Castles of Steel
Robert K Massie Jonathan Cape, 884pp, £25
ISBN 0679456716
Winston Churchill coined the epithet "castles of steel" to describe the dreadnoughts of the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet when, mobilised before the outbreak of the First World War, they made their way to their Scapa Flow anchorage "like giants bowed in anxious thought".
It rings just as well as a title for this formidable book. There were, however, two categories of dreadnought - the beautiful, fast and vulnerable battlecruisers, the very images of Nelsonic elan, and the tremendous battleships, all weight and brute power, the ultimate weapons by which the power of a navy was judged and represented. Castles of Steel is decidedly a battleship book: stately, immense and telling a mighty story mightily.
Its subject is the sea-rivalry between Britain and Germany that was a principal cause of the First World War, and Robert K Massie is surely its definitive popular chronicler. It has often been done before, but never so masterfully - the old tales are told, the old controversies reassessed, the old characters brought to life again with skill. Essentially it is the record of a struggle between the two greatest navies of the day, the ancient Royal Navy of the British (or of the English, as it was habitually called by the Germans and all too often by the author himself) and the young, technologically brilliant Imperial Navy of the Germans. Massie's great advantage in writing this account, however, is his familiarity with the diplo-matic, economic, political and one might almost say the temperamental background to its events.
He briefly traces the origins of the rivalry to the Kaiser's envious obsession with naval glory, as exemplified by his grandmother Queen Victoria's splendidly paramount fleet, and to Grand Admiral von Tirpitz's conviction that even the greatest military power could be impotent on the world stage without command of the sea. Massie examines the consequences from the widest of perspectives. He is as interested in strategy as he is in ships, describes emperors, admirals and statesmen with equal vigour, compassionately analyses battles but never loses his grasp on the terrific theme of the narrative: the clash between ambitions, temperaments and techniques that led to the symbolic climax of it all, the Battle of Jutland.
Jutland dominates three chapters of this volume, and its protagonists - Jellicoe and Beatty, Hipper and Scheer - are even-handedly assessed. But the battle was fundamentally symbolical, because although its result was eventually to determine the whole course of the war, and it was in the North Sea that the two great enemies finally faced one another cap a pie, gun to gun, still Jutland itself ended anticlimactically in the maintenance of a status quo. It was all the British really needed (as Churchill said, at Jutland Jellicoe could have lost the war in an afternoon), but as a sea-fight it was no more than a draw.
It was the epicentre of the naval war, all the same. There were lesser raids and battles in the North Sea, there were battles in the southern oceans, there were U-boat battles, and convoy battles, there was the desperate tragedy of Gallipoli and the long blockade of Germany that was decisive in the end. All these conflicts Massie includes in his narrative, and he illustrates them with a vivid gallery of antagonists: dashing cruiser captains such as von Muller of the Emden, heroic Maximilian von Spee who refused to accept defeat at the Falkland Islands, imperturbable crews of Q-ships and audacious U-boat aces, disrespectful Roger Keyes or the all-too-obedient Admiral Troubridge.
As for their respective masters - on the one side (for example) Churchill, Lloyd George and the irrepressible "Jacky" Fisher, on the other the Kaiser himself and the gloriously fork-bearded von Tirpitz - was ever a war waged by more remarkable characters? It was said of Wilhelm that what he really wanted of his new fleet was a mammoth joint regatta with his grandmother's navy, all the dreadnoughts on show at Cowes and a grand celebratory banquet. It was Fisher who declared that the three principles of naval war should be 1) Give no quarter; 2) Take no prisoners; 3) Sink everything.
By the end of the book President Wilson and the Americans have arrived, like dei ex machina. Its leitmotif throughout, though, has been the titanic confrontation between the North Sea navies, and when we see the mutinous and demoralised High Seas Fleet finally scuttling itself in Scapa Flow, it is a truly allegorical conclusion to an almost Olympian drama.
The only faults of Castles of Steel are its enormous, undiscriminating length and its unrelenting pace - the battleships sail through its prose in all their majesty, but the graceful battlecruisers are fighting somewhere else.
Jan Morris's latest book is A Writer's World: travels 1950-2000 (Faber & Faber)
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