Warship 2023

An Amazon delivery driver brought me this year's issue of WARSHIP on Thursday, and over the weekend I spent several very enjoyable hours reading it.

I have been buying this publication since 1977, when it started life as a quarterly softback magazine. It became a hardback annual in 1989, and the original softback issues were then re-bound and sold in hardback format, with four quartlerly issues in each volume. They form the backbone of my naval history and warship design collection and currently occupy well over a metre of my bookshelves.

This issue was edited by John Jordan, and contains the following article:

• Editorial
• A series of unfortunate events: The loss of HMS Audacious by John Roberts
• Clemenceau and Foch: France's first modern aircraft carriers by Jean Moulin and John Jordan
• The Italian Connection: Ansaldo's UP.41 design by Stephen McLaughlin
• Takasago, Kasagi and Chitose: The IJN's first 8in-gun protected cruisers by Kathrin Milanovich
• The Italian Navy and the battleship in the 1930s: Theory and practice by Michele Cosentino
• Postwar electronic warfare system in the Royal Navy by Peter Marland
• The German Flak Ships Part 1: The German and ex-Norwegian hulls by Aidan Dodson and Dirk Nottelmann
• The strange fate of General Alekseev's guns by Sergei Vinogradov
• The Battleship Massena by Philippe Caresse
• The development of the Yokosuka Navy Yard by Hans Lengerer
• Preparing for the next Pacific War: The US Navy and distributed naval operations by Conrad Waters
• Warship Notes
• 'Hidden in plain sight': The proposed conversion of the two-deck HMS Duncan to a breastwork monitor on the lines of HMS Devastation by Ian Sturton
• Patterns of political nomenclature in the Russian and Soviet Navies by Kenneth Fraser
• HMS Pioneer, 1945 by Kenneth Fraser
• 'Zombies' in warship history: The first in a new series that looks at some of the 'zombie facts' that continue to stalk histories of the world's warships by Aidan Dodson
• A's and A's
• Reviews
• Warship Gallery
• The Imperial German Navy 1890 – 1918 by Dirk Nottelmann

There is a lot of interesting stuff in this year's annual but one particular article stands out as being of more interest to me than the others ... The German Flak Ships Part 1: The German and ex-Norwegian hulls. I have written several blog posts about this topic as well as mentioning them in a guest blog post on THE DAWLISH CHRONICLES website.

This is a book that I know that I will return to many, many times in the future for both information and inspiration.

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WARSHIP 2023 was edited by John Jordan and published in 2023 by Osprey Publishing (ISBN 978 1 4728 5713 2).