Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War

Rating:
Summary: An excellent all encompassing work
Review: Mr. Barnett undertakes to describe the Royal Navy's operational history in World War II. To do this, he has to take up where World War I ended and the interwar years. He describes the budget cuts, wholesale decommissioning of ships, the subordination of the Fleet Air Arm and the neglect lavished on the RAF's Coastal Command. This book becomes, in certain areas, a work on Joint Warfare - the current rage in the United States, but not a new concept if one goes back and looks at Saunders and Wolfe in the French and Indian Wars and Grant and Foote in the Civil War.

This work is painstaking in it's detail. One may not agree with the conclusions of the author, but you will know how he arrived there. I found his arguements thought provoking and informative.

What one has in this work is a review, warts and all of the state of the Royal Navy from 1918 to 1945. The Royal Navy started to rearm in the 1930s but it was not always a well designed ship that went into service. The Tribal class with single purpose low angle main battery - fine for ship to ship combat but useless for engaging aircraft as would be shown in the Mediterranean and Norway. New aricraft carriers were commissioned but aircraft were obsolescent or hasty sea conversions of RAF aircraft such as Spitfires and Hurricanes. A poor choice of fire-control systems put ships are a disadvantage when engaging aircraft. In all, a very mixed picture. Barnett gives the failures and successes of the Royal Navy high visibility. He is balanced in his approach, not failing to describe positive aspects of failures and negative points in successes.

I found this an excellent all around history of the Royal Navy. It is very useful as an adjunct to the biographies of Royal Navy leaders and events. I recommend it for anyone with an interst in the Royal Navy.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent all encompassing work
Review: Mr. Barnett undertakes to describe the Royal Navy's operational history in World War II. To do this, he has to take up where World War I ended and the interwar years. He describes the budget cuts, wholesale decommissioning of ships, the subordination of the Fleet Air Arm and the neglect lavished on the RAF's Coastal Command. This book becomes, in certain areas, a work on Joint Warfare - the current rage in the United States, but not a new concept if one goes back and looks at Saunders and Wolfe in the French and Indian Wars and Grant and Foote in the Civil War.

This work is painstaking in it's detail. One may not agree with the conclusions of the author, but you will know how he arrived there. I found his arguements thought provoking and informative.

What one has in this work is a review, warts and all of the state of the Royal Navy from 1918 to 1945. The Royal Navy started to rearm in the 1930s but it was not always a well designed ship that went into service. The Tribal class with single purpose low angle main battery - fine for ship to ship combat but useless for engaging aircraft as would be shown in the Mediterranean and Norway. New aricraft carriers were commissioned but aircraft were obsolescent or hasty sea conversions of RAF aircraft such as Spitfires and Hurricanes. A poor choice of fire-control systems put ships are a disadvantage when engaging aircraft. In all, a very mixed picture. Barnett gives the failures and successes of the Royal Navy high visibility. He is balanced in his approach, not failing to describe positive aspects of failures and negative points in successes.

I found this an excellent all around history of the Royal Navy. It is very useful as an adjunct to the biographies of Royal Navy leaders and events. I recommend it for anyone with an interst in the Royal Navy.

Rating:
Summary: Good price dated book
Review: This is a book written by Correlli Barnett who has written quite a large number of books and he is famous for a work called "the Desert Generals". The Desert Generals was a sustained attack on the reputation of Field Marshal Montgomery and if nothing else was quite amusing. This book is a history of British naval actions in the Second World War and perhaps lacks the laughs and descends a bit into a boys own account of the operations .

Barnett comes across as a is a bit of a whinger. He starts out by saying how dreadful it was that British Governments of all political persuasions did not spend money on the navy after the First World War. My god they only kept thirteen battle ships in commission. And in 1922 those peaceniks signed the Washington treaty that limited the number of battleships to a 5:5:3 ratio with America and Japan.

Sometime later all this doom and gloom is repeated when he describes a number of engagements between the Italian Fleet and the British Mediterranean Fleet. The Italian Battle Ships had been built after the war and thus were able to go faster than the British Ships and to avoid battle. Barnett then goes on to lament that if Britain had spent money on its navy things would have been different.

What makes all of these statements unbelievable is his descriptions of the numerous actions in which aircraft were able to reduce modern battleships to sunken heaps of scrap iron. At Taranto some less than twenty old slow Swordfish by planes were able to put the Italian battle fleet out of action. The Prince of Wales and the Repulse were sunk in a few minutes by Japanese land based bombers.

If Britain had engaged on a huge program of naval construction in the twenties it would have built a fleet of battleships. The development of air power meant that the only function left to battleships in the Second World War was as target practice for carrier planes. The two largest and most expensive battleships in the world the Mushasi and the Yamato both went to the bottom without sinking a thing. Yet the cost of building battle ships was enormous. With the steel out of one battleship you could build 20,000 tanks.

Italy was a country that rearmed in the 20's. When the Second World War came around its planes were slow poorly armed biplanes. Its tanks were glorified armored cars and it had no anti tank weapons of note. Using this ancient equipment Italy went on to lose battle after battle.

Britain rearmed at the right time. Its fighter aircraft were able to match the German equivalents. Its new battleships were armored better than the German and Italian equivalents and it built aircraft carriers unlike Italy or Germany. Despite this slightly critical note these ravings which tie together the main narrative the book is not that bad.

The stuff on the battle of the Atlantic is so so being rather dated and opinionated. The author appears not to have read Clay Blair's definitive two volume treatment of that subject "Hitler's U-Boat War". (This book would seem to have been published prior to Blair's) The book's main strength is in describing the Mediterranean campaign.

Barnett tries to be a bit sensational in suggesting that having the empire was a bit of a waste of time and that those remote colonies Canada, India and Australia did not really put into the war effort. He then goes to suggest that the African Campaign was a poor use of resources.

The basis of saying that was to show that the Germans generally ran the African theatre on a shoestring and that the British put in huge quantities of men and material and spent most of there time getting beaten. Whilst this is true it is hard to think what else the British might have done. If they had landed forces in France the excellent rail system would have allowed the Germans to concentrate forces and to cream them. Africa was from the British point of view a sensible place to launch a campaign because of the problems that the Germans had in supplying their forces. It allowed the British to feel as though they were doing something whilst the Russians set about winning the war.

Despite the authors complaints it would seem that successive British Governments adopted a balanced and sensible approach to rearmament. The major problems they had, the fall of France and Singapore were not due to poor preparation but due to dreadful generalship. A readable but dated book but at a very reasonable price.

Rating:
Summary: Good price dated book
Review: This is a book written by Correlli Barnett who has written quite a large number of books and he is famous for a work called "the Desert Generals". The Desert Generals was a sustained attack on the reputation of Field Marshal Montgomery and if nothing else was quite amusing. This book is a history of British naval actions in the Second World War and perhaps lacks the laughs and descends a bit into a boys own account of the operations .

Barnett comes across as a is a bit of a whinger. He starts out by saying how dreadful it was that British Governments of all political persuasions did not spend money on the navy after the First World War. My god they only kept thirteen battle ships in commission. And in 1922 those peaceniks signed the Washington treaty that limited the number of battleships to a 5:5:3 ratio with America and Japan.

Sometime later all this doom and gloom is repeated when he describes a number of engagements between the Italian Fleet and the British Mediterranean Fleet. The Italian Battle Ships had been built after the war and thus were able to go faster than the British Ships and to avoid battle. Barnett then goes on to lament that if Britain had spent money on its navy things would have been different.

What makes all of these statements unbelievable is his descriptions of the numerous actions in which aircraft were able to reduce modern battleships to sunken heaps of scrap iron. At Taranto some less than twenty old slow Swordfish by planes were able to put the Italian battle fleet out of action. The Prince of Wales and the Repulse were sunk in a few minutes by Japanese land based bombers.

If Britain had engaged on a huge program of naval construction in the twenties it would have built a fleet of battleships. The development of air power meant that the only function left to battleships in the Second World War was as target practice for carrier planes. The two largest and most expensive battleships in the world the Mushasi and the Yamato both went to the bottom without sinking a thing. Yet the cost of building battle ships was enormous. With the steel out of one battleship you could build 20,000 tanks.

Italy was a country that rearmed in the 20's. When the Second World War came around its planes were slow poorly armed biplanes. Its tanks were glorified armored cars and it had no anti tank weapons of note. Using this ancient equipment Italy went on to lose battle after battle.

Britain rearmed at the right time. Its fighter aircraft were able to match the German equivalents. Its new battleships were armored better than the German and Italian equivalents and it built aircraft carriers unlike Italy or Germany. Despite this slightly critical note these ravings which tie together the main narrative the book is not that bad.

The stuff on the battle of the Atlantic is so so being rather dated and opinionated. The author appears not to have read Clay Blair's definitive two volume treatment of that subject "Hitler's U-Boat War". (This book would seem to have been published prior to Blair's) The book's main strength is in describing the Mediterranean campaign.

Barnett tries to be a bit sensational in suggesting that having the empire was a bit of a waste of time and that those remote colonies Canada, India and Australia did not really put into the war effort. He then goes to suggest that the African Campaign was a poor use of resources.

The basis of saying that was to show that the Germans generally ran the African theatre on a shoestring and that the British put in huge quantities of men and material and spent most of there time getting beaten. Whilst this is true it is hard to think what else the British might have done. If they had landed forces in France the excellent rail system would have allowed the Germans to concentrate forces and to cream them. Africa was from the British point of view a sensible place to launch a campaign because of the problems that the Germans had in supplying their forces. It allowed the British to feel as though they were doing something whilst the Russians set about winning the war.

Despite the authors complaints it would seem that successive British Governments adopted a balanced and sensible approach to rearmament. The major problems they had, the fall of France and Singapore were not due to poor preparation but due to dreadful generalship. A readable but dated book but at a very reasonable price.