Great Escapes

Barbara A Bond • £25
Times/HarperCollins

This is a definitive history of the intelligence service MI9’s emergency escape and evasion mapping programme and the contribution the maps made to victory in 1945. It includes fascinating stories of secret maps used by prisoners in World War Two.

The creation of MI9 in December 1939, the rationale for the new military intelligence branch and the context of the history of military mapping on silk is outlined. The map production programme is described, together with its progress and the challenges faced. The various groups of maps are identified and described, together with the source maps on which they were based.

The ingenious methods of smuggling the maps into the camps, with other escape aids, in apparently innocuous leisure items are also covered. These maps were then copied and reproduced to support the escapes. Coded correspondence with the camps is discussed, and a successful deciphering of some of that correspondence is provided. The implications for the escape and evasion programme were considerable.

10 Greatest Ships of the Royal Navy

John Ballard • £15.99
Amberley Books

For more than 150 years it was the world’s most powerful force: between victory at Trafalgar in 1805 and the withdrawal from ‘east of Suez’ in the 1960s, the ships of the Royal Navy were ubiquitous. From Newfoundland to New South Wales and Cyprus to Ceylon, the Royal Navy was there, protecting British interests, projecting British power and maintaining British prestige. An Act of Parliament laid down that the Royal Navy had to maintain a number of battleships at least equal to the combined strength of the next two largest navies in the world and in addition to this, shipyards up and down the land were sending the most technologically advanced vessels of the age down their slipways.

In this readable and informative book, John Ballard tells the story of ten of the most significant ships in the Royal Navy, from HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, to HMS Invincible, the key ship of the Falklands War. In between there are the stories of a variety of ships that encompass the era of the Royal Navy’s global pre-eminence and Pax Britannica, two world wars, the Cold War and the complex post-Cold War era.

Great Passenger Ships 1930-40

William H Miller • £19.99
The History Press

The 1930s was perhaps the most glamorous and exciting decade for the great liners, highlighted by ferocious international shipbuilding rivalry: Germany’s Bremen and Europa, Italy’s Rex and Conte Di Savoia, France’s Normandie and Britain’s Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. Passengers travelled on some of the most popular liners of all time, such as L’Atlantique, Empress of Britain, Empress of Japan, Queen of Bermuda, President Coolidge, Strathnaver and Strathaird, Orion, Capetown Castle, Oranje, Mauretania, Andes, all explored here. Despite the worldwide Depression and a great shift in trading patterns, it was a wonderful decade for shipbuilding and the era of art deco on the high seas.

Captain Cook’s Merchant Ships

Stephen Baines • £16.99
The History Press

While the story of Endeavour is widely known, Captain Cook sailed with eight ships, which began their lives as merchant vessels. This detailed illustrated history tells the story of these vessels and the people who sailed in them. In placing these ships and people in the personal, political, social, financial, scientific and religious contexts of their times, this book provides a comprehensive and readable account of the ‘long 18th century’. Using contemporary sources, this gripping narrative fills a gap in Cook history and attempts to catch something of the exciting, violent, gossipy but largely untaught and unknown period through which these vessels and their people sailed literally and figuratively between the old world and the new.