I always find the New Vanguard ship books from Osprey to be a great read and this one is no exception. It covers the war-time and post war builds and use of US heavy cruisers. Few realize that these gun ships were in use up into the the Vietnam war and beyond. They were particularly useful in both Korea and Vietnam, performing basically the same missions as they did in World War II, which was escort and shore bombardment. Their 8 inch guns were able to hit quite far inland, a perfect platform for both 'softening up' areas for landing and hitting targets several miles inland. An interesting fact is that no war-time build US heavy cruiser ever saw ship to ship action and only one was damaged by a Japanese offensive action, in this case the USS Canberra which was hit by a torpedo from a Jill torpedo bomber while operating off Taiwan.

Since these were no longer constrained by treaty, these ships exceeded the 10,000 ton limit of earlier heavy cruisers, some of them getting quite large. There were four main classes of heavy cruisers; the Baltimore class, Oregon class, Des Moines class and the Alaska class. This latter class of ships is often mistakenly called a battle cruiser, but in reality it was just a big gun heavy cruiser. Two of the class saw action late in the war while one was launched, but cancelled after being 84% complete and later scrapped, as were almost all of these ships.

Two of these ships were later converted to missile cruisers, the USS Chicago and USS Albany, while one served until 1975, the USS Newport News. Only one heavy cruiser anywhere is the world was preserved and that is the USS Salem, a ship that had 'low miles' on her and is now on display in Quincy, Massachusetts.

In line with other books of this series, we are given a look at what went into the development of these ships and the various designs. This is followed by a look at the weapons and other systems of the ships, followed by a run-down of each of the classes and the ships that were both built and planned. Their war time and peace time records are also covered. This is topped off by an analysis of the ships in terms of how they performed their missions. In all, it makes for an excellent book on the subject and one that needs to be on the shelf of any ship modeler and enthusiast.

September 2014

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