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From the moment when the launching of HMS Dreadnought made every capital ship in the world obsolete overnight, we have been fascinated with these powerful surface combatants. Here Robert M. Farley looks at the history and folklore that makes these ships enduring symbols of national power—and sometimes national futility. From Arizona to Yamato, here are more than sixty lavishly illustrated accounts of battleships from the most well-known to the most unusual, including at least one ship from every nation that ever owned a modern battleship. Separate essays and sidebars look at events and lore that greatly affected battleships.
This fully illustrated volume details every aspect of the WWII battleship, from plans, building, and modifications to active service and final breaking. Built in 1937, the HMS Duke of York enjoyed a distinguished wartime career that included sinking the German battleship Scharnhorst in 1943 and serving as the flagship of the British Pacific Fleet in 1945. This study of the iconic King George V-class battleship offers comprehensive and detailed documentation in plans, photographs, and text. The core of the book is the reproduction in full color of a complete set of as-fitted plans of the ship, including many details and close-ups. These are complemented by a thorough set drawn after the ship’s major refit in March 1945, showing all the modifications undertaken to prepare the ship for service alongside the US Navy in the Pacific. Photographic coverage begins with the stunning views taken by the builder’s cameraman during every stage of construction, continues with many shots of her active service, and concludes with an illustrated chronology of the breaking up. The accompanying text is as enlightening as the illustrations, resulting in a complete portrait of a great ship in all its complexity.
The biggest battleship of her era was originally to be called the Rio de Janeiro but due to a change of ownership became Sultan Osman I and finally HMS Agincourt. This is a look at her chequered history which started with British and German shipyards vying to build her.
This naval history of WWII explores the advancing technology and tactics of battleships through a fascinating survey of ship-to-ship duels. While many naval battles of the Second World War were decided by the torpedo or the aerial bomb, there was a surprising number of traditional ship-to-ship engagements involving the big guns of battleships and cruisers. Big Gun Battles recounts some of the most significant and technically fascinating of these gunfire duels in a narrative that combines lively storytelling with an in-depth understanding of the factors influencing victory or defeat. Covering all theatres of the naval war from 1939 until the Japanese surrender, the selected incidents demonstrate the changing face of surface warfare under the influence of rapidly improving fire-control systems, radar, and other technologies. By 1945, battleships achieved the pinnacle of gunnery excellence.
The launch in 1606 of HMS Dreadnought, the worlds's first all-big-gun battleship, rendered all existing battle fleets obsolete, but at the same time it wiped out the Royal Navy's numerical advantage, so expensively maintained for decades. Already locked in the same arms race with Germany, Britain urgently needed to build an entirely new battle fleet of these larger, more complex and more costly vessels In this she succeeded spectacularly; in little over a decade fifty such ships were completed, almost exactly double that of what Germany achieved It was only made possible by the companyÍs vast industrial nexus of shipbuilders, engine manufacturers, armament fleets and specialist armour producers, whose contribution to the Grand Feet is too often ignored. This heroic achievement, and how it was done, is the subject of this book. It charts the rise of the large industrial conglomerates that were key to this success, looks at the reaction to fast-moving technical changes, and analyses the politics of funding this vast national effort, both before and beyond the Great War. It also attempts to assess the true cost- and value- of the Grand Fleet in terms of the resources consumed. And finally, by way of contrast, it describes the effects of the post-war recession, industrial contraction, and the very different responses to rearmament in the run up to the Second World War.
By the acclaimed author of Destroyers of World War Two, this book is a fully illustrated and highly detailed overview of the capital ships that saw action in the last war. Compiled with the assistance of naval authorities and experts from around the world, it includes not only detailed descriptions of the ships' armament and armour, full technical specifications, date of construction, service and engagement record, but also accounts of the ultimate fate of the ships.
"Fully updated with an extended introduction by Ian Sturton and an outstanding selection of images, Conway's Battleships is a comprehensive study of the world's capital ships from the emergence of HMS Dreadnought in 1906. In their day, these mighty ships represented a country's military pride. They served with distinction in two World Wars and threatened and impressed in equal measure. Superseded by the aircraft carrier and finally rendered obsolete in the missile age, a few of these ships, nevertheless, continued in service to the end of the twentieth century, with two of the US Iowa class present at the Gulf War in 1990-91." "Organized by nation, type and class, each entry describes the sister-ships of the class in detail, with specification tables, diagrams of ships in profile and career histories. A wealth of visual information can be gained from browsing through the many photographs and artworks, showing hull and deck details, ships in port, underway and in action. Fully international in its scope and extensive in its coverage, this is an essential addition to the library of any naval historian or warship enthusiast."--BOOK JACKET.
This book covers the development of U.S. battleships, from the Maine and Texas of 1886, through the Montana class of World War II, up to the recommissioned Iowas. It examines the original designs as well as the many modifications and reconstructions these ships underwent during their long and active careers. Like the other books in Norman Friedmans design-history series, U.S. Battleships is based largely on formerly classified internal U.S. Navy records. But research for this book has also included a full survey of British files, both those compiled when American ships served with the Royal Navy in the two world wars and those supplied by British battleship designers attached to the U.S. Navy. In addition, the author consulted official battle damage reports to help evaluate various designs.
An extraordinary—and strikingly illustrated—reflection on the meaning of war from one of our greatest living writers. The battleship Yamato, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, was the most powerful warship of World War II and represented the climax, as it were, of the Japanese warrior traditions of the samurai—the ideals of honor, discipline, and self-sacrifice that had immemorially ennobled the Japanese national consciousness. Stoically poised for battle in the spring of 1945—when even Japan’s last desperate technique of arms, the kamikaze, was running short—Yamato arose as the last magnificent arrow in the imperial quiver of Emperor Hirohito. Here, Jan Morris not only tells the dramatic story of the magnificent ship itself—from secret wartime launch to futile sacrifice at Okinawa—but, more fundamentally, interprets the ship as an allegorical figure of war itself, in its splendor and its squalor, its heroism and its waste. Drawing on rich naval history and rhapsodic metaphors from international music and art, Battleship Yamato is a work of grand ironic elegy.
This richly detailed tribute to the legendary Yamato is now back in print by popular demand. Equipped with the largest guns and heaviest armor and having the greatest displacement of any ship ever built, the Yamato proved to be a formidable opponent to the U.S. Pacific Fleet in World War II. This classic in the Anatomy of the Ship series contains a full description of the design and construction of the battleship including wartime modifications, and a career history. This is followed by a substantial pictorial section with rare onboard views of Yamato and her sister ship, a comprehensive portfolio of more than 600 perspective and three-view drawings, and 30 photographs. Such a handsome and thorough work is guaranteed to impress modelmakers, ship enthusiasts, and naval historians.