Battleship Builders - Constructing and Arming British Capital Ships (Johnston Ian)(Paperback / softback)

The launch in 1906 of HMS Dreadnought, the worlds first all-big-gun battleship, rendered all existing battle fleets obsolete, but at the same time it wiped out the Royal Navy's numerical advantage, so expensively maintained for decades. Already locked in an arms race with Germany, Britain urgently needed to build an entirely new battle fleet of these larger, more complex and more costly vessels. In this she succeeded spectacularly: in little over a decade fifty such ships were completed, almost exactly double what Germany achieved. It was only made possible by the country's vast industrial nexus of shipbuilders, engine manufacturers, armament firms and specialist armor producers, whose contribution to the creation of the Grand Fleet is too often ignored. This heroic achievement, and how it was done, is the central theme of this book.
It charts the rise of the large
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