World War II at Sea: A Global History with Naval Historian Craig Symonds
Press Release · Thursday, May 3, 2018

Washington, DC

Washington, D.C. – On Friday, May 11, at noon, the National Archives presents a special program with Naval historian and author Craig Symonds on his book: World War II at Sea: A Global History. A book signing follows the program.  

The event will be held in the William G. McGowan Theater of the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. and live streamed on YouTube. Attendees should use the Special Events entrance on Constitution Avenue at 7th Street, NW.  This public program is free to the public, but reservations are recommended and can be made online.

Craig L. Symonds ranks among the country’s finest naval historians. He is a noted author, historian, speaker, and a professor emeritus at the United States Naval Academy, where he formerly chaired the History Department. A former Naval officer himself, Symonds has written over a dozen books on American Naval history.  World War II at Sea is his crowning achievement, a narrative of the entire war and all of its belligerents, on all of the world’s oceans and seas between 1939 and 1945.

World War II at Sea offers a global perspective, focusing on the major engagements and personalities and revealing both their scale and their interconnection: the U-boat attack on Scapa Flow and the Battle of the Atlantic; the "miracle" evacuation from Dunkirk and the pitched battles for control of Norway fjords; Mussolini's Regia Marina-at the start of the war the fourth-largest navy in the world-and the dominance of the Kidö Butai and Japanese naval power in the Pacific; Pearl Harbor then Midway; the struggles of the Russian Navy and the scuttling of the French Fleet in Toulon in 1942; the landings in North Africa and then Normandy. Here as well are the notable naval leaders-FDR and Churchill, both self-proclaimed "Navy men," Karl Dönitz, François Darlan, Ernest King, Isoroku Yamamoto, Erich Raeder, Inigo Campioni, Louis Mountbatten, William Halsey, as well as the hundreds of thousands of seamen and officers of all nationalities whose live were imperiled and lost during the greatest naval conflicts in history, from small-scale assaults and amphibious operations to the largest armadas ever assembled.

The National Archives Museum in Washington, DC, is Metro accessible on the Yellow and Green lines, Archives/Navy Memorial station. For upcoming programs, visit the Calendar of Events online: www.archives.gov/calendar.