Have a Holly Jolly Dreadnought!
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Do you need holiday gifts for multiple people who could possibly be tolerant of reading about battleships? If so, look no further! David Axe:
In many ways, the battleship represented the greatest-ever concentration of naval power in a single vessel. Between World War I and World War II, the big, fast, thickly-armored and heavily-armed warships dominated the world’s oceans.
And then, very quickly, the battleship became practically obsolete. Why is a complex question — one that University of Kentucky professor Robert Farley,an occasional War Is Boring contributor, addresses in his new tome The Battleship Book.
“The world reached ‘peak battleship’ in 1918,” Farley writes, “when 118 dreadnoughts served in 13 different navies.” Combat claimed eight battlewagons during the Great War. “The Second World War was far more deadly.” Sixty-three battleships were in service in 1939 and another two dozen of the giant warships left the slipways before the conflict’s end. Twenty-three sank in combat.
If you want to ensure that the book arrives for the holidays, I’d order directly from Wildside; Amazon’s ship date remains January for obscure reasons.