Your Navy

Naval History Through World War II

Introduction by Kirt Blattenberger

In August of 1944, my father-in-law, Marlet Goodwin, enlisted in the Merchant Marines and spent two years working in the "belly of the beast" in the engine rooms of the ships on which he sailed. He recently passed on to me some of the training manuals that he received while in the Merchant Marines and later while in the Naval Reserves. Some of the information contained in those manuals are amazingly detailed - both for mechanical and electrical systems. Since the basics have not changed much over the past 70 years, I thought it might be useful to make some of the content available here.

Copyright

Government publications are considered to be in the public domain, and may be freely redistributed so long as credit is given*. Accordingly, I have undertaken the task of scanning and publishing the content of the Your Navy course here. Other manuals will be added as time permits. The time consumed in doing so is extensive. Each page was scanned once to do an optical character recognition (OCR) processing on it, and then again to obtain the images (OCR tries to interpret images as text and makes a real mess there). Although anyone may freely copy a government publication, no one may copy my version of the publication of it. If you want to publish content from the manuals, you must scan your own images and create your own duplicate text. However, I welcome anyone to print out these complete pages for use in self-study, or even as part of a classroom course - just be sure to give proper credit.

Here is the "Your Navy" - Naval History Through World War II (NAVPERS 10600) in its entirety (or will be eventually). It should be one of the best resources for people seeking an unrevised version of naval history up through the end of World War II.

* Relevant excerpt from the www.cendi.gov website.

Frequently Asked Questions About Copyright Issues Affecting
 the U.S. Government CENDI/2004-8 Updated March 2007

2.2.4 What is public domain? Public domain refers to works that are not protected by copyright and are publicly available. They may be used by anyone, anywhere, anytime without permission, license or royalty payment.

A work may enter the public domain because the term of copyright protection has expired (see FAQ Section 2.1.6), because copyright has been abandoned, or in the U.S. because it is a U.S. Government work and there is no other statutory basis for the Government to restrict its access (see FAQ Section 3.1.5).

A work is not in the public domain simply because it does not have a copyright notice. Additionally, the fact that a privately created work is, with permission, included in a U.S. Government work does not place the private work into the public domain. The user is responsible for determining whether a work is in the public domain.

It is important to read the permissions and copyright notices on U.S. Government publications and Web sites. Many Government agencies follow the practice of providing notice for material that is copyrighted and not for those that are in the public domain. Examples of government agency copyright policies and statements are: National Library of Medicine,38 NASA Center for AeroSpace Information (CASI),39 and Library of Congress.40