Naval History of the Second World War

Co-edition Perrin / Ministère des Armées

Hundreds of thousands of works have been written on the Second World War, in dozens of languages. Many of them do indeed address the maritime dimensions of the conflict, the role played by the Royal Navy, the Kriegsmarine and the United States Navy, the role of the various naval forces on a given theatre of operations or in a given battle — most notably in the Mediterranean and the Pacific — but none before this one had assessed the impact of the maritime forces of all the belligerent nations on the overall course of the conflict.

From the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 to the signing of the Japanese surrender aboard USS Missouri in September 1945, by way of the Battle of the Atlantic where the German U-Boote distinguished themselves, the Mediterranean campaign, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the titanic clashes of the Coral Sea, Midway, the amphibious operations "Torch" and "Overlord", and the Battle of Leyte Gulf and the assault on Iwo Jima, Craig Symonds presents an unrivalled synthesis of the conflict, without omitting the study of the technological breakthroughs — in aircraft, torpedoes, cryptanalysis, radar and ultimately atomic energy — that it generated.

Drawing on numerous previously unpublished sources, it also allows the historical actors to speak for themselves, in order to recount the Second World War at sea as contemporaries experienced it: a single, vast and complex story involving national leaders, strategists, fleet commanders and ship captains, engineers, turret crews, aircraft pilots, merchant seamen, and a human drama of planetary dimensions that exerted a lasting, outsized impact on world history.

A major work already hailed as a future classic.