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The years 1939-1945 is etched on the minds of many for myriad reasons. It was an epoch of terrible chaos, devastating loss, and inexplicable horror. The Second World War was wreaking havoc all over the world. Several events have shaken the collective conscience of mankind. Hitler’s pathological hatred for the Jews, the holocaust, the Auschwitz concentration camps and its horrors, the atomic bomb and its long-term detrimental repercussions, the economic perils, rampant epidemics, severe shortage of food and supplies, deaths due to starvation, etc. are well known dark pages of history. Though these events have been repeated ad nauseum, they still don’t fail to send shivers down one’s spine. But the Laconia Incident that transpired on the eve of September 12th, 1942, stood apart in its scale and tragedy. An armed British ship was intercepted by a German U-boat. The teal waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific was no safer for anybody. It was replete with U-boats and submarines that took the cover of darkness and the sinister waves to waylay enemy ships. They waited in stealth to pounce on the enemy and scuttle the ship on sight. The Laconia Incident is a bone-chilling tale of tragic killing of hundreds of people when a German U-boat torpedoed a British armed ship. The RMS Laconia was unescorted and a sitting duck to the German U-boat. The commanding officer ordered it to be torpedoed. The orders were carried out in an instant. When the German commanding officer Captain Hartenstein surfaced the submarine hoping to collect any intelligence from the sinking ship, he was appalled by the innumerable upturned faces dotting the violent shark-infested sea. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were scrambling for life. What should the German captain do? Should he rescue the enemy civilians? Should he execute the dictator Fuhrer’s orders of eliminating all survivors? Should he follow the calls of his heart and embark on a near-impossible rescue mission? The Captain unlike his Fuhrer had his heart in the right place. He dared to carry out a mission to save the enemy jeopardizing his own life and career. And for this act of humanity and compassion, will he be honored or cursed? Read the book to know the tragic story of the Laconia Incident and the German Captain Hartenstein who risked his own life and career to rescue the enemy.
The fire extinguisher; the airline safety card; the lifeboat. Until September 11, 2001, most Americans paid homage to these appurtenances of disaster with a sidelong glance, if at all. But John Stilgoe has been thinking about lifeboats ever since he listened with his father as the kitchen radio announced that the liner Lakonia had caught fire and sunk in the Atlantic. It was Christmas 1963, and airline travel and Cold War paranoia had made the images of an ocean liner's distress--the air force dropping supplies in the dark, a freighter collecting survivors from lifeboats--seem like echoes of a bygone era. But Stilgoe, already a passionate reader and an aficionado of small-boat navigation, began to delve into accounts of other disasters at sea. What he found was a trunkful of hair-raising stories--of shipwreck, salvation, seamanship brilliant and inept, noble sacrifice, insanity, cannibalism, courage and cravenness, even scandal. In nonfiction accounts and in the works of Conrad, Melville, and Tomlinson, fear and survival animate and degrade human nature, in the microcosm of an open boat as in society at large. How lifeboats are made, rigged, and captained, Stilgoe discovered, and how accounts of their use or misuse are put down, says much about the culture and circumstances from which they are launched. In the hands of a skillful historian such as Stilgoe, the lifeboat becomes a symbol of human optimism, of engineering ingenuity, of bureaucratic regulation, of fear and frailty. Woven through Lifeboat are good old-fashioned yarns, thrilling tales of adventure that will quicken the pulse of readers who have enjoyed the novels of Patrick O'Brian, Crabwalk by G nter Grass, or works of nonfiction such as The Perfect Storm and In the Heart of the Sea. But Stilgoe, whose other works have plumbed suburban culture, locomotives, and the shore, is ultimately after bigger fish. Through the humble, much-ignored lifeboat, its design and navigation and the stories of its ultimate purpose, he has found a peculiar lens on roughly the past two centuries of human history, particularly the war-tossed, technology-driven history of man and the sea.
"The perspective of 15 years, painstaking research, thousands of interviews, extensive analysis and evaluation, and the creative talent of John Toland [paint] the epic struggle on an immense canvas. . . . Toland writes with the authority of a man who was there. . . . He tastes the bitterness of defeat of those who surrendered and writes as if he had the benefit of the eyes and ears of soldiers and generals on the other side of the line. . . . If you could read only one book to understand generals and GIs and what their different wars were like this is the book."--Chicago Sunday Tribune "The author has devoted years to studying memoirs, interviewing veterans and consulting military documents, both German and American. He also has revisited the old battlefields in Belgium and Luxembourg. . . . Toland has told the whole story with dramatic realism. . . . It is a story of panic, terror and of high-hearted courage."--New York Times Book Review "For the first time in the growing literature of World War II, the inspiring story of the stubborn, lonely, dogged battle of the Americans locked in this tragic salient is told. . . . gripping . . . You cannot put it down once you start it."--San Francisco Chronicle
From the author of the Fall 2015 Disney movie The Finest Hours, the “thrilling and perfectly paced” (Booklist) story of the sinking and rescue of Bounty—the tall ship used in the classic 1962 movie Mutiny on the Bounty—which was caught in the path of Hurricane Sandy with sixteen aboard. On Thursday, October 25, 2012, Captain Robin Walbridge made the fateful decision to sail Bounty from New London, Connecticut, to St. Petersburg, Florida. Walbridge knew that a hurricane was forecast, yet he was determined to sail. The captain told the crew that anyone could leave the ship before it sailed. No one took the captain up on his offer. Four days into the voyage, Superstorm Sandy made an almost direct hit on the ship. A few hours later, the ship suddenly overturned ninety miles off the North Carolina coast in the “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” sending the crew tumbling into an ocean filled with towering thirty-foot waves. The coast guard then launched one of the most complex and massive rescues in its history. In the uproar heard across American media in the days following, a single question persisted: Why did the captain decide to sail? Through hundreds of hours of interviews with the crew members and the coast guard, Michael J. Tougias and Douglas A. Campbell create an in-depth portrait of the enigmatic Captain Walbridge, his motivations, and what truly occurred aboard Bounty during those terrifying days at sea. “A white-knuckled, tragic adventure” (Richmond Times-Dispatch), Rescue of the Bounty is an unforgettable tale about the brutality of nature and the human will to survive.
The former German U-boat commander Herbert Werner navigates readers through the waters of World War II, recounting four years of the most significant and savage battles. By war's end, 28,000 out of 39,000 German sailors had disappeared beneath the waves.
A comprehensive training and reference manual used as a textbook in maritime institutions. Addresses the prevention, control, and extinguishing of fires aboard commercial vessels and on offshore drilling rigs. Includes chapters on emergency procedures and equipment as well as case studies of past shipboard fires. Generously illustrated with drawings, photos, diagrams, tables, and checklists. Recommended reading for all maritime personnel and kept both in shipboard reference libraries and in the offices of maritime executives.
On February 16th, 1942 a Nazi U-boat brazenly shelled the huge Lago oil refinery on Aruba and torpedoed the tankers Pedernales and Oranjestad, both tied up in Aruba's San Nicolas Harbour. Oranjestad was sunk and Pedernales badly damaged. The damage to the refinery was minor, but that same night other U-boats attacked and sank four more tankers in the waters between Aruba and Curaçao and Venezuela. It was the long night of the tankers and the opening salvo of a two year struggle to dominate the Caribbean Sea. In the last twelve days of February, 1942 alone the submarines sank 17 more ships, most of them tankers. Long Night of the Tankersis the story of the German effort to cut the Caribbean off from Britain, the United States andCanada and the desperate defence mounted by the Allies, along with a half dozen other Caribbean and South American nations. The loss of the oil threatened Britain's ability to wage war; the loss of the tankers almost strangled the oil supply to America's industrial north east. When even Churchill and Roosevelt began to worry about the vulnerable Caribbean, the US and its allies poured thousands of men, hundreds of aircraft and dozens of ships into the Caribbean region, organized an effective convoy system and rallied the Central and South American nations against the Germans. By mid 1944, the Caribbean had become an Allied lake and the submarine threat was defeated. But to this day, the old timers of the islands still remember the oil-soaked beaches, the explosions in the night and the bodies of dead sailors washed ashore that marked this dramatic chapter in the Second World War.