Ok I just received this one today so here is a brief review:
Castle Class Corvettes: An Account of the Service of the Ships and of their Ships Companies, Compiled by Norman Goodwin, Edited by Steve Bush. Hardback. 530 pages. Maritime Books 2007
Norman Goodwin is the archivist of the Castle Class Corvette Association and was both a Navigating Officer and First Lieutenant on Castle Class Corvettes during the war. Given that background and the size of this book you would expect that this would be both an exhaustive and definitive book on this class of ship, sadly that is not the case.
But lets look on the bright side for a bit, the WWII Castle Class is a poorly researched escort ship type and we are lucky to have at least one single decent volume on this subject now. The book itself is nicely put together with a good quality hardback binding and a suitably dramatic piece of artwork by Ossie Jones on the cover. The book has four main chapters including The Ship, Service at War and Peace, Ships Histories (the latter making up the bulk of the volume) and Escort Group Reports. These chapters are followed by no less than 25 appendices!
After a Foreword and Acknowledgements the first chapter introduces us to the ship type and its main equipment, plus its role as an anti-submarine escort. I was pleased to see that the following chapter mentions the use of some of the ships as hospital ships near the end of the war and that post war use as weather ships is also covered. The third chapter is the meat of the volume and covers each ship in alphabetical order with RCN corvettes incuded toward the end of the chapter.
This third chapter, which lists all of the ships, is a bit of a mixed bag. For many ships there is very little information and what is given has clearly been mined from your average WWII Ship A-Z, or possibly lifted direct from the descriptions on U-Boat.net under the Allied Vessels database. As with the Battle Class volume many subsequent pages are taken up with a dry list of ship movements which have simply been transcribed from the admiralty records in the PRO. There are a few images of each ship, mostly from the Imperial War Museum collection, and a thin scatter of veteran photos.
Rather annoyingly there are frequent left side pages of veteran photos which are simply repeated throughout the volume. The repetition is bad enough, but this is made worse by the lack of any captions for the vast majority of the photos. This is rather worrying as they have obviously come from the archive collection of the Castle Class Corvette Association, so are we to assume that the archivist forgot to record who was in each photo and from what ship ? That is rather a lot of historical information wasted if it is true.
Considering this book also claims to be "An Account..........of their Ships Companies" there are very few veterans accounts in the volume, which is disappointing. Nonetheless the accounts that are included are of some interest and do help to fill out the picture of life onboard the Castle Class.
The fourth chapter on Escort Groups present numerous reports from Castle Class ships during convoy escort duty throughout the war and is quite a useful addition.
The appendices are the usual ragbag of technical details, production details, escort groups again, a list of commanding officers and some more anti-submarine information.
The Good:
1. Hey, we have a book on the Castle Class at last
2. It is a good general introduction to the class, though not definitive in any way.
3. The information on Escort Group duties and roles is quite useful.
4. The anti-submarine role and tactics are well represented.
5. Some of the veterans accounts are interesting.
6. Nicely produced in terms of binding and cover artwork.
The Bad:
1. Repetitive and uncaptioned veterans photos
2. A lack of good clear deck, interior and equipment photos and loads of the same old side profile shots.
3. No camouflage information or colour profiles (in fact no colour at all)
4. The ship movement lists could easily have been confined to a series of references to relevant documents in the PRO and are clearly used to pad the volume out.
5. There are no plans at all of any of the ships in this volume
6. There is absolutely NO BIBLIOGRAPHY in this volume at all, which is quite appalling.
7. There is NO INDEX
Overall, a good try and the volume will be useful, but you do get the feeling this was a wasted opportunity. For modellers there will be little to aid the construction and detailing of corvette models in here as there are no plans whatsoever and very few detailed images. For researchers and casual readers on naval history this volume will have some uses and could prevent an expensive visit to the PRO if you live a long way from London. If you are a dedicated corvette and escort ship fan, like me, then the book will be an essential addition to the library as there simply is nothing else in print dedicated solely to this class of ship.