The Battleship Holiday: The Naval Treaties and Capital Ship Design

Excellent book! There isn't much new information on battleship design here, but I doubt that it is possible to add much more after all these years. Most of the information in it is taken from other books on battleships written by people such as R.A. Burt, Campbell, Dulin and Garzke, Staff, Jentschura, Friedman, Lengerer, Massie, Roberts, and so forth. There are also citations from books on specific subjects such as the Battle of Jutland and histories of specific navies and their ships.The advantage of this book is that it puts all the information on a given subject in one place. Specific topics discussed in quite a bit of detail include the evolution and development of gunnery ranging and fire control, side armor, deck armor, and underwater protection against torpedoes. There is also much discussion on the politics behind the Washington Treaty of 1921, the First London Treaty of 1930, and the Second London Treaty of 1937.The book discusses battleships that were actually built as well as ships that were designed but never started or, if started, never finished. One subject that is not discussed are the projected battleship designs of the late 1920s by the US, Britain, and Japan in anticipation of the end of the "Battleship Holiday" in 1931. Fortunately, there are other books that discuss this subject in great detail,

Large number of Black and white pictures. Wish there had been more line drawings. I feel too little attention was paid to the United States program and also the Japanese program. I do feel it provides some insights that I was not aware of in some of the American and British treaty negotiators. Also it provides insights I had not found discussed in other sources concerning the French and Italian programs. For the most part aircraft carrier design is only mentioned in passing.

I was somewhat disappointed in this book, whose title is less than accurate. Based on the title, I expected a detailed review and plans of capital ship designs developed immediately prior to the Washington Naval Treaty and then the various design studies for 35,000 ton ships developed by the major navies during the period in which the treaty was in force, leading ultimately to the relatively few "Treaty Battleships" actually designed and completed prior to the Second World War. Instead, what I got was a well-researched but disjointed discussion of capital ship design and operations from 1914 through the Second World War, some of which seem tacked on mainly to make the book longer to justify its price. Tucked into this book were some excellent and informative chapters on the evolution of fire control systems in the various navies, some interesting details regarding the treaty negotiations, and some limited design studies, but far too much involved discussions of wartime operations, both in WW1 and WW2, that seemed largely unrelated to the advertised purpose of this book. For the reader interested mainly in the effects of the naval treaties on warship design between the wars, I'd recommend John Jordan's "Warships after Washington" over this volume.

I found this to be an overall good book, and it includes technical details on some ships such as the Germans Panzershiffen that are not normally covered in other naval texts about the interwar period. However, there is no mention at all of the Soviet Union or their efforts to build capital ships. While the USSR was not a signatory to the naval treaties, and economic problems in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War prevented her from building capital ships in the 1920s, she certainly followed international naval affairs and progress. When economic conditions improved in the 1930s the USSR first sought American technical assistance (by virtue of an attempt to have the US build a battleship for the USSR in the United States) with the design her navy. Failing to obtain that, she then obtained German technical assistance. The four giant Sovetsky Soyuz class battleships that the Soviets laid down but never completed are nowhere mentioned either. The complete omission of any mention of capital ship development by one of the major world powers of the era is very puzzling to me, and seriously degrades the overall quality of the book.

This book presents an excellent overview of capital ship design and combat from about 1905 through 1945. Although its central subject matter is the impact of the various naval treaties of the 1920s and 1930s, it reaches beyond those specific considerations. For someone interested in capital ships of the time in question, this book is a great read.My primary critique is an excessive number of endnotes. Many or most of them are simple citations, but there are just enough hidden nuggets that the reader feels compelled to check all of them. A footnote format would be better, and it would also help to limit notes to either citations or substantive text but not to mix those concepts. That being said, the quality of the work easily outweighs this fault.

This is an impressive study of how suspension of capital ship construction in the 1920s and early 1930s (due to international agreements) impacted the design of the ships built after the treaties concluded in the years before (and during) World War II. For design work was never suspended and major naval powers continued to develop potential battleship designs in the expectation the treaties would, indeed, no longer limit naval shipbuilding. Rather than the more usual country-by-country survey, Stern (author of eight previous naval studies) opts for a more useful comparative analysis on roughly chronological grounds. The result is considerable insight into the building of the final post-treaty battleships that marked the apogee of their type. Recommended.

Bravo Zulu, a navy expression for well done, applies here as I found the book to be the Bravo Zuluest book I have ever read on the naval arms race that was forestalled only to be resumed ten years later. There are many intimate details about the subject that I did not know but found to be integral to understanding the capital ship world of way back then.

Since well before this book was published in October, I looked forward to getting hold of a copy. Unfortunately, having read it, I was disappointed.There are a number of ways this book could have turned out. It might have been a narrative around the treaties and the design and development of the ships, like Massie’s first war books. It could have been the story of the performance of the ships in wartime, like Gordon. Or it could have been a detailed technical catalogue of the ships, in the style of Siegfried Breyer’s authoritative manual. The problem ultimately is one of space: this is a short book and there is simply too ground to cover.This is more difficult because the book does not actually do what it says on the tin: it is not just about the treaty battleships but spends 80 pages – over a third of its length – as a general history of the background to the Dreadnoughts and through the earlier ships of the type. This is far too long as an introduction and creates space constraints for later, but equally not enough to do the job properly: the story is not told evenly across all types, some ships are examined in detail and many important ships are virtually ignored (eg the Royal Sovereigns). And the scope is (deliberately) exclusively on the key six nations, so nothing at all on the Austrians, Russians and South Americans.Having introduced those ships, there is then very haphazard coverage on inter war modernisations. There is mention on page 147 of the Queen Anne Mansions structures of the QE class rebuilds, but then as the picture shows on page 150, this was not a feature of the immediate modernisations. There is nothing at all on the extensive rebuild of the Renown, nothing on the rebuilds of the Kongos and virtually nothing on the extensive work on some of the US ships. If the answer is that this was outside scope, then why the detail on the Italian rebuilds?I would have expected more on the ships which went no further than design stage before the Washington treaty. Unfortunately this book is stronger on pictures than plans, but as there are by definition no photographs of the ships not built, we have no guides to visualise. We have artists impressions of the two US ships, and (unusually) a plan of the G3, but neither impressions nor plans on the Japanese at all.I did not feel the material on the treaty ships themselves was well structured, it is bitty, inconsistent and episodic, chapters 9 and 10 in particular lack logical structure. Coverage of the war service is thin and superficial. The whole Bismarck episode is dealt with inadequately in two scanty pages; spending a page more on the Scharnhorst is just perverse. There is nothing on the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse at all, perhaps because the author makes the arbitrary limitation of keeping the chapter to ship to ship conflicts. Judgements are made but not really justified by proper analysis: the issues around the UK’s shelling of the Vichy French Navy are complex and still sensitive: to dismiss (page 210) the action as ‘misbegotten on the basis of the single paragraph here is just tabloid journalism not serious academic study. Page 177 poses an interesting idea about the British philosophy on the 14” gun, but there’s nothing to back up who held this view and on what evidence the proposition is put forward. There are many similar points.The notes to the text are fairly extensive and worth reading in themselves. But even with them, I found myself simply not trusting the judgements or even the facts in the text (page 96 gives two different numbers for the displacement of the planned G3s). These issues are complex and there are conflicting sources; I would contrast this book with a work like Andrew Gordon’s Rules of the Game, which scrupulously sifts the various sources and so draws conclusions you can trust. The Battleship Holiday is lightweight by comparison, not just in length but in approach.I’m not sure what to say about style. The author is American and I found the writing style grated with me. Is that unfair and purely a question of difference across the Atlantic? Possibly. But the casual style doesn’t help.Curiously, the one earlier review here complains about the switching between imperial and metric sizes for guns and says he had to make his own crib sheet. This is actually already provided in the book on page 7.The book is not without value. There is a great deal of interesting material and some of the pictures are striking. But this is in no sense a definitive work. As a Christmas stocking filler, it was expensive.

A fascinating and wryly amusing account of the shenanigans around the ‘battleship holiday’ and its outcomes for the worlds navy’s and indeed, the balance of power at sea.I read books of this kind while I’m having my morning coffee, and this book really enhanced that pleasure - highly recommended, not least for the authors sense of humour!

Good book, but nothing really earth shatteringly new. Would have preferred more illustration of the proposed design, only one I haven't seen a variant of before. Worth getting if your new to the subject.

This covers the whole Dreadnought era and is carefully researched and we'll written.

An excellent well researched book