Publisher's Synopsis
This is the story of the greatest and most awe-inspiring class of ship ever built, from its origins in the 1850s to its demise on 7 April 1945, when the last and greatest of them all, the 70,000-ton Yamato, sank under a torrent of aerial bombardment. For a hundred years the great fleets acted as symbols of the world's leading nations. In tracing the evolution of the battleship from the earliest days to the pinnacle of its development, Peter Padfield reviews the pressure of politics which drove technology to its limits in the quest for larger ships with heavier armour and bigger guns. He describes the great naval arms race before the Great War; the huge naval conflicts within that war; the desperate post-war attempts to control the naval arms race and the rise and destruction of the Japanese navy at the hands of America. Originally published as The Battleship Era, this is a completely revised edition of Peter Padfield's classic book.
