The Battleship Holiday: The Naval Treaties and Capital Ship Design

I've always had an interest in ship design – particularly warship design – and when I realised that this book had been published some months ago, I decided to buy a copy.

The book's contents are:

• Acknowledgements
• Author's Notes
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: The Path to the Battleship Holiday
• Chapter 1: The Last generation: 1906 – 1914
• Chapter 2: The Pudding in Which One Finds the Proof: The First World War – 1914 – 1916
• Chapter 3: The Art and Practice of Main-Battery Fire control in 1916
• Chapter 4: Seeing It Through to the End: The First World War – 1916 – 1918
• Chapter 5: The Washington Naval Treaty: 1918 – 1923
• An Interim Conclusion (or Jutland: What Was and Was Not Learned)
• Part II: A Short Holiday and its Aftermath
• Chapter 6: The Make-Ups: 1922 – 1927
• Chapter 7: The Fabric Begins to Fray: 1927 – 1929
• Chapter 8: The Fraying Accelerates: 1929 – 1936
• Chapter 9: The New Generation: 1934 – 1949
• Chapter 10: Feet to the Fire: 1936 – 1945
• Chapter 11: The Long Good-Bye (Covered Concisely): 1946 – 2006?
• Afterword
• Appendix: New-Generation Battleships
• Notes
• Sources
• Index

As can be seen from the contents, this is much more than just a book about the Washington Treaty and its effects. It is a history of battleship design from the Dreadnought to the present day, and shows how the interaction between the competing pressures (political, military, and economic) affected the designs of the battleships that were used during the Second World War.

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THE BATTLESHIP HOLIDAY: THE NAVAL TREATIES AND CAPITAL SHIP DESIGN was written by Robert C Stern and published in November 2017 by Seaforth Publishing (ISBN 978 1 84832 344 5).