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showing 62 library results for 'P/18(6)'

Chatham in the great war. "Chatham played a very important part in the nation's Great War effort. It was one of the British Royal Navy's three 'Manning Ports', with more than a third of the town's ships manned by men allocated to the Chatham Division. The war was only 6 weeks old when Chatham felt the affects of war for the first time. On 22 September 1914, three Royal Naval vessels from the Chatham Division, HMS Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue, were sunk in quick succession by a German submarine, U-9. A total of 1,459 men lost their lives that day, 1,260 of whom were from the Chatham Division. Two months later, on 26 November, the battleship HMS Bulwark exploded and sunk whilst at anchor off of Sheerness on the Kent coast. There was a loss of 736 men, many of whom were from the Chatham area. On 18 August 1914, Private 6737 Walter Henry Smith, who was nineteen and serving with the 6th Battalion, Middlesex Regiment, became the first person to be killed during wartime Chatham. He was on sentry duty with a colleague, who accidentally dropped his loaded rifle, discharging a bullet that strook Private Smith and killed him. It wasn't all doom and gloom, however. Winston Churchill, as the First Lord of the Admiralty, visited Chatham early on in the war, on 30 August 1914. On 18 September 1915, two German prisoners of war, Lieutenant Otto Thelen and Lieutenant Hans Keilback, escaped from Donnington Hall in Leicestershire. At first, it was believed they had escaped the country and were on their way back to Germany, but they were re-captured in Chatham four days later. By the end of the war, Chatham and the men who were stationed there had truly played their part in ensuring a historic Allied victory."--Provided by the publisher. 2017. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 914.223"1914/1918"
Okinawa : the last naval battle of WW2 : the official Admiralty account of Operation Iceberg /compiled by John Grehan. "Having all but swept the Japanese Imperial Navy from the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, the Allied forces stood on the brink of invading the Japanese Home Islands. The launching pad for the invasion was to be the island of Okinawa. Amid the terrible slaughter and the shocking casualty statistics of the US Tenth Army and the US Marines, as well as the unrelenting defiance of the Japanese defenders so often detailed in the many books on the battle, the vital part played by the Allied navies in transporting, landing and supporting the ground offensive is all too often overlooked. The naval forces involved included the US Task Force 58 and the British Pacific Fleet composed of ships from the Royal Australian Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy, and the Royal New Zealand Navy which together with those of the Royal Navy constituted the most powerful fleet Britain had ever put together. The total firepower of the Allied force was staggering, consisting of 18 battleships, 27 cruisers, 177 destroyers/destroyer escorts, 11 fleet carriers, 6 light carriers and 22 escort carriers and various support and troop transport ships. Pitted against this formidable array was the Japanese Combined Fleet, with just one super battleship, one light cruiser and eight destroyers. But the Japanese had one other fearful weapon - the kamikaze. The resultant battle saw the Japanese fleet wiped out, but the Allies lost twenty-four support vessels and a further 386 ships were damaged - many at the hands of the kamikaze pilots. After the fighting the Admiralty called for a summary of the battle to be written for internal Royal Navy consumption. It is that secret report, which it was never intended would be seen by the general public, that is published here for the first time."--Provided by the publisher. 2022. • BOOK • 1 copy available.
The war of the gunboats / Bryan Cooper "The 'little ships' of the Second World War - the fast and highly manoeuvrable motor torpedo boats and gunboats which fought in coastal waters all over the world - developed a special kind of naval warfare. With their daring nightly raids against an enemy's coastal shipping - and sometimes much larger warships - they acquired the buccaneering spirit of an earlier age. And never more so than in the close hand-to-hand battles which raged between opposing craft when they met in open waters. Large numbers of these small fighting boats were built by the major naval powers. The Germans called them Schnellboote (Fast Boats), referred to by the British as E-boats (E for Enemy). In the Royal Navy they were MTBs and MGBs. The American equivalent were PT boats (for Patrol Torpedo). They fought in the narrow waters of the English Channel and the stormy North Sea, in the Mediterranean off the coasts of North Africa and Italy and among the islands of the Aegean, across the Pacific from Pearl Harbour to Leyte Gulf, in Hong Kong and Singapore, and off Burma's Arakan coast. Bryan Cooper's book traces the history and development of these craft from their first limited use in the First World War and the fast motor boats designed in the 1930s for wealthy private clients and water speed record attempts. With account of the battles which took place during the Second World War, when the vital importance of coastal waters came to be recognised, he captures the drama of this highly individual form of combat. And not least the sea itself which was the common enemy of all who crewed these frail craft."--Provided by the publisher. 2009. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 623.824"19"
The truth about the mutiny on HMAV Bounty : and the fate of Fletcher Christian /Glynn Christian. "The Truth About the Mutiny on HMAV BOUNTY - and the Fate of Fletcher Christian brings this famed South Pacific saga into the 21st century. By combining unprecedented research into Fletcher Christian and his fate with deep knowledge of Bounty's Polynesian women, Glynn Christian presents a fresh and comprehensive telling of a powerful maritime adventure that still captivates after 230 years. Of over 3000 books and major articles on the mutiny, or the five feature films starring such as Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson, none has told the true story as until 1982, no author knew the real Fletcher Christian, or could understand his relationship with William Bligh, his mentor-turned-nemesis. Glynn Christian's extraordinary research into Bligh, Christian and Bounty included every deposit of documents worldwide and a sailing expedition to Pitcairn Island. This book details the cramped dark conditions on the ship and how Bligh bravely commanded it at Cape Horn, saving it and the crew. Yet he was unable to keep discipline because he didn't punish enough, instead relying on his brutal tongue. Forced to remain in Tahiti for 23 weeks, Bligh struggled to retain order when Bounty sailed. Glynn Christian reveals how this affected Fletcher Christian mentally, explaining his out-of-character mutiny. Then Christian showed revolutionary social conscience, using democracy and uniforms on Bounty to maintain leadership, including through the little-known settlement of Fort George on Tubuai. After this, he and Bounty disappeeared for 18 years. Bounty's story becomes that of Pitcairn Island, of revolutionary black women who protected their children with the blood of their fathers and continued Fletcher's ideals to become the first women in the world permanently to have the vote and guarantee education for girls. But where was Fletcher Christian?"--Provided by the publisher. 2021. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 996.18
An empire of magnetism : global science and the British magnetic enterprise in the age of imperialism /Edward J. Gillin "During the 1840s and 1850s, the British government financed a worldwide investigation into how the Earth's magnetic phenomena operated, consisting of a network of naval expeditions and colonial observatories. Questions surrounding terrestrial magnetism were not just philosophical, but also engendered urgent concerns over the accurate navigation on which Britain's commercial and colonial power depended. With the guidance of a powerful lobby of scientific and social elites, the British state was able to mobilize the extensive resources of its empire to the collection of magnetic data through carefully coordinated observations. Yet, as An Empire of Magnetism argues, the experimental instruments and techniques required to conduct this work were to be found amid Britain's booming industry, where the harnessing of coal and iron, and use of steam power, shaped a scientific culture prominently concerned with the relationship between heat, pressure, and motion. In particular, it was philosophical apparatus fashioned within the mines of Cornwall that the government conscripted within this worldwide magnetic investigation. These locally produced experimental techniques and technologies proved capable of transformation into a system for obtaining magnetic measurements over great expanses of time and space. As this book demonstrates, this not only resulted in the most eminent global science of the age, but also became inseparable from the proliferation of empire as British naval crews and natural philosophers surveyed previously unknown regions in the search for magnetic data. This vast scientific enterprise had crucial implications for the formation of the 'modern state', its use of empirical knowledge, and the expansion of nineteenth-century empire."--Provided by the publisher. 2023. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 538.094109034