Rating: 
Summary: You Can Smell the Cordite
Review:
By Bill Marsano. The steel battleship, that most splendid of boy's toys, so beloved of admirals and the public too, had an amazingly short lifetime. From the Royal Navy's Dreadnought of 1906 to their ultimate expression in World War II, battleships lived a mere forty years. World War II brought Germany's splendid Bismarck, Japan's Yamato and Musashi, and several American classes, the best of them being the mighty Iowas.
But it also brought naval aviation, so that for most of the war the magnificent giants were dinosaurs, often reduced to shore bombardments. Hood vs. Bismarck, after all, lasted but three salvos; Bismarck vs. Rest of Royal Navy was hardly a match; and Japan's godzillas fell to naval aviation. The only big-gun fleet action of the war was, I think, 1944's Battle of Surigao Strait, a reasonably satisfactory demolition derby between Nishimura of Japan's Force C and our Navy's reincarnated Pearl Harbor survivors.
So battleships had only World War I in which to show their stuff. Robert K. Massie's big, rich, Omaha-steak of a book tells us all about it.
Much of this war has long since faded to sound bites; at sea we get the Lusitania, submarines and a spoonful of Jutland, and that's about it. Fans of naval rifles, mines and torpedoes get get much more than that from Massie. The author of "Dreadnought," he knows tactics and strategy, facts and figures, winners and losers. He also knows--is master of--detail and anecdote. In his telling these distant events have the smell of cordite and remote personages come alive on their quarterdecks (and behind their desks).
Garmany's High Seas Fleet was markedly smaller than the Royal Navy, but it had better ships, shells and shooting. Still, the Royal Navy had its great tradition, fighting spirit and confidence in victory while the Germans were often crippled by caution. Massie is superb at showing how the Germans finally lost and the British clumsily won.
Minor events and major are all here, coherently presented. There are Coronel and Falklands; Dogger Bank and Battle of the Bight; the Scarborough Raid (Germans shelling beach resorts); the submarine war; and of course that mighty set-piece, Jutland. There the German High Seas Fleet won the silver medal tactically, giving a real smacking to the Brits, who nevertheless took the gold: At the end, the Royal Navy ruled the waves and the Germans had to run for their lives. (Oddly, it was an American newspaper that best summed-up Jutland, saying "The German fleet has assaulted its jailer but it is still in jail.")
Massie is especially good on the allies' attempt to force the Dardanelles with a fleet of battleships that would then steam up to Istanbul and shell Turkey out of the war. Ships usually come out second-best against fortresses, which don't sink, but here the risk was thought worthwhile: Most of the battleships involved were elderly and due for scrapping anyway. In fact the early stages went well for the allied armada, but when things began to go wrong, the allies were suddenly averse to risking their floating antiques, and the Turks managed to make them quit. (Later, embarrassment led to catastrophe: Gallipoli)
The principal characters, vividly sketched, are Churchill, blundering toward political oblivion, and two admirals. One was John Jellicoe, "inventor" of the dreadnought or modern battleship. A cautious but decisive commander, he trained his fleet well and never used it rashly. He understood that so long as the Grand Fleet remained intact, Germany could never break the allies' strangling blockade. And although the Germans escaped at Jutland, Jellicoe did them terrific damage. The other admiral was David Beatty, head of the battlecruiser squadron. He was brave, dashing, good-looking and outgoing--just the sort of hero the media loves.
Unfortunately he was also a relentless self-promoter, a jealous back-stabber and a bloody fool to boot. At the opening of Jutland he attacked at top speed, leaving his slightly slower but more heavily armed battleships behind, and his gunnery was poor, so his command was savaged by the outnumbered but hard-shooting Germans. Beatty wasn't the only fool involved. Ashore, the Admiralty bungled their intelligence work; afloat, rear elements of the Grand Fleet saw German units escaping--but didn't report to higher command, thinking someone else surely would.
No, not the only fool, Beatty, but surely the worst. The British public was disappointed by Jutland; they wanted a Trafalgar and, failing, that, a scapegoat. Beatty made sure they got one--Jellicoe--whom he and the press blamed for letting the Germans get away.
By two copies of this book so you can give one to a friend. What arguments you'll have!--Bill Marsano is an old devotee of naval combats, hardcover and soft.
Rating: 
Summary: A good sequel to DREADNOUGHT
Review: ...but at the same time perhaps a little disappointing. This is probably the most "readable" account of the Royal Navy in the First World War that I have read -and I have read quite a few- but at the same time I kept feeling that something was missing. Part of me wonders if it has nothing to do with Massie & the mere fact that the really important part of naval strategy in the Great War was making sure that Nothing Happened dooms any account to "something missing". At the same time however I feel that Massie could have made use of a better editor in this follow-up to his really interesting first volume on the pre-war Anglo-German arms race. Here we all too often have the text of a message or letter as it was written TO someone & then a few pages later we have the exact same text repeated as it is received by someone -it makes one keep thinking "but wait, we already KNEW that!" More than half the book is devoted to the first year of the war, and much of the rest revolves around Jutland, and while I was fascinated by the accounts of Coronel & the Falklands, I wish that Massie had perhaps given more time to the smaller engagements & perhaps to the sheer tedious hell of the blockade. At the same time, given that I am discussing an author who has already shown a predeliction to battleships (and who writes superbly about them) I probably shouldn't complain that very little of this book goes anywhere that a battleship or a battleship enthusiast hasn't gone. Massie touches on the personalities & issues of Jellicoe vs. Beatty, Churchill vs. Fisher, and Fisher vs. Everyone, but I wanted more. I am probably just greedy, but to me an ideal Massie would have been a trilogy: pre-war (already done extraordinarily well in his DREADNOUGHT); The war's outbreak through Jutland as a Vol 2. and post-Jutland to 1942 & the effective end of battleships in the South China Sea in Vol 3. Lacking that this is still a "must have" for any fan of the Navy, but I feel a little like Beatty must have felt when the High Seas Fleet surrendered without a fight:Well, this is glorious, but it isn't exactly what I wanted.
Rating:
Summary: This book is HUGE...
Review: ..but that has nothing to do with its size. OK, so it is a big book and you will certainly know you are carrying it if it is your chosen vacation reading. That would be a mistake, because once you are into this book it is very unlikely you will want to put it down again - and thereby miss your vacation entirely.
Its HUGENESS comes as a gripping story of political intrigue, monumental egos, grand strides across the timeline of battleship development (read 'Dreadnought' first if you can), immensely capable, brave and resolute men, truly global strategies, tales of adventure, frustration, desperation, triumph, horrific clashes of titanic proportions and a clean, fresh and engaging style that goes all the way there in explaining the Great War in its fullest context. OK, so there's no sex (..actually there is..but you'll have to find it...and its as smutty as Hollywood would want..Clue: David Beatty)
The astonishing thing is, this is not a novel..it is HISTORY (you know, that boring period you feel asleep in at school..)..
..put it down if you can. As gripping as the cold waters that consumed so many souls in it's unfolding, those 90 years ago. A masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: A Dagwood Sandwich of a Book-Very Good but not a Classic
Review: During the mid 1990's, I spent several enjoyable months reading Robert Massie's "Dreadnought". It was one of those books that I hated finishing. Every chapter brimmed with wonderful anecdotes and stellar writing. I put "Dreadnought" right up there with Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August" as one of the classic accounts of the Great War.
At 780 pages, "Castles of Steel" requires an act of faith to pick up the book and begin reading. Fortunately, Massie delivers a well written account of the naval war between Great Britain and Germany. All of the major sea battles of the war are examined with careful but not pedantic detail. Fortunately, as a work of popular history, Massie does not need to bog down his story with the obscure details an academic history would have to include. There will probably never be a better written popular account of the Great War at Sea.
Unfortunately, Robert Massie has to crowd in an awful lot of history into his 780 pages. What gets lost in his account is the well told anecdote and the rich background detail that made "Dreadnought" such a pleasure to read. There is just enough background writing to make one miss reading "Dreadnought". "Castles of Steel" would have had to push on a thousand pages to fill it with the same level of detail. To give but one example, Massie never informs his reader about simple details such as what is the difference between a light cruiser, a fast cruiser and a battle cruiser. The maps and pictures also do not do justice to the story being told.
All in all this is a very good acccount of naval warfare during the Great War. I will probably never have to read another book on this subject. However, "Castles of Steel" does not rise to the level of classic like "Dreadnought" or "The Guns of August." I would be willing to bet that in 40 years, "Dreadnought" will still be in print and "Castles of Steel" will only be found in libraries.
Rating: 
Summary: More propagada.
Review: Here we go again.Like his first book in the series,"Dreadnought",this book is little more than a bunch of recycled anti-German British propaganda circa 1917.We are even treated to yet another retelling of how the u-boats caused the US to enter the war.What a joke.If you really want to know how and why the US entered the war,read Walter Karp's "The Politics Of War" instead of this worthless junk.
Rating:
Summary: Great Narrative - some bits missing
Review: It's hard to imagine a 900 page book is incomplete - but it is. The narrative is well written and very engaging, but I found myself using other resources such as an Atlas with better charts and the Internet during my reading to better understand what was happening in the battles. The book could have been improved by more and better maps [especially of Jutland - showing Jellicoe's turn, the German turnabouts and the German escape through the British wake]. A few tables incorporating sinkings and outcomes, and comparing ship types would have helped. What is the difference between an armored cruiser and a battle cruiser? Finally, a short epilogue indicating the ultimate ends of the the main characters [Jellicoe, Fisher, Beatty, the German admirals] would have tied things up nicely. It would have been nice to see Jellicoe's 1914 'tactics' letter in an appendix [I found it on the 'Net], etc. Excellent writing, but a few things like this would have topped it off.....
Rating:
Summary: Good account
Review: Massie is probably the finest writer of popular history in the grand manner that there is. Not for him the niceties of sociology, political nuance, cultural studies and the like, but this is no criticism. Nor indeed I suspect is there much deep consultation of primary sources.
This is an excellent account of the war at sea during WW1 and a fine continuation of "Dreadnought". The book was like the war at sea, somehow a bit of an anticlimax after the build up of tension and expectations arising from the naval race before the war. The prewar race and the tensions these generated were expertly explained by Massie in "Dreadnought". Both the British and the Germans undoubtedly felt this frustration about the naval campaign. The British were frustrated in their designs by a degree of incompetence and bad luck (the escape of the Goeben, the battle of Coronel, the Dardanelles, the escape of the German battlecruisers at the battle of Dogger Bank and the miraculous escape of the High Seas Fleet at Jutland). The Germans were strategically defeated ultimately in most these actions, even if they sometimes claimed they were victories (such as at Jutland). The Dardanelles was a failure and Massie seems to subscribe to the views of many (including Keyes) who suggest that the Narrows could have been forced with more effort. Even in victory the British had nagging signs of failures of leadership, ship construction and ordnance - all this made the whole war less than the glorious Nelsonic denouement that the Royal Navy had expected prewar. The only action that seemed to prove the Royal Navy's élan was the Battle of the Bight and the crushing of von Spee's Pacific squadron at the battle of the Falkland Islands. The U boat war that followed Jutland was grim and decidedly unromantic. The Germans were disappointed that their powerful surface navy - whose existence had almost guaranteed that Britain would be their enemy, never was able to accomplish any of its goals, almost entirely due to the timidity of the Kaiser in ordering that his precious fleet was not to be risked in dangerous offensive actions.
It is a fair statement that the only contenders in the war that really mattered were the British and the Germans and this part of the war is covered superbly. I have to say I would have liked some account of the other great powers - what about the Russian Baltic fleet? Or the French? The Austro-Hungarians had a fleet too- what did it do during the war? Then there was the Japanese, of course. None of these questions are answered. Massie has kept his attention on the items of real strategic importance which was probably the right choice, but I still have these questions and it would have been nice to be able to at least answer them in part after having read the book. Another failure of the book is that it does not have enough pictures of the castles of steel themselves. What about a picture of Canopus or the Cressy class etc. etc.? We readers want to see these vessels. Nor are the maps up to the standard required, particularly the one of Jutland which is entirely inadequate. I suspect that this is due to meanness on behalf of the publisher. With these kinds of books maps are very important.
Nevertheless, this is a wonderful read. As usual, Massie is top of the heap at this kind of writing so it is heartily recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Very good, although not Massie's best.
Review: Robert K. Massie presents us in this book with his account of the confrontation between the British and German Fleets in the Great War. As could be expected from the author, the style of the book makes it a pleasure to read. Nevertheless, it must be considered less succesful than his previous masterpiece Dreadnought by two reasons: first, the technical and tactical details of naval war do not lend themselves easily to the human portraiture and anecdote on which Mr. Massie excels; and second, the story has been told so many times that most of the details are already known to any moderately knowledgeable person in military or naval history. This said, there are still many little known facts, for instance about the strenuous efforts of German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg to refrain his admirals and avoid confrontation with the United States, that are very instructive in refuting the simplistic vision of a monolithic, militaristic Germany. It is also very funny in a certain sense the tale of the Jutland battle: although gunfire was exchanged between the British and German fleets, the true battle was fought, for many years afterwards, between the two British admirals John Jellicoe and David Beatty. From Massie's account, as indeed from most recent analyses (notably Andrew Gordon's exceptional The Rules of the Game), Jellicoe emerges as a far more likable figure than the bombastic and self-serving Beatty. In summary, although this book does not reach the heights of Dreadnought, no person interested in history can go wrong in reading it.
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.
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