Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea

Massie, Robert K. Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea. New York: Random House, 2003. 880pp. $35

This work is the sequel to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Massie's Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (Random House, 1991). It is a sweeping narrative of World War I at sea. While it focuses primarily on the struggle between the main German and British fleets, it also examines the German U-boat campaign, other revolutions in undersea weaponry, the pivotal role of good intelligence, and the broad geographic scope of the war. The book provides a clear sense of how important the clash of British and German navies was to the war's eventual outcome, and it illustrates how Winston Churchill's dramatic description of Admiral John Jellicoe, commander in chief of the British Grand Fleet, as "the only commander who could lose the war in an afternoon" could be an accurate one.

This is also a cautionary tale of failures and missed opportunities. In the earliest stages of the conflict, we see both sides baffled when their opponent's actions do not match prewar assumptions. The German naval strategy, for example, was based on the certainty that...