VICTORY AT SEA 1939-1945

From documents and records, allied and enemy, and written with the approval of the British Admiralty, the Admiralty Archivist and Head of Historical Section provides a running account of World War II's sea war and an overall survey of campaigns and actions and major naval operations as they ""fitted into, and in their outcome influenced, the major strategical pattern"". The decline of the Navy after World War I, the lateness in reactivating, the status when war struck are the prefatory notes to the attempts to hold the sea ring of safety against the enemy, the penetration of the U boats, and the hard fought battle of the Atlantic with its long toll of losses, reverses, and the two ""happy times"" of the Germans. There are calamities of strategy, shortage of equipment, the lack of efficient air cover; there are the dark years before the entry of the United States, the physical demands of the campaigns in North African the Mediterranean, the Normandy landings; there is the thin spread in the Pacific hamstrung by the vast Japanese conquests; and there is the proof of the importance of sea power in military operation. This report gives the full scope, with credit and blame, of the Navy's work in the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, analyzes the significance of a shield of sea power with combined services, and is an able one-volume history, for the student of naval and military operations.