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‘The Rodney Papers, Selections from the Correspondence of Admiral Lord Rodney, Volume II, 1763–1780'. Edited by David Syrett. This is the second of two volumes of a planned three-volume edition of Admiral Lord Rodney's correspondence edited by Professor David Syrett, Distinguished Professor of History at Queen's College, City University of New York, and published after his untimely death in 2004. It covers Rodney's life from the end of the Seven Years'War in 1763 until the completion of his 1780 campaign in the West Indies and highlights the extraordinary contrasts in the admiral's complex personality, on the one hand the consummate professional fighting tactician and strategist, on the other the dissolute, overbearing, avaricious, and uncongenial wastrel. The first part of this second volume covers the 16 years which followed Rodney's return from the West Indies in 1763 during which he managed lose the entire fortune he had accumulated during his earlier career. A three year appointment as commander in chief in Jamaica, far from improving his finances, made matters worse as the Navy Board withheld his pay against excessive expenditure. On his return he fled to France to escape his creditors and stayed there until 1778, despite repeated efforts to gain a command following the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. The second part deals with just a single year from March 1779 to March 1780 and reveals what might be called the other Admiral Rodney. With the Royal Navy having performed disappointingly since the outbreak of the war and with France having joined the conflict, Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, turned in desperation to Rodney as an admiral who could win battles. Appointed commander-in-chief of the squadron in the Leeward Islands, he was given the task of relieving Gibraltar and resupplying the British base at Minorca on the way to his new command. To that end, he left England on Christmas Day 1799 with a squadron of 21 ships of the line and a convoy of 55 transports and store ships. Despite having to protect his own convoy, in the nine days between 8 and 17 January 1790 he took an entire Spanish convoy of 15 merchant vessels together with a ship of the line and six smaller escorts and then, in the Moonlight Battle, defeated a Spanish fleet of 11 ships of the line, destroying one and capturing five. The final part covers just five months from Rodney's arrival in the West Indies in March 1790 to his departure for New York the following August. In that time he fought a series of actions against superior French forces which, though inconclusive, nevertheless were of immense strategic importance in frustrating French and Spanish threats to British possessions. Perhaps most significantly, Rodney believed that, because the failure of some of his captains to obey his orders, the engagement off Martinique on 17 April was one of the great lost opportunities of the American War. The planned third volume of ‘The Rodney Papers'remains to be prepared and published.

Contains the weekly series U-boat Situation and the more intermittent bulletin U-boat Trends, written during World War II by Rear Admiral J.W. Clayton and Commander Rodger Winn.These documents relate on a weekly and, in some cases, daily basis, exactly what the British knew concerning the activities of the German U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic. Circulation was restricted at the Admiralty to the First Lord, the First Sea Lord and perhaps five or six others while at Western Approaches Command and RAF Coastal Command, only the commanders-in-chief and three staff officers at each headquarters were even aware of the existence of U-boat decryption intelligence. U-Boat Situation was a weekly series showing the worldwide deployment of German U-boats and giving a general account of their activities and those of the Allied anti-U-boat forces. The U-Boat Trends bulletins, on the other hand, were issued on an irregular basis as the situation demanded and were designed to keep readers abreast of the latest technological developments and strategic and tactical trends. The first U-Boat Situation appeared on 15 December 1941 and publication continued on a weekly basis from 5 January 1942 until the end of the war. U-Boat Trends began publication on 2 November 1942 with special supplements produced as and when events warranted. Initially Rear Admiral Clayton, who had been recalled from retirement before the outbreak of the war to become head of the Operational Intelligence Centre within the Naval Intelligence Division, was the author of both publications. However on 8 August 1943 Commander Winn, a peacetime barrister who had been made head of the Submarine Tracking Room in 1940, took over writing U-Boat Situations while Clayton continued with U-Boat Trends. Taken together, U-Boat Situation and U-Boat Trends, which were based on decryption and other largely signals derived intelligence and were written by two men at the centre of the Allied intelligence effort against the U-boats, are pivotal to understanding how the Battle of the Atlantic was fought and its eventual outcome. They not only provide an'insider's'history of the conflict, but also show with exceptional clarity what the Allies knew at any given time. While it is difficult, because of the extreme secrecy surrounding U-boat decryption intelligence, to reconstruct Allied decision-making, it is incontrovertible that the communications intelligence represented by these two publications gave the Allies a huge advantage over the U-boats.