Customer Reviews

Battlecruisers (Chatham Shipshape)

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The prospective buyer of "Battlecruisers" by John Roberts should be warned not to expect too much from this book. First, it's only about the British battlecruisers. All other navies are ignored. Secondly, it's a design history. The text is a synopsis of the Admiralty's meetings dealing with the design of these controversial vessels. Little of that controversy, or of that surrounding its source, Admiral Jackie Fisher, sparks this prose. I found it dry and quite uninteresting. Once the story of the blueprints is told, Roberts' interest wanes. None of the elan of these unique vessels shines through this book. Those who manned their fragile hulls are forgotten; this is not their story. Indeed, in its design tables and rough sketches this book deals more with ships that weren't built, rather than those that were.

Most disturbing is the lack of scale line drawings to illustrate the vessels' appearance. Yes, Roberts has drawn a wonderful 1:200 scale plan of Lion-class Queen Mary provided as a separate double-sided sheet, a couple of nice detail drawings, and sketches of armor layout. But there are no other drawings to show the appearance of the other six classes of British battlecruisers. This is an unforgivable omission in a book of this price and this pretentious title. What this book does offer is 80 large, nicely reproduced b/w photographs, 47 of which are credited to the author's collection. These 47 are not the usual collection of Imperial War Museum photos and were new to my eye.

Aside from the backroom discussions leading to their design, there is little here for the historian. Aside for the photos and the large-scale drawing of Queen Mary there is nothing here for the modeler.

_Battlecruisers_ is, first and foremost, a design history of the British battlecruisers developed immediately before and after the First World War. As any student of naval history knows, battelcruisers combined large guns with high speed (and, consequently, light armor) in a package which some felt would eventually replace the battleship. This, of course, did not happen, and even 80 years later there is a considerable disagreement over these "greyhounds of the sea."

As somone who likes getting into the gritty details of ship designs, I found _Battlecruisers_ to be an interesting book. Unfortunately, though, it's also a short book, a mere 128 pages (plus fold-out blueprints). This is a shame, as while the book of necessity mentrions some of the controversy surrounding these ships, it does not delve nearly deeply enough into the basic rationale for the ships as expressed by their creator, Lord Fisher. On the other hand, one could make the argument that such details are out of place in a design history, and furthermore that Fisher himself was never able to clearly articulate their rationale in anything other than pithy phrases such as "speed is armor."

If you are a familiar with the battlecruiser controversy, then I recommend this book. If you are not familair with it, I would suggest reading the section on the Battle of Jutland in John Keegan's _The Price of Admiralty_, and then reading _Battlecruisers_ concurrently with the relevant chapters in Robert Massie's _Dreadnought_.