Rating: 
Summary: Massive Attack
Review: Robert Massie has done it again -- another "Massive" tome on a topic that doesn't initially seem fascinating, but turns out to be a spellbinding narrative of central importance. Before reading "Dreadnought", this book's predecessor, my understanding of the Anglo-German naval race was limited to a dry few paragraphs in general histories of World War I. Massie put the drama and all its personalities at center stage and showed how crucial Kaiser Willhelm II's vanity fleet was in provoking Britain's turn toward the Entente, an alignment which proved fatal to the Second Reich. "Castles of Steel" picks up the story with the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914. It is much more of a military history than its political/diplomatic precedessor, with detailed and often gripping descriptions of naval battles and pursuits. Massie neglects to offer a basic tutorial on the ships of the day, so it's up to the reader to learn on the job about the differences between battleships and battle cruisers, twelve inch guns and eight inch guns, coal and oil power, etc. But it can be done. Massie is at his best in describing the action of surface fleets. Each naval engagement of the war, from minor skirmishes and raids to epic battles like Jutland, are given microsopic treatment. Such a detailed narrative allows Massie to draw insights that might be invisible from a simplified overview. Events in war cause subtle chain reactions. One British admiral's caution in interpreting Winston Churchill's muddled orders lets a German ship escape and leads to his court martial; a few months later, on the other side of the world, one of his colleagues charges into a fatal and pointless battle to avoid the same fate. The escaped German ship is decisive in swinging Turkey into the war; within a year Churchill's career--and perhaps the war itself--is on the line in the daring and hapless Gallipoli operation to knock Turkey out. And so on. Castles of Steel will thoroughly dispell the notion that the two great fleets were largely passive throughout the war (excluding Jutland) and that the naval war was a bit of a sideshow to the real action on land. He shows how decisive even an indecisive result at sea could be--as long as Britain could maintain its blockade on Germany while avoiding strangulation of its commerce by the U-boat campaign. Massie is also strong on showing how Jutland--whatever its tactical outcome--must have been a strategic defeat for the High Seas Fleet, since it left the U-boats as Germany's only offensive option at sea. That in turn led to America's entry and Germany's certain defeat on land. Massie is not as interested in the details of the U-boat war. Although his chapter on the subject is able and informative, he does not attack it with the same passion and detail as he does the surface ships. In that he resembles his hero in this book, Admiral Jellicoe, a master of surface warfare who respects and fears these new weapons, but does not really make them his own. Like most military histories, this book could have used about ten times the maps the editors saw fit to include. Massie's narrative is masterful, but visual aids will always help to track the complex movements of hundreds of ships. I also wish that Massie had spent as much time getting inside the heads of the German commanders and sailors as he did their English counterparts. There is an inexplicable gap, for example, between the professional, courageous and highly capable High Seas Fleet at Jutland in 1916 and the demoralized, mutinous ships that failed to stir themselves from port eighteen months later to seek a final confrontation with the British. What happened to these men who had once been eager for a fight, and who claimed never to have been defeated? Massie gives us a few clues--the effects of the blockade, the deterioration of Germany's position on land, the (mostly) universal reluctance to engage in suicide missions. But this is one of the rare points on which the reader wishes for more detail. Still, Castles of Steel is a marvelous effort, and I am willing to pick up whatever Mr. Massie cares to write next and carry it straight to the cash register--that is, if I can lift it.
Rating:
Summary: History at it's best
Review: Robert Massie is a great writer. His massive books weave together naval technology, politics, geography, personalities, tactics, and human error into a tightly woven and crystal clear narrative.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, little known part of a horrible war.
Review: Robert Massie is a master of compelling popular history. Castles of Steel is a masterpiece. It is a retelling of the sea war during WWI, particularly from the British point of view. The sea war has always taken a back seat to horrific ground war--the astounding losses in single ground battles made the sea war seem insignificant in comparison. And so it is. But Massie has uncovered a fascinating story, in particular the standoff between the British and German fleets in the North Sea. His recounting of the Battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland make for compelling reading, as are his description the two great South American battles (the defeat of the British at Coronel and the British revenge at the Falkland Islands). He tells his story crisply. His prose is clear and exciting. And he goes below the mechanics of ship movements to introduce us to some wonderful characters: the doomed Admiral Craddock, the victorious but ultimately ill-fated Admiral Spee. Likewise the two great British admirals, the impetuous Beatty and the beloved Jellicoe. I read the book in giant gulps late into the night. Highly recommended to any lover of popular history.
Rating:
Summary: A worthy successor to his book DREADNOUGHT
Review: Robert Massie is that rare creature - a popular historian who also does his research properly. This is a very worthy successor to his magnificent book DREADNOUGHT, that people should have bought and read before they go on to read this one. It is also good to see Churchill being given his due prominence for the pivotal role that he played in the First World War. Buy both books for Thanksgiving or Christmas and have a great read. Christopher Catherwood, author of CHRISTIANS MUSLIMS AND ISLAMIC RAGE (Zondervan, 2003) and THE BALKANS IN WORLD WAR TWO (Palgrave 2003)
Rating: 
Summary: FINELY- WRITTEN AND WELL-RESEARCHED WW I NAVAL HISTORY
Review: Robert Massie won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography (PETER THE GREAT: HIS LIFE AND WORLD) so there are some credentials here. He also wrote DREADNOUGHT and the curious reader may wonder what is in this book and not in DREADNOUGHT and vice-versa because much of this book is about dreadnoughts, the "castles of steel" of the title. In CASTLES OF STEEL, Mr. Massie takes us through the naval history of WW I from the hunt for the German warship Goeben in the Mediterranean to the climatic (and anticlimatic) battle of Jutland to the defeat of the U-boats. It is quite a story and covers the political events in as much detail as the naval actions. It is fascinating to learn how the Allies did finally defeat the U-boats and exactly what caused America to enter the war. The battle of Dogger Bank is described as is the Gallipoli Campaign and Room 40. The personalities and lives of the major players are related including love affairs and rivalries. President Woodrow Wilson's role in trying to broker a peace before finally throwing in the towel is recounted. With 880 some pages there is plenty of detail and you can image the research that went into writing CASTLES OF STEEL. Mr. Massie certainly knows his ships and his writing is entertaining. The only complaint I have is Mr. Massie's irritating habit of revealing the outcome of a battle before the battle is over. Spoils the suspense a bit. Still, this is a finely-written and well-researched general history about a nearly forgotten but massive conflict.
Rating:
Summary: World War I at sea, according to Massie
Review: Some years ago I wrote a review of the author's book Dreadnought, and quipped that his last name should be Massive, not Massie, as his books are so dang long. This one isn't as hefty as Dreadnought, but at just under 800 pages of text it's not exactly a lightweight either. There is a lot of material, here, though, and the author works very hard to make the book interesting and the characters memorable, while all the time recounting the events he's interested in.
World War I at sea was dominated by a few events: the battles off South America at the start of the war, a few skirmishes in the North Sea, Gallipoli, the Goeben fiasco, and finally the Battle of Jutland. The author suitably spends a good deal of time on each of these episodes: the recounting of Spee's journey across the Pacific to the Battle of Coronel and finally to destruction at the Falklands takes a hundred pages, and Jutland takes a little more than that. There's much about the various characters involved, some of them rather obscure. Most notable is British Admiral David Beatty's wife, who turns out to have been the heiress to the Marshall Field fortune, and what the English would call an ugly American. The passage where she tries to browbeat Winston Churchill, of all people, into reassigning her husband's ship to suit her social schedule, is frankly priceless.
The book's prose is wonderful, and everything is very accessible, so why only four stars? Well, there are some shortcomings in the book, too. First there's the lack of maps. It's virtually impossible to follow a naval battle without charts showing you the positions of the various ships at particular points in the day, so that you can see why someone turned a particular direction or whatever. The book has only large-scale maps which don't help you with this at all. When you get to Jutland, if you haven't got a good working knowledge of the battle already you'll only have a dim appreciation of the course of the fighting.
Second the author has some eccentricities. One of the strangest is his insistence on anglicizing the name of the Kaiser of Germany to William from Wilhelm. This is just strange, and it's the sort of thing British historians did half a century ago, but Americans haven't done it in decades. The author leaves intact virtually every one else's name, so Franz Hipper remains Franz instead of Francis, and even the ship Kronprinz Wilhelm retains its German name, but the Kaiser is William. Just weird.
Second, as is usual with Massie, while he understands the personalities involved well, his knowledge of the technical stuff involved in naval warfare is weak at points. In Dreadnought, he misunderstood the flaws in British battlecruiser design: here he revisits the issue and gets it right this time, even giving you information on how the Germans prevented the sorts of disasters that plagued the British at Jutland. Apparently one of the German ships (Seydlitz) almost blew up to a magazine explosion at Dogger Bank, and they took measures afterwards. But he gets the sinking of the Lusitania wrong, repeating the old story that the ship was packed with explosives which probably sunk it. Robert Ballard went down and looked at the wreck: the hold that supposedly had the explosives in it was intact and empty, and evidence in the wreck at least implies the explosion was caused by coal dust.
These shortcomings aside, this is a wonderfully written book and well worth the effort if takes to read it, if you're interested in the subject, of course.
Rating:
Summary: The Grand Fleet Triumphant
Review: The first book in this saga, "Dreadnought," was the spellbinding tale of how Tirpitz and Fisher, repectively the two great architechts of the German and British navies, spent the two centuries preceding World War One amassing huge capital fleets made up of the new "dreadnought" battleship class. "Castles of Steel" tells the story of how those fleets came to clash.
For almost two years, the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet rode at anchor virtually nonstop; two enemies staring each other off at opposite ends of the North Sea, awaiting the "Great Day" of long-awaited fleet action. Meanwhile, lesser craft battled in the periphery: thus the battles of Coronel and the Falklands, expertly related by Massie, involved large numbers of obsolete craft, while the British Navy's doomed attempt to force the Dardanelles was repulsed by Turkish howitzers fired from the clifftops and carefully-laid mines that floating down the straits.
The two great crises in the first part of this book are, first, the German naval raids on English seaside villages (which greatly hardened British popular opinion against Germany), and, second, the Dardanelles-Gallipoli campaign, in which the British and French failed to score a hoped-for knockout blow against Turkey - costing Winston Churchill his job as First Lord of the Admiralty. But the book's obvious climax arrives in 1916, when the inevitable fleet action occurs at the Battle of Jutland. The British dreadnoughts under Jellicoe stood their ground but sustained somewhat greater losses; the German High Seas fleet under Scheer made two passes at the Grand Fleet but then turned tail and headed back to base, where it stayed for the war's duration. Strategically, the British had held their own; the Kaiser was beaten at sea.
I could not conceive of a better or more thrilling narrative of Jutland. Massie is, however, equally at ease describing the monotony of life at the British Scapa Flow base, or the later 1917 anti-submarine campaigns. Just as the first book, "Dreadnought," unabashedly built up Jacky Fisher as its hero, "Castles of Steel" really credits the Royal Navy's victories - including the Allied triumph over unrestricted submarine warfare - to Lord Jellicoe. This is a view that accords with latter-day conventional historical widsom, but has not always prevailed in the battle accounts, because many historians, particularly in the first twenty years after Jutland, had credited favored Admiral Beatty, the cruiser commander, diminishing Jellicoe as over-cautious.
This is a first class narrative of one of history's greatest naval rivalries; whether or not the fate of World War One turned on armed or naval action will always be debated, but if you read this book, even a die-hard militarist will be tempted to join the navalist camp.
Rating:
Summary: Britannia Rules the Waves - Maybe
Review: The text opens with a review of the July 1914 diplomatic crisis and concludes with the scuttling of the German High Seas fleet at Scapa Flow. The author, Robert Massie, gives a concise narrative of the Great War at sea between Germany and Britain focusing on weapons and tactics together with covering the colorful/controversial military and political leaders. The well-written battle narratives (Jutland being the most famous) are most interesting as are the lesser battles in the Pacific and the Falkland Islands.
The German High Seas fleet was second only to the British Royal Navy with German dreadnoughts superior in armor and water-tight integrity while British dreadnoughts were faster and had larger guns. These differences were due to the Royal Navy tactic, advanced by First Sea Lord Fisher father of the dreadnought warship, which was to get there first, hit hard, and leave quickly; while Admiral von Tirpitz's, founder of the Imperial German navy, maxim was "....that a ship's primary mission (is) to remain afloat." Consequently, German warships, which were only slightly slower that the British dreadnoughts, could sustain multiple hits, remain afloat and continue to fight.
The concise narrative of the Gallipoli campaign espoused by Admiralty First Lord Churchill and grudgingly supported by The First Sea Lord Fisher is both interesting and well written. As originally conceived it was an all Royal Navy effort (infantry could not be spared from France) to force the Dardanelles, occupy Constantinople, enter the Black Sea, take Turkey out of the war, and reopen a supply route to Russia. The naval effort was halted after March 18, 1915 when ships were damaged by mines. Later information from American diplomats established that had the Royal Navy pressed on the fleet could have forced the straits leading to a "victory decisive upon the whole course of the war." After the naval efforts, attempted infantry operations were a dismal failure resulting in Churchill losing his cabinet post and ultimately the First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher leaving as well.
The Royal Navy fostered protests from neutral countries when they blockaded Germany. In response Germany initiated a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare resulting in the torpedoing of the passenger liner Lusitania in May 1915 with the loss of several lives including 128 Americans. Kaiser William wishing to keep America neutral suspended unrestricted submarine warfare. Now, Germany's only recourse was to weaken the Royal Navy. The Battle of Jutland, May 31,1916, resulted when the German High Seas Fleet tried to lure the British Grand Fleet into a surface battle trap. The author devotes five interesting chapters to Jutland. While the German battle fleet sank a greater number of ships than the British, they failed to seriously injure the Royal Navy, and at the end of the battle, the British battle fleet was positioned between the Germans and their safe home ports. The German fleet escaped during the night of May 31/June1.
Mistakes were made by commanders in each fleet. The author notes "Hipper (a German Admiral) made no mistakes at Jutland and was the only one of the fours senior admirals present to come away with his reputation enhanced." The book gives a succinct account of the political maneuvering and fall-out after Jutland. British Admiral Jellicoe ultimately lost his command of the British Grand Fleet becoming First Sea Lord in the Admiralty. The Germans faced a serious problem: unable to weaken the British Grand Fleet and reduce the blockade which was strangling Germany yet forbidden by the Kaiser to use their most effective weapon, unrestricted submarine warfare, political maneuvering and debate commenced. The major political issue for Germany was that returning to unrestricted submarine warfare would bring America into the war. Ultimately the German army high command, convinced the Kaiser that before America could become a factor Germany would win the war. Germany then resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. The text gives an excellent account of how Germany addressed this problem.
With the return of unrestricted submarine by the Germans, America entered the war. The author notes that the German gamble to win the war with an unrestricted U-boats offensive failed. By July 31,1918 more than a million American soldiers were in Europe with many thousands more arriving each month. The hand-writing was on the wall, "Germany could not win" so they responded to American President Wilson's peace offers and signed an armistice on November 11,1918. A critical requirement of the 11 November armistice was that German warships and submarines would be surrendered to the Allies and would be brought to designated British ports awaiting disposition. German Admiral Reuters, German commander of the surrendered fleet at Scapa Flow, and his officers "all felt themselves still bound by a standing order of the Imperial Navy that no German warship was to be allowed to fall into enemy hands." On 21 June 1919 Reuters gave the order, and the German navy scuttled their warships in Scapa Flow. On June 28, 1919 the Treaty of Versailles was signed, the German fleet was at the bottom of the sea, and the Great War was over.
This book by Robert Massie reads like a novel: smooth, interesting and always moving forward. He brings the political maneuverings and personalities of the major players in both Britain and Germany into focus while narrating the critical naval events of WWI. It's a lengthy work, 786 pages of text alone, but both the amateur and advanced student will find reading this work was worth the effort.
Rating:
Summary: A Nifty Naval Tactic
Review: There is a really nifty description of a naval warfare tactic in this book that is so specific to the Dreadnought era. If two ships are battling on the open ocean when it is almost sundown, then if the ship due west has an important advantage, because the sun is in its opponent's eyes. The gunners on the latter have trouble discerning where their shells land, relative to the target. But suppose the sun now sets? Then the situation reverses totally. The east ship is now in shadow. But there is enough residual sunlight, from over the horizon, to highlight the west ship against it. It is obvious once you think about it, but how many of us have? Very nice - how the tactical situation can complete reverse in minutes, and due to the geometry of a sphere. Plus it is something that is true only of naval battles. On land, even on plains, there is usually some terrain folding to obviate this. Also, this tactic only really held true when Dreadnoughts ruled. Prior, there were sailing ships. But the cannons mounted on those had much shorter range (a few hundred meters). So it was far easier for either ship to see where its shells landed, irrespective of the sun's position. And by the end of World War 2, ships could use radar, instead of direct visuals, to aim, and also use ship-launched missiles, which could hit over the horizon.
Rating:
Summary: An epic account of the war at sea 1914-1918
Review: This book is simply the best, most extraordinary and knowledgeable account of the Great War at Sea 1914-18. No other study or similar volume compares to what Mr. Massie has done here.
This book follows on his excellent account of the build up to the Great War and the development of the dreadnought. His last book on this subject (Dreadnought: Britain Germany and the coming of the great war) detailed the great naval arms race that made war 'inevitable'. This book details the actual conflict. The author argues that while the arms race made war inevitable the German high commands decision not to boldly use the navy condemned it to failure. The author tells many fascinating tales in his book. He has excellent character sketches of Churchill, Scheer and Tirpitz. He also looks at the amazing story of the 'Goeben' a German surface raider.
He looks at the advent of unrestricted submarine warfare. He also looks at the battles that did take place like the River Plate(Falklands) and Dogger Bank as well as the bombardment of British coastal cities by German ships.
The climax of the volume is the battle of Jutland. The author tells in stunning detail every action packed minute of this epic clash of steel on the high seas.
An amazing book, sure to be THE standard on the subject for years to come. Massie's prose is beyond comparison, he writes history to make you feel it, to give you an appetite for the wide range of subjects he touches upon. All WWI enthusiasts and naval buffs will love this book as will the common reader with an interest in history.
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