Naval Firepower: Battleship Guns and Gunnery in the Dreadnaught Era

...but anything by Friedman is worth reading.

This book was a difficult read unlike virtually every other Friedman book I've read. Despite the somewhat misleading title this book is almost entirely about fire control - how to hit the target one is shooting at. The problem is a very complex one and the chapters the author devoted to explaining it were not entirely adequate. I think more space should have been devoted to graphic (one picture being worth a thousand words) explanation than pictures of battleships. As it is the chapters have to be read carefully and repeatedly to absorb all the concepts.

Worse than this is his descriptions of the various mechanisms developed to solve the fire control problem. These mechanisms were very complex electromechanical calculators and his descriptions were not adequate. The illustrations helped immensely but not all systems could be shown and the ones that were shown were shown piecemeal - the plotting room, the director, the rangefinder, etc. I came away from this book thinking I grasped the concepts but not quite certain. One had to make a *lot* of inferences and draw a lot of conclusions.

Overall, I thought this book was a little overambitious. I think if Friedman had limited himself to British practice he could have been more thorough. As it was I got the impression that Friedman expected more familiarity from his readers than this reader possessed.

What saved this book for me was Friedman's analysis of the effects that fire control limitations influenced design, operations, and combat. This is what Friedman does best.

In short, a disappointment.

Naval Firepower by Norman Friedman is the freshest and most ground-breaking book of Naval History I have read in years. It is an absolute Must Have for anyone who considers themselves a Battleship Buff...

I heard about it coming out months ago and decided I wanted to buy it 'at some point', but was in no hurry. Friedman can at times be a bit dry and pedantic with the wealth of detail he brings to the subject.

You know how it is. There was a point in my life when I bought every 'Battleships of the World' type book I could get my hands on. But when you have Jane's And Conway's And Preston And half a dozen others, you start to say, 'ok, I don't need another book with the same fifty ships and their data in it again...' So then you start looking for individual ship's histories, battle histories, AOTS, etc. etc. I reached the point where I decided that I'd derived all the excitement I'd ever have from the technical side of things. I had assumed there would be little or no illustration based on the subject matter: fire control development in Battleships in the 20th Century. Turns out that fire control affects everything else to do with battleships, design, tactics, strategy, and finally the history itself. Imagine spending millions upon millions of pounds or yen or dollars to build the best dreadnought your nation knows how to produce and then suddenly realizing... "Here it is. But can it actually hit anything?'

Kudos to Friedman! This is his best book!

Now what's needed is a comparable history of the Torpedo. That ought to be stunning!
Anyone?

Friedman picks up the fire control story around 1900, when the British wanted to retain gunnery superiority over the rapidly expanding torpedo threat. From here until approximately 1943, the history is British-centric because the majority of fire control technology was British in origin until the Americans took the lead during WW2. Other navies are covered in detail, using the British systems as the benchmark, and Friedman carefully points out that spectacular results (such as that which the Germans achieved at Jutland) did not always require the most advanced equipment.

Friedman's stunning hypothesis is that the British sought long range technology with no tactical doctrine in mind. As the ranges went out, hitting rates went down, and the Royal Navy discovered that they did not have enough ammunition to sink a German ship at long ranges, nor enough time at short ranges before the torpedoes arrive.

Friedman works this into an explanation as to why British battlecruisers blew up at Jutland. It is by no means an excuse for the infamously shoddy armor, but it does attempt to share the blame with the confused rapid-fire-at-all-ranges doctrine that the BCF followed.

If you are interested in fire control, then you should consider this mandatory reading, alongside Brooks' Dreadnought Gunnery, and Gordon's Rules Of The Game for a more biographical perspective.

This book is a complete waste of time if you read it to learn about Dreadnaught gunnery and fire control. The gunnery problem is a complex one, and is never properly explained. The various solutions and devices to generate solutions are even more complex than the problem and they too are not properly explained.

The photographs in the book are superb warship photos, but they are lacking the value that they should have had. The captions try to point out various fire control features in the photos, without identifying them in the image. They should have been photoshopped with captioning and frames to clearly point out the features that the author intended.

If you are interested in fire control during the dreadnaught era, I suggest you visit [...], whose creator, Tony Noyes, gives sensational animated lectures that will introduce you to the problem and show various attempts to solve it.

Although I am not an expert on the subject matter, I have been reading naval history for 40 years, and I found this book to be well worth the purchase price. For one thing, it is full of interesting and useful pieces of information on the development and operation of naval fire control systems, both in general, and for most major navies up through through WWII. Most of this information I have not seen elsewhere, including information on non-anglo-saxon navies such as the Italians, French and Russians. Admittedly the level of detail is less on these latter navies. It would also have been nice to have more quantitive information on relative performance of these systems, but since the real navies didn't have this comparitive information either, I can't complain too much. The bibliography is mediocre, but the "Notes" section at the end is fascinating.