The British Battleship. Norman Friedman

      THIS book brings me back to the very first book I wrote, Battleship Design and Development 1905-1945. It began when I was a graduate physics student, and my late friend Horst Feistel asked me why battleships were designed as they were. I had learned enough about naval architecture and related subjects to produce a sort of answer based on engineering considerations. Much of what I have learned since has been an education in the non-engineering, often political or fiscal, issues which so often trump engineering logic. My first book tentatively explored some of those conflicts between engineering logic and reality, and this current book is largely an account of such conflicts. My education in naval reality based on the historical record began in 1973 with friends I want to thank for introducing me to the primary sources for such work, both in the National Maritime Museum and in the Public Record Office at Kew (now The National Archive, but I always think of it as the PRO): David Lyon, Alan Raven, John Roberts, and Antony Preston, of whom David and Antony are very sadly no longer with us. I had begun corresponding with both David and Alan during the spring of 1973.

      When I was fortunate enough to visit England that summer my wife Rhea accompanied me to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich for what she thought would be a brief visit to David’s domain, the Draught Room. The material David showed me then and later inspired me to seek similar material describing the US Navy. The history of British Second World War battleships by Raven and Roberts inspired me to write, among other things, the US Navy ship design series, and later to return to work on British themes. Rhea survived an extended visit to the room housing Lord Nelson’s cufflinks, while I learned to my delight that even mere mortals could partake of the Covers, the most basic sources for most Royal Navy warship designs. It was Alan who taught me that the Covers were not enough, that I should go to the PRO, too. Rhea helped me conduct an experiment (standing on the bed in our hotel room) which showed that these wonderful documents could be photographed (using film; I now use a digital camera). For this book I returned to one of the microfilms I produced in the Draught Room many years ago, because I have been unable to find the document I photographed then.

      My experience with David, Alan and the British documents was tempered by a long career in US defence policy, initially at Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute, which exposed me to (among many other things) the politics and mechanics of arms control, in that case, nuclear, but not so very unlike that of the naval arms control described in this book. For more recent access to crucial documents (including but not limited to the Covers) I am grateful to Jeremy Michell and Andrew Han-Loong Choong of the Brass Foundry, in effect successor to David Lyon’s long-vanished Draught Room; Jenny Wraight the extraordinarily knowledgeable and helpful Admiralty Librarian at Portsmouth; Librarian Allison Wareham of the Royal Navy Museum Archive and her assistant Heather Johnson; and the staff of Churchill College Cambridge for help with their archive. I have also benefited from access to the collections of the US National Archives, particularly for inter-war arms control and naval attaché reports. Stephen McLaughlin very kindly provided copies of the battleship pages of the George Thurston notebook, which lists and describes Vickers export designs. Prof Fernando L Wilson of the Universidad Adolfo Ibanez in Chile provided invaluable information about the Chilean dreadnoughts and also about other South American programmes. Many years ago, too, I benefited enormously from discussions with the late David Topliss, who was then chief of the Brass Foundry, and who was working on a study of the British warship export market; from discussions with Chris Carlson; with Chris Wright, editor of Warship International; with A D Baker III (who has always been far more than an illustrator); with Alan Raven; with Dr Tom Hone; with Dr Nicholas Lambert; and with Prof Jon Tetsuro Sumida. I am also grateful for insights offered by Bill Jurens and by Miles McLaughlin. John Roberts kindly read the manuscript and provided some valuable comments. The reproductions of the as-fitted drawings in this book will show readers just how much Mr. Baker adds when he draws a ship. That involves not merely interpreting these often ambiguous drawings, but incorporating considerable other information, much of it derived from extremely careful examination of surviving photographs, many of them muddy at best. The results include insights I have tried to include in some captions. For assistance with photographs I am grateful to Chuck Haberlein, Curator Emeritus of the photo collection of the US Navy History and Heritage Command; to Janis Jorgensen of the Naval Institute Photo Collection; to Bill Taylor; to Rick E Davis; to Clare Sharpe and Paul O’Reilly of the Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt Naval and Military Museum; to Dr. David Stevens and John Prettyman of the RAN Seapower Centre; to the State Library of Victoria; and to Chris Wright of Warship International.

      I am grateful to all who helped, and who incidentally helped me, avoid some mistakes. Any errors which remain are of course by own responsibility.

      My wife Rhea, who so innocently encouraged me to visit David Lyon in 1973, thus is indirectly responsible for much I have published since then. Without her sacrifice of what must have seemed an endless stay in the Nelson Room, I would never have realised what existed, and what should have been done using that wonderful trove of information. Rhea was glad for both of us to spend a great deal of our vacation with the four naval people I met at and after the visit to Greenwich, and all of us became great friends, often seeing each other on later visits to the United Kingdom. She has been my greatest support ever since. That has been much more than passive; it has, for example, included discussions of the historical (political) end of the story, based partly on her own experience as a student of history (David Lyon used to say that only ‘trained historians’ had any business writing history: Rhea is, but I am not – and neither are most of those who have been concerned with the history of naval technology).

       INTRODUCTION