The Men of the Merchant Service PDF Download

Author: Frank Thomas Bullen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Merchant marine
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Author: William Geroux
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698184726
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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“Vividly drawn and emotionally gripping." —Daniel James Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat From the author of The Ghost Ships of Archangel, one of the last unheralded heroic stories of World War II: the U-boat assault off the American coast against the men of the U.S. Merchant Marine who were supplying the European war, and one community’s monumental contribution to that effort Mathews County, Virginia, is a remote outpost on the Chesapeake Bay with little to offer except unspoiled scenery—but it sent an unusually large concentration of sea captains to fight in World War II. The Mathews Men tells that heroic story through the experiences of one extraordinary family whose seven sons (and their neighbors), U.S. merchant mariners all, suddenly found themselves squarely in the cross-hairs of the U-boats bearing down on the coastal United States in 1942. From the late 1930s to 1945, virtually all the fuel, food and munitions that sustained the Allies in Europe traveled not via the Navy but in merchant ships. After Pearl Harbor, those unprotected ships instantly became the U-boats’ prime targets. And they were easy targets—the Navy lacked the inclination or resources to defend them until the beginning of 1943. Hitler was determined that his U-boats should sink every American ship they could find, sometimes within sight of tourist beaches, and to kill as many mariners as possible, in order to frighten their shipmates into staying ashore. As the war progressed, men from Mathews sailed the North and South Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and even the icy Barents Sea in the Arctic Circle, where they braved the dreaded Murmansk Run. Through their experiences we have eyewitnesses to every danger zone, in every kind of ship. Some died horrific deaths. Others fought to survive torpedo explosions, flaming oil slicks, storms, shark attacks, mine blasts, and harrowing lifeboat odysseys—only to ship out again on the next boat as soon as they'd returned to safety. The Mathews Men shows us the war far beyond traditional battlefields—often the U.S. merchant mariners’ life-and-death struggles took place just off the U.S. coast—but also takes us to the landing beaches at D-Day and to the Pacific. “When final victory is ours,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower had predicted, “there is no organization that will share its credit more deservedly than the Merchant Marine.” Here, finally, is the heroic story of those merchant seamen, recast as the human story of the men from Mathews.

Author: Joseph Wechsberg
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486781186
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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This fascinating chronicle of the world's great financial families offers candid profiles of the personalities behind seven legendary banking houses: Hambros, which now survives in name only; Barings, the oldest British banking dynasty; the Rothschilds, who amassed the largest private fortune in modern history; the Warburgs, a German dynasty of Venetian origin dating from the sixteenth century; the venerable Hermann Josef Abs, long-time chairman of Deutsche Bank; Lehman Brothers, formerly the oldest continuing partnership in American investing; and the eccentric and culturally savant financier Raffaele Mattioli, who headed Banca Commerciale Italiana. Focusing on figures of late-nineteenth-century London, this chronicle marks the distinctions between the cloistered Old World aristocracy and the rise of the high-stakes investors of Wall Street. Written by a longtime correspondent for the New Yorker, this fascinating account of daring financial adventures and their merchant banker orchestrators provides a wealth of context for understanding the evolution of modern investment banking. A new Foreword has been written specially for this edition by Christopher Kobrak, Wilson/Currie Chair of Canadian Business and Financial History at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Dover (2014) republication of the edition originally published by Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1966. See every Dover book in print at www.doverpublications.com

Author: Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 692

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Author: Robert Bennet Forbes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Merchant mariners
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Author: Jeffery Dennis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Author: Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bills, Legislative
Languages : en
Pages : 774

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Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military art and science
Languages : en
Pages : 854

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Author: Royal United Service Institution
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 856

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Author: Alston Kennerley
Publisher: Seaforth Publishing
ISBN: 139907430X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Frank Bullen burst on the national and international popular literary scene at the end of the nineteenth century like a supernova which shone for the first decade or so of the next century and then was gone. But the memory of that brilliance lasts, like his fictional whaling epic, The Cruise of the Cachalot, into the present; this is a book still in print in any number of editions. Bullen’s Voyages is a long overdue tribute to that memory, focusing on the sea career which is so prominent in his writing. Of the era of his youth he wrote that ‘those were the days when boys in Geordie colliers or East Coast fishing smacks were often beaten to insanity and jumped overboard, or were done to death in truly savage fashion, and all that was necessary to account for their non-returning was a line in the log to the effect that they had been washed or had fallen overboard’. It was a brutal world, and a close examination of maritime records shows that the bullying, two shipwrecks and the tropical illnesses he describes so vividly, really occurred before he was even fifteen; and those were just the start. Hardly a voyage passes without similar dramatic episodes. But disentangling truth from fiction is not always easy. At one level The Cruise of the Cachalot is undoubtedly fiction, and there are unanswered questions about his young life as a ‘street arab’, as he once described himself. Yet Rudyard Kipling could write in 1898 of Cachalot ‘it is immense… I’ve never read anything that equals it… such real and new sea pictures’. Though Bullen conceals the names of several of his ships, this new biography reveals their real identities, while the author carefully distinguishes the fact and the fiction through his sea-going career. Bullen, who wrote more than thirty books, is second to none in his remarkable writing about the days of sail and the lives of merchant seafarers. A literary commentator writing in 1917, two years after his death, asserted: ‘Perhaps no writer has ever written so graphically or so sympathetically of the trials and dangers incurred by our merchant sailors than Frank Bullen, and his books today are a living witness to the courage and loyalty of our mercantile marine’. This elegant and highly readable biography is the first to describe his extraordinary life, and Bullen’s own vivid writing colors every page.