One redeeming thing so far is the stuff on the post-war Gallant class destroyers which is better covered than some books I have.
I have to agree with you Terry on photo's many are half of one of the large pages and clearly printed, but they mostly have been all seen before!
Am I right to draw the conclusion naval authors let publishers or their 'helpers' sort the photos and they do the captions at the end just before full printing? If so I wish they would be more creative and not go to the same old places and use the same old photo's.
Also a general tendency I see in this book is if there's a choice of a post-war photo or a wartime one the post-war will be used. To prove the point I see on the O/P class a total of 6 photos used, only one is wartime!
I know Alan has some good ones in wartime why were these not used instead?
I assume the general lack of wartime photos is an avoidance of the IWM high photo reproduction costs??? I wish again they would be more creative, I have found many sources in this country for good Royal Navy photographs you just need to get off ones backside and do the work!
Finally on photo's the source is rarely given so assertaining if its IWM, NMM, PRO, WSPL or from private collections is very difficult, most published images are well referenced though it seems e.g. p166.
I know this is volume 2 and this is the 1936 tribals up to the current building type 45's but for the war classes generally I would like to see more photo's from such a renowned author and 2 naval draftsmen/co-authors as these gentlemen are, I did notice some of the Hunt class as new to me though, but that was the exception to the rule.
Onto the bibliography I could have wrote a similar one on RN destroyers and frigates, without doing any of the author's research! About 95% of what is listed I have in my reference library and I'm sure most here do also.
On the unpublished material it would have been more useful if the author followed Langtree's lead in giving the full PRO/NMM/IWM reference number in the bibliography and sub-dividing it via location i.e, what was at the Brass Foundry, what was looked at in Greenwich, what was at Naval Historical Portsmouth and what was a Kew in the PRO, was this not possible as he was working on this book since the early 1990s and couldn't always tie down what came from where?
It sounds like I'm damning this book to shreds, but after such a long wait I expected much better, perhaps some of these problems maybe corrected in Volume 1 if sales of this volume 2 allow it to be published?
Danny DON'T "waterline"...!
