[Subnuts]

I've posted my review to Amazon.com. I was thinking about giving the book four stars due to some annoying editing mistakes, but there's so much good stuff in this book I had to give it a full five stars.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R21M81...cm_cr_rdp_perm

Having previously read a number of standard works on British Battleships by R.A. Burt, Alan Raven, and David K. Brown, I seriously wondered what new information Norman Friedman would bring to the table. Rather than stepping on the toes of his predecessors, Dr. Friedman chooses to take a boardroom-level approach to the subject of British capital ship design from "Dreadnought" to "Vanguard." As with his previous books, he keeps the nitty-gritty details of warship design in the context of the political, economic, and military realities of the time. I've been a British warship fanatic for some time, but even I was impressed by the depth an extent of the research on display here. The bibliography lists a large number of Admiralty documents from the British National Archives, along with original Ship Covers, minutes from Churchill's tenure as First Lord, and design notebooks.

Friedman is Friedman - photo captions go on for paragraphs, and details are frequently thicker than your Grandma's pea soup. I've come to expect this, and it doesn't really bother me too much anymore. This book is ambitious even by his standards. People fascinated by the process of warship design will find much to love here, right down to the frustrating "can we make the ship two feet wider and gain a little metacentric height, but risk losing a half knot at deep displacement?" type questions that have plagued naval staffs and naval architects for decades. There is an enormous amount of information here on the design of the aborted Lion-class, G3 and N3 types, and 12-inch "treaty battleships" sketched before the 1930 London Naval Treaty of 1930, which I hadn't read before. Friedman's takes on the buildup to the "Dreadnought revolution," the origins of the battlecruiser, and the design of the Queen Elizabeth-class vary substantially from their "standard" telling. He also delivers an even-handed explanation for some of the more controversial design decisions, including the King George V-class' 14-inch main battery, the Nelsons' bridge arrangement, and Hood's armor scheme. There's even an entire chapter devoted to battleships designed and built for the export market during the pre-war Dreadnought craze, including ships intended for Greece and the Netherlands.

This book is BIG, and I feel like I'm not giving it the credit it deserves. I wouldn't recommend reading it you haven't read any of the classic works on the subject, or some of Norman Friedman's recent works, especially "Naval Firepower" and "Fighting the Great War at Sea." It covers an enormous amount of ground while still focusing on the titular subject. The text is immensely detailed, but still make effective use of plain language to describe complex concepts. In many ways, this book is a British analogue to Friedman's "illustrated design history" on American battleships. You could probably read both back-to-back and get two very different takes on a similar story.

Now, a little bad news. Like a lot of recent Seaforth titles, my issues with this book lie mainly in it's presentation and editing. A few of the double-page photographs have gutters which run through the ships' masts or funnels. The editing and sentence structure in the first chapter is frequently terrible, but thankfully much better in the rest of the book. The quality of the plans is all over the place. A.D Baker's and Alan Raven's work fares the best, although they are presented at too small a scale. Unfortunately, John Roberts' and George Richardson's drawings are frequently washed out and jittery looking. Comparing Roberts' crisply detailed, large-scale foldouts in "British Battleships of World War Two" with the plans in this book was rather depressing.

That said, this IS an excellent work, which can sit proudly on my shelf alongside my other table-shaking naval references. The color section, featuring a number of fold-out reproductions of Admiralty draughts, including a stunning gatefold depicting HMS Valiant in 1939, is an added bonus. Some nagging flaws in visual presentation aside, this is one of the finest naval histories I've read in a long time.