Archive Results For: Baltic
Book Review-‘Southern Thunder: The Royal Navy and the Scandinavian trade in World War One’ by S. R. Dunn
Standing on the shores of the North Sea in a typical winter gale presents a bleak and forbidding prospect. It is sobering to consider that for the four years of the First World War this was a battleground where the warring nations committed their navies to a bitter and relentless struggle in order to wrest […] Read More
Filed under: Baltic | WW1 | North Sea
Subjects include: Navies | Strategy & Diplomacy
Book Review – ‘The Sea in History: The modern world’ by Steven Gray
This tome forms a substantial finale to the four volume Sea in History series, a result of the huge Oceanides project. It is an 848-page behemoth, with a contributor list that reads like a who’s who of modern naval history, and indeed beyond the field. It is therefore appropriate that the volume is edited by a scholar as distinguished […] Read More
Filed under: Atlantic | Baltic | English Channel | North Sea | Irish Sea | Mediterranean | Nineteenth Century | Indian Ocean | Caribbean | Pacific
Subjects include: Battles & Tactics | Manpower & Life at Sea | Merchant Marines | Miscellaneous | Navies | Strategy & Diplomacy
Book Review – ‘The Great War at Sea: A naval atlas 1914–1919’ by Nicholas Tracy
A timely arrival in the middle date of the centenary of the First World War, Faulkner and Wilkinson’s atlas of the naval part of it is certain to be valued by those interested in the subject. Their work is based on the records of the Royal Navy’s historical branch, which used graphics extensively in the […] Read More
Filed under: Atlantic | Baltic | English Channel | North Sea
Subjects include: Battles & Tactics | Navies
‘We Do Not Want to Be Too Hard on the Norwegians’: Sterling balances and rebuilding the Norwegian merchant shipping fleet, 1945–1950
This article looks at Anglo-Norwegian financial relations in the crucial five years after 1945. Norway lost half of her merchant fleet and had accumulated substantial sterling balances during the war through insurance claims from ships sunk in British and Allied service, and from freights carried. Given Britain’s position as banker to the sterling area and […] Read More
Filed under: Baltic | North Sea
Subjects include: Administration | Merchant Marines
The Schlüsselfeld Ship Model of 1503
The use of table decorations in the form of ship models, known as nefs, became a way of demonstrating prestige among the elite merchant class of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One of the most impressive and important of these centrepieces is the so-called Schlüsselfeld model made in 1503 for Wilhelm Schlüsselfeld (1483–1549), head of […] Read More
Filed under: Baltic
Subjects include: Merchant Marines | Ship Models & Figureheads
Book Review-‘Freeing the Baltic’ by G. Bennett
The author, Captain Geoffrey Bennett (1908–1983), served briefly as Britain’s naval attaché to Moscow after Stalin’s death in 1953. He published a number of naval histories upon his retirement, including studies of the First World War battles of Coronel and Jutland. This is the third edition of this book, which was originally published under the […] Read More
Filed under: Russian Revolution | Baltic | WW1
Subjects include: Battles & Tactics | Strategy & Diplomacy
Book Review – ‘The Crimean War in Imperial Context, 1854–1856’ by Nicholas Tracy
The publisher of this study asserts that this is ‘the only book to consider expertly translated sources in eight languages that examine the conflict’s maritime history in areas ranging from South America to Scandinavia . Until now, accounts of Britain’s and France’s naval campaigns against Tsarist Russia in the Baltic, White Sea, and Pacific have […] Read More
Filed under: Atlantic | Baltic | Crimean War | Mediterranean | Nineteenth Century | Pacific
Subjects include: Battles & Tactics | Navies | Strategy & Diplomacy
Book Review-‘The British Navy in the Baltic ‘by J. D. Grainger
The British Navy in the Baltic is the latest from John Grainger, author of such books as the Dictionary of Naval Battles and The First Pacific War: Britain and Russia, 1854−1856, also from Boydell and Brewer. The book was written with the support of the Swedish Society for Maritime History, and is part of their […] Read More
Filed under: Baltic
Subjects include: Battles & Tactics | Navies
Book Review – ‘‘Deutsche, werdet Mitglieder des Vaterlandes!’: Der Deutsche Flottenverein 1898–1934’ by Marcus Faulkner
The growth of navies at the end of the nineteenth century paralleled an increased public interest in naval affairs and the rapid expansion of naval interest groups. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Imperial Germany where, within a comparatively short period, the navy was transformed from a coastal defence force to an oceangoing fleet […] Read More
Note: The Complements of Four Dutch Ships Taken at the Texel in 1799
In 1799 an Anglo-Russian expedition under the overall command of Admiral Duncan sailed for Holland to land on the Helder and take possession of the fleet of the Batavian Republic in the Texel in the name of the Prince of Orange, and to provoke or encourage an uprising against the French occupiers. The land part […] Read More
Filed under: Napoleonic War | Baltic | French Revolution
Subjects include: Manpower & Life at Sea
Neutral Waters? British Diplomacy of Force in the Canary Islands at the Start of the First World War
At the beginning of the First World War, Britain had to confront a phenomenal challenge. Faced with the indisputable British naval hegemony, Germany launched the cruiser warfare, using armed merchant ships as auxiliary cruisers, as its first offensive weapon in the economic war, attacking trade from the South Atlantic, through which much of the British […] Read More
Filed under: Atlantic | Baltic | WW1 | English Channel | North Sea
Subjects include: Strategy & Diplomacy
Figureheads and Symbolism Between the Medieval and the Modern: The ship Griffin or Gribshunden, one of the last Sea Serpents?
The Griffin or, as it was sometimes called, Gribshunden (griffin hound) was a ship that belonged to the Danish–Norwegian King Hans. The ship sank in 1495 and was one of the largest and most modern warships of its day. In 2015 a peculiar figurehead carving was raised from the wreck. It is shaped like a beast swallowing a man […] Read More
Filed under: Baltic | High Middle Ages | Shipwrecks
Subjects include: Ship Models & Figureheads | Shipbuilding & Design