Battleships Sailors

Few warships saw more service than HMS Warspite, a battleship built for the era of big-gun duels that survived to be one of the first victims of the guided-missile age. Commissioned during the First World War, the ship played a major - and nearly disastrous - part in the battle of Jutland. Radically modernised in the 1930s, Warspite continued to make headlines in the Second World War, in action against the Germans at Narvik, the Italians in the Mediterranean, and the Japanese in the Indian Ocean. Heavily damaged by a guided bomb at Salerno, the ship survived to provide fire-support for the D-Day landings. Even at the end of her life the ship refused to slip into quiet oblivion, breaking free from the tow on the way to the breaker's yard and going ashore in a Cornish cove. The inside story of this career is told in this book through the memoirs and recollections of those who served in the ship, civilians who refitted the ship and entertained the crews, and even the enemies who fought against her. The resulting narrative weaves these individual experiences into the wider political and strategic context. It also provides plenty of detail - at Jutland, for example, while the crews of one gun battery were decimated by enemy fire, their opposite numbers on the disengaged side had nothing to do except play cards.