Looking for books on WW2 Battleships

by WarDaddyReddit

Note: I asked on another subreddit and they directed me here, so if this isn’t the appropriate place I apologize.

In particular I’m looking for books that focus only on either the KMS Bismarck or the USS Missouri. I’ve found some but the reviews state that the information inside the books often contradict other parts of the book. If you have any recommendations I would appreciate it, thanks.

thefourthmaninaboat

There's a lot of books that have been written on the Bismarck, with a wide range of quality. The most comprehensive, detailed and accurate recent work is Battleship Bismarck: A Design and Operational History, by Garzke, Dulin and Jurens. It covers the design of the ship in detail, as well as her short operational life. There are also sections discussing the German naval policy that led to her design and construction, as well as some discussion of her British opponents. It's well-written, very clear and covers almost everything you might want to know about the ship. Garzke and Dulin have also written a trilogy on the battleships of WWII that is, while older, an excellent reference work. Koop and Schmolke's Battleships of the Bismarck Class is less detailed, but a useful reference for things like crew numbers and technical information on the ships, as well as a good collection of line drawings and photos. There are plenty of histories of Bismarck's sole voyage, from Forester's Sink the Bismarck through to the present day. Most of these are popular histories, and so lack the rigour or detail of more academic works, but are more engaging reads. The fairly recent entries in this field of Konstam (Hunt the Bismarck) and Ballantyne (Killing the Bismarck) are probably your best bets here, though there's probably more good ones I've not read.

Works on the Missouri alone are rarer. For the Iowa class in general, then Friedman's US Battleships or the relevant volume of Garzke and Dulin's trilogy would be my go-tos. Both of these works are excellently detailed descriptions of the processes behind the designs of American battleships. There is an entry in the Anatomy of the Ship series describing the Missouri. While I've not read it, I have read several other works in the series. They're aimed more at the modeller than at the historian, and so tend to feature more in the way of scale drawings, plans and technical details rather than historical descriptions. Still, they can be useful at times.