The battleship 'Balmoral' has gone missing, although it's not lost at all. Dirty Fred and a group of happy scoundrels 'borrow' it to rescue Tom Leven and his important invention. During their adventures they rescue high-ranking military officers from a sunken ship, impersonate them in their official engagements, avert a military crisis and solve a crime. The novel is a comical crime adventure, written in Jeno Rejto's unique style of understated humour. The author has been likened to a Hungarian P.G. Wodehouse.
This richly detailed tribute to the legendary Yamato is now back in print by popular demand. Equipped with the largest guns and heaviest armor and having the greatest displacement of any ship ever built, the Yamato proved to be a formidable opponent to the U.S. Pacific Fleet in World War II. This classic in the Anatomy of the Ship series contains a full description of the design and construction of the battleship including wartime modifications, and a career history. This is followed by a substantial pictorial section with rare onboard views of Yamato and her sister ship, a comprehensive portfolio of more than 600 perspective and three-view drawings, and 30 photographs. Such a handsome and thorough work is guaranteed to impress modelmakers, ship enthusiasts, and naval historians.
From the moment when the launching of HMS Dreadnought made every capital ship in the world obsolete overnight, we have been fascinated with these powerful surface combatants. Here Robert M. Farley looks at the history and folklore that makes these ships enduring symbols of national power—and sometimes national futility. From Arizona to Yamato, here are more than sixty lavishly illustrated accounts of battleships from the most well-known to the most unusual, including at least one ship from every nation that ever owned a modern battleship. Separate essays and sidebars look at events and lore that greatly affected battleships.
On Wednesday 10 December 1941, the third day of the war with Japan, two Royal Navy capital ships were sunk off Malaya by air torpedo attack. They had not requested the air support that could have saved them and 840 men died in the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser HMS Repulse.
This acclaimed naval historian's book tells the complete history of the battleship - the greatest and most awe-inspiring class of ship ever built - from its origins in the 1850s to what the author regards as the end of the era, the sinking of the Japanese battleship Yamato on April 6, 1945.
An extraordinary—and strikingly illustrated—reflection on the meaning of war from one of our greatest living writers. The battleship Yamato, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, was the most powerful warship of World War II and represented the climax, as it were, of the Japanese warrior traditions of the samurai—the ideals of honor, discipline, and self-sacrifice that had immemorially ennobled the Japanese national consciousness. Stoically poised for battle in the spring of 1945—when even Japan’s last desperate technique of arms, the kamikaze, was running short—Yamato arose as the last magnificent arrow in the imperial quiver of Emperor Hirohito. Here, Jan Morris not only tells the dramatic story of the magnificent ship itself—from secret wartime launch to futile sacrifice at Okinawa—but, more fundamentally, interprets the ship as an allegorical figure of war itself, in its splendor and its squalor, its heroism and its waste. Drawing on rich naval history and rhapsodic metaphors from international music and art, Battleship Yamato is a work of grand ironic elegy.
From a broad, historical perspective, the dreadnought represents an archetype, and its history a kind of moral tale. Its awesome size, its formidable presence, and its immense power have gained it tremendous respect, loyalty, and, as Robert O'Connell shows in this myth-shattering book, unwarranted longevity as well. With provocative insight and wit he offers us an irreverent history of the modern battleship and its place in American history, from the sinking of the coal-fueled Maine in 1898 to the deployment of the cruise missile-armed Missouri in the Persian Gulf War of 1991. The modern navies were the first of the armed services faced with fundamental and abrupt technological change. The wooden sailing ships that had fought sea battles for nearly two centuries were, in only a few years, rendered obsolete by a veritable tidal wave of innovation. With the deployment of the revolutionary HMS Dreadnought in 1903, the new technology reached its full fruition: the gigantic sleek, steel-clad, many-gunned vessel that would rule the seas (or at least the minds of Naval commanders) for years to come. O'Connell shows how other nations raced to emulate this new prototype (much in the fashion of the nuclear arms race of later decades), usually at the expense of much more effective forms of naval force. He also demonstrates compellingly the dashed expectations for the battleship occasioned by the outbreak of war in 1914. While many anticipated a massive twentieth-century Trafalgar, in actuality dreadnoughts everywhere avoided battle, and when they did fight, the results were most often inconclusive or even irrelevant. With the Battle of Jutland in 1916--the only real naval showdown of the war--the ineffectiveness of the battleship as the pre-eminent weapon of war was made abundantly clear: the German navy scored on only 120 hits out of 3,597 heavy shells fired while the British had an even more dismal showing--100 out of 4,598, or a hit ratio of 2.17%. Yet, in spite of this display of impotence, the world's great naval yards continued to turn out the huge vessels. O'Connell observes that even after the heart of the American fleet was sunk by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, the almost superstitious faith in the battleship insured its survival. While they have never played a decisive role in the outcome of any modern war, they have continued to be resurrected and refurbished--even equipped with cruise missles--right up to the present day. Sacred Vessels is more than the unmasking of a false idol of naval history. It is a cautionary tale about the often unacknowledged influence of human faith, culture, and tradition on the exceedingly important, costly, and suppossedly rational process of national defense. Not only is it a gripping tale well-told, it is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the dynamics involved in the arming of nations.
This new edition of a classic work on British battleships is the most sought after book on the subject. Containing many new photographs from the author's exhaustive collection this superb reference book presents the complete technical history of British capital ship design and construction during the dreadnought era. Beginning with Dreadnought, all of the fifty dreadnoughts, 'super-dreadnoughts' and battlecruisers that served the Royal Navy during this era are described and superbly illustrated with photographs and line drawings.
The story of the HMS Hood, the last great warship of the British Royal Navy, told by the bestselling author of Hannibal. When it was launched in 1918, the HMS Hood was the flagship of the Royal Navy. As a battle cruiser, “The Mighty Hood” was fast enough to evade enemy cruiser ships and powerful enough to destroy them. But for all the Hood’s might, it had one fatal flaw: armor had been sacrificed for speed. In 1941, the Hood confronted the legendary German warship Bismarck. A salvo from the enemy penetrated the Hood’s ammunition magazine, destroying the British ship and killing all but three of its crew. The brutal defeat marked the end of the Royal Navy’s dominance. But it also inspired Winston Churchill’s vow to sink the Bismarck—a vow that in time was fulfilled. Through oral history and documentary research, Ernle Bradford chronicles the Hood’s career from design to demise, with colorful insight into life aboard the ship as well as its broader historical significance.
