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

New York: Random House, 2003. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. David Lindroth (Maps). xii, [2], 865, [1] pages. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Front DJ flap price clipped. Some creasing to DJ edges and a scratch to rear DJ. Robert Kinloch Massie III (January 5, 1929 - December 2, 2019) was an American journalist and historian. He devoted much of his career to studying and writing about the House of Romanov, Russia's imperial family from 1613 to 1917. Massie was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Peter the Great: His Life and World. He also received awards for his book Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (2011). His book Nicholas and Alexandra (1967) was adapted as a British film by the same name that was released in 1971. It starred Laurence Olivier, Michael Jayston, and Janet Suzman. Massie worked as a journalist for Collier's and from 1959 to 1962 for Newsweek before taking a position at the Saturday Evening Post. He also taught at Princeton and Tulane universities. In 1967, after leaving the Saturday Evening Post to concentrate on his historical writing, Massie published his breakthrough book, Nicholas and Alexandra, an authoritative biography of Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1918, reigned 1894-1917) and Alexandra of Hesse (1872-1918), the last Emperor and Empress of Russia. His interest in the Russian imperial house had been inspired by the birth of his son, Robert Kinloch Massie IV, who was born with hemophilia. This hereditary disease also afflicted Nicholas's only son the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, heir apparent to the imperial throne. In a work of extraordinary narrative power, filled with brilliant personalities and vivid scenes of dramatic action, Robert K. Massie, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and Dreadnought, elevates to its proper historical importance the role of sea power in the winning of the Great War. The predominant image of this first world war is of mud and trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, poison gas, and slaughter. A generation of European manhood was massacred, and a wound was inflicted on European civilization that required the remainder of the twentieth century to heal. But with all its sacrifice, trench warfare did not win the war for one side or lose it for the other. Over the course of four years, the lines on the Western Front moved scarcely at all; attempts to break through led only to the lengthening of the already unbearably long casualty lists. For the true story of military upheaval, we must look to the sea. On the eve of the war in August 1914, Great Britain and Germany possessed the two greatest navies the world had ever seen. When war came, these two fleets of dreadnoughts gigantic floating castles of steel able to hurl massive shells at an enemy miles away were ready to test their terrible power against each other. Their struggles took place in the North Sea and the Pacific, at the Falkland Islands and the Dardanelles. They reached their climax when Germany, suffocated by an implacable naval blockade, decided to strike against the British ring of steel. The result was Jutland, a titanic clash of fifty-eight dreadnoughts, each the home of a thousand men.
When the German High Seas Fleet retreated, the Kaiser unleashed unrestricted U-boat warfare, which, in its indiscriminate violence, brought a reluctant America into the war. In this way, the German effort to seize the trident by defeating the British navy led to the fall of the German empire. Ultimately, the distinguishing feature of Castles of Steel is the author himself. The knowledge, understanding, and literary power Massie brings to this story are unparalleled. His portrayals of Winston Churchill, the British admirals Fisher, Jellicoe, and Beatty, and the Germans Scheer, Hipper, and Tirpitz are stunning in their veracity and artistry. Castles of Steel is about war at sea, leadership and command, courage, genius, and folly. All these elements are given magnificent scope by Robert K. Massie s special and widely hailed literary mastery.