Bücher von Fred T. Jane

A facsimile edition of Jane's Fighting Ships, 1920, the 23rd edition of the most authoritative source of information about the navies of the world. Despite low quality scan with many clipped or twisted pages, this facsimile reproduction is an essential reference purchase for naval enthusiasts of the Great War and Interwar periods. First editions of the 1920 edition sell for hundreds of dollars through antiquarian bookstores or are available only at the reference desk of major libraries. One-hundred-plus pages of advertisements from companies like Thornycroft, Vosper, General Electric, Yarrow, Babcox & Wilson, and many more provide unrivaled flavor of the era and demonstrate the centrality of naval power in daily life. Five-hundred-plus pages of silhouettes, specifications, plans and pictures of every ship of every navy provide the definitive contemporary understanding of the status of the world's navies.

An influential work on naval strategy, The Influence of Sea Power on History (1890) by Alfred Mahan, an American naval officer, had been instrumental in reshaping military tactics in navies all around the world. Its central idea was that a nation's success was determined by its 'sea power' - its ability to command the oceans with a large fleet. Frederick Thomas Jane (1865-1916), the founding editor of All the World's Fighting Ships and All the World's Airships (which continue to this day), here recounts historical battles to argue that other factors were as crucial, if not more, in determining military outcomes. In this daring and astute critique of Mahan's work, Jane proposes that 'fitness to win' played an essential role in securing victory. First published in 1906, this work is a thought-provoking contribution to the debate that influenced the naval arms race in the period before the First World War.