The Kaiser’s Battlefleet: German Capital Ships 1871–1918

By Aidan Dodson

The battleships of the Third Reich have been written about exhaustively, but there is little in English devoted to their predecessors of the Second Reich. This new book fills an important gap in the literature of the period by covering these German capital ships in detail and studying the full span of battleship development during this period.
The book is arranged as a chronological narrative, with technical details, construction schedules and ultimate fates tabulated throughout, thus avoiding the sometimes disjointed structure that can result from a class-by-class approach. Heavily illustrated with line work and photographs, many from German sources, the book offers readers a fresh visual look at these ships, beyond the limited range of images available from UK sources.
A key objective of the book is to make available a full synthesis of the published fruits of archival research by German writers found in the pre-WW2 books of Koop & Schmolke, Großmer’s on the construction programme of the dreadnaught era, Forstmeier & Breyer on WW1 projects, and Schenk & Nottelmann’s papers in Warship International. As well as providing data not available in English-language books, these sources correct significant errors in the ‘standard’ English sources.
This entirely fresh study will appeal to historians of WWI German naval developments as well as to enthusiasts and model makers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Nov 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473881556

Aidan Dodson

Aidan Dodson is Hon. Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol, UK, was Simpson Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo in 2013, and Chair of the Egypt Exploration Society during 2011–16. Awarded his PhD by the University of Cambridge in 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2003. He is the author of over twenty books, most recently a new edition of Amarna Sunset (AUC Press, 2018) and Sethy I, King of Egypt (AUC Press, 2019).

Reviews for The Kaiser’s Battlefleet

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The title of this work is really all you need to know, as the the author provides you first with an extended examination of how the force structure of the Second Reich's naval effort evolved before moving on to an overview of how that force performed in wartime (up to and including the service of the last of these ships during World War II) and winding up with a technical overview of all these classes; including the alternate proposals for each ship; highly recommended.