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Chargement... Histoire navale de la Seconde guerre mondialepar Craig L. Symonds
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. I try to keep looking for ways to interact with my kids in new ways. My son loves reading about military history, so I though I would add a book on that topic to my reading list. Reading it together would give us more things to talk about. Oxford University Press was kind enough to send me a review copy of its upcoming release: World War II at Sea: A Global History by Craig L. Symonds. My son and I jumped in and enjoyed this narrative of the naval war and all of its belligerents, on all of the world’s oceans and seas, between 1939 and 1945. If that sounds like a lot. It is. At almost 800 pages, it’s a tremendous collection of the events of World War II through the lens of big steel ships. I have to admit, I knew bits and pieces of World War II history, but I never put it all together to figure out the chronology of events and how they related to each other. The book opens with 1930 London Conference, an early attempt at an arms treaty. The goal was to limit the tonnage of naval ships to prevent a build up in naval power among Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Japan. The arguments over the numbers of battleships at the beginning of the war become out of touch. Mr. Symonds shows how these limitations on naval warfare become misplaced as the strategies and purpose of the navies changed rapidly during the war. WWII brought major technological advances in warfare that radically changed naval strategy. That conference failed to address aircraft carriers. By the end of the war, aircraft carriers were the key naval strength. World War II at Sea covers all of these major engagements and their interconnection with other aspects of the conflicts: the U-boat attack on Scapa Flow the Battle of the Atlantic the “miracle” evacuation from Dunkirk the battles for control of Norway fjords Mussolini’s Regia Marina, the fourth-largest navy in the world, but ineffective for a lack a fuel Japanese naval power of the Kidö Butai Pearl Harbor Midway the forced neutrality of the French navy and eventual scuttling the landings in North Africa and into Italy the Normandy invasion I found the story-telling to be top notch. It’s not easy to keep no many battles, ship and personalities in context. I found Mr. Symonds to have done a masterful job of illuminating the mechanics of large-scale warfare in water and the key role it played. As for my son, he knew most of this information separately. He appreciated so much being put together in place to add more context to the underlying events. He felt it was too brief at times for the areas he wanted to dive more deeply into. Originally appeared: https://www.compliancebuilding.com/2018/04/14/weekend-reading-world-war-ii-at-se... World War II at Sea from Craig Symonds is a comprehensive (not exhaustive) history of the naval war in its entirety told chronologically. In other words, a section about the North Atlantic will be followed by a section on the Pacific if there were events that occurred simultaneously or one right after the other. So told as the war unfolded, which means taking into account what is happening in other parts of the world. The purpose of this book is to tell the story in a more realistic manner than the books that have focused on specific battles or theaters, not to break new ground with a new piece of information. Having one comprehensive narrative is breaking new ground and the failure to realize that is not the fault of either Symonds or the book. Those volumes are tremendously important because they are so focused but they also often lose sight of the big picture: the war as a whole. This volume places the war as a whole at the center and shows how the war at sea unfolded in all waters and for all navies. To criticize this book for not getting every bit of minutiae right is petty at best and empty chest-pounding at worst (and most likely). There are thousands of books with the minutiae, enjoy them, they are wonderful books. But this wasn't trying to be like them. I would recommend this to anyone interested in World War II, from introductory to historian. As an introduction it allows a person to have a perspective on the battles and events they have or will learn more about. For a historian, professional or amateur, this serves as a reminder that the war was not a collection of separate battles in isolation but very much a series of events that were influenced by previous and concurrent events and thus affected future events. We often, when looking at specific moments, lose track of the whole. This book puts the whole back in focus. In doing so, it will allow the more focused books to be better understood beyond the simple-minded regurgitation of numbers and gun size. Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads First Reads. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Appartient à la série éditoriale
La première histoire intégrale de la Seconde Guerre mondiale sous l'angle maritime, par l'un des meilleurs spécialistes américains : une saga aussi vaste que les océans. Sur la Seconde Guerre mondiale ont été écrits des milliers voire des centaines de milliers d'ouvrages, dans des dizaines de langues. Nombre d'entre eux traitent certes des dimensions maritimes du conflit, de la place qu'ont occupée la Royal Navy, la Kriegsmarine et la marine des États-Unis, du rôle des diverses marines sur tel théâtre d'opérations ou au cours de telle bataille, tout particulièrement en Méditerranée et dans le Pacifique, mais aucun avant celui-ci n'avait évalué l'impact des forces maritimes de l'ensemble des nations belligérantes sur le cours du conflit dans sa globalité, et même sur son issue. Pourtant, il n'y eut pas une guerre dans l'Atlantique et une autre dans le Pacifique, une troisième en Méditerranée et une autre encore dans l'Océan Indien ou en mer du Nord. Dresser la chronique de ce conflit en blocs géographiques distincts permettrait sans doute de simplifier les choses, mais ce n'est pas ainsi que la guerre s'est déroulée ou que les principaux responsables ont eu à la conduire. Les pertes de navires durant la bataille de l'Atlantique affectèrent en effet la disponibilité des unités de transports de troupe pour celle de Guadalcanal ; les convois en direction de l'île de Malte assiégée, en Méditerranée, privaient ceux de l'Atlantique d'une partie de leurs escortes ; la poursuite du cuirassé Bismarck imposa de ponctionner des forces basées en Islande, à Gibraltar et en Grande-Bretagne. La trame chronologique et spécifiquement navale choisie par Craig L. Symonds permet de mettre en lumière à quel point les événements maritimes ont tracé et orienté en profondeur le cours de cette guerre. Du traité naval germano-britannique de 1935 à la signature de l'Acte de capitulation japonais signé sur le USS Missouri en septembre 1945, en passant par la bataille de l'Atlantique où se... Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)940.54History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- Military History Of World War IIClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Symonds has done an excellent service and is to be commended for his work.
The Battle of Midway has frequently been cited as the turning point in the naval war in the Pacific. What Symonds reveals is just how incredibly lucky the US forces were to catch the Japanese forces in the few minutes when they were most defenseless. One must not diminish the role of the naval aviators, for it was great and decisive.
Midway was spectacular but the grinding battle of the North Atlantic, though less glamorous, was spectacular in another way with men fighting the elements as they fought above and below the waves. One of my cousins married a man who had three ships sunk under him and yet he kept going out.
It is sad that so much of naval strategy was based on how the previous war was fought. That was probably inevitable. Still, it was costly. ( )