Product Description

The Battlecruiser - in their time this class of ships was considered one of the great triumphs of the Royal Navy, as swift as a destroyer but packing a deadly firepower equal to any ship afloat. But the ships had one fatal flaw: their armour could be pierced by a single enemy shell. The Battle of Jutland exposed this Achilles' heel, then further disasters followed in the next world war with the tragic sinkings of the Hood and Repulse. 1943 - Of all her class, HMS Reliant and one other have survived. Reliant has the reputation of a lucky ship but when Captain Guy Sherbrooke joins her he knows he could be her last captain. As Britain prepares to invade occupied Europe, Reliant will be thrown head first into the conflagration. All those who sail in her know that there can be no half measures: only death or glory awaits HMS Reliant.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #201941 in Books
• Published on: 1997-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 368 pages

From the Back Cover
The Battlecruiser - in their time this class of ships was considered one of the great triumphs of the Royal Navy, as swift as a destroyer but packing a deadly firepower equal to any ship afloat. But the ships had one fatal flaw: their armour could be pierced by a single enemy shell. The Battle of Jutland exposed this Achilles' heel, then further disasters followed in the next world war with the tragic sinkings of the Hood and Repulse.
1943 - Of all her class, HMS Reliant and one other have survived. Reliant has the reputation of a lucky ship but when Captain Guy Sherbrooke joins her he knows he could be her last captain. As Britain prepares to invade occupied Europe, Reliant will be thrown head first into the conflagration. All those who sail in her know that there can be no half measures: only death or glory awaits HMS Reliant.
'Excellent ... what Reeman likes is plot and characterisation, and, like many a good craft, his lines are good and clean' Guy Walters, The Times

'If any author deserves to be 'piped' into bookshops with full naval honours it is Douglas Reeman, without question master of both genres of naval fiction - historical and modern' Books Magazine

About the Author
Douglas Reeman did convoy duty in the Navy in the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the North Sea. He has written over thirty novels under his own name and more than twenty bestselling historical novels featuring Richard Bolitho under the pseudonym Alexander Kent.

Customer Reviews

Authentic WWII naval yarn with a human side
This is a fast-paced, entertaining story of the war at sea, and one of the few to be set on board a capital ship. Gunnery duels with a German heavy cruiser and an Italian battleship are both shown to be less one-sided than they might seem: a single 8-inch shell could pierce the battlecruiser's flimsy armour, while the battleship's greater strength may be outweighed by superior gunnery. As always in war, nothing is certain except that death or injury are only an eyelash away.

The book is by no means one-sided. The action sequences take up only a fraction of the time, leaving plenty of room for character development and even one or two romantic subplots. There is nothing two-dimensional about even the least of Reeman's people.

However there does seem to be a rather breathless quality about the book, as if it had been written in too much of a hurry. Although its technical accuracy is greater than that of a novel like Alastair Maclean's famous "HMS Ulysses", it falls far short in terms of the steadily mounting tension that made that book impossible to put down. Especially towards the end, some of the scenes are almost perfunctory.

The author's grasp of detail and atmosphere is flawless, which is not surprising as he joined the Royal Navy in 1941 and served in the North Sea, the Atlantic and the Arctic. This is Reeman's 32nd book, not counting another 23 written as Richard Kent.

Story of a fictional sister ship to Renown and Repulse
The story begins three years into World War II, as the new captain of the fictional battlecruiser HMS Reliant, a sister to Renown and Repulse, attends the funeral of his predecessor before going to Scotland to take command.

Douglas Reeman, who served in the Royal Navy during world war II, has become a very prolific author of seafaring novels. This is his 55th published nautical adventure: he has written 32 under his own name and 23 novels in the "Bolitho" series under the pen-name Alexander Kent.

It would be slightly cruel to say that this is his 55th variant of the same book, but only slightly. The books he wrote as Douglas Reeman are mostly tales of war at sea in the 20th century, covering almost every type of ship and every theatre of war in which the Royal Navy saw action. The Bolitho novels span the Nelsonian era from the American War of Independence to the end of the Napoleonic wars, and detail the naval careers first of a fictional naval officer, Richard Bolitho, from Midshipman to Admiral of the Fleet and then of his nephew Adam.

But although these books, just like the historic service history of the Royal Navy, cover a huge range of ship types and just about every part of the world, they all have almost identical plots and essentially the same cast of characters under different names.

There is the bog-standard primary hero, who is almost invariably the commanding officer of a ship or occasionally a squadron, and most often a captain RN, except that in the chronologically first few Richard Bolitho novels the hero has not yet reached the rank to command a ship and in the later ones he is an admiral. In "Battlecruiser" this character is the new commanding officer of HMS Reliant, Captain Guy Sherbrooke. As usual he is a competent, brave, and considerate officer who has been promoted steadily but not as fast as some of his flashier colleagues, and who is wrestling with inner demons, in this case from the loss of his previous ship with almost all hands.

There is the hero's superior, an aggressive, glory-hunting, ruthless, interfering, and totally unprincipled flag officer, who in this book is called Admiral Vincent Stagg. As in many of the Douglas Reeman and Alexander Kent books this character is the darling of the press and the Admiralty, aggressive to the point of lunacy, and nearly as dangerous to the men under his command as he is to the Germans/French.

There is always at least one secondary hero, a younger officer or seaman under the command of the book's central figure, and the secondary plot is usually a kind of bildungsroman for that character. In "Battlecruser" the secondary hero is the pilot of HMS Reliant's auxiliary flying boats, a young Canadian reserve (RCNVR) officer called Dick Rayner.

There is the obligatory love interest for the primary hero, and as often applies, another for the secondary hero. In this book, Guy Sherbrooke meets a beautiful civil servant when she is assigned to assist some press and a retired naval hero visiting HMS Reliant. Unusually this relationship has to be a chaste one, as her husband is a prisoner of war held by the Japanese and she isn't going to cheat on him. So instead Dick Rayner gets to enjoy the statutory love scene which always appears about two-thirds of the way through a Douglas Reeman book, usually shortly before our heroes set sail for the climactic final battle.

The plot development is just as formulaic as the characters.

Where Reeman scores, however, is in his descriptions of life at sea and of the tensions leading up to battle. He also makes some pithy and accurate observations on the problem with the entire class of Battlecruisers. These ultra-glamorous, and beautiful ships, once nicknamed the "great cats," were powerful, fast and deadly - both to the enemy and to their own crews.

Battlecruisers were a product of the same brilliant but unhinged mind which was also responsible for the concept of the dreadnaught battleship, Admiral Jacky Fisher, but where the dreadnaught was to dominate the seas for nearly half a century, the battlecruiser was a romantic disaster.

Conceived as super-heavy scouts and cruiser-killers, battlecruisers were the size of a battleship, had the armament of a battleship, and the speed of a destroyer.

HMS Reliant in this book, like her real historical sisters Renown and Repulse, has a main armament of six "fifteen inch" guns, each firing shells six foot long and 15 inches in diameter which weighed a ton and a half. If you could stay afloat yourself long enough to do so, that gave you enough firepower to smash any structure ever built or sink any ship, but the catch was that staying afloat for long in a battlecruiser if you were up against a battleship, or even another battlecruiser, was not easy.

To get their tremendous speed, battlecruisers sacrificed protection and armour - usually they were not much better protected than a heavy cruiser half the size.

So when battlecruisers came up against any enemy warship smaller than a capital ship, their speed and firepower enabled them to hunt it down and blow it out of the water very quickly. But sooner or later, most battlecruisers had to fight battleships, or came under heavy air attack, and then their lack of adequate armour protection was nearly always fatal.

Summary: this novel was written by a man who knows what it was like to go to sea in fighting ships of the second world war, and it shows. He is also a highly competent writer, and the book flows easily and is entertaining to read. Some of the negative reviews of this book are over the top. Provided you don't mind his re-use of plots and characters, there is no reason why you should not enjoy this book or any of Reeman's other novels.

Where he suffers is by comparison with the truly great writers of 20th century naval fiction. As another reviewer has pointed out, Reeman knows far better than Alistair Maclean what life on a WWII warship was like, but Maclean is a brilliant writer while Reeman is only a good one, and so "HMS Ulysses" is in a different league to anything Reeman has written.

He suffers even more by comparison with Nicholas Montsarrat and C.S. Forester, who were brilliant writers who also knew firsthand what it was like to serve on a warship in World War II. Hence "Battlecruiser" is to Montsarrat's "The Cruel Sea" or Forester's "The Ship" and "The Good Shepherd" what the typical Mills & Boon romance is to Jane Austen.

But having said all that, Reeman would never have managed to sell so many books if he was writing rubbish. This is a competently written story of WWII at sea and if you like that kind of novel you will very probably enjoy it.

Battlecruiser, A battle to stay awake long enough to read half page.
I have been a Reeman Fan for many years and have previously read most of his books, however, this is one that until recently I had missed and now I wish I still had missed it! It was boring, boring, boring. Predictable and shallow. I will consign this one to the nearest charity shop.