This book traces the history of the battleship era - a period of about eighty years from the 1860s to the 1940s. Before the age of airplanes and missiles, the fate of nations often depended on naval power, and the backbone of that power was the battleship. Peter Padfield traces the evolution of the dreadnought from wooden sailing ships-of-the-line through ironclads to their final flowering in World War 11 in the Japanese Yamato and Musashi. He simultaneously explores the development of strategy, tactics, and the increasingly potent guns and armor. He also describes in vivid detail the bloody battles fought by these ever-more-lethal vessels. Woven into the story of the great ships and their 'underhand' enemies - the torpedo boats, submarines, and finally airplanes-is the story of the men who designed and developed them, and who fought them in battle: men like Toga, Jellicoe, Beatty, Hipper, Cunningham, Lee, and Oldendorf.