Edwyn Gray's history of British submarine warfare in the First World War is less an examination of the employment of submarines in the war than it is a collection of stories of their deployments. Drawing upon their reports and postwar memoirs, Gray recounts their experiences in dramatic fashion, interspersed with the sort of humorous anecdotes that give a sense of how the sailors coped with the unique stresses they faced. While it makes for entertaining reading, there is little effort to connect it to the larger context of the war at sea, let alone the larger conflict taking place around them. Readers seeking entertaining accounts of combat will find Gray's book well worth reading, but those seeking an analysis of their role in the war or any comparison with the similar campaign mounted by Germany will likely be disappointed by its limitations.

Among warships cruisers may lack the power of battleships and the mystery of submarines, but their combination of speed and firepower made them vital components of most major navies for much of the twentieth century. Though ostensibly about the Royal Navy's cruiser force during the Second World War, Alan Raven and John Roberts provide in this book a far more comprehensive compilation, one that begins with the pre-First World War Arethusa class and concludes with the postwar completions of wartime programs. Its coverage is encyclopedic, detailing their design histories, the construction and trials of the warships, and the modifications they underwent over the course of their service lives.

 

Supplemented by numerous tables and generously illustrated with photographs and line drawings, Raven and Roberts's book is an invaluable technical resource for anyone interested in the subject. Yet where the authors fall short is in detailing the war service of these vessels. Such coverage is actually provided in the early chapters, which describe the cruisers that served in the First World War. This makes the absence of similar coverage for their successors in the Second World War -- the titular focus of the work -- particularly glaring. Readers seeking a more comprehensive analysis would do well to supplement this book with Norman Friedman's more recent British Cruisers: Two World Wars and After which, while not as well supplemented with pictures, nonetheless provides a more useful narrative analysis of its subject.

This is an encyclopedic book in the truest sense of the term. What David Hobbs, a former naval officer and curator of the Fleet Air Arm Museum, has done in it is provide a description of every ship conceived by the Royal Navy over the past century to launch and support aircraft as a primary part of its mission. This requires him to define some parameters for the sake of manageability -- vessels such as battleships, for example, which were equipped with a floatplane or two for scouting purposes, were left out. Nevertheless, his scope is vast, encompassing not just aircraft carriers but seaplane tenders, "merchant aircraft carriers," maintenance carriers, and LPHs. For each he provides a description of the development of the design followed by a breakdown of the service history of each vessel in its class, which he compliments with a generous selection of photographs from his own extensive collection. Nor does he stop there, as he devotes chapters to designs that were never built (including one about the amazingly off-the-wall Project Habakkuk) and to parallel developments in other navies, showing how these vessels and the ideas they embodied shaped British concepts about the design and role of carriers. All of this makes for a book that a worthy addition to the library of anyone interested in the history of the Royal Navy or of carrier aviation more generally, providing as it does a wealth of material that better understands the evolution of these vessels but their role in the Royal Navy and the broader challenges Britain faced as a naval power over the last century.

Her pops, King Henry VIII, had the right idea, but it wasn't until Queen Elizabeth I took hold of the reigns (see what I did there?) that the British Royal Navy really set sail!

QE I's support of dashing sea captains like Francis Drake, in their attempts to harass the might Spanish Empire, was what kickstarted one of the most dominate naval powers of all time. England's fleet controlled the seas for approximately the next four hundred years, putting it to particularly effective use against France during the Napoleonic Wars.



I'm over-simplifying the history, but if there's one person who doesn't it's The Habit of Victory author Peter Hore. He's penned a very thorough analysis of English naval dominance, mostly during what would become known as The Age of Sail. It's an entertaining retelling of dramatic battles and the colorful characters who orchestrated them.

Who isn't at least familiar with the name Lord Horatio Nelson?


I won't guarantee your reading enjoyment if you're not already a fan of sailing or naval war strategy. I was admittedly bored by the section on the relatively contemporary navy of the 20th century, mainly World War II. But for those of you who, like me, get a thrill from reading about long, dangerous voyages and daring victories all left to the chance vagaries of the wind, well then, hang on to your halyards!