Alan Raven

Although there is a great deal of useful information in this work, it's hard for me to be very enthusiastic about it. What this essentially boils down to is that one can't forget that this is a fragment of what was going to be a larger book. Perhaps if it had been advertised straight-up as a chronology I might feel a little less judgemental. I'd also be less judgemental if a follow-on work giving an overview of RN cruisers during the rest of the war emerged. When one thinks about it, Alan Raven has to be a rather old man and one suspects that this product is a result of a ruthless assessment of what he was really capable of getting done in the time he had left. Read as an inter-library loan but, if I had the option to buy a remaindered copy, I'd take advantage of it.… (mais)

Among warships cruisers may lack the power of battleships and the mystery of submarines, but their combination of speed and firepower made them vital components of most major navies for much of the twentieth century. Though ostensibly about the Royal Navy's cruiser force during the Second World War, Alan Raven and John Roberts provide in this book a far more comprehensive compilation, one that begins with the pre-First World War Arethusa class and concludes with the postwar completions of wartime programs. Its coverage is encyclopedic, detailing their design histories, the construction and trials of the warships, and the modifications they underwent over the course of their service lives.

Supplemented by numerous tables and generously illustrated with photographs and line drawings, Raven and Roberts's book is an invaluable technical resource for anyone interested in the subject. Yet where the authors fall short is in detailing the war service of these vessels. Such coverage is actually provided in the early chapters, which describe the cruisers that served in the First World War. This makes the absence of similar coverage for their successors in the Second World War — the titular focus of the work — particularly glaring. Readers seeking a more comprehensive analysis would do well to supplement this book with Norman Friedman's more recent [b:British Cruisers: Two World Wars and After|10804709|British Cruisers Two World Wars and After|Norman Friedman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347417821s/10804709.jpg|15718119] which, while not as well supplemented with pictures, nonetheless provides a more useful narrative analysis of its subject.… (mais)