Customer Reviews

The World's Great Battleships

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This book reads easily and has some nice drawings. The earlier sailing ships are pretty well depicted, but as it got closer to WWII, there were many discrepancies, particularly to displacment (weight) of the ships depicted in the drawings. They run the gamut from quoting misleading "official" records at the time by the Germans for the Graf Spee (10,00 tons)for instance, when it was actually nearly 20% heavier. I thought anyone familiar with the subject matter would know that, to mixing standard and full load displacement for ships such as the Bismarck and Tirpitz, in two different drawings. A nod to the Tirpitz being a bit heavier, but 20-25%, they were sister ships ! In fact, standard and full load displacemt seem to be mixed without thought, shifting 10,000 tons one way or the other, making it very difficult to compare the ships of the same era. Very disconcerting to even a casual knowledge of the big gunned ships of the day. The text does read better and like I said is fun for a quick journey through some of the great ships of the past, just don't use it as a source for an important project.

This is a book obviously meant for the layman interested in the history of big gun warships, from the time of the Spanish Armada until the Gulf crisis. It's about battleships all right - little about cruisers or destroyers (the story of the Glowworm sinking is told here). I bought this book hoping it would help me as a modeler, but there are few good photos, and the illustrations are often cutaways showing the inside of a ship - not bad for a student though. It gives somewhat detailed history on warships, such as the Bismarck and Scharnhorst chases, but only the most well-known stuff are mentioned here. As a bonus though, the pic which supposedly shows the midget subs firing on the US battleships at Pearl Harbor is in here. All in all, it's quite an enjoyable read. Not a bad buy. But modelers should get something else.

Robert Jackson's "The World's Great Battleships" is a quaint little reference book that attempts to cover warships that lead to the development of the battleship from the middle ages to the 1940s. This task is nearly impossible in a book that is only 147 pages long. In short, Jackson should have focused on battleships, and only battleships within this book. With a start at HMS Dreadnaught on towards the USS Montana class (which was never built). While the images and basic details of select classes of warships is a very nice feature of the book, overall I would have preferred the book to focus on the most relevent battleships in the evolution of this type of warship rather than a quick overview of multiple classes.

Still, the book is a good "quick-grab" reference book to find the basic details of the more famous classes of battleship.

Mr Jackson provides a good overview of battleship history starting at the very beginning of wooden ships equipped with heavy guns right through to the final deactivation of the Iowa-class battleships in the early 1990's.

However, the last page contains an annoying error and then the last paragraph has a rather shocking one.

First, the book misidentifies the Royal Navy warship that shoots down the Silkworm ASM that was fired at USS Missouri during the Gulf War (It was actually HMS Gloucester).

Merely an annoying error to be sure but the last paragraph reveals either bad research or really bad editing.

It notes the final disposition of the Iowa-class saying something to the effect of "The Navy's homeporting plan puts [this battleship] stationed at [this base]."

So what's the problem? Ships that have been decommissioned do not get "homeported" by the Navy. The ships and ports provided are the homeports while the ships were in commission, not their "final resting places"!

It does get USS Missouri's final location correct but it was odd for a good book to fall apart like that in the last paragraph.

The only good thing this book has going for it is the technical color illustrations. There are inconsisties galore: in the full illustration of the Kirov-class battlecruiser, in the specs box next to armament, he only notes the 25 SS-N type missiles, nothing more, even though this powerful behemoth bristles with all sorts of additional heavy firepower. The format is way too concise for a book with a title of this magnitude--should have been a 9" x 12" with a meticulous 300+ page content! Chapters & coverage are minimal and far too general. The ship selection is dull: when covering the US Civil War era, Jackson could certainly have included color illustrations of the Monitor & Virginia, two of the most prominent warships (and certainly considered "battleships")in naval history, in the first major war which astronomically elevated the stature of the ironclad for the first time in the history of naval warfare. There is really nothing much to go on..unless you're a boy with a beginning fascination with warships in general (like myself when I was a kid). Under those circumstances, this book would have made a perfect birthday or Christmas gift. So I passed it along to my 8 year old nephew, who excitingly embraced the book and could not put it down. If you are a serious naval or military history buff, move along please!!

This book reads well but their just is not that much in the way of useful information or details to interest anyone beyond the typical interest of the ordinary coffee table book. Nice looking book with some nice illustrations and an attractive oversized format. Some of the information appears to be inaccurate, especially pertaining to the battlewships of WW 2. A valuable edition if one's basis for value is a books weight and appearance.