Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very Good. No Jacket. Book. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. Pages are clean and unmarked. The cover corners and edges are unmarred. The binding is tight. 186pp.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Fair. Connecting readers with great books since 1972. Used textbooks may not include companion materials such as access codes, etc. May have condition issues including wear and notes/highlighting. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very Good in Good jacket. Format is approximately 5.75 inches by 8 inches. x, [6], 170, [4] pages. Maps. Illustrations. DJ worn, stained and soiled. Includes Preface; The Challenge; The Challenge Met; The Passage; The Attack; Aftermath; and Index. Includes 11 illustrations between pages 142 and 143, as well as two Black and White maps (Attack on the Tirpitz, and Tirpitz Berth). An account of a secret World War II mission unparalleled in the annals of the sea. Thomas Gallagher's account of the gallant and almost unbelievable expedition of British midget submarines to attack and disable the German battleship Tirpitz is one of the great stories to come out of World War II. The Tirpitz was the mightiest naval vessel in all of Europe. When the Germans slipped her into the fjords of occupied Norway in January 1942, she became an overwhelming menace to Allied shipping. Her presence made it impossible for British battleships and aircraft carriers needed in the Pacific to get there. All attempts to destroy her had failed. Churchill and many others felt that she was one of the two or three most crucial problems of the war. Churchill demanded a new weapon. The result was the British X-craft, or midget submarine, and a secret mission against the battleship that was a thousand times the X-craft's size. Gallagher gives the story an unremitting tension, and his material remains fascinating down to the postscripts. This book is at once a mystery and a social document. Readers will be impressed with this coldly surgical dissection of human frailty and the breakdown of human values when leadership fails in a crisis. Thomas Gallagher (1918-1992) was a widely published journalist and the author of eight books, including The Gathering Darkness (1952), which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Fire at Sea: The Story of the Morro Castle (1959), which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for nonfiction. Thomas Gallagher was a writer whose painstaking research informed nonfiction on great disasters and military heroism and novels that probed the lost lives of bumbling, self-destructive people. Mr. Gallagher was born in Manhattan in 1918. After graduating from Columbia College in 1941, he served in Iran during World War II as a civilian attached to the Army Corps of Engineers. He then shipped out as a seaman on freighters with the merchant marine, where he began to write. His well-received first novel, "The Gathering Darkness" (Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), traced the disintegration of a New York family after it lost its fortune in the stock market crash of 1929. Although he continued to write novels, Mr. Gallagher also turned to nonfiction, producing "The X-Craft Raid" and "Fire at Sea" (Rhinehart & Company, 1959), an investigation of the 1934 fire that destroyed the luxury liner Morro Castle off the New Jersey coast. Mr. Gallagher concluded that rather than being an accident, the fire was set by the ship's sociopathic radio officer. The book won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for nonfiction. Mr. Gallagher's last novel, "Paddy's Lament" (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), dealt with the Irish potato famine. Derived from a Kirkus review: Churchill glumly called it "the beast" and declared that "the entire naval situation throughout the world would be altered" if it were sunk or crippled; the 43, 000-ton battleship Tirpitz, kept at anchor in a Norwegian fjord, paralyzed the Royal Navy in the North Atlantic. Gallagher has reconstructed the improbable story of how a small band of highly selected British naval officers in "ugly ducklings"--specially designed midget submarines--carried out the unenviable job of destroying the monster. He has poured through logs, diaries and intelligence reports and interviewed British, German and Norwegian survivors of the nautical David and Goliath encounter and he conveys the perils of the actual raid with mounting excitement. The X-craft (six were eventually launched) was a marvel of British ingenuity; above water it was propelled...
"The X-Craft Raid" is a well-written account of a dangerous raid on a sister ship to the Bismark called the Tirpitz . Larger than all other battleships at the time, the Bismark and Tirpitz had longer range guns and heavier armor, making them extremely difficult to get near enough to sink. The necessity and effort to sink the Bismark has been well documented, and "The X-Craft Raid" reveals the extraordinary depths to which the English navy went to rid the northern waters of this monstrous, heavily protected battleship Tirpitz. Her position in the fiords of the Barents sea made it impossible for English supply ships to reach Russian ports where war materials were badly needed in the fight agains Hitler's war machine. The only possibility of getting enough explosives close enough to the Tirpitz to damage or sink her was to use mini-subs with frogmen aboard to cut through the torpedo nets that surrounded the heavily guarded ship. The difficulty of the training and de-bugging of a totally new vessel took the lives of several English sailors even before the raid was underway, I recommend this as one of the best accounts of the extreme effort that war can demand, and of the courage and tenacity of the English sailors of World War II. Once you start it, you won't put it down.