This book does for naval anti-aircraft defence what the author's Naval Firepower did for surface gunnery ‰ÛÒ it makes a highly complex but historically crucial subject accessible to the layman. It chronicles the growing aerial threat from its inception in the First World War and the response of each of the major navies down to the end of the Second, highlighting in particular the widely underestimated danger from dive-bombing. Central to this discussion is an analysis of what effective AA fire-control required, and how well each navy's systems actually worked. It also takes in the weapons themselves, how they were placed on ships, and how this reflected the tactical concepts of naval AA defence. As would be expected from any Friedman book, it offers striking insights ‰ÛÒ he argues, for example, that the Royal Navy, so often criticised for lack of 'air-mindedness', was actually the most alert to the threat, but that its systems were inadequate not because they were too primitive but because they tried to achieve too much.??The book summarises the experience of WW2, particularly in theatres where the aerial danger was greatest, and a concluding chapter looks at post-1945 developments that drew on wartime lessons. All important guns, directors and electronics are represented in close-up photos and drawings, and lengthy appendices detail their technical data. It is, simply, another superb contribution to naval technical history by its leading exponent.

Naval Ordnance and Gunnery is the most definitive book to emerge from WWII on the subject of naval ordnance and fire control. Encyclopedic in content, the text runs nearly 600 pages and is richly illustrated with photos and diagrams of systems used on destroyers, cruisers, battleships and other warships. Within its pages you'll find detailed descriptions of weapons and ammunition, and discussions on subjects from gun design and construction, to fire control and trajectory analysis. Individual chapters discuss explosives, ammunition, gun assemblies (including barrels, breech assemblies and mounts), turret installations, semi-automatic guns, machine guns, small arms, torpedoes, depth charges and mines, and a history of fire control. Chapters about the fire control problem include studies of gun sight principles, range measurement, the surface problem, the AA problem, fundamentals of director control, dual-purpose battery fire-control system, main battery fire-control system, machine-gun control, torpedo control, spotting, and organization and communications systems and procedures. The book's easy-to-understand text explains the myriad complex problems affiliated with gunnery, and is an indispensable reference for the historian, docent or modeler intent on understanding how WWII gun crews and systems operated. Work on Naval Ordnance and Gunnery began in 1943 at the request of the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Personnel. A capable team of five officers, working as writers and editors, compiled the book from a wide variety of sources including curriculum documents from the U.S. Naval Academy and Midshipmen's Schools, material from the Bureau of Ordnance, and various publications from the General Motors Corporation (which designed and built many of the 20mm and .50 caliber guns described in the book). Although it was declassified after WWII, it's never been easy to obtain a copy of this text. This high quality reprint includes all the original text, diagrams and photographs from the original 1944 edition.