Kongō-Class Battleships: In the Imperial Japanese Navy in World War II

Great Book, but the description on the back of the book is misleading. It says that Kongō were the smallest battleships in the Japanese Navy, that was actually the Fusō class. Other than that, a great book!

Excellent book Great pictures lots of information very happy with this book and all the other ones in the series that I own

Ein echtes Lengerer-Buch: Keine eigene Substanz. Die Fotos sind alle seit Ewigkeiten bekannt und auch hier zu klein und teils in miserabler Qualität enthalten, dazu ein paar ebenso wenig nützliche "Skizzen" und der übliche langweilige Text. Wer die Standardwerke über japanische Schlachtschiffe besitzt, braucht das Buch nicht. Nahezu alles, was es am Markt sonst über die Kongô-Klasse gibt, ist meilenweit besser. Das Bändchen ist nur für Leute, die sonst gar nichts zur japanischen Marine im Bücherschrank haben, aber rasch billig eine Übersicht über diese vier Schiffe wünschen und denen die größeren seriösen Quellen zu teuer und die antiquarische Suche nach älteren (und besseren) preisgünstigen Quellen zu umständlich ist. Ich habe das Machwerk zurückgeschickt. Billig, aber sein Geld nicht wert. Schade, die Serie hat ansonsten auch gute Titel - freilich von anderen Autoren.

This is a very fine book that packs 143 photographs into its 128 landscape format pages - a well produced hardback on good quality paper. The text is brief, the book relying largely on photo captions and 29 data tables to tell the story. This is very much the history of design, construction, fittings and reconstructions, of which there were two major and several minor over the fairly long lives of this class. It is not really a book about the adventurous careers of the Kongo’s - only 16 pages are devoted to that.I did not know so many photos existed: quality is of course variable, many being really ‘snaps’ rather than artistic portraits. Some more detailed annotations would have been welcome. There is a detailed drawing of Kongo’s pagoda mast as at 1937, though you wont find this until you reach page 107. Photo captions cannot describe the layout very well so a drawing section explaining these famous mast structures as they appeared over time would have been interesting. Although the general arrangement plan of Kongo gives some indication of armour protection it is not very clear and only half a page of text is devoted to the subject. There is plenty of data about guns, but only one drawing of a gun turret and that is unreadable.Really this book is all about the photographs. They are packed in, mostly two to a page and thus many are rather small. A large area close to the spine is often wasted on a few words of description which would have been better placed below an enlarged image. Publishers should remember that battlecruisers and their photos tended to be long for their height, and plan their books accordingly!Despite these few carping criticisms the book is very interesting and you can spend hours studying the photos. The Kongo's were modified almost out of recognition, but could never overcome the flawed battlecruiser concept that Admiral Fisher bestowed on the Royal Navy’s ships and these four for Japan as well. However because their high speed suited them for working with carriers and cruisers yet nevertheless were considered more expendable than newer battleships, the Kongo’s had very active lives in WW2 before they met their fate. The £15 I paid for this book represents excellent value and I do recommend it.

Kongo-Class Battleships in the Imperial Japanese Navy in World War II is another entry in Schiffer’s “Legends of Warfare” series, by two of the authorities on Japanese warships of the period. Most of the writing in the book talks about the design process and the design itself, but there is also a short section on the operational history of the ships at the end. Like other entries in the series, the book contains numerous photographs and some diagrams and tables, as well as the text.The writing is solid, and does a good job of conveying the information required with no typos or (as far as I could tell) errors. It is clear that the authors are very knowledgeable on the topic, and have done everything they can to squeeze as much information into the book as possible (the captions to the photographs are well worth reading, as well as the main text). The tables are clear and generally well-defined, and the level of detail for a relatively short book with many images impressive. The operational section, while short, contained more information on the key encounters these ships took place in, for the ships in question, than some books focused on operational performance, such as Dull’s Battle History of the Japanese Navy.The photos are also well-chosen, and provide many views of the ships at different times in their lives, including a few detail shots and some of Kongo under construction. Sadly, as is the case for most Japanese warships, there are only limited photographs of the later and particularly wartime careers, but the book makes the best of the available content, and included more than a few photos I hadn’t seen before, and a few that have not been previously published. As would be expected for the time period, the quality of the photos varies substantially.All up, it’s an excellent piece of work, and easily recommended for anyone interested in the IJN’s “Dreadnought Era”/Second World War. I look forward to their next book, on the Fubuki-class destroyers.