Laconia incident - A High-Risk Military Rescue Operation of WWII Under The Line of Fire

Laconia incident - A High-Risk Military Rescue Operation of WWII Under The Line of Fire PDF

Author: Edgar Wollstone

Publisher: AJS

Published:

Total Pages: 43

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The years 1939-1945 is etched on the minds of many for myriad reasons. It was an epoch of terrible chaos, devastating loss, and inexplicable horror. The Second World War was wreaking havoc all over the world. Several events have shaken the collective conscience of mankind. Hitler’s pathological hatred for the Jews, the holocaust, the Auschwitz concentration camps and its horrors, the atomic bomb and its long-term detrimental repercussions, the economic perils, rampant epidemics, severe shortage of food and supplies, deaths due to starvation, etc. are well known dark pages of history. Though these events have been repeated ad nauseum, they still don’t fail to send shivers down one’s spine. But the Laconia Incident that transpired on the eve of September 12th, 1942, stood apart in its scale and tragedy. An armed British ship was intercepted by a German U-boat. The teal waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific was no safer for anybody. It was replete with U-boats and submarines that took the cover of darkness and the sinister waves to waylay enemy ships. They waited in stealth to pounce on the enemy and scuttle the ship on sight. The Laconia Incident is a bone-chilling tale of tragic killing of hundreds of people when a German U-boat torpedoed a British armed ship. The RMS Laconia was unescorted and a sitting duck to the German U-boat. The commanding officer ordered it to be torpedoed. The orders were carried out in an instant. When the German commanding officer Captain Hartenstein surfaced the submarine hoping to collect any intelligence from the sinking ship, he was appalled by the innumerable upturned faces dotting the violent shark-infested sea. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were scrambling for life. What should the German captain do? Should he rescue the enemy civilians? Should he execute the dictator Fuhrer’s orders of eliminating all survivors? Should he follow the calls of his heart and embark on a near-impossible rescue mission? The Captain unlike his Fuhrer had his heart in the right place. He dared to carry out a mission to save the enemy jeopardizing his own life and career. And for this act of humanity and compassion, will he be honored or cursed? Read the book to know the tragic story of the Laconia Incident and the German Captain Hartenstein who risked his own life and career to rescue the enemy.

Abandon Ship!

Abandon Ship! PDF

Author: Richard F. Newcomb

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2002-11-12

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0060959215

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Originally published in 1958, "Abandon Ship!" was the first book to describe how the survivors of the "U.S.S. Indianapolis" sinking watched their shipmates fall prey to shark attacks, dehydration and death, and the first to question why the captain, Charles McVay, was court martialed.

Lifeboat

Lifeboat PDF

Author: John R. Stilgoe

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9780813922218

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The fire extinguisher; the airline safety card; the lifeboat. Until September 11, 2001, most Americans paid homage to these appurtenances of disaster with a sidelong glance, if at all. But John Stilgoe has been thinking about lifeboats ever since he listened with his father as the kitchen radio announced that the liner Lakonia had caught fire and sunk in the Atlantic. It was Christmas 1963, and airline travel and Cold War paranoia had made the images of an ocean liner's distress--the air force dropping supplies in the dark, a freighter collecting survivors from lifeboats--seem like echoes of a bygone era. But Stilgoe, already a passionate reader and an aficionado of small-boat navigation, began to delve into accounts of other disasters at sea. What he found was a trunkful of hair-raising stories--of shipwreck, salvation, seamanship brilliant and inept, noble sacrifice, insanity, cannibalism, courage and cravenness, even scandal. In nonfiction accounts and in the works of Conrad, Melville, and Tomlinson, fear and survival animate and degrade human nature, in the microcosm of an open boat as in society at large. How lifeboats are made, rigged, and captained, Stilgoe discovered, and how accounts of their use or misuse are put down, says much about the culture and circumstances from which they are launched. In the hands of a skillful historian such as Stilgoe, the lifeboat becomes a symbol of human optimism, of engineering ingenuity, of bureaucratic regulation, of fear and frailty. Woven through Lifeboat are good old-fashioned yarns, thrilling tales of adventure that will quicken the pulse of readers who have enjoyed the novels of Patrick O'Brian, Crabwalk by G nter Grass, or works of nonfiction such as The Perfect Storm and In the Heart of the Sea. But Stilgoe, whose other works have plumbed suburban culture, locomotives, and the shore, is ultimately after bigger fish. Through the humble, much-ignored lifeboat, its design and navigation and the stories of its ultimate purpose, he has found a peculiar lens on roughly the past two centuries of human history, particularly the war-tossed, technology-driven history of man and the sea.

Ten Hours Until Dawn

Ten Hours Until Dawn PDF

Author: Michael J. Tougias

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2007-04-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1429909617

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In the midst of the Blizzard of 1978, the tanker Global Hope floundered on the shoals in Salem Sound off the Massachusetts coast. The Coast Guard heard the Mayday calls and immediately dispatched a patrol boat. Within an hour, the Coast Guard boat was in as much trouble as the tanker, having lost its radar, depth finder, and engine power in horrendous seas. Pilot boat Captain Frank Quirk was monitoring the Coast Guard's efforts by radio, and when he heard that the patrol boat was in jeopardy, he decided to act. Gathering his crew of four, he readied his forty-nine-foot steel boat, the Can Do, and entered the maelstrom of the blizzard. Using dozens of interview and audiotapes that recorded every word exchanged between Quirk and the Coast Guard, Tougias has written a devastating, true account of bravery and death at sea, in Ten Hours Until Dawn.

Marine Fire Prevention, Firefighting and Fire Safety

Marine Fire Prevention, Firefighting and Fire Safety PDF

Author: Maritime Training Advisory Board (U.S.)

Publisher: DIANE Publishing

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0788104780

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A comprehensive training and reference manual used as a textbook in maritime institutions. Addresses the prevention, control, and extinguishing of fires aboard commercial vessels and on offshore drilling rigs. Includes chapters on emergency procedures and equipment as well as case studies of past shipboard fires. Generously illustrated with drawings, photos, diagrams, tables, and checklists. Recommended reading for all maritime personnel and kept both in shipboard reference libraries and in the offices of maritime executives.

Long Night of the Tankers

Long Night of the Tankers PDF

Author: D. H. Bercuson

Publisher:

Published: 2014-02-07

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781770870949

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

On February 16th, 1942 a Nazi U-boat brazenly shelled the huge Lago oil refinery on Aruba and torpedoed the tankers Pedernales and Oranjestad, both tied up in Aruba's San Nicolas Harbour. Oranjestad was sunk and Pedernales badly damaged. The damage to the refinery was minor, but that same night other U-boats attacked and sank four more tankers in the waters between Aruba and Curaçao and Venezuela. It was the long night of the tankers and the opening salvo of a two year struggle to dominate the Caribbean Sea. In the last twelve days of February, 1942 alone the submarines sank 17 more ships, most of them tankers. Long Night of the Tankersis the story of the German effort to cut the Caribbean off from Britain, the United States andCanada and the desperate defence mounted by the Allies, along with a half dozen other Caribbean and South American nations. The loss of the oil threatened Britain's ability to wage war; the loss of the tankers almost strangled the oil supply to America's industrial north east. When even Churchill and Roosevelt began to worry about the vulnerable Caribbean, the US and its allies poured thousands of men, hundreds of aircraft and dozens of ships into the Caribbean region, organized an effective convoy system and rallied the Central and South American nations against the Germans. By mid 1944, the Caribbean had become an Allied lake and the submarine threat was defeated. But to this day, the old timers of the islands still remember the oil-soaked beaches, the explosions in the night and the bodies of dead sailors washed ashore that marked this dramatic chapter in the Second World War.

Night Probe!

Night Probe! PDF

Author: Clive Cussler

Publisher: Bantam

Published: 2014-11-11

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0553394924

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In the midst of an international crisis, Heidi Milligan, a beautiful, brilliant American naval commander, accidentally discovers an obscure reference to the long-buried North American Treaty, a precedent-shattering secret pact between the United States and Great Britain. The President believes that the treaty offers the single shot at salvation for an energy-starved, economically devastated nation, but the only two copies plummeted into the watery depths of the Atlantic in twin disasters long ago. The original document must be found—and the one American who can do the job is Dirk Pitt. But in London, a daring counterplot is being orchestrated to see that the treaty is never implemented. Brian Shaw, a master spy who has often worked hand in hand with American agents, now confronts his most challenging command. Pitt’s mission: Raise the North American Treaty. Shaw’s mission: Stop Pitt. Praise for Night Probe! and the Dirk Pitt® novels “A rich tale . . . an absorbing, carefully told mystery with plenty of surprises.”—Los Angeles Times “Dirk Pitt is a combination James Bond and Jacques Cousteau.”—New York Daily News

Lanterna Rally - Theme by Grace Themes