Castles of Steel

Starred review from September 22, 2003
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Nicholas and Alexandra returns with a sequel to Dreadnought that is imposing in both size and quality, taking the British and German battle fleets through WWI. The fluent narrative begins amid the diplomatic crisis of July 1914 and ends with the scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow in 1919. Massie makes a coherent if long narrative out of a sequence of events familiar to students of naval history but probably not to many other potential readers. The focus is on the two fleets that confronted each other across the North Sea, their weapons and tactics and their complex and controversial leaders, both military and political. As in his other books, the author describes his cast of characters with the vividness of a novelist, British Admiral Beatty's disastrous marriage being a painful case in point. What emerges from that focus is not only a number of outstanding battle narratives (Jutland is only the most famous), but a closely argued case for the German fleet having been a disaster for its country's war effort. Once built, the High Seas Fleet made war with England and the blockade of Germany inevitable. Unable to break the blockade with that expensive fleet, Germany felt compelled to choose between a negotiated peace and unrestricted submarine warfare. Once the Germans chose the latter course, American intervention and disaster become nearly unavoidable. It may seem odd to describe a book of this size as an "introduction," but readers will soon understand that the size of the topic requires a long narrative. "Castles of steel" was Winston Churchill's grand phrase for the Grand Fleet and its German counterpart, and this unusually fine military narrative lives up to it as well.

July 1, 2003
World War I on the high seas: from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Dreadnaught and Nicholas and Alexandra.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2003
Massie has distinguished himself as a writer who pens enormous narrative histories so engaging that readers, losing themselves in the romance-novel story style, forget that they're reading nearly 1,000 pages of nonfiction. Dovetailing nicely with " Dreadnaught" (1991), which covers 40 years of British-German politics leading up to the Great War, his latest selection delves into politics by other means as the world's then two most powerful navies attempt to sink each other in the cold North Sea. While our cultural memory of World War I has largely been muddily entrenched in France and Belgium, this book shows that the sea was the war's most vital battleground, at a formative moment, adrift between Admiral Nelson-style high-seas adventure and modern aircraft-dominated naval combat. Yet while clearly well researched regarding technical specifications (gun apertures, water displacement, hull composition), Massie's tome is less a tale of technology and more of what he writes best: biographies of great men and complicated events. In this instance, it's the patient, thoughtful Admiral John Jellicoe, the man Winston Churchill said was "the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon," and his foil, the flamboyant Admiral David Beatty, at sea against the wishes of his clingy aristocratic wife. The key German officers are also covered, and the war's climax at Jutland is as much their story. Unlike the British attempt to eliminate the German High Seas Fleet, this book is a decisive success.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)