Had a chance to look through Lavery's book this morning and initial impressions are favourable. Here is a quick personal review:
This book is very much in the style of Brian Lavery's 2004 work
Hostilities Only - Training the Wartime Royal Navy which I can thoroughly recommend. Printing and binding was done in Malta this time which seems odd given the drive for resource sustainability these days and the fact that his previous work mentioned above was wholly printed and bound in the UK. I find the folded card cover binding a slight nuisance as the inner flap keeps trying to spring out and unfold as you flip through the pages.
Content draws heavily on NMM sources, particularly the numerous technical drawing images, while documents from the IWM and National Archives are also evident. There is no separate bibliography as such at the back of the book and primary and secondary sources alike are instead combined in the chapter
Notes section.
Chapters cover design, evolution, armament, detection equipment, crew, accommodation, the frigates in service during the war and a conclusion discussing post-war operations and the legacy of the River Class.
As a thorough descriptive technical treatise on a single class of ship this is a very readable and detailed account. The nearest comparison would be the Conway
Anatomy of the Ship series, the volumes of which are always profusely illustrated with technical drawings and photographs. Lavery's work on the other hand is heavy on text and thin on images which can make it a bit of a dry read at times. I feel it would have made the volume more interesting if there were some included accounts of life at sea on the River Class from the actual veterans themselves. On too many occasions Lavery has to resort to quotes from Nicholas Monsarrat's published novels and memoirs to fill the obvious lack of other first hand accounts. On far too many occasions in WWII naval literature we only get to hear the voice of the officers and it is about time the voices of the ratings were given some air.
Curiously there is no appendix list of all the River Class ships manufactured in the UK and abroad (Canada and Australia) which would have been useful to the general reader coming to this volume as a primary source on this class of ships. Yes, you can get this kind of information online if you know where to look and from previously published lists of WWII ships, but it remains an odd omission from what will be the definitive book on this class for years to come.
The book also mistakenly cites the Australian built Diamantina as the only surviving ship in this class when in fact you can still see the former HMS Windrush (later the French La Decouverte) beached at Querqueville near Cherbourg, France. Despite the fact that I have drawn the attention of many people to the plight of this ship no moves to preserve her have been made and she is scheduled for destruction this Autumn and may only just have gone to the scrapyard!! A sequence of photos of Windrush at Cherbourg can be seen here
http://p214.ezboard.com/ftheflowerclasscorvetteforumsfrm21.showMessage?topicID=9.topic
The above are fairly minor quibbles however and there is no doubt that this volume makes an important and timely contribution to a little known, or researched, class of escort warship active in WWII. Along with other close escort ship classes the River Class played a vital role in ensuring the safe arrival of convoys in the North Atlantic, Mid Atlantic and Far East throughout most of the second world war. The book will be of interest mainly to historians, researchers and enthusiasts of the lesser known escort warships of WWII.
For modellers of the River Class the volume will probably be disappointing as it has just a few technical drawings with no scales and only two decent large photos of the port and starboard views at the rear. The technical drawings are, however, fully referenced to the archive catalogues and could be viewed or copied at source in the UK.
Mark Walters