Customer Reviews

Jane's Battleships of the 20th Century

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Seapower competition is history of strategic gambles and capital ships were the instruments to achieve control of sealanes. This volume presents a review of the most important units and classes that were the mainstays of fleets. Unfortunately this work is not organic because the author provides only a limited description of design and costruction evolution of battleships and battlecruisers.

The review of ship characteristics falls short of expectations since it fails to produce a good assessment of seakeeping features and of operational capabilities. Limited facts are reported to explain technical improvements implemented during ship life span to match the neverending changes in strategies. Just few hints are shown to reveal topmost aspects and defects of each design with some information on consequential wartime limitations imposed during active service. Interspersed with descriptions of most important naval engagements and with summaries of most significant doctrines for naval warfare, this work gives only a superficial insight of opposing requirements that had been involved in planning, designing and building a battleship; in facts a short study for each class is presented without giving details of research and innovations in naval architecture that earmarked the field. A missing part is a wide overview of naval artillery. Since guns were among the leading specifications in launching a new class, it is odd that a better explanation of armament development is not covered.

Good points in this book are the nice color profiles, sometimes completed with plan and bow views. Unfortunately no scales are indicated, so being of limited use for modelers.

This is a book that you want to like because it is a nice concise country-by-country review of battleships and battlecruisers from approximately 1900 to the present. The book also includes a number of nice anecdotes in an attempt to bring the ships to life by connecting them to the men who fought them and the events that they were involved in. All this aside, however, there are some unconscionable errors. The author completely misses an entire series of British battlecruisers represented by the New Zealand, Australia and Indomitable. These were pivotal ships, yet to the author of this book it appears they never existed. There are also several notable omissions of ships that belonged to certain British and American battleship classes -- how do you lose or forget about a ship? And the author gives pretty short shrift to a series of very important American battleships from the late teens and early 1920's that shaped the Japanese response to America's naval strategic doctrine -- the author just sort of compresses these ships onto one page, which is a real pitty. There are other contradictions in terms of describing one ship being "well-armored" but another ship with equivalent specs not being well-armored (you really can't have this both ways). And while, nice at the end of the day the anecdotes are so short as to be a historical tease rather than a substantial benefit. The author has the right idea, but he needs to apply further research and perhaps convince his editor to give him about a hundred more pages to work with.

Read the next 2 reviews; they're right on point on "missing" ships and classes of ships. The Author is also disppointed with the book; he complained that the book is a "committee" effort driven by graphic artists and a publisher who are targeting a mass audience (at an affordable price). The book has glossy pages, is well illustrated with photographs, Tony Gibbons' famous color drawings (I prefer line drawings; Gibbon's drawings are like paintings), and has only basic data (doesn't include gun length calibers, discussion of armor scheme, etc.). Bernard Ireland, the author, writes unique prose, but he seemed handcuffed by the publishing handlers. Ideal for "young readers" but all collectors will be disappointed.

This book is technically inaccurate in many instances and is organized illogically. The pictures are mostly previously published, therefore the book offers little new to the naval historian or enthusiast. Full plans of side and overhead views would have been better than the paintings included in the book. Any title published under the "Jane's" name should have been more carefully researched..

This is my favourite reference book on battleships, just because it is so attractively balanced. Coloured diagrams of most classes mentioned, together with plentiful photographs, supplement very readable text descriptions. Before the end of the contents, the reader has been thrilled by photographs of Royal Sovereign, Resolution and Revenge (seen from the next ship ahead in line), the pre-dreadnought Agamemnon, and Malaya in company with Alabama and South Dakota off the coast of Norway.

The layout is a bit capricious, with some classes being relegated to brief mentions or telescoped into the sections on similar ships. Now and then, the author sees fit to pop in a "feature" - for instance the account of Heligoland Bight and the Falklands that appears opposite the text on the Invincible class battlecruisers. These are welcome, although they sometimes break up the logical progression of designs through the years.

I am not qualified to judge the book's accuracy, so I cannot dispute or confirm any statements made on this score. At least there were no errors gross enough to leap off the page at me.

Not ground-breaking by any means, but did have some unusual photos, i.e. the Nevada after being A-bombed, battlecruiser casualties at Jutland, etc. A good survey or gift for a budding battleship nut.

A book with great historic photographs of battles but unfortunately the book offers no specific detail concerning the ships themselves (anti-aircraft guns, range etc...). One would also so wished for a cutout or at least a detailed profile of these glorious battleships. If one is looking for a book full of historic battles and pictures then this is a book for you. However if on the contrary one is looking for something with detail it isn't something that you would base a project on. On the whole the aspect of the book doesn't deserve a rank associated with that of the Jane's series. It is a real shame seeing as the book itself has an appealing aspect.

This book has great artwork. Beyond that, I believe the book's text author (Bernard Ireland) didn't do his homework. There's no way to know for sure... the book doesn't have a references section... apparently Mr. Ireland wrote the whole thing from memory. If that's the case then it's trully a remarkable acheivement. The fact that this book comes under the auspices of 'Janes', one of the most accurate technical series in the world, is a disgrace. The technical data in this book is just plaing WRONG and shows a carelessness I didn't think a professional historian would allow.

What others had to say about this book are actually correct. But any book isn't totally complete and comprehensive.
I wish this book were thousands of pages longer. I wish it covered every aspect of the world's battleships. There are always chunks of data I'd love to find in this category. A book that resembled a Wizards Tome, so large it would be difficult to turn pages and impossible to move.
I have thirty or forty books on battleships, but, (and this is important), Jane's Battleships of the 20th Century is the first and last book when I have a question or desire a image.

The minute you open the book, the pages come alive with illustrations, text, and statistics for many ships. Many navies are represented, including Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Great Britan, Japan, and the United States. You are told the strengths and weaknesses for most ships, and, more importantly, what their fate was in battle, or in peace time. It gives detailed descriptions of almost all aspects of the ship, and how these aspects influenced the ship's performance in battle. I recommend this book for those interested in naval history, ships, and military history.