Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44461 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-15
• Binding: Hardcover
• 176 pages

Synopsis
Winston Churchill famously claimed that the submarine war in the Atlantic was the only campaign of the Second World War that really frightened him. If the lifeline to north America had been cut, Britain would never have survived; there could have been no build-up of US and Commonwealth forces, no D-Day landings, and no victory in western Europe. Furthermore, the battle raged from the first day of the war until the final German surrender, making it the longest and arguably hardest-fought campaign of the whole war. The ships, technology and tactics employed by the Allies form the subject of this book.Beginning with the lessons apparently learned from the First World War, the author outlines inter-war developments in technology and training, and describes the later preparations for the second global conflict. When the war came, the balance of advantage was to see-saw between U-boats and escorts, with new weapons and sensors introduced at a raid rate. For the defending navies, the prime requirement was numbers, and the most pressing problem was to improve capability without sacrificing simplicity and speed of construction.

The author analyses the resulting designs of sloops, frigates, corvettes and destroyer escorts and attempts to determine their relative effectiveness.

Customer Reviews

Well worth buying ......but......
First the good points

# The author brings his extensive personal knowledge to the subject. Spending his entire working life as a naval architect with the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors, David Brown can give his own characteristic insight and observations into many aspects of the subject - but in an interesting and understandable way. This is one of the very real values of the book

# The book is not overburdened by the "laundry lists" of ship names, launch dates etc which are readily available elsewhere and probably in the library of most people buying this book already. Where tabular information is given it is relevent, and in many cases , new.

# The photographs are very well chosen, plenteous,and printed to a good size - and above all are superbly reproduced. These photos, many of which are new to me, are easily worth the modest sum charged for the book.

Now the quibbles
# This is an attempt to tell the technical history and operational of escorts in the context of the Battle of the Atlantic. In the words of the late Tony Preston "this is attempting too much on the dispacement". Too much has had to be left out of the conflict itself - for instance the part placed by Escort Carriers - to give the full picture.

# A fair amount of the available space in the book has been used to reproduce the (copyright free) maps from an HMSO publication "The Battle of the Atlantic". As the author states these give a vivid impression of the geographical shifts in the battle. But they have been reproduced too small to differentiate between the symbols for merchant ships sunk and U boat losses. They should have been simplified and made smaller, or reproduced to the original size. As in ship design all space is valuable and all allocation a compromise - and this compromise has not worked.

But this book is still very well worth buying and can be thoroughly recommended.