Great Battle Fleets
by Oliver Warner
About the Book
Used Book. Hardcover. Dust jacket included. Good condition.
-- From the dust jacket
The era of the battle fleet is over. Never again will mighty surface fleets clash on the high seas. From the sixteenth century to the Second World War, when battle fleets faced each other, the fate of nations hung in the balance. The westward thrust of Islam was checked by the Spanish and Venetians at Lepanto in 1571; the United States owes her emergence as a nation in part to the action of the French fleet off Chesapeake Bay in 1781; in 1942 at Midway the fate of Japan was sealed in a titanic struggle between the two most powerful fleets ever to oppose each other.
In this book the distinguished naval historian Oliver Warner tells the stories of the Spanish, Elizabethan, Dutch and Swedish fleets, of the fleet of France and Nelson’s fleet, of the Imperial Japanese fleet, the British Grand Fleet, the German high Seas Fleet, and the united States fleet. He describes each at its zenith, detailing also its origins and later history. He tells of the commanders, the fighting men, the engagements and above all of the ships themselves: the Venetian galleasses, Nelson’s ships of the line, the early ironclads and the revolutionary Dreadnoughts.
The wide range of illustrations in colour and black-and-white capture the drama and heroics of the battles and the majesty of the great ships and fleets at sea. Together, text and pictures combine to make this an important and highly attractive book, presenting as it does a broad view of the distribution of sea power over the last five hundred years.
