Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland: The Question of Fire Control (Cass Series: Naval Policy and History)

This is an excellent primer on WWI naval gunnery. Anyone who plays naval miniatures or who is interested in this niche history subject will not be disappointed. While the fundamental assessment does involve Pollen vs. Dreyer, the book explains every single relevant aspect to fire control, including diagrams, and voluminous first hand citations. Ever wonder how a ship in WWI could hit a moving target at 10 miles? This book shows the Royal Navy's years of experimentation to solve this problem. In addition, this book provides insight in just how complex the entire procedure of evolutionary technology is in practice. In other words, the book produces a useful study model of the 'hit and miss' aspect of lethal technology. Most importantly, the book does not require any technological background in order to be understood and is written with careful and clear explanations of what could otherwise be rather difficult and dull material.

I have no opinion about this item since Amazon has not seen fit to ship it to me. I pre-ordered this item in October 07 at the pre-order price. Since then Amazon has sold this item at the normal price but has not considered it necessary to actually honor their pre-order agreement. At this time we are in a stand-off: I refuse to cancel the pre-order and Amazon is "unable to determine a ship date". If I ever receive this item from Amazon I will be glad to forward an actual review of the product.

Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland: The Question of Fire control, by John Brooks, Routledge, 2005, 321 pages.


A better title might be: Fire Control: the Question of Dreyer vs. Pollen. Rather than offering a comprehensive discussion of fire control, this book confines itself with the relative merits of two fire control systems and some of the issues concerning the decisions to select one over the other. The book sets out to answer more or less the following questions: did the navy buy the inferior system and did it make any difference. The author makes a cogent case for his opinions.

I'm deducting one point because the title is overly broad.

This book is a scholarly work and reads like one. There are over 1000 footnotes and over 100 quotes. In a scholarly work that would be 1000 small nuggets and 100 big nuggets of fact. These quotes are, of course, taken out of context. They are certainly well footnoted, but that is of little benefit to the average battleship nut (I am one) who doesn't have access to the contextual documents. The author uses these quotes to tell his story, but the effect is disruptive. The average non-scholarly reader would get more out of it if the author simply used his own words.

I am deducting another point for style. Deducting a point because a scholarly work reads like a scholarly work may sound foolish, but this review is for Amazon where the average reader is not looking for a scholarly work on a squabble from almost a century ago.

This book is the best primer on dreadnought gunnery at the time of the Battle of Jutland. There is no comparable work in English for this complex subject and it's effects on naval warfare.

The book is easy to read as it leaves the complex mathematics involved to the appendices but gives the reader a useful understanding of the problems, solutions and terms used before delving into the equipment's developmental history in a similar matter. After this the reader is taken to the Battle of Jutland and is shown the effects of the technology and the decisions that put it in to use. The German solutions to the same problems at the battle are also covered as is the subsequent development of fire control to WWII.

The book is written as a statement/descenting work on many long held beliefs of the effects of the British Naval Establishment leading up to Jutland.

This is a 'must read' for anyone wishing an introduction to the complexities of battleship fire control and British and to a lesser extend German solutions. The reader will depart with a good understanding of all of this.

I can not reccomend this book highly enough!