Robert J. Schneller - Böcker

"Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" With those words, David Glasgow Farragut led a fleet of Union warships into Mobile Bay, where he achieved one of the most celebrated victories in American naval history. What separates the good officer from the great one, writes Robert J. Schneller, Jr., is the courage to make difficult decisions in the heat of combat despite personal fear or the awful realization that some men will have to pay in blood.Farragut's personal attributes, such as his sharp intelligence and confidence, and his careful preparations, keen situational awareness, and courage to act boldly at decisive moments produced the Union's most important naval victories and resulted in his appointment as the U.S. Navy's first admiral. These qualities also made Farragut the greatest naval officer, Union or Confederate, of the Civil War and, indeed, the most outstanding U.S. naval officer of the nineteenth century.

Though dismissed from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1861, William Barker Cushing soon rejoined the service and transformed himself from a renowned rabble-rouser into a living legend who embodied the special qualities that the Navy demands of those who undertake its most hazardous and secret tasks. By the end of the Civil War, he had amassed four commendations from the Navy Department and earned the thanks of Congress and President Lincoln. Employing his customary readable style, Robert J. Schneller focuses on Cushing's meteoric naval career and those aspects of his personality that affected it. His concise account of this remarkable man reveals some of the most astonishing combat missions of the American Civil War.

To win glory and power, to be renowned throughout posterity—such was the ambition that fueled John A. Dahlgren's controversial rise to eminence during the Civil War era. While he ranks with the foremost contributors to the American naval tradition and is known as the "father of American naval ordnance", personal conflicts and the lack of major victories at sea nearly obscured his historic legacy. Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance in 1862, Dahlgren was recognized as the top ordnance expert in America and was known around the world. He achieved this reputation largely for inventing the Dahlgren gun, the most powerful and reliable naval cannon of its day and the standard armament on Union warships. But because ordnance work did not yield the glory he so desperately desired, he abandoned the post of bureau chief for a fighting berth. With the help of friend Abraham Lincoln, he took command of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron--only to preside over the Navy's greatest disappointment during the war, the failure to capture Charleston. Drawing on Dahlgren's meticulously kept diaries and records and recently uncovered family papers, author Robert Schneller describes with a biographer's sensitivity and a historian's perspective the admiral's many technical triumphs as well as the plots, duels, intrigues, and betrayals that plagued Dahlgren's life.