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op aanvraag omdat er zo weinig 'Dutch' te verkrijgen is :)

British, Soviet, French and Dutch Battleships of World War II
by Robert O. Dulin, William H. Garzke

Battleships and battlecruisers are warships of a bygone age, but for the first several decades of the twentieth century they were regarded as the ultimate weapon of sea power by the major navies of the world. With their large guns, heavy protection, and large displacement, they were accorded the compliment of being termed " capital ships." Until World War II, it was axiomatic that capital ships were considered the basic measure of relative naval
power. Now they are merely the vanished symbols of a past age of sea power.
During most of the first half of the twentieth century, until air power made them obsolete, the number, characteristics, and availability of capital ships fundamentally influenced foreign policy and naval strategy. From the onset of the Dreadnought era, government officials, naval officers, civilian engineers and technicians, and laymen debated the complex problems of determining how many capital ships were necessary,
their desired characteristics, and the best means of deploying and operating battle fleets, which were based on the battleship.

Two epochal developments during World War I significantly influenced the course of capital ship design: .
• The development of the submarine as an effective combatant type forced the designers of capital ships to provide reasonable protection against torpedo attack .
• Similarly, the development of aircraft prompted interest in antiaircraft gunnery and in heavier deck armor to resist bombs.
In the years following World War I, the supremacy of the battleship was challenged by the advocates of air power. They insisted, accurately but prematurely, that the primacy of the capital ship was doomed by air power. The success of U.S. Army
aviators under the leadership of General William "Billy" Mitchell in sinking a destroyer, light cruiser, and three obsolete battleships (most notably the ex-German Ostfriesland) in rather sensational (and one-sided) ordnance trials in 1921 and 1923
inflamed the controversy. Battleships were not defenseless and certainly not without any protection, but they did succumb to a new and more dangerous foe. For the next two decades, there was a proliferation of periodicals and books that forecast the demise of battleships under air attack, either at sea or in port. Inevitably, these developments influenced the design of new capital ships.......

Jane's Information Group | 1981 | 415 pages | PDF | 40,7 MB 

Thanks to admin & AH :)