America's Sailors in the Great War

Seas, Skies, and Submarines

Lisle A. Rose

344 pages

Published: November 2016

25 illus.

ISBN: 9780826221056

American Military Experience

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Price: $39.95

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About This Book: Honorable Mention, 2016 Lyman Awards, presented by the North American Society for Oceanic History

This book is a thrillingly-written story of naval planes, boats, and submarines during World War I.

When the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, America’s sailors were immediately forced to engage in the utterly new realm of anti-submarine warfare waged on, below and above the seas by a variety of small ships and the new technology of airpower. The U.S. Navy substantially contributed to the safe trans-Atlantic passage of a two million man Army that decisively turned the tide of battle on the Western Front even as its battleship division helped the Royal Navy dominate the North Sea. Thoroughly professionalized, the Navy of 1917–18 laid the foundations for victory at sea twenty-five years later.
Authors and Editors: Lisle A. Rose has worked as a sailor, a professor, a diplomat, and a court-appointed special advocate for at-risk children. He has written more than a dozen books, six of which are published by the University of Missouri Press. Rose holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of California-Berkeley, and lives in Edmonds, Washington.

Full bio: Lisle A. Rose (b. October 23, 1936) is a retired U.S. State Department official, former university teacher and author of 14 books. Following three plus years in the United States Navy as a polar sailor, Rose received his B.A. degree from the University of Illinois in 1961 and his Ph.D in American history from the University of California Berkeley in 1966. Following several teaching positions, he joined the State Department’s Historical Office in 1972 where he spent the next five years editing various compilations in the ongoing series, Foreign Relations of the United States. In 1978, Dr. Rose transferred to the Department’s Bureau of Oceans, International Scientific and Environmental Affairs where he served first as Polar Affairs Officer and then as Advanced Technology Affairs Specialist. During these years, he was a member of the U.S. Delegation to the Third United Nations Conference On the Law of the Sea, and drafted policy initiatives on the Arctic and earth remote sensing. He also lectured on these topics abroad. Rose retired in 1989, relocating to the Seattle area where he has engaged in an active writing and publishing career.
Praise For This Book: “America’s Sailors in the Great War is a fascinating revelation of life on and under the seas, in the pitiless North Atlantic and the waters surrounding the UK. Captain Lisle Rose makes clear that the success in moving massive quantities of war material, sustaining supplies, and millions of American troops to the fray resides in large measure on the extraordinary performance of seamen and ships, which did the grudging and hazardous convoy duty.”—Admiral Tom Hayward, (retired) USN Former Chief of Naval Operations

“In recounting the U.S. Navy’s roles in World War I, Rose makes clear that the Americans were an important component to the ultimate victory, and that the experience laid the keel for the great Navy that would fight and win the next war where the stakes were even higher. Truly a vicariously edifying experience!”—Thomas J. Cutler, U.S. Naval Institute, U.S. Naval War College, author of A Sailor’s History of the U.S. Navy

“The author tells the story of how the U.S. Navy successfully re-invented itself from a navy built around a blue water battle fleet to a force whose main mission was antisubmarine warfare. Woven within this larger story are tales of sailors committed to the land and air battle on the Western Front.”—The Journal of America’s Military Past

“Rose ‘gets it right,’ correctly including chasers in the account while avoiding hyperbole and not repeating the undocumented claims of earlier works.”—Subchaser Archives Notes

“Conveys the unforgiving conditions of the North Atlantic to the reader as the sailors knew them. The author describes how World War I prepared the Navy for what it would have to do a generation later in World War II.”—Military Heritage

“Rose touches on many subjects often overlooked, such as the lack of a credible naval air arm or the role of the Naval Militia in the mobilization of the fleet and describes how the service grew and adapted to make a vital contribution to the Allied cause. But he also does not hesitate to point out the limitations of the U.S. Navy, which had an unbalanced fleet and little understanding of the problems of the war at sea.”—The NYMAS Review

“Achieves its aims of describing U.S. efforts in 1917-18 and evaluating their performance, which was generally superb.”—Proceedings, a publication of the US Naval Institute

"An excellent introduction to the men and machines that so heroically completed the missions assigned to them." –The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord