BATTLESHIP (Padfield) (New Edition)

The history of the battleship - the greatest and most awe-inspiring class of ship ever built - from origin in the 1850s to the sinking of the greatest of them all on 6th April 1945, when the 70,000 ton "Yamato" sunk under a torrent of aerial bombardment. Peter Padfield traces the extraordinary twists in the evolution of the battleship. He reviews the pressure of politics which drove technology to its limits. He tells of the great naval arms race before the Great War; of the huge naval conflicts within that war; of the great post-war attempts to control the naval arms race and of America's destruction of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The sinking of the "Yamato" was not simply the death of a ship, nor even the final destruction of the IJN, but the end of an era which only lives now in grainy black and white film. "A splendid book" - Tom Pocock, "Books and Bookmen".