I’m looking for some good technical military naval fiction novels, along the lines of David Poyer’s Dan Lenson series and John (J.) Gobbell’s Todd Ingram series.
I’ve read Tom Clancy, Robin White, Joe Buff, a bit of Stephen Coonts, a bit of Dale Brown. Not bad, but a bit too superficial with the technical details and/or gritty details of naval ship operation. I find both Poyer and Gobbell convey the complexity of ship operation, and other stuff like how little sleep the crew gets. Not that I know actually how anything is; sounds realistic to me
I’m looking for more along these lines.
Has anyone read the Dark Pacific series from David E. Meadows? Is it any good?
I’m not familiar with the work of Poyer and Gobbell, buy if you like technical naval fiction, I’d recommend the ultimate classic submarine novel Run Silent, Run Deep, but distinguished submariner Capt. Edward L. Beach Jr. Its sequels Dust on the Sea and Cold is the Sea are quite good as well. If you’re interested in well plotted non-fiction as well, I also recommend Beach’s Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton, his account of taking the new nuclear submarine he commanded for a little shakedown cruise, the first undersea circumnavigation amidst the height of cold war tensions.
Choosers of the Slain by James H. Cobb is a fun, generally plausible tale of a high-tech U.S. Navy destroyer in the near future. There have been some sequels, but they’re not quite as good.
Maybe not technical enough for you, but The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat is a wonderful, deeply affecting book about a Royal Navy corvette on convoy duty during WW2. Anyone who loves naval fiction should read it - it’s a classic, and rightly so.
One of the newly great works of Naval history (with lots of tech & specs) is Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. It’s non-fiction, but it flows through the whole story like fiction. A scrappy flotilla of Destroyer Escorters and Carrier Escorts off the Philippines in 1994 just happens to run into the largest Japanese fleet (at that point in the war). Burnination follows. But on the Japanese. The Battle of Samar was one of Naval histories great upsets, but is little known. It’s a cool book, and like I said, has lots of info on the different types of ships and tactics daily life of a Sailor, if you’re looking for something historical.
Nitpick: 1944 was when Taffy 3’s famous stand took place. By 1994 the US Navy and the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force were on relatively friendly terms.
