Garzke books

marcelo_malara · Post by **marcelo_malara** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 3:44 pm

Dave, are the trio of books by Mr. Garzke worth buying?

Dave Saxton · Post by **Dave Saxton** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 7:03 pm

If your intersted in these matters, then the Garzke & Dullin books are required reading. They are expensive, so if you have access to them through a library...ect, you could save a lot of money.

I believe that Raven and Roberts did a better job of examining British battleships, and I much prefer Norman Friedman's examinations of overall battleship design, and US battleships in particular. In my opinion Garzke's works are valuble contributions overall, though. Certian techincal details are provided by Garzke that are hard to obtian otherwise. Just don't assume that they represent the final word on the matter, but same could be said of any secondary source.

marcelo_malara · Post by **marcelo_malara** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 1:39 am

Which are the books by Raven and Roberts? I have Battlecruisers by Roberts and it is very, very poor. I have US Submarine Design by Friedman and didn´t like it too.

Dave Saxton · Post by **Dave Saxton** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 6:42 pm

R&R's "British Battleships", is exaustive and well written. It is well researched too. It includes alot of archive derived technical data, and outstanding blue print drawings. I Havn't seen the two books you listed, so I can't comment on them. I just think that Friedman's batteleship books, and that particular R&R work, have more "meat" to them than the G&D series. I think that the G&D books are good though. It's just of matter of cost for what you get. Eventually everyone should add these to their collection if they can.

In the G&D books you get a breif overview of the design history of each class, and some breif general desriptions of the qualities of such factors as armor protection, underwater protection, propulsion systems, gunnery systems, and so forth. G&D's works include drawings. They also include sections called "Operation History" that is just a very brief summary such as (I'm paraphrasing) "In autum 1942 BB55 was torpedoed by an IJN submarine." The nice thing about the G&D works are the inclusion of specification tables on hard to find data, such as metcentric height, stabilty, and so forth. There are some brief contributions in the appendix of the US Battleships volume by the likes of Bill Jurens too.

I hope that helps you decide if it's what you want, and it's worth it to you.

marcelo_malara · Post by **marcelo_malara** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 9:58 pm

Dave, thank you very much for the data. Raven and Roberts is not available in amazon, so I will have to wait till it is reedited!