Stealth At Sea: The History of the Submarine
By Dan Van der Vat
Houghton Mifflin Company
New York, NY
$30.00
Naval historian and newspaper correspondent Dan Van der Vat has written the Twentieth Century’s most comprehensive chronicle of one of the world’s most crucial weapons. Central to two world wars and the cold war, the submarine matches or exceeds in military significance the role played by the battleship, the aircraft carrier, the strategic bomber or even the land-based missile.

What began as a gleam in the eyes of 17th century Fenian Irishmen intent on sabotaging the British Navy, first proved its lethal power during the American Civil War, when the Confederates sank the USS Housatonic. Stealth At Sea recalls the fascinating, occasionally tragic, early days of what was then called the submersible man-of-war.

It wasn’t until the First World War that the submarine truly came into its own. Germany’s reliance on the [Read more...]