As a young Royal Air Force technician stationed in Malaya in 1941, the author was ordered on a clandestine mission to Japanese-occupied Indo-China where he heard of the existence of a Japanese naval task force secretly on its way to Hawaii, intent on annihilating the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. He also learned of Japan's intentions to simultaneously decimate ...
Great technological advances were made in almost every area of maritime military activity between 1793 and 1914. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Napoleonic wars marked the zenith of fighting sail and wooden hulls. By the dawn of the twentieth century, heavily armed iron-hulled warships, powered by oil-fired burners and driven by screw propellers, pointed to the shape ...