Guns At Sea
Padfield,Peter1973
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Main title:
Guns At Sea / Peter Padfield
Author:
Imprint:
United Kingdom : Hugh Evelyn Ltd., 1973
Collation:
Hardback + 320 pages
Notes:
God, the gun and the sailing ship were the three pillars of Western civilization. It was the simultaneous development of guns and sailing ships and the fusing of the two into a weapon that swept all before it which allowed Renaissance Europe to establish world supremacy. In tracing this process from when guns were first taken aboard ships and following it through to the mid-twentieth century when they were finally displaced by airborne missiles, Peter Padfield has written the first full-length study of naval gunnery. He examines the methods and difficulties of naval gunners, together with the possibilities and limitations of their instruments and weapons through the four centuries during which they dominated sea warfare; and he shows the continuous interaction of their developing art with naval tactics, thus presenting a unified view of sea warfare., In so doing he is being controversial but he provides the reader with all the evidence of first-hand accounts and of illustrations from notebooks, gunnery manuals and hitherto unpublished private papers necessary to make his own judgement. But this book is also a story full of adventure, both in the smoke and din of action and in the continuous challenge of how to hit a fast-moving target at long distance from an unstable platform. The author's ability to capture the flavor of each period succeeds in adding to an important contribution to maritime history the excitement of discovery.
ISBN:
238789454
Dewey class:
623.418
Language:
English
Subject:
BRN:
2852237
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