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Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM |
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This Day in Alternate History Blog
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Castles
of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea Robert
K. Massie, who wrote Dreadnaught, a study of the politics behind the
Anglo-German naval race and the British entry into the First World War, as well
as books on Russian history and whose wife was an advisor to president Regan,
has recently re-entered the book writing club with this new book.
Castles of Steel, which explores the naval side of the Great War, is the
story of the British and German struggle for superiority in the North Sea.
Massie
begins with a short overview of material he covered in Dreadnaught. He notes how the Kaiser was determined – from long-standing
feelings of inferiority – to build a navy comparable to Britain’s.
This particular obsession concerned Britain enough to come to an
agreement with their traditional foes – the French – and even to make an
accommodation with the Russians. Massie discusses the chain of events that led to the First
World War in an interesting, but cursory manner, which is unsurprising, given
that most books on the naval war skip over the background entirely.
However, the reader is left with a good background to understand the
reminder of the book, while the advanced reader can skip over that chapter to
reach the meat of the book. As one
of Massie's greatest skills as a writer is his ability to create short but
thorough sketches, whither political, technological or biographical, there is a
great deal of information contained within the first and following chapters.
The
meat of the book, of course, is the war itself.
Massie describes battles in details that enable to reader to cover ground
quickly – in places the book reads like a novel – and to discover how the
battles turned out the way they did. Massie
does not shy away from discussing ‘what-if’ situation; he notes that if the
British Mediterranean fleet was commanded by a Nelson, the British might have
chased the Germans into Italian waters and sunk them there. Further, what if the Goeben had managed to attack the
French transports, perhaps creating a slaughter and weakening the French?
There
is also a study of the role of battleships.
The navies of the world strove to build or purchase such ships – but
did not have the slightest idea what to do with them afterwards, during wartime. The development of new technologies was not aided by a
doctrine that allowed for using the new ships.
The British did not understand the value of convoys until it was almost
too late, while the Germans failed to grasp their advantages and strike fast, or
indeed build plenty of submarines until the war was well advanced.
Massie
spends considerable time on Churchill. More
than any other figure in the book, Churchill can be counted as the ‘hero’ or
‘villain’. His plans to use the
fleet aggressively could have lost the British the war, but they also allowed
the British to develop their new technologies and experiment with new ideas.
Churchill, however, attempted to run the war by remote – using radio
– a technique that caused considerable confusion and delay.
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