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(More customer reviews)Bill Garzke and Bob Dulin have outdone themselves again. When I was the structural project leader to direct the hull and armor redesigns for the reactivation of the Battleship NEW JERSEY at Long Beach Naval Shipyard (the planning yard for the Battleships), we used their earlier edition of this book as our general guide. Two members of my design team brought in their personal copies and kept them handy so I could include excerpts from them for official Navy memos and instructions. The Naval archives were sorely lacking detailed chemical and heat treating records of the Class A and Class B armor of the Battleships. A quick phone call to Bill Garzke gave me an armor expert on the west coast that had all the data our designers and welding engineers needed. Thanks, Bill. I owe you one. The only thing I have found missing from this edition is the fantastic Gibbs & Cox scheme D Battleship that was half Battleship and half Aircraft Carrier and was actually bought by the Soviet Union in WW II, but never built. In this edition, perhaps the most important section is the one devoted to the disasterous incident of turret II on the IOWA where 47 men were killed. The authors go into meticulous detail as to actual facts and almost every conceivable theory as to what caused the deflageration (not an explosion). However, they are properly cautious as not to force their personal opinions on the reader. Yet they give enough detail, including histories of past turret incidents on other Battleships, so the reader can draw his own conclusions. There are a few typos and descrepancies between the text and the illustrations. For example, the text correctly identifies the powder in the propellent bags as D846 where the illustrations identify it as B846. Also, the elevation sketch indicates that the heavily armored turret bustle hatch was blown off when in fact it was the turret bustle hatch ACCESS PLATFORM below the bustle (overhang) that was blown over the side. But these are miniscule descrepancies only an "insider" like me would know (I was tasked to write a repair procedure). All in all, it is unthinkable that any true Battleship historian or lover would be without this book. Actually, both the 1976 and this 1995 edition should be in every Naval Architect's library. Richard A. Landgraff DREADNAUGHT CONSULTING Long Beach, California
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