Gunboat!: Small Ships at War [Hardcover]

Bryan Perrett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2000

By focusing on 13 classic engagements in which gunboats won the day, you appreciate how they were used to establish and control empire, preserve trade routes, and police pirates and rebels. Starting with the Burma war in 1824, and ending with the dramatic escape of the Amethyst down the Yangtze in 1949, this gunboat saga depicts exploits from China to Argentina, from the Crimea to the Mississippi, and from the Persian Gulf to East Africa.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Bryan Perrett, a former army man himself, has been writing about military adventure and heroism for some years now, collecting a large band of enthusiastic readers. His books have formed the mainstay of the Cassell Military Paperbacks list and include such gems as Last Stand!, At all Costs!, Impossible Victories, Against all Odds!, and many more

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Cassell (October 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0304353027
• ISBN-13: 978-0304353026
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #570,903 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Little Ships, March 5, 2002

By 

Jeff Hubbell (Toronto, Ontario) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cassell Military Classics: Gunboat!: Small Ships at War (Paperback)

I just wish I could have liked this book more. The subject matter -- the little warships that shaped world foreign policy for much of the 18th, 19th and early 20th century -- deserve more attention than they get. Perrett tries hard to convey this, but you sometimes get the sense that he wishes he lived in that era. At any moment you're half expecting him to refer to indigenous peoples as savages. He certainly editorializes throughout.
That aside, Perrett's book is an entertaining read, outlining some aspects of the history of gunboats. Yet, for all their importance, the gunboat story is divided up into a series of small histories -- the gunboats did this HERE, the gunboats did that THERE. There doesn't seem to be a common glue (apart from being gunboats) cementing the place of these small ships in history.
But it's hard to put down, nonetheless. His telling of the fierce little wars these ships fought in China and the middle east are the stories of Empire. Some significant gunboat incidents are marginalized -- the bombing of the USS Panay by the Japanese on the Yangtze River is one that came to mind, and the final chapter telling of the U.S. war on the Mekong River in Vietnam gets really short shrift, which was unfortunate. You get the sense it was tacked on.
But I'd recommend the book without much reservation. It's lively, it's fun, it's entertaining and informational, and you can't ask for a lot more than that.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Book, December 19, 2006

By 

panther "panther" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cassell Military Classics: Gunboat!: Small Ships at War (Paperback)

This is an excellent book from start to finish, most of the action is based with the Royal Navy mainly because Britain was defending an empire and was at the time the dominant power. The US receives less mention because during the era of gunboat diplomacy the US was busy managing it's own affairs and it's foreign policy was isolationist until after the Spanish-American war.

Chapters include stories on different stages of the gunboat development from an action perspective such as the Crimean War, Sudan War 1870s-80s and WWI. Also there are interesting chapters on Mississippi gunboats, operations against piracy, police actions against natives in the Pacific and gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean with tin pot dictators/warlords and one or two interesting chapters about operations in China, including 'where blood was thicker than water' when it came to saving lives of the Western people in China against bandits where an American gunboat helped a British gunboat. The only down point where I agree with past reviewers is the very small chapter on riverine warfare in Vietnam, which in my opinion should have been left out because it was not in the realm of gunboat diplomacy or any bearing on development of the gunboats of the time. A chapter on the subject is best left to a book on Naval counter insurgency.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Big Adventures, Giant Characters and Tiny Ships, November 24, 2006

By 

C. Ryan (Winthrop, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cassell Military Classics: Gunboat!: Small Ships at War (Paperback)

This book is not about grand strategies, the technical evolution of gunboats as naval weapons or academic theories about so-called gunboat diplomacy. It is a well written collection of thirteen interesting narratives about the use of gunboats - typically small vessels with relatively heavy armament - in major and minor conflicts from the 1850s through the 1940s. All the stories involve the British Royal Navy, with two exceptions: gunboats on the Mississippi River during the American Civil War and a pathetically inadequate "chapter" - less than two pages - about a single aspect of the USN's riverine actions in Vietnam.

Some of the incidents were highly improbable: transporting gunboats hundreds of miles through the jungle to neutralize WWI German forces on an African lake and shootouts between an RN frigate and Red Chinese artillery batteries hundreds of miles up the Yangtze River in 1947. In this day of central "command and control" by people far from the scene of action and the absurdity of getting a military lawyer's permission to strike targets the depiction of actions in which local commanders take full initiative as to whether or not and how to undertake action against an adversary (and not be second guessed afterward) almost seems like fiction. The fact that most of the wars or campaigns won't be familiar to many Americans adds to the exotic images that the author portrays; one gunboat captain "goes native" and wears a skirt.

The summary of the ill conceived 1914-1917 British campaign to capture Baghdad - even through their initial mission to simply protect their Persian Gulf oil supplies from the Turks had already been quickly accomplished - reads like a cautionary tale for American and British experience since 2003. The "hooligan element" loots and terrorizes Basra after the Brits liberate it from the Turks and far more troops are needed than initially anticipated. Sound familiar? In this action several gunboats - some of which will play an encore role against Germans in the 1942-43 North African and Sicily campaigns - steam up the Tigris River providing heavy firepower to soften up the Turks and add punch to the British Army troops' efforts in a manner similar the way aircraft and armor are used today.

Finally there are the "characters", mostly junior officers who distinguish themselves in colorful ways. Almost unbelievably one RN officer who commanded a gunboat in combat against Sudanese forces on the upper Nile in 1896 goes on to launch "black ops" torpedo boat raids in the Baltic Sea to support White Russians against Red Russians in 1919 and is finally seen being captured by the Germans while serving as naval liaison to an army unit in North Africa in 1942. What a pleasure to read about situations where the characters are allowed to be heroes instead of portrayed as victims.

The 224-page paperback includes some reasonably helpful maps, 15 pages of black and white photographs, a one-page bibliography and a most useful seven-page index.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in 19th and 20th Century naval and military history or anyone who simply enjoys improbable adventure tales from an earlier era.