No one has done more to prevent conflict – no one has made a greater sacrifice for the cause for Peace – than you, America’s proud submarine family. You stand tall among our heroes of the Cold War… Colin Powell

The hunter hunted : submarine versus submarine : encounters from World War I to the present Robert C. Stern London : Chatham, 2007 Hardcover. vi, 248 p., [16] p. of plates : ill., 1 map, 1 port. ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

Submariners like to say that at sea there are only two kinds of vessel: submarines and targets. From their inception submarines have been hunters, and for much of their history they have been extremely difficult to counter, so it was inevitable that attempts would be made to use their hunting qualities against their own kind. This book chronicles some of the most significant of those clashes, from primitive beginnings to the dangerous, high-tech cat-and-mouse games of the Cold War era.

At first submarines were little better than submersible torpedo-boats – and slow, half-blind ones at that – with weapons that could not operate in three-dimensions, so the early encounters occurred with the hunted party on the surface. Even then there were failures, mishaps and ‘friendly fire’ incidents, with mysteries surrounding the fate of some boats that remain unsolved to the present. It was not until 1945, when Venturer sank U864, that a submarine fell prey to another while both were submerged. This is still the only such confirmed sinking, but since 1945 there have been rumours of others, accidental victims of the ‘war by another name’ that characterised the tension between the West and the Soviet Union.

The book concludes by investigating some of those for which evidence has leaked out. With individual chapters devoted to each incident, the book may be read as a series of dramatic narratives, but taken as a whole it amounts to a complete history of the submarine from an unusual and previously neglected angle.

Israel cannot afford to stand against the entire world and be denounced as the aggressor… Moshe Dayan

Foxbats over Dimona : the Soviets’ nuclear gamble in the Six-Day War  Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez  New Haven : Yale University Press, c 2007  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xi, 287 p. : maps ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-273) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez’s groundbreaking history of the Six-Day War in 1967 radically changes our understanding of that conflict, casting it as a crucial arena of Cold War intrigue that has shaped the Middle East to this day. The authors, award-winning Israeli journalists and historians, have investigated newly available documents and testimonies from the former Soviet Union, cross-checked them against Israeli and Western sources, and arrived at fresh and startling conclusions.

Contrary to previous interpretations, Ginor and Remez’s book shows that the Six-Day War was the result of a joint Soviet-Arab gambit to provoke Israel into a preemptive attack. The authors reveal how the Soviets received a secret Israeli message indicating that Israel, despite its official ambiguity, was about to acquire nuclear weapons. Determined to destroy Israel’s nuclear program before it could produce an atomic bomb, the Soviets then began preparing for war – well before Moscow accused Israel of offensive intent, the overt trigger of the crisis.

Ginor and Remez’s startling account details how the Soviet-Arab onslaught was to be unleashed once Israel had been drawn into action and was branded as the aggressor. The Soviets had submarine-based nuclear missiles poised for use against Israel in case it already possessed and tried to use an atomic device, and the USSR prepared and actually began a marine landing on Israel’s shores backed by strategic bombers and fighter squadrons. They sent their most advanced, still-secret aircraft, the MiG-25 Foxbat, on provocative sorties over Israel’s Dimona nuclear complex to prepare the planned attack on it, and to scare Israel into making the first strike. It was only the unpredicted devastation of Israel’s response that narrowly thwarted the Soviet design.

Deep down in his heart the genuine Englishman has a rugged distaste for seeing his country invaded by a foreign army. People were asking themselves by what right these aliens had overrun British soil. An ever-growing feeling of annoyance had begun to lay hold of the nation… P.G. Wodehouse

Voices prophesying war : future wars, 1763-3749  I.F. Clarke  Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1992  Hardcover. Rev. ed. of: Voices prophesying war, 1763-1984. 1966. x, 268 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. [218]-223) and index. Checklist of imaginary wars [in English, French, and German literature], 1763-1990: p. [224]-262. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

In 1918, the American colonists were loyal subjects of the British crown, the British army crushed the Russians at Vienna with a roar of musketry and cavalry charges, the British navy unveiled its secret weapon (fireships), and the British king–after personally leading his men in battle – claimed the title of King of France. Or so went a less-than-accurate prediction from 1763 entitled The Reign of George VI, 1900-1925.  It was the first of a long line of fiction forecasting the shape of wars to come.

In Voices Prophesying War, I.F. Clarke provides a fascinating history of this unusual genre – a strand of fiction that has revealed more about contemporary concerns than the direction of the future. The real surge of fiction about future wars, he writes, took place after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Clarke skillfully evokes the context of fear and political tension that gripped Britain after the German victory as he describes a wave of stories that predicted a foreign conquest of England.

Starting with The Battle of Dorking (an account of a German invasion that was later translated and issued by the Nazis in 1940), forecasts of a future catastrophic war led to an invasion scare and a demand for military reforms. The French, too, fought fictional wars with Germany over Alsace-Lorraine (and occasionally with Britain), taking revenge in print for their humiliating defeat in 1871.

The tense years just before World War I spawned another surge of fiction predicting the next great war, (leading P. G. Wodehouse to publish a hilarious parody, The Swoop! or, How Clarence Saved England, depicting an attack by eight separate enemies on an England so indifferent that the newspapers report the invasion with the cricket scores).

But Clarke shows how the predictions were taken seriously by the public and the military authorities. In 1906, Field Marshal Lord Roberts collaborated on an invasion scare story to promote his campaign for a larger army (and the newspaper that published it had him reroute the invaders, to take them through its strongest markets). Ironically, the most accurate predictions (including a story about unrestricted submarine warfare by Arthur Conan Doyle) were derided as implausible.

Clarke follows the genre though to the present day, looking at how the Cold War shaped speculative war fiction and even science fiction accounts of conflict in the distant future. The end of the Cold War, he notes, has left writers floundering in their search for a believable enemy. No author, he writes, was as remarkably prescient as H.G. Wells, who foresaw atomic bombs as early as 1913. But, as Clarke shows, writers have yet to give up trying to predict the wars to come – offering a window into the fears of the present.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. History is bunk!

As the Second World War drew to a close three politicians with very different agendas gathered to discuss the peace. Churchill, dedicated to preserving the remnants of the British Empire, Roosevelt, dedicated to replacing the old empires with the United Nations and Stalin, dedicated to restoring the Russian Empire into a Soviet one. Of the three only Churchill failed entirely. Roosevelt’s continuation of Wilson’s dream never succeeded at its stated goals but is becoming a nightmare empire of dysfunction in the next century. Stalin’s success was immediate but never complete enough to be lasting and while it still exists, like a death star, it can only destroy – never create. While this book may be a record of the conference – albeit with strong predispositions – it is lacking in its explanations of both cause and effect and fails to show the horror of the consequences of imperialism regardless of its origins or intentions.

Yalta : the price of peace  S.M. Plokhy  New York : Viking, 2010  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xxviii, 451 p., [8] p. of plates : ill., maps ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 409-430) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

In February 1945 Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at Yalta, a resort town on the Black Sea, as their armies converged on Berlin. Each came with sharply different views of what the world should look like after the war. Over the course of eight fateful days they partitioned Germany, approved the most aggressive aerial bombing campaign in history, redrew the borders of Eastern Europe, and created a new international organization to settle future disputes.

Two months later, Roosevelt was dead, Stalin was strengthening his grip on Poland, and Churchill was on the cusp of a humiliating electoral defeat.

For sixty-five years, opinion has been bitterly divided on what they achieved. Did Yalta pave the way to the Cold War? Did an ailing FDR give too much to Stalin? While the accepted verdict on both questions has been, and remains, a resounding YES!, In this book Plokhy draws on newly declassified Soviet documents to sanitize the truth of Yalta and paint an original – if inaccurate – portrait of FDR and Churchill as a wartime leaders.

This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you via a satellite circling in outer space. My message is a simple one: Through this unique means I convey to you and all mankind, America’s wish for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men everywhere… Dwight David Eisenhower

HISTORIC VIEW OF THE VEREIN FUER RAUMSCHIFFAHRT, 1930. LEFT TO RIGHT: RUDOLF NEBEL, FRANZ RITTER, UNKNOWN, KURT HEINISCH, UNKNOWN, HERMANN OBERTH, UNKNOWN, KLAUS RIEDEL, WERNHER VON BRAUN, UNKNOWN, KLAUS RIEDEL HOLDS EARLY VERSION OR MODEL FOR THE MINIMUM ROCKET, ‘MIRAK’.

A ball, a dog, and a monkey : 1957, the space race begins  Michael D’Antonio  New York : Simon & Schuster, 2007  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. 306 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-291) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG   

Photograph shows people walking by a model of Sputnik III at the USSR Exhibition in Sokolniki Park, Moscow, next to the American National Exhibition.

When the Soviet Union launched the first orbital satellite, Sputnik I, Americans panicked. The Soviets had nuclear weapons, the Cold War was underway, and now the USSR had taken the lead in the space race. Members of Congress and the press called for an all-out effort to launch a satellite into orbit. With dire warnings about national security in the news almost every day, the armed services saw space as the new military frontier. But President Eisenhower insisted that the space effort, which relied on military technology, be supervised by civilians so that the space race would be peaceful. Meanwhile, the Soviets put a dog inside the next Sputnik, and Americans grew more worried as the first animal in space whirled around the Earth.

Explorer 1 First U.S. Satellite

Throughout 1958 America went space crazy. UFO sightings spiked. Boys from Brooklyn to Burbank shot model rockets into the air. Space-themed beauty pageants became a national phenomenon. The news media flocked to the launchpads on the swampy Florida coast, and reporters reinvented themselves as space correspondents. And finally the Army’s rocket program succeeded. Determined not to be outdone by the Russians, America’s space scientists launched the first primate into space, a small monkey they nicknamed Old Reliable for his calm demeanor. And then at Christmas time, Eisenhower authorized the launch of a secret satellite with a surprise aboard – President Eisenhower’s Christmas Message.