Italian Battleships - 'Conte di Cavour' and 'Duiio' Classes 1911-1956

This very pleasing book has a quality feel to both its design and even the feel of the pages between your fingers. Generally speaking, it makes you, as a reader, feel that the authors (Ermino Bagnnasto and Augusto de Toro) have done everything they can to give you the best possible experience when reading this weighty tome. That said, books like this are most often broken down into three key areas, design, construction and operational service and occasionally some elements of these are skipped over somewhat. In the case of this book even the writers admit in their foreword that most of their attention has been lavished on these beautifully designed battleships after their 1930s reconstruction and World War Two service histories. To be fair, the battleships service in World War One was rather limited and of no great consequence, but I would have liked to have seen a fraction more attention paid to this part of their careers. In 1903 the Italian designer of these battleships, Cunibarti, laid the foundations of all subsequent Italian battleship designs with these warships. He, like his contemporaries in Great Britain, Austria, Germany, France, Japan and the United States found that there was never enough tonnage available to provide for a truly balanced overall design combining firepower with horsepower and protection. As built, the Conti di Cavour’s had five turrets for 13 heavy guns but on a hull only one knot faster than the pre-Dreadnought Dante Alighieri Class that preceded them. On commissioning, the Italian design was already outclassed by new ‘Super Dreadnoughts’ entering service elsewhere across Europe. It is interesting to note that the Italian ‘Super Dreadnoughts’ of the Caracciolo Class were never completed. A great deal of the text of this book is devoted to the extensive reconstruction programme to modernise the two classes in the 1930s bringing them close to parity with other European battleships of the period. As rebuilt the battleships had an extremely handsome appearance but to achieve this the hulls were practically gutted and the centre triple turret abandoned, whilst uprated modern machinery was installed to improve their top speed performance. The ships had a new, innovative, form of armour protection installed which proved inadequate as was proven when two battleships sank to the bottom of Taranto harbour in November 1940 after Swordfish torpedo bombers from HMS Illustrious sank them in the daring Royal Navy raid. The book goes into great detail about the Italian Navy’s operations during World War Two which was very interesting. There’s an interesting account of the loss of Giulio Cesare in Russian hands in 1956: one of many Battleships lost to an internal magazine explosion (two of these five included) with the usual terrible casualty list - 609 dead. Near the end of the book there is a short but interesting colour section and a long listing of every movement of the four surviving ships during WW2. This book is clearly a labour of love by the authors who have poured huge amounts of time and effort into crafting it. There is a wealth of stunning photographs (mostly black and white) and for model boat enthusiasts the line drawings are plentiful and extremely detailed.