The World’s Great Submarines

The submarine has revolutionised naval warfare. These vessels, which wage war beneath the waves, have progressed from the crude, steam-driven craft of the American Civil War to silent nuclear submarines which can cruise for months underwater without surfacing, and which carry intercontinental missiles mounting multiple nuclear warheads. The World’s Great Submarines traces the history of these vessels, such as those invented by David Bushnell in the late eighteenth century. ‘Bushnell’s Turtles’ were egg-shaped, hand-propelled and largely ineffective, but were a foretaste of things to come.

It was in World War I that the submarine proved itself to be a potentially war-winning weapon. The World’s Great Submarines charts the grim battle of attrition which was waged under the waves by German U-boats and Allied submarines alike. Read about U.9, commanded by Otto Weddigen, which sank three British cruisers at the beginning of the war. The campaign waged by Germany nearly brought Britain to her knees and nearly won the war as the U-boats inflicted terrible damage on the Allied merchant marine. The World’s Great Submarines tells the full story of this campaign, as well as the Allied attempts to counter this threat, and the advances made during the war in submarine design and weaponry and anti-submarine warfare.

The World’s Great Submarines then moves on to World War II, when Germany, Britain and America had submarine fleets battling beneath the waves. It describes the great U-boat aces, such as Günther Prien and Otto Kretschmer, the British X-craft which sunk the Tirpitz and the remarkably successful American submarine campaign against Japan in the Pacific. In the post-war world, submarine development made great strides as NATO and the Warsaw Pact squared up to each other for a possible nuclear confrontation. The World’s Great Submarines recounts the submarines of the Cold War era, such as American Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine. The 1970s and 1980s saw even larger submarines being launched, such as the American ‘Los Angeles’ class and the Russian ‘Typhoon’ class. The World’s Great Submarines contains full-colour artworks, many of them cutaways, of the most important submarines in naval history, with each artwork accompanied by a full specifications table. The illustrations are complemented by dozens of colour and black-and-white photographs of submarines, making The World’s Great Submarines a superb illustrated history of warfare under the waves.