|
|
This edition of Warship contains ten main articles, a sizable collection of book reviews, some smaller ship notes and a collection of photographs. The main articles cover an impressively wide range of topics.
Three cover the Imperial Japanese Navy and look at two extremes – we start with a look at the early history of the two 16in gun battleships Nagato and Mutsu looking at their original design, before the later modifications into the more familiar Second World War forms. At the other end we look at two classes of escort destroyers built towards the end of the Second World War, when the Japanese Navy finally realised that it needed large numbers of escort ships instead of a small number of the best possible ships. In the middle is an attempt to work out exactly what changes the Japanese made to the Russian battleship Orel, captured during the Russian-Japanese War and taken into Japanese service as the Iwami. This shows the advantage of going back to original contemporary documents and clears up some of the disagreement between published works.
Two look at the French Navy, starting with a look at two post-war carrier escorts, then moving on to look at the Bouvet, one of a series of pre First World War experimental French battleships, lost at the Dardanelles after hitting a mine and sinking very quickly. The same area is covered by a look at a clash between the Russian and Ottoman fleets off the Bosphorous in 1915, which shows that the Russian fleet was largely dominant despite the presence of one modern German battlecruiser on the Ottoman side.
The Soviet Union is covered by a look at the flotilla leader Tashkent, part of the interwar Soviet attempt to reconstruct its ship building industry after the Imperial version was destroyed by the Revolution and Civil War. This involved Italian help, and we also look at a series of unsuccessful Italian midget submarines produced in an attempt to enable mass production of those weapons.
The final article looks at the last 140 years of the Royal Navy’s Fishery Protection Squadron, looking at how the Navy attempted to carry out a job that was important but not glamorous, and that it often didn’t see as a key role – unenthusiastically turns out to be the main answer…
As with earlier editions of this book, the 2024 edition contains a useful collection of articles covering an impressively wide range of topics.
Chapters
Nagato and Mutsu: The 16in-Gun Battleships that Survived the Washington Treaty
The Beginings of Soviet Naval Power: The Flotilla Leader Tashkent and her would be successors
Action off the Bosphorus, 10 May 1915
Suffren and Duquesne: France’s First Modern Carrier Escorts
The Escort Destroyers of the Matsu and Tachibana Classes
The Making of an Armed Merchant Cruiser : SMS Seeadler
The Battleship Bouvet, Martyr of the Dardanelles
Mussolini’s Caprices: The Italian Midget Submarines and Elektroboote of 1934-1943
Fit for Purpose? The Royal Navy’s Fishery Protection Squadron, 1883-2023
From Orel to Iwami
Author: Various
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 224
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2024