in Operation Pedestal to run supplies to the besieged island
of Malta.
New in card cover - 384 pp, 170 photographs, 12 maps and plans
Previously published in 1989 under the title 'British River
Gunboats', this is a photographic survey mainly covering the
famous Insect class which was built for service on the Danube in
1915. They served for a further thirty years in various theatres,
including in the Middle East on the Tigris, and during World War
II in the Mediterranean and Egypt. Also portrays the tiny Fly
class, the Peterel class, the various types which served in the
Yangtse River in China, and the Dragonflies, the last of the Royal
Navy's river gunboats.
New in card cover - Small format, 66pp,
62 b/w photos
The British Version of Admiral Karl Dönitz's Memoirs from the
Admirality's Secret Anti-Submarine Reports. a fascinating
first-hand account of the Battle of the Atlantic as seen from
the headquarters of the U-boat fleet. For the first time noted
naval historian Jak P. Mallmann Showell has combined Dönitz's
memoirs in a parallel text with the British Admiralty's secret
Monthly Anti-Submarine Reports to produce a unique view of the
U-boat war as it was perceived at the time by both sides. The
Anti-Submarine Reports were classified documents issued only to
senior officers hunting U-boats, and were supposed to have been
destroyed at the end of the War, but by chance a set survived in
the archives of the Royal Navy's Submarine Museum in Gosport.
In the early years of the Second World War, the elite force of
German submariners known as the Ubootwaffe came perilously close
to cutting Britain's transatlantic lifeline. As the U-boat
memorial near Kiel records, by the end of the war, of the 39,000
men who went to sea in the U-boats, 27,491 died in action and a
further 5,000 were made prisoners of war. Of the 863 U-boats
that sailed on operational patrols, 754 were lost. Grey Wolves
captures life on board a U-boat, in text, letters, diaries,
journals and memoirs. It is a vivid, brutally realistic portrait
of the men who fought and died beneath the surface of the
Atlantic in what was, perhaps, the most critical battle of the
war.
German Naval Bases in France 1940-1945. When the Wehrmacht
overran France in May and June of 1940, the German navy's dream of
access to the Atlantic was realised, and Brest, Lorient, St Nazaire,
La Pallice and Bordeaux were converted into naval bases for surface,
U-boat and auxiliary cruiser operations. Though it is only the
heavily fortified U-boat bunkers that have received any attention to
date, this book describes the extent to which the French cooperated
with the German authorities to convert the existing ports, and
explains how the 45,000 workers of the Todt Organisation built the
monumental bunkers and other facilities.
New in d/w - 234pp, numerous
b/w photos, illustrations & maps
