Book description
Britain, like other colonial powers, established, controlled and
accessed her empire from the seas. It was realised that the preservation
of secure trading conditions required armed ships able to operate in
shallow coastal and river waters. The gunboat was developed to meet this
need: a small, shallow-draft, steam-powered screw or paddle driven
vessel, sufficiently fast and manoeuvrable to take the enemy, whether on
shore or afloat, by surprise.
In this book Bryan Perrett recounts thirteen episodes of exciting
gunboat action, ranging from the Burma war in 1824, through two world
wars and on to the dramatic escape of the Amethyst down the Yangtze in
1949. Bryan Perrett left the army as a successful career officer to
take up the pen as a full-time writer. Able to write to any brief (he
was captioning picture-strips for schoolgirl comics at one point), he
found his metier as a military historian and writer of good, fast,
episodic, narrative popular histories. His many books, all founded on
meticulous research from primary sources, find a wide popular
readership. He is the bestselling author in the bestselling Cassell
Military Classics series
