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.

In this book, author Konstam takes a look at the final classes of British battleships, the Nelson and King George V class. The HMS Vanguard is also included, though it is a post war ship. 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 after WWI and the need to keep the Nelson class within the limitations of the various treaties. This was not needed with the King George V class nor with the Vanguard, which was basically a wartime-developed ship. 

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 and during WWII. Then there is the war record of each ship and its eventual fate. Those not sunk were broken up for scrap by 1958, though the Vanguard lasted a bit longer. Some interesting information, only one of these ships was sunk, that being the Prince of Wales by the Japanese early in the Pacific war. One of the KGV ships never fired its guns in anger, and the Vanguard used the turrets from the WWI era Courageous and Glorious as those ships were converted to aircraft carriers and didn't need them.

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.

December 2009

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