Dodson, Aidan The British Hawkins Class Cruisers. An Odyssey Through Two World Wars

During the First World War, rumours of heavily armed German privateers led to the construction of the first "modern" heavy cruisers by the Royal Navy. Named after famous Elizabethan sailors, the ships were clearly different from the cumbersome armoured cruisers of the previous generation and were a further development of the highly successful light cruisers built since the mid-1910s. As such, they were the prototypes for the Washington Treaty cruisers that dominated naval construction in the 1920s, and two of them also pioneered the use of catapults for launching aircraft from cruisers. Completed too late to take an active part in the First World War, they had mixed fortunes, spending much of their careers as flagships but also being drawn to rocky reefs, with fatal consequences in two cases. The Cavendish (later the Vindictive) fulfilled a remarkable range of roles during her career: She was built as a cruiser, then completed as an aircraft carrier, then converted back to a cruiser, then converted to a specialised cadet training ship, and finally converted to a repair ship. In the meantime, Effingham underwent the most extensive refit of any British cruiser of her time. All surviving ships were disarmed and almost scrapped as a result of the London Naval Treaty, but returned to serve in various capacities during the Second World War. Two of them were awarded battle honours during the Norwegian campaign - albeit in one case with fatal results - and the Hawkins and Frobisher spent long years as ocean escorts in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans before being returned to bombard the beaches of Normandy. The story of the Hawkins class therefore weaves together strands that include the technical development of the cruiser in the UK and abroad, the early use of aircraft at sea, international naval diplomacy and treaty-making between the wars, the development of the cadet training system in the Royal Navy, the way in which the vital southern and eastern trade routes were kept open, and the contribution of naval forces to the success of the invasion of Europe. With its detailed descriptions and analyses of the ships and their development, and the narratives of their careers linked to an extensive collection of photographs and line drawings, this new history of a major Royal Navy cruiser class will delight naval historians and enthusiasts, ship modellers and all those with an interest in the navy in peace and war.