Gunboat! - Bryan Perrett

So the weekend wasn't all running around helping Alex and watching crap movies. There was time to read a book.

Gunboat! is, as you might imagine, about gunboats, those flat-bottomed ships most commonly used by navies to patrol rivers and other shallow waterways. Perrett focuses almost exclusively on British gunboats - except for a chapter about American use in the Civil War - but I don't know if that was simply a choice on his part to focus on them, or if they were just the majority. The latter would be possible, given the British maritime tradition.

The book starts with the first major introduction of the gunboats in the Crimean War, where the British capital ships couldn't get close enough to Russian forts and batteries to do any damage. From there, Perrett moves forward through the gunboats frequent use in China to deal with pirates, the American Civil War, some of the conflicts in Egypt, and World Wars 1 and 2. Perrett doesn't go into massive detail, but he does give some depth to the specific engagements. The chapter I was most interested in was the one on operations in Mesopotamia during World War 1, because of the all-too-brief mention Halpern made in his Naval History of World War 1. This book does give a much greater view of that than Halpern did, getting into some of the good and bad command decisions, the difficulties faced because of the climate, the successes and reverses.

One thing Perrett highlights is the level of cooperation between gunboats and land forces. It makes sense, given how close to shore gunboats tend to operate, but I wasn't expecting it. There are several occasions of gunboats either transporting troops, helping to ferry them out of lost situations, bringing in supplies, or sending their own crews on land to help hold a position until the army can show up. Some of them were involved in the "Desert Column" march across the desert to try and help relieve Khartoum (because the Nile was down too low for the boats to readily make it upriver)*. It was fairly surprising how well it seemed to go. There weren't really many examples of the gunboat forces and the land forces butting heads, which does not seem typical.

* They apparently quite enjoyed learning to ride camels, which given what I've heard about camel's temperament, seems strange. They're like bigger, surlier horses, which know how to spit.