David Syrett – författare

The Seven Years War was the most successful in British History, with naval supremacy triumphantly asserted over France and Spain, and a vast new overseas empire conquered. This is the story of the British shipping that carried, supplied and sustained the British expeditions that shattered French and Spanish imperial power in America.Solidly based on primary sources, the book shows that the tide of victories would have been impossible without a sophisticated and highly effective logistical support operation which got the troops, provisions and munitions to where they were needed and then maintained British armed forces in and off the coasts of Europe and throughout the world.

Showing the complex interaction of strategy, logistics, administration, and economics, Syrett’s pioneering text brings to light some basic causes for the ultimate failure of the British war effort during the American War of Independence. This war effort was fatally compromised by the British need to support a great army and a large naval force in the western hemisphere while at the same time facing a coalition of maritime powers on the European continent.

Showing the complex interaction of strategy, logistics, administration, and economics, Syrett''s pioneering text brings to light some basic causes for the ultimate failure of the British war effort during the American War of Independence. This war effort was fatally compromised by the British need to support a great army and a large naval force in the western hemisphere while at the same time facing a coalition of maritime powers on the European continent.

During the American Revolutionary War, Great Britain's Royal Navy faced foes that included, in addition to American forces, the navies of France, Spain and the Netherlands. In this operational history of a period that proved to be a turning point for one of the world's great naval powers, David Syrett presents a saga of battles, blockades, great fleet cruises and, above all, failures and lost opportunities. He explains that the British government severely underestimated the Americans' maritime strength and how that error led to devastating consequences. The seemingly invincible navy failed to muster even one decisive victory during the extensive naval conflict. Noting the complex reasons for British failure in European waters, Syrett lays primary blame at the feet of Britain's political leadership. He describes how Lord North, the first lord of the Treasury and head of government, abdicated control of Britain's military to individual members of the cabinet. Syrett suggests that constant vacillations in policy and strategy, which resulted from power shifts among the cabinet ministers, prevented North's government from formulating a comprehensive wartime strategy or providing the Royal navy with the strategic guidance to launch a successful campaign. Syrett concludes that Britain's inability to gain naval superiority in European waters had a profound effect on the outcome of the American Revolutionary War. He demonstrates how the Royal Navy's failure to hunt down and destroy American blockade runners allowed Yankee rebels easy access to European arms and munitions. He also shows that the inability of the British to defeat French and Spanish naval power off the Continent gave Bourbon monarchies the means to aid American naval forces and to conduct naval operations against the British in such areas as the West Indies and the Indian Ocean.

The Defeat of the German U-Boats explains the significance and the outcome of World War II's most important naval campaign in the European theater—the air and sea battle that ended Germany's bid to sever Allied supply lines in the Atlantic. David Syrett's comprehensive account offers a detailed analysis of the effort to stop German U-boat attacks on Allied merchant vessels, which by 1943 ranked as the Allies' top priority in their strategy to defeat Hitler's forces. Syrett argues that the Germans were unable to match Allied communication, technological, and tactical advances and that the Allies prevailed largely because of their skill in utilizing the material and intelligence resources at their disposal. Beginning with a detailed description of the U-boat, Syrett discusses the weaponry developed by the Allies to stop this destructive craft. He uses intelligence information—released decades after the war—to plot the progression of each Allied convoy, German U-boat assault, and Allied response. Crediting the Allied victory with keeping Britain in the war and making possible the 1944 invasion of northwest Europe, Syrett emphasizes the Battle of the Atlantic's pivotal role in determining the war's outcome.

Made up of members of the Coldstream and Scots Guards, British Yeomanry cavalry regiments, New Zealanders, South Africans, and Indian Army men, the Long Range Desert Group was perhaps the most effective of all the "special forces" established by the Allies during the Second World War. It was able to go thousands of miles into enemy territory, well-armed and carrying its own supplies of petrol, food and even water to last for weeks at a time - something quite new in military history.Using experience acquired in WWI and inter-war exploration travels, the LRDG thus developed the ability to appear almost anywhere in the desert to carry out almost every type of ground reconnaissance mission possible in desert warfare, exploring and mapping the terrain, transporting agents behind enemy lines or determining the strength and location of enemy forces with an extraordinary degree of accuracy and detail and thus able to verify or hide Ultra intelligence. Equally important were their skills in the art of desert navigation, demonstrated in the outflanking of the enemy during the Allied advance from El Alamein westward to Tunisia, as led by the LRDG. Once it had teamed up with the Special Air Service (SAS), made up of British, Free French, Commonwealth and Jewish Palestinian soldiers, the LRDG perfected the art of irregular mechanized warfare conducted in the rear of the enemy's forces in the desert, attacking enemy installations of all kinds, mining roads, raiding airfields, destroying enemy aircraft on the ground and inflicting losses upon the enemy in inverse proportion to their own remarkably low rate of casualties. Through meticulous research in original archival material, this book thus tells the extraordinary story of how a relatively small number of dedicated men developed the methods and techniques for crossing by motor vehicle the depths of the then unmapped and seemingly impassable great deserts of Egypt and Libya, the Western Desert, during the British Army's North African Campaign of 1940-43. The Long Range Desert Group and the Special Air Service as a matter of course did extraordinary things - the heroic was the commonplace. Their tactics, techniques and remarkable success in desert warfare continue to make them of great interest to the student of military affairs. Likewise, as it seeks to answer how the deep desert can best be used for military purposes, this study is pertinent to today's military operations, perhaps more so than at any time since World War II. "…this study provides fresh insights into the nature of desert warfare, past, present and future… [and] reveals the peculiarities of this warfare often lost to modern armies… a virtual primer, useful to commanders and soldiers alike. At long last this book can find its rightful place in the classroom of military courses and colleges and in the hands of those interested in the intricacies, complexities and problems of military operations in desert regions". From the Foreword to the book by Colonel (Retired) David M. Glantz.EPUB3: Reflowable

Overbearing, avaricious and difficult, yet talented and ambitious, George Brydges Rodney was an original thinker and one of the great admirals of the eighteenth century. The contents of this volume, the first of three, document his career from 1742 until 1763, touching on both his private and political life.

This title was first published in 2002. This book contains the U-boats situations and trends written by the staff of the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre during the Second World War. Based largely on communications intelligence, the U-boat situations and trends were designed to inform a small number of senior officers and high officials of the latest events and developments in the Allied war against the U-boats. The Battle of the Atlantic and the war against the U-boats was the longest and the most complex naval battle in history. In this huge conflict which sprawled across the oceans of the world the U-boats sank 2,828 Allied merchant ships while the Allies destroyed more than 780 German U-boats. These documents relate on a weekly, and in some cases a daily, basis exactly what the Allies knew concerning the activities of the U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic.