Chariots of Fire

by Philip Kaplan

"In Battleship, Philip Kaplan describes, often in their own words, the lives of the men who crewed these giant vessels in war and peace. We share the experiences of a young officer aboard a British battleship at Jutland, hear at first-hand how it felt to witness the fiery death of the Scharnhorst in the arctic waters off North Cape and go inside one of the turrets of an Iowa class battleship as her sixteen-inch guns bombard Iraqi positions during the Gulf War. The book also relates the stories of some of the most famous battleships, including HMS Warspite, which fought at Jutland in World War I, in the Mediterranean and off Normandy in World War II and, defiant to the last, broke free of her tugs on the way to the breaker's yard to be torn apart on the rocks off Cornwall; the Bismarck, which sunk HMS Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy, before being hunted to destruction in the North Atlantic; and the USS Missouri, which, along with her three sister ships, survived into the age of the sm