by BB62vet » Sun Jan 17, 2021 9:48 am
I have just finished reading the recent publication WARSHIP BUILDERS by Thomas Heinrich. Available thru Naval Institute Press, this is an excellent reference and history of how navies of the WWII era came into being, who built them, and everything in between! Mr. Heinrich compares the production of four different countries and how they each approached what must have been a daunting task - build a modern fleet to serve your country's needs. He makes parallel comparisons throughout the book between the shipbuilding efforts of the U.S., Britain, Germany, and Japan. Emphasis throughout is with the U.S. shipbuilding industry.
As a ship modeler who tends to research my projects as much as possible prior to construction, I have always had a thorough lack of understanding as to why the "same" ships in a class were actually different - Mr. Heinrich makes this question completely understandable in his descriptions of how the various shipyards were employed, organized, managed, supported, and so forth in order to produce shipbuilding on a scale never seen before.
In this book two particular classes of ships are given special treatment - IOWA class battleships and CLEVELAND class cruisers - how they were designed, constructed, problems encountered, and various other usually omitted details of production are quite well defined. I fully understand now why my comments over the years in my forum posts are basically correct when I've stated my own thinking on why differences in class ships existed. This book backs that thinking up completely.
For anyone interested in how our navy in WWII came into existence, I highly recommend reading this book.
I have just finished reading the recent publication [b]WARSHIP BUILDERS[/b] by Thomas Heinrich. Available thru Naval Institute Press, this is an excellent reference and history of how navies of the WWII era came into being, who built them, and everything in between! Mr. Heinrich compares the production of four different countries and how they each approached what must have been a daunting task - build a modern fleet to serve your country's needs. He makes parallel comparisons throughout the book between the shipbuilding efforts of the U.S., Britain, Germany, and Japan. Emphasis throughout is with the U.S. shipbuilding industry.
As a ship modeler who tends to research my projects as much as possible prior to construction, I have always had a thorough lack of understanding as to why the "same" ships in a class were actually different - Mr. Heinrich makes this question completely understandable in his descriptions of how the various shipyards were employed, organized, managed, supported, and so forth in order to produce shipbuilding on a scale never seen before.
In this book two particular classes of ships are given special treatment - IOWA class battleships and CLEVELAND class cruisers - how they were designed, constructed, problems encountered, and various other usually omitted details of production are quite well defined. I fully understand now why my comments over the years in my forum posts are basically correct when I've stated my own thinking on why differences in class ships existed. This book backs that thinking up completely.
For anyone interested in how our navy in WWII came into existence, I highly recommend reading this book.