This illustrated naval history presents a comprehensive study of French battleships constructed after the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922.The French battleships of the Dunkerque and Richelieu classes were the most radical and influential battleship designs of the interwar period, and were coveted by the British, German and Italian navies following the Armistice of June 1940. Using a wealth of primary-source material, this volume provides a full acc...

"An important work for anyone interested in warship design, the naval side of World War II in the Mediterranean, or modern Italian history."—New York Military Affairs SymposiumFor its final battleship design Italy ignored all treaty restrictions on tonnage and produced one of Europe's largest and most powerful capital ships, comparable with Germany's Bismarck class, similarly built in defiance of international agreements. The three ships of the Littori...

The most comprehensive English-language study of the German Imperial Navy's WWI battlecruisers, fully illustrated with drawings, diagrams and photographs.In this in-depth study, naval historian and author of Battle on the Seven Seas Gary Staff presents a full analysis of Imperial Germany's battlecruisers. Known as Panzerkreuzer, the eight ships of this class were involved in several early North Sea skirmishes before their historic victory against the Royal...

"An extraordinarily detailed account of the development of Royal Navy cruisers . . . a towering work" from the author of Fighting the Great War at Sea ( Warship 2012).For most of the twentieth century, Britain possessed both the world's largest merchant fleet and its most extensive overseas territories. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Royal Navy always showed a particular interest in the cruiser—a multipurpose warship needed in large num...

The conception and evolution—through inter-war tensions, global war, and years of Cold War hostility—of the Royal Navy's large fleet destroyers.The Tribal class destroyers are heroes of the Altmark incident, of the battle of Narvik, and countless actions across all theatres of operation. Yet there has been surprisingly little written about these critical ships, still less about their wartime successors, the Battle class, or their postwar incarnations, the Daring cla...

The work of explorers, surveyors and spies in the race to conquer Southern Asia is vividly recounted in this history of British imperial cartography.In the 19th century, the British and Russian empires were engaged in bitter rivalry for the acquisition of Southern Asian. Although India was the ultimate prize, most of the intrigue and action took place along its northern frontier in Afghanistan, Turkestan and Tibet. Mapping the region and gaining knowledge of the ene...

A 1955 military memoir offering a first-hand account of life in the British 7th Armoured Division during World War II.Few accounts of the tank battles in the Western Desert during the Second World War have provided so vivid an evocation as Cyril Joly's classic account Take These Men. In such inhospitable conditions, this was armoured warfare of a particularly difficult and dangerous kind.From 1940 to 1943, battles raged back and forth as one side o...

A detailed history and analysis of the most controversial amphibious operation in the Pacific during WWII: the Battle for Peleliu.On September 15, 1944, the United States invaded the tiny Pacific island of Peleliu, located at the southern end of the Palau Islands. Boasting a large airfield from which the Americans could mount bomber campaigns, Peleliu was a strategically essential part of Gen. MacArthur's long-awaited liberation of the Philippines. With the famed 1...

" This superb book . . . will undoubtedly become the definitive volume on British Aircraft carriers and naval aviation . . . magnificent."—Marine NewsThis book is a meticulously detailed history of British aircraft-carrying ships from the earliest experimental vessels to the Queen Elizabeth class, currently under construction and the largest ships ever built for the Royal Navy. Individual chapters cover the design and construction of each ...

The rapid evolution of radio and radar systems for military use during the Second World War, and devices to counter them, led to a technological battle that neither the Axis nor the Allied powers could afford to lose. The result was a continual series of thrusts, parries and counter-thrusts, as first one side then the other sought to wrest the initiative in the struggle to control the ether. This was a battle fought with strange-sounding weapons: 'Freya', 'Mandrel', 'Boozer' and 'Window'; ...

"An exceptionally vivid memoir of a French soldier's experience of the First World War."—Max Hastings, New York Times bestselling authorAlong with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceaseless combat, wherever the French army fought its fiercest battles: Artois...

What was the soldiers experience of the Battle of the Somme? How did the men who were there record their part in the fighting or remember it afterwards? How can we, 100 years later, gain an insight into one of the most famous and contentious - episodes of the Great War? Matthew Richardsons graphic account, which is based on the vivid personal testimony of those who took part, offers us a direct impression of the reality of the battle from the perspective of the ordinary soldiers and junior...