One of the great spectacles of modern naval history is the Imperial Japanese Navy's instrumental role in Japan's rise from an isolationist feudal kingdom to a potent military empire stridently confronting, in 1941, the world's most powerful nation. Years of painstaking research and analysis of previously untapped Japanese-language resources have produced this remarkable study of the Navy's dizzying development, tactical triumphs, and humiliating defeat. Unrivaled in its breadth of coverage and attention to detail, this important new history explores the foreign and indigenous influences on the Navy's thinking about naval warfare and how to plan for it. Focusing primarily on the much-neglected period between the world wars, two widely esteemed historians persuasively explain how the Japanese failed to prepare properly for the war in the Pacific despite an arguable advantage in capability. Maintaining the highest literary standards and supplemented by a dazzling array of charts, diagrams, drawings, and photographs, this landmark work provides much important information not available in any other English-language source. Consciously avoiding the Eurocentric bias of conventional military scholarship, David Evans and Mark Peattie make a unique contribution to naval historiography that will be prized by serious historians and casual readers alike and that promises to spark debate within the academic community.

Organized by the four major ages of warships - galley, sail, steam, and modern - George graphically presents the design evolution, construction, and operational uses of specific ship types, including their defenses, weapons, propulsion, and famous sea battles. While his focus is on ships of major naval powers, he also offers interesting examples from lesser navies and includes Leonardo da Vinci's submarine designs, Germany's pocket battleship, Austria's World War I air-cushion catamaran, and Italy's naval tanks with lateral caterpillar chains.

remove from The 'ShipCraft' series provides in-depth information about building and modifying model kits of famous warship types. Lavishly illustrated, each book takes the modeller through a brief history of the subject class, highlighting differences between sister-ships and changes in their appearance over their careers. This includes paint schemes and camouflage, featuring colour profiles and highly detailed line drawings and scale plans. The modelling section reviews the strengths and weaknesses of available kits, lists commercial accessory sets for super-detailing of the ships, and provides hints on modifying and improving the basic kit. This is followed by an extensive photographic survey of selected high-quality models in a variety of scales, and the book concludes with a section on research references—books, monographs, large-scale plans and websites.The subject of this volume is the largest and most sophisticated German cruiser class of WW2. The five ships suffered very different fates. Blucher was sunk during the invasion of Norway in 1940, whereas Admiral Hipper fought right through the war. The most famous, Prinz Eugen, escaped when Bismarck was sunk and survived to be expended in a postwar Atomic bomb test. Seydlitz was intended to be converted to an aircraft carrier, but never finished, while Lutzow was sold to Russia and sunk by her erstwhile owners.

Very Special Ships is the first full-length book about the Abdiel-class fast minelayers, which were considered the fastest and most versatile to serve in the Royal Navy during World War II. This book spans the scope of the class from alpha to zulu as they operated in many roles, most famously as blockade runners to Malta, transporting items as diverse as ammunition, condensed milk, gold, and VIPs. To provide a complete picture of this important class of ships, Very Special Ships examines the origin and history of the minelayers, describes the design and construction of each ship in the class, details the operational history of the ships during World War II, and concludes with the post-war careers of the surviving ships.

Philip Reed, best known for his superb models of ships from the age of sail, here turns his attention to the other highly popular subject for ship modelers - the warships of the Second World War. The book is a step-by-step manual for building a scratch waterline model of the Ca Class destroyer HMS Caesar, the sistership of Cavalier now on display in drydock at Chatham Historical Dockyard. These emergency built ships were launched between 1943 and 1945 and Caesar herself was to see action in 1944 on the Russian convoys and then in defense of the Western Approaches. The model presented in the book is built to the scale of 16ft to the inch and is designed to be displayed as a waterline model in a diorama. Every aspect is covered from the construction of a bread and butter hull through to the the details of camouflage, bridge, funnel, mast, the 4.5in, Hazemeyer and Oerlikon guns, boats, davits, depth charge gear, torpedo tubes, searchlights, vents and lockers,and the sea itself. Ship’s plans and a picture gallery at the end of the book devoted to a whole array of the author’s WWII model warships complete the book. More than fifty years of modeling experience is passed on through wise and practical advice and thus each page will be of the utmost value to scratch builders and to any kit builders who may be setting out to construct a model of a WWII warship.

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.

Covering every major warship type from the American ironclads of the 1860s through today's super-sophisticated aircraft carriers, this fact-filled directory describes more than 200 fighting vessels, providing technical specifications along with development and service histories. Intricately detailed full-color drawings vividly bring the warships to life, while contemporary photographs depict the vessels at sea and in combat.