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Title: The Submarine Pioneers by Richard Compton-Hall ISBN: 0750921544 Publisher: Sutton Publishing Pub. Date: February, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.95

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Average Customer Rating: 1.5

Rating: 1
Summary: English Misinformation on Submarine Pioneers
Comment: I read between 2 and 6 books a month. In the last ten years I have read four or five history books by English authors that have been bombastic propaganda and utter fiction. This seams to be a curse that many English authors are afflicted with. They portray England as the only place which has ever done anything right, falsify historical facts, and endlessly degrade all other people and nationalities. This book is by far and away the worst of that lot.
The book starts out with the launching of HM Torpedo Boat No. 1 in 1901. The acceptance of Submarines by the Royal Navy, clearly is the only logical start to the history of Submarines. Sketches of other possible ENGLISH submarine ideas prior to this, (that were never built or tired) are referred to as the only RELEVENT predecessors to this event. Chapters after chapter is then spent on denigrating all non British submarine pioneers. Numerous submarine pioneers are simply ignored as if they simply didn't exist. The American Revolutionary War Submarine Turtle is dismissed as a propaganda ploy by the Colonials. The only argument for this appears to be that the Bushnell brothers were not experienced ship carpenters, and thus couldn't have built a wooden submarine. In another chapter Robert Fulton and the Nautilus are dismissed as a failed Scottish-Irish farmer turned con man, who tried to sell useless, submarines and torpedoes to the English and French. It is clearly implied that any Englishman must know that someone who is 'Scottish-Irish' couldn't succeed, only English Aristocrats could do anything correctly.
I haven't read anything quite like this book since I read a publication from the 'Flat Earth' society on how the earth really was flat, and the entire space program was a faked in a Hollywood studio.
The problem with the book is the occasional kernel of valid information contained in the vast outpouring of misinformation. Reading the book reminds me of a crow searching through hog dung to find the occasional kernel of corn that managed to pass the pigs digestion (author's mind) and emerge intact in the vast pile of excrement.There is an occasional bit of information from his extensive research that escaped his mental composting. Otherwise this book rates no stars at all.
I bought this book used for 5% of their list price through Amazon. It was in New condition, and still stiff in the back hald. The last buyer apparently hadn't even opened the book past the first couple of chapters. I plan to sell it as used in the same condition. Maybe you can be the third person to read only the first couple of chapters of this copy of the book and discard it.
The only English History authors who I have found to consistently avoid this British bias and denigration of all other nationalities are B.H. Liddel Hart and J.F.C. Fuller. I have found virtually ALL of the British naval authors addicted to glorifying the British Navy, degenerating everyone else, and omitting any mention of less than perfect British performance.

Rating: 2
Summary: My opinion about this book
Comment: I believe that many british naval historians think that the history of the Royal Navy and its ships is the only chapter of the world's naval history which deserves to be analyzed and written. This book is an excellent example.It deals with some of the first submersible ships. The submarines described are mainly british or those built by other countries considered potential challengers of the British Empire. The rest are dismissed with little more than a few words or simply ignored. Even then, the best descriptions are mostly anecdotical, so you can find in this book descriptions of the bedroom behavior of members of the british royal family or George Washington's dental prostheses. If you are really interested in serious books about submarines you will find several of them in this excellent website. This is definitely not one of them.