Naval Fiction

Captain Carlisle hails from Virginia, a loyal colony of the British Crown. As the clouds of war gather, Carlisle's small frigate is ordered to Toulon on a reconnaissance mission. If battling the winter weather in the Gulf of Lions is not a sufficient challenge, Carlisle must also juggle the delicate diplomatic issues in this period of pre-war tension while contending with an increasingly belligerent French frigate. But Carlisle has additional problems unique to his colonial origins.

Off the shore of Costa Rica, the Navy command ship USS Coronado launches an all-out assault against one of the most powerful drug lords in Central America. The high-tech fist of the US military is poised to come down like a sledgehammer. Everything is going according to plan until the quiet jungle erupts in a chaos of blood, shrapnel, and fire. When CIA operative Rick Holden and Naval Intelligence Officer Laura Peters begin investigating the circumstances of the ambush, they uncover something much more sinister than a failed military operation.

Scarred—physically and emotionally—by the brutal warfare at Dunkirk, Jack Pembroke decides to leave his home in England to join his father, Admiral Pembroke, in the South African Cape. A fledgling naval force is preparing to fight the coming onslaught of German raiders, and Jack is soon thrust back into action when he is appointed commander of a minesweeping flotilla. Unknown to Jack, a Nazi commerce raider has left Germany for the Cape intending to wreak havoc on Allied shipping.

Pearl Harbor has been bombed. The Nazis unleash their U-boats against the east coast and sink American ships. Young men overwhelm the recruiting offices and James Brand is determined to serve in the U.S. Navy and not in some research laboratory. He plans to become just another recruit, but his talents are known to most of the scientific community, including Einstein.

1809. After his heroic actions during the retreat to Corunna, Captain Sir Thomas Kydd is the toast of London society. Here he falls in with the legendary frigate captain Lord Thomas Cochrane. So begins a relationship, professional and personal, that will be unlike any that Kydd has known: a relationship that will lead him, almost simultaneously, to first glory, then ruin.

This highly regarded war memoir was a best seller in both Japan and the United States during the 1960s and has long been treasured by historians for its insights into the Japanese side of the surface war in the Pacific. The author was a survivor of more than one hundred sorties against the Allies and was known throughout Japan as the Unsinkable Captain.

Lieutenant Sam Bitka, US Naval Reserve, is getting used to civilian life when he is called back to active duty. Tensions between Earth and the alien Varoki are on the rise, and Sam is assigned as tactical officer aboard the deep space destroyer USS Puebla. Dispatched to the distant world of K'tok to protect human colonists, he wants nothing more than to serve out his active duty time and get back to his civilian life. But when the Varoki launch a crippling surprise attack against the Earth coalition fleet, Sam finds himself suddenly in command of the USS Puebla.

After gaining valuable experience as an aide to Governor Lord Horatio Hornblower, William Brewer is rewarded with a posting as first lieutenant on the frigate HMS Defiant, bound for American waters. Early in their travels, it seems as though Brewer’s greatest challenge will be evading the wrath of a tyrannical captain who has taken an active dislike to him. But when a hurricane sweeps away the captain, the young lieutenant is forced to assume command of the damaged ship, and a crew suffering from low morale.

The year 1941: Andrew Troost, heir to generations of naval tradition, has just been made admiral, when reports fly in of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Troost's son, Warren, has followed in his footsteps and is one of the men fighting for his country on a PT boat in the Pacific. In New York City, Tony Trapasso hears the call to action and gets ready to join the naval action. With him is Jacob Miller, a young man choosing to become a naval pilot instead of following the rabbinical calling of his Jewish forebears.

December 7, 1941 - America is attacked by the Japanese and dragged into a worldwide struggle for power unlike anything ever seen on Earth. While the United States and the Navy reel from the devastation of Pearl Harbor, the Nazis begin a brutal campaign within sight of the shores of the nation. U-boats prowl the American coast from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico, sinking shipping seemingly unopposed!

USS Bull Shark is running for Pearl Harbor after leaving New London and her victory over the Nazi Q-ship, but all is not well aboard the boat. The Japanese are planning a major offensive and the clock is rapidly ticking – with what will become one of the most decisive battles of the war looming on the horizon, the Navy still doesn’t know exactly where or when it’s going to happen. Can Bull Shark play her part in the Battle of Midway? Or will she meet with Yamamoto’s secret weapon and be swept aside in Japan’s quest for power?

The marines have seized control of the Japanese airfield on Guadalcanal, but this isn’t the end of their troubles…it’s only the beginning. The Japanese bomb them by day, attack from the forbidding darkness of the jungles by night, and their ships, like hungry sharks, prowl just offshore after the sun goes down. Whoever controls the canal controls the war. The Japanese know this, so they concoct a plan to send men and equipment ashore using fast destroyers—ships that can come by night and leave before the Cactus Airforce or Admiral Fletcher’s carrier planes can stop them.

Amphibious warfare was in its infancy in the mid-18th century–it was the poor relation of the great fleet actions that the navy so loved.... That all changed in 1758 when the British government demanded a campaign of raids on the French Channel ports. Command arrangements were hastily devised and a whole new class of vessels was produced at breakneck speed: flatboats, the ancestors of the landing craft that put the allied forces ashore on D-Day.

October 1789, New South Wales, and into Sydney, capital of Britain's infant colony, sails the frigate Tempest. She is one of His Majesty's ships employed in policing the new southern trade routes. Her captain is Richard Bolitho, who hopes to be ordered home to England. Instead he is dispatched on a mission to the islands of the Great South Sea, where he must face hazards of fickle winds, pirates, and savage islanders.

Responsible for protecting British convoys in the Channel in a small Chaser, young Peter Sinclair, RN, is thrown head-first into the horrors of war. Sent to serve in HM submarine Rugged, defending convoys delivering food and supplies to the besieged island of Malta, Sub-Lieutenant Sinclair finds himself 120 feet beneath the sea, surrounded by deadly mines and just three miles from the enemy's doorstep.

When Captain Guy Sherbrooke joins HMS Reliant in 1943, he knows he may be her last Captain. Sister battleships have been destroyed, and Sherbrooke cannot alter the bitter truth that there will be no half measures for HMS Reliant.

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia has been roundly thwarted. But even as Capt. William Laurence and the dragon Temeraire pursue the retreating enemy through an unforgiving winter, Napoleon is raising a new force, and he’ll soon have enough men and dragons to resume the offensive. While the emperor regroups, the allies have an opportunity to strike first and defeat him once and for all - if internal struggles and petty squabbles don’t tear them apart.

It is 1943 and Captain Mike Blackwood, Royal Marine Commando, is a survivor. Young, toughened, and tried in the hellish crucible of Burma, he labours beneath the weight of tradition and the burden of his own self-doubt. For him, the horizon is not the lip of the trench seen by men of the Corps in the previous war, but the ramp of a landing craft smashing down into the sea, and the fire of the enemy on a Sicilian beach.

In late 1756, as the British government collapses in the aftermath of the loss of Minorca, and the country and navy are thrown into political chaos, a small force of ships is sent to the West Indies to reinforce the Leeward Islands Squadron. Captain Edward Carlisle and his first lieutenant George Holbrooke are fresh from the Mediterranean and their capture of a powerful French man-of-war. Their new frigate Medina has orders to join a squadron commanded by a terminally ill commodore. Their mission: a near-suicidal assault on a strong Caribbean island fortress.

North America’s French and Indian War may be over, but at the end of 1760 the wider Seven Years War is still raging in Europe and across the seas of the world. Nevertheless, the New England merchants are growing restless at the restrictions on their trade with the French islands, and one Rhode Island company is determined to defy the law and bring home a cargo of contraband molasses.