From the moment when the launching of HMS Dreadnought made every capital ship in the world obsolete overnight, we have been fascinated with these powerful surface combatants. Here Robert M. Farley looks at the history and folklore that makes these ships enduring symbols of national power—and sometimes national futility. From Arizona to Yamato, here are more than sixty lavishly illustrated accounts of battleships from the most well-known to the most unusual, including at least one ship from every nation that ever owned a modern battleship. Separate essays and sidebars look at events and lore that greatly affected battleships.

This new edition of a classic work on British battleships is the most sought after book on the subject. Containing many new photographs from the author's exhaustive collection this superb reference book presents the complete technical history of British capital ship design and construction during the dreadnought era. Beginning with Dreadnought, all of the fifty dreadnoughts, 'super-dreadnoughts' and battlecruisers that served the Royal Navy during this era are described and superbly illustrated with photographs and line drawings.

Vigorous and highly readable, this portrait of the enlisted man's life aboard the U.S. battleship California depicts the devastation at Pearl Harbor from the hazardous vantage point of the open "birdbath" atop the mainmast.

The battleships of the worlds navies in the 1820s were descended directly in line from the Revenge of 1577: they were wooden-built, sail-powered and mounted guns on the broadside, firing solid shot.In the next half century, steel, steam and shells had wrought a transformation and by 1906, Dreadnought had ushered in a revolution in naval architecture. The naval race between Britain and Germany that followed, led to the clash of the navies at Jutland in 1916. Though this was indecisive, the German navy never again challenged the Grand Fleet of Britain during the war, and eventually the crews refused to put to sea again.Disarmament on a massive scale followed, but the battleship was still regarded as the arbiter of sea-power in the years between the wars. However, the advocates of air power were looking to the future, and when in 1940 biplane Swordfish torpedo bombers of the Fleet Air Arm sank three Italian battleships at their moorings in Taranto, the Japanese sensed their opportunity. Their attack on the American Pacific fleet base at Pearl Harbor sank eight battleships but the American carriers were at sea, and escaped destruction. Given the distances involved, the Pacific war was necessarily a carrier war, and in the major actions of the Coral Sea, Midway, Leyte Gulf and the Philippine Sea, all the fighting was done by aircraft, with battleships reduced to a supporting role.Soon after the war ended, most were sent for scrap, and a naval tradition had come to an end.

Presents a global vision of the development of the world's battleships. Each chapter explains the origins of a ship, her importance as a national symbol, and her place in the fleet