The British Hawkins Class Cruisers: An Odyssey Through Two World Wars

During the First World War, rumors of heavily-armed German raiders led to the building of the first modern heavy cruisers by the Royal Navy. Named for famous Elizabethan seamen, they were very different from the lumbering armored cruisers of the previous generation and were enlarged developments of the highly successful light cruisers that had been built since the mid-1910s. As such, they provided the prototypes for the Washington Treaty cruisers that dominated naval construction during the...