submarine warfare

American Civilians Defend Against U-Boats

Timothy Gay | Spring 2020

In 1942, over a quarter of a million ordinary citizens volunteered to help defend our country as Nazi submarines terrorized the East Coast and Caribbean waters, sinking fuel tankers and cargo ships with near impunity.

The First Act of Submarine Warfare

Frederic D. O'Brien | September 2001

THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR SUBMARINE

One night in early September, 1776 in New York Harbor, a small vessel called the Turtle made the world’s first submarine attack on a warship. The pilot, Ezra Lee, was a sergeant in the Continental Army.

The ‘Holland’ Surfaces

Richard F. Snow | April/May 1984

The U.S. Navy’s first submarine was scrapped half a century ago. But now we have been given a second chance to visit a boat nobody ever expected to see again.

IN 1930 THE United States Navy’s first submarine was hauled away from the Bronx park where it had long been on display and was knocked into scrap by a salvage company that had paid one hundred dollars for the privilege.

Sea Power Confronts The Twenty-first Century

Nathan Miller | April/May 1983

An Interview With Edward L. Beach, the captain who first took a submarine around the world underwater looks at the U.S. Navy past and present and tells us what we must learn from the Falklands war

Naval power … is the natural defense of the United States,” said John Adams, who more than any other man deserves to be called the father of the American Navy.

Culpable Negligence

Edward L. Beach | December 1980

A SUBMARINE COMMANDER TELLS WHY WE ALMOST LOST THE PACIFIC WAR

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Featured Authors

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.

Catton, Bruce

Bruce Catton (1899 – 1978) was the Founding Editor of American Heritage and arguably the most prolific and popular of all Civil War historians. He wrote an astonishing 167 articles for American Heritage, and won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia. Catton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Gerald Ford, in 1977, the year before his death.