Sacred Vessels is an irreverent account of the modern battleship and its place in American naval history from the sinking of the coal-fired Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898 to the deployment of the cruise missile-armed Missouri in the Persian Gulf in 1991. With provocative insight and wit, Robert O'Connell conclusively demonstrates that the vaunted battleship was in fact never an effective weapon of war, even before developments in aircraft and submarine technology sealed its doom. The worlds navies failed to recognize the full implications of rapid technological change at the turn of the...