Washoe County Library System

"The gripping story of how, during a twelve-week period in the spring of 1943, a handful of battle-hardened American, British, and Canadian sailors turned the tide in the Atlantic. Using extensive archival research and interviews with key survivors, Offley places the reader at the heart of the most decisive maritime battle of World War II."--Amazon.com.

Mathews County, Virginia, is a remote outpost on the Chesapeake Bay with little to offer except unspoiled scenery—but it sent an unusually large concentration of sea captains to fight in World War II. The Mathews Men tells that heroic story through the experiences of one extraordinary family whose seven sons (and their neighbors), U.S. merchant mariners all, suddenly found themselves squarely in the cross-hairs of the U-boats bearing down on the...

The story of America's little known war-within-a war -- that of the "silent service" -- U.S. submarine warfare during World War II.

Recounts the discovery of a sunken German U-boat by two scuba divers, tracing how they devoted the following years to researching the identities of the submarine and its crew, correcting historical texts and breaking new ground in the world of diving.

"The fate of the USS Flier is one of the most astonishing stories of the Second World War. On August 13, 1944, the submarine struck a mine and sank to the bottom of the Sulu Sea in less than one minute, leaving only fourteen of its crew of eighty-six hands alive. After enduring eighteen hours in the water, eight remaining survivors swam to a remote island controlled by the Japanese. Deep behind enemy lines and without food or drinking water, the crewmen...

These celebrated memoirs are the story of WWII, as told from the perspective of the German Navy's Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz. Credited with inventing U-boat tactics, he recounts his experiences over ten years as a U-boat commander and his twenty days as President of Germany. Explaining the Nazi regime as a product of its time, he argues that he was not a politician and thus not morally responsible for the regime's war crimes. He criticizes dictatorship...

Describes the Allied military plans against the German warship Tirpitz, culminating in the November 1944 operation by the British Royal Air Force, commanded by Wing Commander Willie Tait.

Follows the daring patrol of the U-96, one of the famed German U-boats known as the "gray wolves." The crew is graphically portrayed in a life-and-death struggle, challenging the British Navy at every turn.

On December 7, 1941, even as Japanese carrier–launched aircraft flew toward Pearl Harbor, a small American cargo ship chartered by the Army reported that it was under attack from a submarine halfway between Seattle and Honolulu. After that one cryptic message, the humble lumber carrier Cynthia Olson and her crew vanished without a trace, sparking one of the most enduring nautical mysteries of the war. What happened to the ill–fated ship? What...