"Battleships and Battlecruisers" (used book)

Battleships and Battlecruisers

by Richard Humble

About the book

Used book. Hardcover. Dust jacket included. Good condition.

Written and illustrated to the same high standards as his much-acclaimed Undersea Warfare and Aircraft Carriers, Battleships and Battlecruisers is the third of Richard Humble's new studies of leading modern warship types. It tells the story of the armour-plated giants in which sea power was measured in the 'big-gun' era, before the rise to dominance of the aircraft-carrier in the Second World War.

Richard Humble traces the battleship's painful evolution from the multi-decked 'wooden walls' of the age of sail to the oil-fired super-Dreadnoughts of the 20th Century. Part and parcel of the4 story is the strange parallel history of the battle-cruiser, in its heyday the fastest and most powerful heavy warship in the world.

By the time of the battle-cruiser's murderous losses in the turmoil of Jutland in 1916 the battle-cruiser had,m in barely eight years, already been rendered obsolescent by the superior armour and hitting-power of the fast battleship. For all that the battle-cruiser stayed in service, again to demonstrate its weaknesses under German shells and Japanese bombs and torpedoes in the Second World War.

In the same conflict the battleship's capabilities were transformed by modern radio communications and the 'magic eye' of radar -- only to be wholly outclassed by the range and hitting-power of the aircraft-carrier.

And yet, as this fascinating account reveals, the wholesale scrapping of 'redundant' battleships after 1945 was premature. Revived in the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts, and yet again in the US Navy of the 1980s, the battleship story is still far from over.