Castles Of Steel: Britain, Germany and the winning of the Great War at sea

Reviewed by GARTH GEORGE

By Robert K. Massie

Published by Jonathan Cape


It is May 30, 1916, the eve of the Battle of Jutland, the pivotal naval engagement of World War I. Admiral David Beatty's Battle Cruiser Fleet, including the New Zealand, is racing from the Firth of Forth to rendezvous with Admiral John Jellicoe's Grand Fleet, which has sailed from Scapa Flow.

One captain wore irregular dress. New Zealand's John Green had a green stone tiki pendant around his neck, and his waist was wrapped in a black-and-white flax Maori kilt called a piu-piu, both gifts presented to the ship by a tribal chief during the battle cruiser's visit to the Dominion in 1913. Along with the gifts came the chief's request that they be worn by the captain whenever the New Zealand went into action; if this ritual was faithfully observed, he promised, the battle cruiser would not be seriously harmed. On this day the news that the captain was wearing his necklace and his kilt spread reassurance among the crew. And when the Battle of Jutland was over, New Zealand, hit only once by a heavy shell, was the only one of Beatty's six battle cruisers to suffer no significant damage and escape all casualties.

Considering the millions of words which have filled hundreds of books about the British, German and United States Navies in the Great War, it might seem strange that another should be written (by an American) some 90 years after the event.

But what makes this 800-page history as readable as a well-crafted novel is the author's regular and continual insertion of personal details, such as the tale of the New Zealand's captain. There are hundreds of them - British, German and American - taken from letters, diaries and reports left by all and sundry, from royalty, politicians and senior officers to bureaucrats and lower deck sailors.

My favourite: the brilliant but egomaniacal Admiral Jackie Fisher, in his 70s brought out of retirement to become once again First Sea Lord at the Admiralty, was absolutely convinced of the value of the new-fangled submarine, which some senior naval officers grumbled were unethical, "un-English, the weapon of cowards who refuse to fight like men on the surface" and an "underhanded method of attack".

In his search for support to have more and more built, Fisher took the Prince of Wales (later King George V) for a ride in a submarine, which submerged off Plymouth.

The Princess of Wales, watching from an observation ship, was heard to say quietly: "I shall be very disappointed if George doesn't come up."

This is a book full of heroes and villains (which will depend on whose side you would have been on at the time), their mistresses, amours and sycophants, among them Prince Louis of Battenberg, the British First Sea Lord at the outbreak of war, who - like King George V - came under nasty criticism for his German heritage. They had to change their names, the royal family to Windsor and the Battenbergs to Mountbatten.

Even so, Prince Louis (father of Mountbatten of Burma) had to resign from the Admiralty in the atmosphere of distrust and was replaced by Fisher.

Prince Louis of Battenberg's metamorphosis into Louis Mountbatten, Maquis of Milford Haven, was finalised while he was visiting a country house. He noted the change by writing in the guest book, "Arrived Prince Hyde, departed Lord Jekyll".

Then there is the brilliant young Winston Churchill, First Lord at the Admiralty, who begged Fisher to return. How these two towering egos managed to work together for so long is one of the intrigues of the book.

But neither survived the calamity of the attempts to force the Straits of the Dardanelles and the catastrophic Gallipoli campaign (covered in detail), which Churchill devised and supported and Fisher opposed. When those campaigns were over and the cost had been counted, Fisher went back to retirement and Churchill was shoved into obscurity.

Of the British admirals, the careful and meticulous Jellicoe and the dashing and arrogant Beatty tower above the rest while among the "villains" we have the Kaiser, his Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and Admirals Scheer, Hipper, von Tirpitz and von Spee, among others.

The personalities and politicking, the jealousies, the one-upmanship and backstabbing - on all sides - add the spice which help to make this tome hard to put down.

Throughout it all sail the castles of steel, the mighty dreadnoughts of the British and German Navies, the most fearsome killing machines thus far devised by man, clashing at the Bight, Coronel, the Falkland Islands, Dogger Bank, Jutland - battles that cost the lives of British and German sailors, often thousands at a time, as they blew up or turned turtle.

Ironically it was not the British surface blockade of Germany but the nefarious submarine that settled the issue, for it was Germany's sinking of ships (the Lusitania for one) carrying Americans, then its decision to carry out unrestricted submarine warfare against cargo and passenger ships, that brought the United States into the war.

I have but one criticism of this history, which is recommended for those who, like me, cut their teeth on C. S. Forester, and that is its paucity of illustrations - just 24 pictures, few of them of ships.

As I came to the end of Castles of Steel, I was left pondering how these admirals of yesteryear would be agog today were they to watch a missile warship with pinpoint accuracy demolish, from 100 miles and more away, every one of the behemoth battleships that fought the Battle of Jutland.