by Ingo Bauernfeind
Philadelphia & Yorkshire: Casemate, 2024. Pp. 240.
Illus., tables, biblio., index. $49.95. ISBN: 1636242561
The Last Generation of American Battleships
At first glance, Ingo Bauernfeind’s book on American battleships appears to join the great works by Siegfried Breyer and Garze and Dulin, but this new volume from Casemate offers both more and less. It’s a beautifully illustrated book with a lot of information about battleship design, how U.S. Navy ships evolved over the 20th century, and a fair amount about their performance in battle. But it also offers things that those reference works ignored, such as detailed coverage of the long aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the role of the many museum battleships today.
The strongest, and for many readers the most useful parts, of this book are the sections on the design of each class of battleships constructed after the HMS Dreadnought changed the fundamentals of battleship design. Bauernfeind begins by explaining the technological developments—in armament, propulsion, and protection--that enabled the Dreadnought to eclipse its predecessors. Then he shifts to the first class – the Floridas – of American battleships that are part of this story. Although the USS Florida itself never saw action, and was scrapped in the 1920s, its sister ship, the Utah, still exists as a wreck in the mud of Pearl Harbor. He provides design histories of each class—some in considerable detail, some rather brief—from the earliest dreadnoughts, then on to the ships not completed or converted to aircraft carriers between the wars—to the “fast battleships” completed in time for World War II. But he does not leave out the odd “battlecruisers” of the Alaska class, nor the projected, but never built huge vessels that would have been the Montanas. Bauernfeind includes the basics from the reference works, such as line drawings and the tables showing each class’s displacement, dimensions, armament, performance, etc.
There is also a lot of material not found in any of the reference works. There is a long essay on the wreck of the USS Arizona, written by Daniel J. Lenihan, the National Park Service archeologist who spent years diving on and exploring the battleship’s wreck in Pearl Harbor. Like every section of U.S. Battleships, the essay is lavishly illustrated with beautifully printed color photos and line drawings. This essay complements the already comprehensive pages on the damage suffered by the other battleships on December 7, 1941. A chapter called “Battleships in the Cold War” includes unusual photos, and good coverage, of the battleships used in the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. The chapter also details the modifications to the Iowas that allowed them to be used in Korea and other, more recent, wars. There is also coverage of the museum ships—the Texas, which is the only dreadnought battleship preserved; the Alabama, North Carolina, and Massachusetts of the “fast battleships” built at the beginning of World War II; and the four ships of the Iowa class. Bauernfeind concentrates on the Missouri, a ship that he worked on for years.
This book has many attractive features: it is well written and the photos are both well-chosen and nicely printed. The development of the battleship as a type is carefully explained. But there are some things missing. Considering how little combat these ships engaged in during the four long years of World War II, he provides scant details of these actions. A reader would not know, for example, that the Texas fought a long duel with German shore batteries at Cherbourg, and suffered both damage and casualties. Nor is there any mention of the Colorado at Tinian, where a Japanese 150mm battery, in just 15 minutes, managed to inflict painful casualties on the battleship. Since this was one of just two times an American battleship, in the long Pacific war, suffered damage from enemy shells, it is a surprising omission. Yet, all in all, this attractive volume would be a good introduction to American battleships for anyone new to naval history, while it provides plenty of unusual material for those familiar with the ships.
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Our Reviewer: Jonathan Beard is a retired freelance journalist who has devoted most of his life to reading military history. When he worked, he wrote and did research for British, American and Danish science magazines, and translated for an American news magazine. The first book he owned was Fletcher Pratt’s The Monitor and the Merrimac. Jonathan reviews regularly for the Michigan War Studies Review. His previous reviews include Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution, The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944, Prevail Until the Bitter End: Germans in the Waning Days of World War II, Enemies Among Us, Battle of the Bulge, Then and Now, Mussolini’s War: Fascist Italy From Triumph to Collapse, Engineering in the Confederate Heartland, The Bletchley Park Codebreakers, Armada, Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, The Collaborators, The Enigma Traitors, When Men Fell from the Sky, Midway: The Pacific War’s Most Famous Battle, When Men Fell from The Sky, and The Lost Scientists of World War II
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Note: U.S. Battleships 1939–45 is also available in e-editions.
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