- Hardcover: 880 pages
- Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (Oct 28 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679456716
- ISBN-13: 978-0679456711
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16 x 4.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 Kg
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #171,700 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
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. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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First Sentence
On an afternoon in early July 1914, a middle-aged man with restless, bright blue eyes and curly, iron-gray hair boarded his yacht in the German Baltic harbor of Kiel, and the following morning departed on his annual summer cruise to the fjords of Norway. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
On an afternoon in early July 1914, a middle-aged man with restless, bright blue eyes and curly, iron-gray hair boarded his yacht in the German Baltic harbor of Kiel, and the following morning departed on his annual summer cruise to the fjords of Norway. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Forgotten Side of the Great War,
By
This review is from: Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (Hardcover)
Even a reasonably serious general reader of World War I histories is likely to be far better acquainted with the war on land than the war at sea. After all, what else is there to know besides the Battle of Jutland, the sinking of the Lusitania, the German U-boat offensive and the reactive convoy system? OK, some may have heard of Dogger Bank and recognize that Gallipoli was originally an entirely naval operation until practical difficulties turned it into the disastrous land offensive which has become synonymous with misadventures of the kind. That's it, right? Actually, no, not by a long shot. And if you want to know the "rest" of the WWI story, and perhaps come to agree with the view shared by Author Massie and many other historians that British sea power was the war's ultimate determinant, then this is the book for you. Another reviewer points out that the book appears to have been largely derived from secondary sources, and that may well be true. But Massie's masterful amalgamation, if you will, nonetheless produces a stunning panorama that if not entirely original in its sources, is surely an example of the very finest scholarship of the kind and an "original" in both its sweep and its marvelous presentation in terms of language and story-telling. I made the same "secondary source" comment about Winston Groom's 2002 book on the fighting in the Ypres salient, "A Storm in Flanders," but there is between the two works a distinction with a considerable difference. The Ypres story has been written about with sufficient frequency over the last 90 years that any new telling runs the risk of being downright familiar to serious WWI readers, and so it is with "Storm"; I could have sworn that I had in hand only a slight variation of the several works on the subject I have read. Thus, my conclusion that Groom's book amounted to little more than a nicely turned out rehash. Not at all worthless, just of limited value to the serious WWI reader. Such is not the case with "Castles". The book undertakes nothing less than a thorough account of the entire war at sea and succeeds like nothing else I have ever encountered. Secondary the sources might have been, but the result is indisputably first-rate. Take our "five-star" word for it: you will not only enjoy the read, but will forever after be comfortable that you understand and appreciate the significance of the "forgotten" side of the war.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Narrative - some bits missing,
By A Customer
This review is from: Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (Hardcover)
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.....
5.0 out of 5 stars
Massie Can Still Do It!,
This review is from: Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (Hardcover)
I am a huge fan of Robert K. Massie, and have enjoyed all of his books ("Nicholas and Alexandria" and "Dreadnought" were my favourites). This book shows all of the virtues of this very fine popular historian: fluent prose, well drawn individual portraits, absorbing anecdotes and skilful expositions of complex historical events. I particularly enjoyed his account of the naval campaign at Gallipoli, and his description of the Battle of Jutland ranks in my opinion (along with John Keegan's Jutland piece from "The Price of Admiralty) as the best short account of Jutland ever written. However, readers who are new to Massie should know what to expect: the book is written almost entirely from secondary sources and what he presents is an excellent synthesis rather than an original interpretation; there is little new here. Minor quibbles: I wish the coverage of the German side had been more thorough, and perhaps Massie could have covered the Graf Spee story in fewer pages.
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