Castles of Steel by Robert K Massie

An epic game of battleships

When Britain entered the First World War in August 1914, it was widely expected that a new Trafalgar was imminent. This mighty clash of dreadnoughts in the North Sea would end with the destruction of the German High Seas Fleet, and with it Berlin's impertinent challenge to Britannia's right to rule the waves.

The reality was very different. Both fleets pursued cautious strategies, and the British system revealed alarming flaws. Not until May 1916 did the major clash occur, off Jutland. Even then, the battle proved tactically indecisive, although it was a clear British strategic victory.

German battleships proved less of a threat to British survival than the submarine. The period in 1917 when U-Boats came close to starving Britain into submission by sinking merchant vessels was arguably the closest Britain came to defeat. The Royal Navy played an essential role in victory by the slow, attritional application of seapower; but a new Trafalgar had proved elusive.

Given the subtitle of Castles of Steel, "Britain, Germany and the winning of the Great War at sea", one might have expected greater coverage of the struggle against the submarine, but Robert K Massie devotes less than 100 pages to the post-Jutland era. Similarly, the coverage of some other aspects of the war at sea, such as the preparations for amphibious landings in support of the Western Front, is scant. In a previous book, Dreadnought, he examined the Anglo-German naval rivalry that did much to poison international relations before 1914. Massie is primarily interested in the big warships and the men who commanded them, and he tells their story with panache.

He excels at sprawling narrative histories of epic subjects, studded with vignettes and pen-portraits. With the naval war of 1914-18, he was almost spoilt for choice for larger-than-life characters. One was Winston Churchill, the political head of the navy in 1914. Massie catches him at his worst, trying to run a war on the oceans from his desk in Whitehall. Churchill ran the Second World War in a depressingly similar way.

David Beatty, raffish commander of the battlecruiser fleet at Jutland, was a man for whom the term "cad" might have been invented. Massie relates how he would spend afternoons with his mistress in the North British Hotel in Edinburgh. He was a commander in the Rommel mould. In disregarding signalling and staff procedures in favour of a Nelsonic gut-instinct for battle, Beatty is an attractive and modern figure. However, this approach could lead to problems.

Massie seems to prefer the modest Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet at Jutland. Jellicoe was a control freak, sending out a huge volume of signals while Beatty relied on simple doctrine and the initiative of officers under his command. Massie does not neglect the negative aspects of Jellicoe's approach, but rightly stresses the huge burden on the Admiral's shoulders. While Jellicoe received criticism for failing to seize opportunities to annihilate the German fleet, to have done so would have been to have put his ships at great risk. This would have jeopardised the control of the sea on which British security ultimately rested.

All Jellicoe had to do at Jutland was to remain undefeated. The destruction of the German fleet, Massie correctly argues, "was a secondary object - highly desirable but not essential".

In recent years, much work has appeared on the Royal Navy in the First World War, and Massie draws on much, but not all, of it. He pays a particularly handsome tribute to Andrew Gordon's fine The Rules of the Game. By contrast, his notes lack references to the most recent works on Gallipoli; it is not surprising that his account of the Dardanelles campaign has a somewhat dated air.

But this is not a book for the naval expert. Massie is an accomplished popular historian, and tells an exciting story very well. Castles of Steel will be read by many people who will never pick up a scholarly book on the subject. They will not be disappointed.

Gary Sheffield is senior lecturer in defence studies at King's College, London