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    British Destroyers: From Earliest Days to the Second World War
    Unavailable
    British Destroyers: From Earliest Days to the Second World War
    Unavailable
    British Destroyers: From Earliest Days to the Second World War
    Ebook1,111 pages15 hours

    British Destroyers: From Earliest Days to the Second World War

    By Norman Friedman

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In the late nineteenth century the advent of the modern torpedo woke the Royal Navy to a potent threat to its domination, not seriously challenged since Trafalgar. For the first time a relatively cheap weapon had the potential to sink the largest, and costliest exponents of sea power. Not surprisingly, Britain’s traditional rivals invested heavily in the new technology that promised to overthrow the naval status quo.

    The Royal Navy was also quick to adopt the new weapon, but the British concentrated on developing counters to the essentially offensive tactics associated with torpedo-carrying small craft. From these efforts came ‘torpedo catchers’, torpedo-gunboats and eventually the torpedo-boat destroyer, a type so successful that it eclipsed and the usurped the torpedo-boat itself. With its title shortened to ‘destroyer’, the type evolved rapidly and was soon in service in many navies, but in none was the evolution as rapid or as radical as in the Royal Navy

    This book is the first detailed study of their early days, combining technical history with an appreciation of the changing role of destroyers and the tactics of their deployment. Like all of Friedman’s books, it reveals the rationale and not just the process of important technological developments.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPen and Sword
    Release dateAug 30, 2009
    ISBN9781473812802
    Unavailable
    British Destroyers: From Earliest Days to the Second World War
    Author

    Norman Friedman

    NORMAN FRIEDMAN is arguably America’s most prominent naval analyst, and the author of more than thirty books covering a range of naval subjects, including Naval Anti-Aircraft Guns & Gunnery and Naval Weapons of World War One.

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    • 4/5
      I'll say right up front that this is one of the best works done by Norman Friedman in some time, as he sorts through both the development of the torpedo tactics in the Royal Navy and how the standard flotilla type destroyer of the Interwar Period ultimately came to be. Let;s just say that I had a weak understanding of why British destroyers of World War I had the characteristics they did, and that gap in my knowledge has certainly been alleviated.If I mark this book down for anything it's that Friedman ends by examining the Royal Navy's efforts during World War Ii to convert older destroyers (including the famous fifty ships granted by the United States) into viable modern escorts, but it would seem to me that this part of the story would have been better told in the context of the other convoy escorts developed by the RN. Also, perhaps a summation of the development British surface torpedo warfare might have been appropriate instead.