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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A must have on British Battlecruiser development, 1 Mar 2004
John Roberts is a noted naval historian whose previous work includes co-authoring the excellent British Battleships of WWII and British Cruisers of WWII. This book may be considered as a sort of pre-sequal for the former, but only covering British Battlecruisers. However unlike the two earlier works, John Roberts has clearly been forced to keep his Battlecruiser book within a limited space and buget for there are no detailed side and plan drawings of the battlecruisers within the book itself, although as a sort of compensation there is an excellent seperate A2 size drawing of the Queen Mary folded inside a pocket within the back cover.The book avoids the often treaded path history of the battlecruisers themselves and focusses mainly on their design history. To this end the author has gone back through the achives rather than following the so-called official line which has been covered a thousand times before. The book is split into quite logical sections covering the ships origins, the pre-war battlecruisers, the WWI designs, their guns, machinery and armour before providing a conclusion on the type. He does not cover any developments post World War 1, so anyone wanting to find out how the surviving battlecruisers were modernised for World War II etc, had better refer to his British Battleships of WWII instead. John Roberts merely covers the Battlecruisers conception from armoured cruisers, covering briefly Fisher's thoughts for all mediem calibre gunned type ships before making them all big gunned ships. This work holds many surprises which contrasts the official history of these ships. For example the Indefatigable design did not start off as a merely improved Invincible design. Indeed the chapter showing the return of Fisher in October 1914, really challenges the official line that the Renown and Glorious group were merely intended for the Baltic using both notes by Fisher found in the archives and design details to show that they were not intended for this role.
Historically, the story finishes with the concept of HMS Hood and how she was once termed a Battleship and thus ending the Battlecruiser type as originated by Fisher. Overall, this book may seem pricey for the few pages contained inside. Indeed I feel that the author wanted to include more but could not. However this is as true a story on the history of their design as we shall ever get and therefore should make a good addition to the bookshelf. Although the title is a bit mis-leading, maybe something like "British Battlecruisers - A history of their design and development 1900-1920" would have been better.
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