The Battleships of WWII

Hard Cover series - Battleships of World War II vol 1
M.Skwiot
A-4 format
hardcover,
276 pages
230 photos
ISBN 978-83-951575-6-1

The idea of creating such an album dedicated to the battleships of World War Two had been born in the last dozen or so years. During this period, various concepts appeared in print, which were meant to present those beautiful ships in the form of a "condensed pill". Most of the contributions have been made by foreign authors who had had greater access to photographic references.  It was not easy, because it was difficult to choose several photos illustrating the entire history of the battleship, starting from the moment of the keel laying and ending with its sinking. Then, in some cases it has a further history as a wreck resting on the seabed until today. Initially, we selected over 1,000 photos, which we had to give up because of the size of such an album. In the end, it was divided into two volumes, thanks to which the number of photos remained only slightly reduced. In the case of vessels with a large or interesting combat history, we tried to put more photos illustrating their operational activities. Just like every project executed quite quickly, and the album was made in the period from June to October, I could not collect all the photos that I would like to put in it. There are two reasons: first, there was no time to look for them in the resources of the world's archives; secondly, not all ships have the right number of photos that could be published. The best example of this is the Japanese battleship "Musashi", of which only few photographs exist. Most of them come from private collections and it was very difficult to get permission to publish them. Despite these difficulties, it was possible to gather unique photographic material enriched with the brief combat records of individual battleships, which will hopefully allow the reader to trace their story. In the first volume, the author describes all the most important battleships from ARGENTINA, BRAZIL, CHILE, GREECE, SPAIN, JAPAN, FRANCE, GERMAN