Mounting Britain’s Battleship Guns

“Heavy gun mountings dominated warship design for over half a century. They were among the heaviest, most complex and expensive engineering artifacts of their day, with very few companies capable of building them. The main armament of a battleship made up about a quarter of its cost, and took as long to build as the ship itself . . . .” (p. 7)

As cult objects for naval enthusiasts, battleships are the subject of a vast literature. Anyone who has ever been inside a battleship's turret has surely come away with a sense of wonder at the intricate complexity of the beast. But the technical details of this lethal machinery have largely remained opaque to non-specialist readers. This book fills that gap, at least for the British Royal Navy.

• it must rotate over a wide arc to aim the gun precisely,
• it must elevate the gun to an exact angle in order to hit the target,
• it must absorb the shock of recoil from each shot, and return the weapon to loading position,
• it must deliver projectiles and propellant charges, to the guns from magazines deep in the ship, for ammunition too heavy to manhandle,
• it must provide power-assisted loading and ramming, while doing all this,
• it must protect the turret crew, providing ventilation and illumination so they can perform their tasks.

British Naval Gun Mountings includes a separate chapter for each major type, including warships built in Britain for foreign navies and coast defense guns.

Two great industrial enterprises dominated this industry, Armstrong Whitworth (founded in 1847, at Newcastle-on-Tyne) and Vickers (1828 at Sheffield). In 1927 they merged to form Vickers Armstrongs Ltd., which was nationalized in the 1960’s and then broken up in 1977.

The story begins with the “pre-Dreadnought” battleships of the late Victorian era, which generally mounted four 12-inch guns in twin turrets fore and aft. Over time, naval guns not only grew more numerous, larger in caliber, and longer in barrel, providing ever greater muzzle velocity. This reached a limit in 1917 with two monster 18-inch (457 mm) guns for battle cruiser HMS Furious, so impractical that the ship was soon converted into an aircraft carrier. The book includes many smaller caliber mountings for cruisers and destroyers.

This large-format (9.5 by 11.4 inches) book is illustrated with dozens of photos, many previously unpublished, but what most readers will find of greatest interest are the turret diagrams, with color-coded drawings reproduced from the original ships’ technical manuals.

The author, Ian Buxton, is a retired naval architect. His previous books include Big Gun Monitors (2008) and The Battleship Builders (2022).

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Our Reviewer: Mike Markowitz is an historian and wargame designer. He writes a monthly column for CoinWeek.Com and is a member of the ADBC (Association of Dedicated Byzantine Collectors). His previous reviews in modern history include To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems, 1923-1940, Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler, Rome – City in Terror: The Nazi Occupation 1943–44, A Raid on the Red Sea: The Israeli Capture of the Karine A, Strike from the Sea: The Development and Deployment of Strategic Cruise Missiles since 1934, 100 Greatest Battles, Battle for the Island Kingdom, Abraham Lincoln and the Bible, From Ironclads to Dreadnoughts: The Development of the German Battleship, 1864-1918, Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City, The Demon of Unrest, Next War: Reimagining How We Fight, Habsburg Sons: Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Army, Hitler's Atomic Bomb, The Dark Path: The Structure of War and the Rise of the West, The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War, Operation Title: Sink the Tirpitz, A Light in the Northern Sea, and A Street in Arnhem.

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Note: British Naval Gun Mountings is also available in e-editions.

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