Karl Baumann was born in the Ruhr Valley of Germany during the desperate and tumultuous years of the Great Depression. His pursuit of an occupation is hindered by an abbreviated formal education, unenthusiastic participation in the Hitler youth movement, and the whims of Nazi officials. Baumann's decision to become a sailor at the age of fourteen is both fortuitous and fateful. Baumann comes of age at sea with the German fishing and merchant fleets. He becomes a member of the Kriegsmarine's legendary U-boat force and participates in the Battle of the Atlantic during World War II. He also takes part in the underwater German counteroffensive that attempts to breach the English Channel and attack the Allied armada delivering troops and supplies onto the D-Day landing beaches. Baumann is one of only ten thousand U-boat crewmen who survives the war--and the even smaller fraternity of captured submariners. His personal struggle as a prisoner of war reaches across the Atlantic to a small POW camp located in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. His unusual experiences at Camp Lyndhurst in Augusta County produce life-transforming consequences he never could have contemplated before his capture and imprisonment in the land of his sworn enemy. Fully researched and footnoted, with fifty illustrations. The Longest Patrol is the captivating story of Karl Baumann's wartime odyssey.

it ensured that friction over the Taiwan Strait did not escalate into a full-blown war. In fact, the Taiwan Patrol Force did its job so well that virtually nothing has been written about it. U.S. Navy ships acted both as a buffer between the two antagonists and as a trip wire in case of aggression. The force fulfilled the latter function twice in the 1950s -- during the first (1954-55) and second (1958) Taiwan Strait crises --

Recalls the experiences of Karl Baumann, who joined the German Merchant Marine as a cabin boy at the age of fourteen, in 1939. Baumann enlisted in the German Navy, or Kriegsmarine, in 1941, and served as an anti-aircraft gunner in the submarine service until his surrender to American forces in 1944. Discribes Baumann's internment at the prisoner-of-war camp at Lyndhurst, Virginia, his repatriation to Germany, and his subsequent emigration to Virginia in 1951.

Explosive SAS action in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. The command came: 'Stop those vehicles!' It was like a red rag to a bull. Instantly streams of 7.62 mm tracer and 50 mm calibre machine gun rounds arced across the night sky and smashed into the bus and truck. Elite SAS Patrol Commander Stuart 'Nev' Bonner takes us inside the extraordinary and dangerous world of secret combat operations in this explosive, behind-the-scenes look at life inside the SAS. A world where capture means torture or death, and every move is trained for with precision detail to bring elite soldiers to the very peak of fighting ability. In a career spanning twenty years, fourteen of them in the SAS, Bonner shares with us the inside story of being out in front ? and often behind enemy lines. From patrolling the mountains of East Timor to covert operations in Bougainville and the Solomon Islands, from sweeping into the Iraqi desert ahead of invading US forces to cripple Saddam Hussein's communications to patrolling in war-torn Baghdad and being in the middle of the disastrous Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan ? this is a no holds barred account of what it like to live, eat and breathe SAS.

Starting weeks after Hitler declared war on the United States in mid-December 1941 and lasting until the war with Germany was all but over, 73 German U-Boats sustainably attacked New England waters, from Montauk New York to the tip of Nova Scotia at Cape Sable. Fifteen percent of these boats were sunk by Allied counter-attacks, five surrendered in the region, and three were sunk off New England--Block Island, Massachusetts Bay, and off Nantucket. These have proven appealing to divers, with a result that at least three German naval officers or ratings are buried in New England, one having killed himself in the Boston jail cell. There were 34 Allied merchant or naval ships sunk by these subs, one of them, the 'Eagle', was not admitted to have been sunk by the Germans until decades later. Over 1,100 men were thrown in the water and 545 of them made it ashore in New England ports; 428 were killed. Importantly, saboteurs were landed three places: Long Island, Frenchman's Bay Maine and New Brunswick Canada, and Boston was mined. Very little was known about this.

An illustrated volume of soldier testimonies shares the experiences of veterans from World War II, the Cold War, the War on Terror, and other conflicts, in a collection that describes the challenges of undersea warfare in dramatic detail. 20,000 first printing.