GLI Incroriatori Italiani [The Italian Cruisers]
Rome: Ufficio Storico Della Marina Militare [Historical office of the Navy], 1976. Fourth Edition [stated], Presumed first printing thus. Hardcover. xv, [1], 712, [4] pages. Text is in Italian. Frontis illustration. Illustrations. Index. DJ has some wear and soiling. The Italian Cruisers 1861-1975 of the series "The Ships of Italy" by Giorgio Giorgerini and Augusto Nani. The cruisers and their fundamental role in the history of the Italian Navy are presented to the reader with a significant summary of the criteria of use and their concepts adopted for their realization. n modern military terminology a cruiser is a large warship capable of engaging multiple targets simultaneously. Historically it was considered the smallest ship capable of independent actions - unlike the destroyer who usually requires external assistance from support vessels - but in the modern sense this difference has disappeared.
The term "cruiser" is an invention from the mid-19th century. In the era of sailing ships, frigates were small, fast, long-range ships, armed with two batteries of cannons (one on the upper deck and one below deck) and used for exploration missions and for delivering messages. The majority of the war fleets were composed of the slower and larger vessels that were expected to face the fights that the frigates had to avoid. The first armored ships, although used in the row line, after very few examples of steam ships, were called frigates because, in this generation, they had a single cannon bridge due to the weight of the armor. But they had larger caliber cannons and were of larger tonnage. So the definition of frigate changed, the smaller ships for which this term was used were referred to as "cruisers", quickly abbreviated to "cruisers". For many years the cruisers filled the niche between very light ships such as torpedo boats and ships that were to take part in the combat between fleets, subsequently referred to as battleships. The cruisers were large enough to withstand attacks from smaller, self-sufficient surface ships enough to move far from their bases. The battleships were much more powerful in combat, but so slow and (following the introduction of steam engines) hungry for fuel that making them operate long distances was difficult. For most of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the cruiser was the "projection of force" weapon used by the navy, while the larger ships remained in the vicinity of the base. Their main role was to attack merchant ships, so that this task came to be called cruiser war. The cruisers were also assigned to the main fleet and assigned to advance discovery missions by pushing forward to the fleet to search for the enemy. The growth of air power during the Second World War drastically changed the nature of naval combat. Even the fastest cruiser cannot pass an airplane capable of attacking at ever greater distances over the oceans. This change led to the end of independent operations by large ships or small task forces, and from the second half of the twentieth century naval operations were based around large fleets capable of withstanding all air strikes, except the most massive. This has prompted many marines to change the composition of their fleets based on ships dedicated to a single role, typically anti-submarine or anti-aircraft, and the large "generalist" ships have disappeared from most forces. The United States Navy and the Russian Navy remained the only ones to keep the cruisers operational. Condition: Very good / Good.
Keywords: Italian Navy, Cruisers, Warships, Naval Vessels, Naval Architecture, Naval Strategy, Naval Tactics, Fleet Operations, Naval Operations
[Book #78812]
Price: $100.00