To his enlisted men on U-154, Lieutenant Oskar Kusch was the ideal skipper—bright, experienced, successful, caring, tolerably eccentric—and a popular captain who always brought his boat home safely when so many others vanished without a trace. To most of his officers Kusch came across as someone very different—a Nazi-hating intellectual with an artistic bent given to lengthy criticisms of the ...
In one of the most sensational and perplexing incidents in naval history, Rear Admiral Richard Kempenfelt, a much-voyaged veteran and outstanding officer, drowned along with more than 800 crew and many civilian visitors on a calm summer's morning and in a familiar anchorage. This new work examines that tragedy—the sudden capsizing at Spithead on 29 August 1782 of the mighty ...