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139 books match the query 'World War, 1914-1918' and 4 start with h

cover of Hard Aground: The Wreck of the USS Tennessee and the Rise of the US Navy

Hard Aground

The Wreck of the USS Tennessee and the Rise of the US Navy

Andrew C. A. Jampoler

University of Alabama Press, 2023

Three intertwined stories that reveal the challenges faced by the US Navy in its evolution between the Civil War and the First World War

Hard Aground brings together three intertwined stories documenting the US Navy’s strategic and matériel evolution from the end of Civil War through the First World War. These incidents had lasting consequences for how the navy would modernize itself throughout the rest of the twentieth century.

The first story focuses on the reconstruction of the US Navy following the swift and near-total dismantling of the Union Navy infrastructure after the Civil War. This reconstruction began with barely enough time for the navy’s campaigns in the Spanish-American War, and for its role in the First World War. Jampoler argues that the federal government discovered that the fleet requested by the navy, and paid for by Congress, was the wrong fleet. Focus was on battleships and cruisers rather than destroyers and other small combat vessels needed to hunt submarines and serve as convoy escorts.

The second story relates the short, tragic life of the USS Tennessee (later renamed Memphis), one of the steel-hulled ships of the new Armored Cruiser Squadron that was a centerpiece of the navy’s modernization effort. The USS Tennessee was ordered on two unusual missions in the early months of the First World War, long before the United States formally entered the war. These little-known missions and the ship's shocking destruction in a storm surge in the Caribbean serve as the centerpiece of the story. Threaded through the narrative are biographical sketches of the principal players in the drama that unfolded following the ship’s demise, including two of Tennessee’s commanding officers: Vice Admiral Sims, who commanded the US Navy squadrons deployed to Europe in support of the Royal Navy; Rear Admiral William Caperton, who commanded the Caribbean squadron before the Memphis (formerly the Tennessee) was lost; Charles Pond, squadron commander during the wreck; and the American ambassador to the Ottoman court, President Wilson’s enthusiastic supporter, Henry Morgenthau.

Jampoler rounds out this fascinating account with the story of how the USS Tennessee’s destruction prompted fierce deliberations about the US Navy’s operations and chains of command for the remainder of the First World War and the high-level political wrangling inside the Department of the Navy immediately after the war, as civilian appointees and senior officers wrestled to reshape the department in their image.

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cover of Herbert Hoover: Great War And Its Aftermath

Herbert Hoover

Great War And Its Aftermath

Lawrence E. Gelfand

University of Iowa Press, 1979

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cover of Hero of the Angry Sky: The World War I Diary and Letters of David S. Ingalls, America’s First Naval Ace

Hero of the Angry Sky

The World War I Diary and Letters of David S. Ingalls, America’s First Naval Ace

David S. Ingalls

Ohio University Press, 2012

Hero of the Angry Sky draws on the unpublished diaries, correspondence, informal memoir, and other personal documents of the U.S. Navy’s only flying “ace” of World War I to tell his unique story. David S. Ingalls was a prolific writer, and virtually all of his World War I aviation career is covered, from the teenager’s early, informal training in Palm Beach, Florida, to his exhilarating and terrifying missions over the Western Front. This edited collection of Ingalls’s writing details the career of the U.S. Navy’s most successful combat flyer from that conflict.

While Ingalls’s wartime experiences are compelling at a personal level, they also illuminate the larger, but still relatively unexplored, realm of early U.S. naval aviation. Ingalls’s engaging correspondence offers a rare personal view of the evolution of naval aviation during the war, both at home and abroad. There are no published biographies of navy combat flyers from this period, and just a handful of diaries and letters in print, the last appearing more than twenty years ago. Ingalls’s extensive letters and diaries add significantly to historians’ store of available material.

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cover of How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War

How Will the Heart Endure

Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War

Heather Bryant Jordan

University of Michigan Press, 1992

The career of Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) has been hard to categorize. As an Anglo-lrish writer, a follower of the modernists but not technically one herself; as an independent woman writer but not, by her admission, a feminist; and as a creative writer in time of war, she has eluded compartmentalization. In How Will the Heart Endure, Heather Bryant Jordan provides a new assessment of Bowen’s achievement, arguing that Bowen’s response to war is the best lens for elucidating the relation between art and life expressed in Bowen’s work.Bowen created novels, short stories, essays, and autobiographical works in a war-torn world that saw successively the Troubles in Ireland, the Irish Civil War, World War I, and World War Il. The strains she felt as a result of these experiences were expressed in the intensely personal vision of loss and betrayal that her fiction conveys.Jordan’s study combines historical and literary analysis and incorporates new archival research on Bowen’s correspondence and on her war reports to the Ministry of Information. How Will the Heart Endure offers not only a new reading of Bowen’s work, but an insightful look into the wartime publishing climate in which Bowen and her circle—which included Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, John and Rosalind Lehmann, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Stephen Spender—operated. It will be of interest to specialists in modern British fiction, women’s studies, Irish studies, and Anglo-lrish literature.
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