Product Review (submitted on 6 September 2022):
So, what did happen to all the world’s battleships? It’s a question that seemingly has already been answered. Surely, the big gun battlewagons with a gunnery range of between 20 and 30 miles had been superceded by the aircraft carrier with ranges in the hundreds of miles. It is a question that runs through this heavyweight detailed book that challenges the conventional thinking about the cause of the disappearance of battleships.
The author, Chris Baker, first questioned the rise, and seemingly sudden, fall of the battleship after 1945 forty years ago, but his work at the Ministry of Defence and family life meant his quest to find answers took a backseat. During the pandemic he found time to ask the question again, and the result is an authoritative and unique take on the post-war careers of the world’s surviving battleships. 95 Dreadnoughts still existed on 2 September 1945 (out of 175 built), albeit some, such as Tirpitz, were visible just as wrecks.
Baker examines each class of battleship by its country of origin against a chronological timeframe that saw most navies abandon their manpower intensive, notoriously hard to maintain and astronomically expensive and increasingly ‘irrelevant’ battleships by the late 1950s. Great Britain sent her last battleship, HMS Vanguard, to the scrappers in 1960, but the concept of a powerful unit capable of hitting hard at great distances and offering flagship capabilities, persisted. In the United States particularly, there were calls to complete the last two Iowa Class, USS Illinois and USS Kentucky, and the last Alaska-class battlecruiser, USS Hawaii. In hindsight, as the author postulates, perhaps they should have been, as American battleships played a key role in Korea, Vietnam and even as recently as the first Gulf War, having been continuously updated and upgraded with new lethal long-range strike weapons.
The last conventional battleship went out of service in 1992, and the US Navy struck them from the Navy List, meaning the era of active battleships in the fleet is truly over. Today, battleships are museum pieces and a reminder of what exactly did happen to the battleships.
This book is beautifully illustrated throughout with several never seen before images and is a relatively easy (non-academic) read. I wholeheartedly recommend this book for any naval enthusiast’s bookcase.
