Dwight R. Messimer Livres

World War I was the crucible of antisubmarine warfare (ASW), and the years of trial and error between 1914 and 1918 gave rise to the weapons and tactics used by today's ASW forces. With this study, military historian Dwight Messimer examines the weapons, tactics, and organization used by all the belligerents during the war and provides some surprising findings. Because he draws heavily from personal accounts as well as from official records, his book will appeal to both serious readers seeking hard facts and to general readers who like stories about war at sea. Messimer tells the story from both sides. German survivors who escaped from sunken U-boats explain what it was like to face the newly developed ASW weapons beneath the surface, and pilots tell what it was like from above. The author describes the German's well-organized and efficient ASW organization in the Baltic and the Helgoland Bight. He also discusses the weapons developed during the war that proved to be largely ineffective or outright failures. While his evaluations of the contributions made by aircraft and Q-ships put them in the category of only marginally effective, his analysis of the effectiveness of politics deems that ASW "weapon" the most effective of all. Solidly grounded in the best primary sources available in England, the United States, and Germany, this book is the first to address the ASW of all World War I belligerents.

On July 26, 1918, American aviator First Lt. George Puryear shot down a German observation plane and then, in an act of bravado, landed to accept the crew's surrender. In fact, by miscalculation he had landed inside the German lines, and it was the Germans who accepted his surrender. But Puryear redeemed himself ten weeks later when he led a mass escape from the prison camp at Villingen, Germany.Once he was out of prison and safely in the Black Forest, Puryear “went to a prearranged spot where we were to meet and waited fifteen minutes. While I waited there were about fifty shots fired. No one came, so I got down on my knees, prayed for luck and started off.” Five days later he reached Switzerland, the first American officer to escape from the Germans and return to his unit during World War I. Early the following morning Edouard Isaacs and Harold Willis made the hazardous crossing of the Rhine River to freedom.

Dwight Messimer is a U.S. Army veteran and a former Lecturer in History at the California State University at San Jose. His interests are U.S. Naval Aviation, 1911-42 and World War One with an emphasis on Allied POWs, escapes, and Anti-Submarine Warfare. He is fluent and literate in German. He and his wife live in Northern California.