British Cruiser Warfare: The Lessons of the Early War 1939-1941. By Alan Raven. Seaforth Publishing, Barnsley, 2019.
Reviewed by David Hobbs
ALAN RAVEN is best-known for his co-authorship with John Roberts of the classic works on British Battleships and British Cruisers of World War II in addition to several titles in the influential Ensign and Man o’War series of warship monographs. This is his first major work for several years, however, and it provides an outstanding contribution to the historiography of the Second World War at sea.
It is the result of many years of meticulous research using primary sources among the Admiralty papers held at the National Archive at Kew and others which are fully described in the opening pages. In his introduction he describes the positive results that can be derived from painstaking research into documents that, at first glance, might have been dismissed by others as irrelevant. Raven chose not to use footnotes to indicate individual sources, however, believing that if used comprehensively there would often be more space devoted to notes than actual text for a given page.
The book is divided into two distinct sections, each amounting to roughly half the text. The first is a chronology of events from September 1939 to December 1941, giving outline details of the majority of actions and events in which cruisers were involved. This was a period during which many of the significant lessons of the naval fighting were learnt and, as Raven says in his introduction, a book that attempted to cover the entire war would be a very large one indeed. Although the focus is on cruisers as ‘maids of all work’, the activities of other warship types including battleships, aircraft carriers and destroyers are, of necessity, mentioned in the text giving a wider interpretation of this formative period of naval warfare than the book’s title might suggest. It covers warships of the Commonwealth navies, not just the RN, and so a significant amount of space is devoted to HMA Ships AUSTRALIA, CANBERRA, NAPIER, NIZAM, PERTH, HOBART, STUART, SYDNEY, VAMPIRE, VENDETTA, VOYAGER and WATERHEN. HMS ACHILLES, manned by what was at the time the New Zealand Division of the RN, is also well covered. The chronology covers activities in the North Sea, Norwegian littoral, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean for which data is held in the sources dated up to December 1941.
The second section is divided into individual summaries which cover a wide variety of topics ranging from the organisation of a cruiser as a fighting ship through surface gunnery and fighter direction to damage control and tactics. I found this section fascinating and the amount of detail Raven has drawn from his sources is impressive. In the section on surface gunnery he not only describes how ‘up’ and ‘down’ ladders in 800 yard steps would be used if a target was lost for line but also the errors against fine inclination targets when the firing ship was rolling heavily, a problem known as ‘canted trunnion error’ which was eventually resolved by fitting cross-levelling gear. Some of Raven’s summaries concentrate on subjects that few previous authors have taken into full account. These include the effect of weather on cruiser hulls, the human factor coping with men who were exhausted or wounded in prolonged action, machinery design and many others. Battles are not described in their own right but aspects from them are extracted into the summaries to make various points and this proves to be a good way of relating fact and theory. The subjects known at the time as radio warfare and radio countermeasures are well covered as was the use of code-breaking and the use made of this valuable resource by fleet commanders. Inevitably, after many years of detailed research, the author takes a view on some of the points that emerge. Why, for instance, when Commodore Harwood had predicted that he would intercept GRAF SPEE on the morning of 13 December 1939 off the estuary of the River Plate did he not have all four of his embarked aircraft airborne at dawn or at least manned and at immediate readiness to launch? As it was, none of them was anywhere near ready and after the enemy’s funnel smoke was first sighted at 0610 it was not until 0637 that AJAX launched her first aircraft. Even then it was not ready to spot for several, valuable minutes. Her second aircraft was destroyed on its catapult by the blast from the ship’s own gunfire and EXETER’s two aircraft were destroyed by splinters from GRAF SPEE’s third salvo. Had they been airborne they might have located the enemy first, given Harwood valuable situational awareness and his ships the ability to have their fall of shot reported from the outset. In the sections on the performance of the German and Italian Navies, Raven makes statements that some readers might find provocative but, as he points out in his introduction, all his material came directly from official sources and he, therefore, felt justified in extracting points that were made in contemporary documents. His descriptions of enemy technology and tactics are eye-opening, I had not appreciated the extent to which the immature technology of the machinery fitted in German warships had limited their operational availability during this period. Towards the end of this section he lists the cruisers mentioned throughout the text and provides fold-out pages with large line drawings of NORFOLK, ESSEX, SHEFFIELD and JAMAICA. Throughout, the book is extremely well-illustrated with black and white ship photographs, many of which have not previously been published, together with maps and diagrams which neatly complement the text.
Overall, I found this to be an excellent book which I recommend highly to a wide readership. It has obvious value to historians but contemporary naval professionals will find Raven’s description of evolution from pre-war assumptions to the harsh lessons of reality to be valuable. It is a book that stimulates the thought processes into how and why things happened; ships and weapons might have changed but the effect navies try to achieve with them has not altered greatly and much can be learnt from studying how our predecessors did things.
