When Britain entered World War II, she still had the largest and strongest navy in world, but it was one that wasn't superior by much and consisted of a large number of older ships. By all accounts in terms of battleships (still the king of the seas), she had only about a dozen. Some were battle-cruisers with lighter than normal armor and most of them were either WWI vintage or pretty close to it. Despite the opponents having technically superior ships, the British did manage to use their older assets with considerable effectiveness during WWII. Just about all of them were damaged in some way during the conflict and two of them were sunk.

In this book, author Konstam takes a look at two of the older classes of battleships that served during the war, the Queen Elizabeth and Royal Sovereign class. Of course, it is impossible to provide a detailed history of these ships in just these few pages, but the book provides the basics and a good place to start. It starts by providing a background to battleship design at the turn of the 20th century and the development of the Dreadnought type of battleship with which most of us are so familiar. It was a radical change from the norm and one that make most of the world's battleships obsolete pretty much overnight.

All of Britain's battleship classes are covered in some detail as to the design and armament. This leads us to the two classes in this book. Their history is provided along with the modifications made to the ships prior to WWII. Then there is the war record of each ship and its eventual fate. Those not sunk were broken up for scrap by 1949, leaving none to serve as museum ships. In fact, the British Navy does not seem to believe in keeping these older ships around and has scrapped nearly every ship they have ever used.

This is all accompanied by some superb photos of the various ships and by the excellent art work of Tony Bryan and Paul Wright. This helps us to see how these ships improved over the years and the differences in the various classes. In all, it makes for an excellent primer on the subject and fully meets this reviewer's expectations of books in this series. If you want to learn about the subject, I know you will find it to be equally useful.  Buy with confidence.

May 2009

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