This book focuses on the Royal Navy's response to the rise of the German navy under Hitler within the broad context of the ongoing debate about Britain's policy of appeasement. It combines a narrative of diplomatic events and Whitehall policy-making with the thematic analysis of naval intelligence and war planning. Drawing on the wide range of sources, the author argues that the Admiralty's enthusiasm for naval armaments diplomacy with Nazi Germany was far more rational and more complex than previous studies would suggest.

This book focuses on the Royal Navy's response to the rise of the German navy under Hitler within the broad context of the ongoing debate about Britain's policy of appeasement. It combines a narrative of diplomatic events and Whitehall policy-making with the thematic analysis of naval intelligence and war planning. Drawing on the wide range of sources, the author argues that the Admiralty's enthusiasm for naval armaments diplomacy with Nazi Germany was far more rational and more complex than previous studies would suggest.

In the context of their war experience in the First World War, the changes and developments of the Executive branch of the Royal Navy between the world wars are examined and how these made them fit for the test of the Second World War are critically assessed.

While the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 was a pivotal moment in European history and precipitated the outbreak of the Second World War western historiography has largely neglected Northern Europe. Two questions dominated the course of events, the Anglo-German contest for control of the access to the Atlantic Ocean and the Soviet-German contest for control of their former territories as a precursor to the future Total War they expected to wage against each other. This anthology of 23 essays considers both these issues collectively and provides a new international perspective on the region’s transition from the relative peace of the interwar era to the all out war following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Contributors are Azar Gat, Michael Epkenhans, Andrew Lambert, Tom Kristiansen, Rolf Hobson, Gunnar Åselius, Jörg Hillmann, Werner Rahn, Sławomir Dębski, Ole Kristian Grimnes, Česlovas Laurinavičius, Alfred Erich Senn, Lars Ericson Wolke, Karl Erik Haug, Boris Vadimovich Sokolov, Toomas Hiio, Magnus Ilmjärv, Palle Roslyng-Jensen ,Hans Christian Bjerg, Valters Ščerbinskis, Michael H. Clemmesen, and Marcus Faulkner.

An essential new account of how anti-submarine warfare is conducted, with a focus on both historic and present-day operations. This new book shows how until 1944 U-boats operated as submersible torpedo craft which relied heavily on the surface for movement and charging their batteries. This pattern was repeated in WWII until Allied anti-submarine countermeasures had forced the Germans to modify their existing U-boats with the schnorkel. Countermeasures along also pushed the development of high-speed U-boats capable of continuously submerged operations. This study shows how these improved submarines became benchmark of the post-war Russian submarine challenge. Royal Navy doctrine was developed by professional anti-submarine officers, and based on the well-tried combination of defensive and offensive anti-submarine measures that had stood the press of time since 1917, notwithstanding considerable technological change. This consistent and holistic view of anti-submarine warfare has not been understood by most of the subsequent historians of these anti-submarine campaigns, and this book provides an essential and new insight into how Cold War, and indeed modern, anti-submarine warfare is conducted.

To understand why British naval policy in the Far East was so unsuccessful when the Japanese entered World War II, the author takes the reader back to the end of World War I and examines the roots of British naval strategy.

The length, scale and intensity of the Battle of the Atlantic led the British and German navies to make substantial changes to their organisation, strategy and tactics. In this book, Dennis Haslop examines the pivotal lessons learned, and how these helped to determine the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic Convoy War. He questions how well adapted the two organisations were to learn from the conflict, and how effective they were in identifying problems and producing remedies. Based on the in-depth analysis of British and German primary sources, this study provides an innovative basis against which to assess the German and British approach to changing warfare and provides important new insights into aspects of convoy warfare, in particular the virtually unknown subject of German 'Operational Research'.