British Battleships 1892-1957

When the Vanguard was paid off into reserve in 1956, it marked the end of an epoch of Britain's history: that of her sea power as embodied in her great battleships.

At Queen Victoria's Jubilee Review in 1897, Britain's naval might was assembled in lines of ships covering a distance of twenty-five miles.

Paramount among them, the single element which established beyond question Britain's naval supremacy, were her twenty-two modern battleships.

Yet within sixty years, the ships which had once been the Navy's spearhead and her pride were extinct, superseded by a sea power which had come to depend on submarines, escorts, aircraft and missiles.

In this standard work of naval scholarship, Commander Pears describes each class of ship from those final sixty years in detail, with a photograph of each; and he adds vivid historical notes about both their ancestry and their fortunes.

This facsimile reprint of a classic among naval histories lit was first published in 1957) will be welcomed by anyone for whom the memory of our great capital ships, sailing in line astern under full steam, still stirs the blood.