M. J. WhitleyRezensionen

this book is pretty much what one wants when buying handbooks of warships of WWII or earlier. There are a good number of photographs and plenty of deck plans. It is well written for the genre and I'd like to have one for my home. Anything by the author is worth the investment.

Mr Whitley is one of my favourite writers in the world of naval architecture. This is a worthy addition to his body of work, where he adds to his book on the Battleships and Cruisers of WWI. There is an adequate set of deck plan and the ship photos are well chosen. This is not a book for fans of the mystique of German super ships. It seems that the light cruiser designs had been overloaded with armament, and suffered from engineering problems and very large turning circles. The protection was not well designed and the radius of operations was quite low. The Heavy cruisers were better protected but had the other faults of the Lights. So, the ships, which were good looking had little else to recommend them.½

This handbook is lavish with photographs, has many deck plans and gun descriptions. If you are buying only one book on this topic, and have the money, this is it. The text is relatively informative, and the information on the Soviet Navy seems to be fuller than other handbooks. This volume also covers escort vessels and torpedo boats above 200 tons a useful degree of completeness.

A flatly written history of the WWII German destroyer classes. It does point out that the effect of having a small budget for design, and a short lead time for construction led to these vessels being too complicated for good maintenance under war-time conditions. These are attractive models to own, and popular with naval war-gamers.½

Whitley has produced a reliable work, with good pictures, line drawings, and statistics for each class of cruisers in service during WWII. An excellent book if you want a reliable overview of the subject that covers all nations, not just the major combatants. Each ships has a career summary, and the class origins and evolutions are detailed.

A very good reference, well worth getting.

This book offers a great introductory reference on the battleships in service during WWII. The figures stated for each class are almost always accurate, photos are included, and line drawings too, There are career details for individual ships, as well as a summar of the origins of each design and its evolution into the finished product. The book does not include everything, but then it can hardly be faulted for that as its purpose is not to detail each ship in minute detail, there are plenty of other books that will do that for the reader.

Well worth getting if you seek a relieable quick reference or want to know the basics about all the ships.