Rating: 
Summary: Excellent follow-up to Dreadnought
Review: This book proves to be a highly readable and entertaining account of the naval warfare during the First World War, mostly from the British perception. All the major battles fought between the British and Germans are clearly written and describes here as well as some of the more interesting characters of the naval scenes. The author appears to be firmly in John Jellicoe's camp. Although at first look, it might be a general history of war at sea, its not. This is more or less, a strict view from the British point of view with a few German bones tossed in. French naval activities are almost non-existence in this book.I think I read in one of the previous reviews about lack of maps. This I think is one of the major weaknesses of this book. Author is now writing military history book instead of policy oriented book of Dreadnought. In military books, you need to have maps of battles you are writing about. Somehow, I think Mr. Massie missed the ship on this one. It would have been nice if he included more photos as well, photos of men and ships that he was writing about. But overall, I found this book to be a great read and lucky of me, I do have other sources in my library that got the maps and photos. While I don't think reading Dreadnought is a mandatory thing before reading Castles of Steel, it would probably helped greatly if people did read Dreadnought first. The author provides interesting insights and the book proves to be well written and researched.
Rating: 
Summary: Decent to much
Review: This is a very interesting book about the Sea and WWI. Unfortunatyl it only covers germnay and england in regards to the naval conflict. What about Austria, Turkey, Italy and the others. The neveies of engalnd and germnay fought an all out war in the north atlantic. THis book focuses on the battle of Jutland in great detail. AN interesting account. What about the Emden and Dresden?
Rating: 
Summary: "Dreadnoughts" - The rest of the story
Review: This very long, but extremely well-written, book begins where Mr. Massie's book "Dreadnought" ends, the initiation of the Great War. This book, of course, does not focus on the land battles per se, but rather on the naval aspect of that conflict. Most reasonably educated people of my generation are fairly familiar with the continental battles on the Western and Eastern fronts, but the sea engagements are very much less well known. We were taught that the Battle of Jutland was, more or less, a British victory, and that was it out at sea, except for the U-boat attacks which eventually led to America's entry into the war on the side of the Aliies. This book goes into great detail concerning all of the sea engagements of the conflict, and gives the reasons behind what happened, both the England and in Imperial Germany. We see the internal conflict within the German high command over the use of subs at sea to attack neutral ships, and the eventual triumph of the hard-liners in that struggle, which did lead to the fall of the German Empire. We meet, once again, our friends Churchill and Jackie Fisher from the previous book, and learn the inside details of the Dardanelles and Gallippoli compaigns. This bok corrects the knowledge imbalance about the Great War battles, and is excellent reading for anyone interested in the whole story of that awful conflict.
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