Totally Unexpected | Dreadnought

Must-Read history | Dreadnought | Robert K. Massie

books:


	• Dreadnought Robert K. Massie Ballantine Books, 1992 - 1040 pages average customer review:based on 86 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Genesis of World War I

Dreadnought - Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War
This book discusses the period in European political and military history from approximately 1860 to the outbreak of WWI in August 1914. Author Massie has made a valiant attempt to sort out the complex intertwining of European nationalism, colonialism and militarism all against the backdrop of Kings, Kaisers and Tsars who were related by blood and marriage. This is a large book. The trade paperback edition has 908 pages of text with another 130 pages of supporting documentation. The author engages the reader by his clear prose, extensive use of appropriate quotations and his chapter organization. Each of his 46 chapters centers around one major participant in the military or diplomatic history of the era. We are presented with a detailed biographical sketch of the individual, how they achieved their position and their interaction with other statesmen or members of Royalty. Although the majority of the text is devoted to diplomatic issues the navel competition between Germany and England is fully discussed.
In a few years we will be commentating the centennial year of the beginning of WWI. It will be a gloomy and sad day for those acquainted with the true facts of the origins of this conflict. We all desire for a simple answer to complex historical question such as how did the war start, and, of course, who was to blame? Some will say blame Kaiser William, or Bismarck or the Bosnian assassin or Sea Lord Fisher or British Dreadnoughts. This book provides the reader with a more nuanced idea of what caused this catastrophic war. I concluded that the collective European mindset of power, place and position deeply rooted in the aristocracy, senior civil service and the military resulted in the inevitability of the World War.

Sir Edward Gray England's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs stated at the outbreak of the war: "Thus the efforts of a lifetime go for nothing. I feel like a man who has wasted his life" and "The lamps are going out all over Europe" and "We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime".

for more information click here

Totally Unexpected

I was looking, round about of course, for more information on Jacky Fisher. When the 900+ pages DREADNOUGHT appeared in the mail, I was taken aback. A bit big even for such a remarkable bit of naval engineering. From that point on, however, it was easy going. The scope is tremendous. The intimate look at the key personnel of the period, the politics put into context, and the steady march towards a tragedy no one wanted is just mind boggling. Oneupsmanship, tit for tat, familial squabbles, and a puerile fascination with power projection all milling about is just too much to have been made up. These are real people, in real positions, of real power so convoluted that it's truly difficult to say 'Who's on first.' I found it particularly interesting to read this in parallel with 'Luxury Fleet.' The strengths and weaknesses of the people involved' nay, the political systems involved, come out much more nicely. I finished this book and more than any other time I've closed a book on the events leading up to WW1, I thought: How utterly stupid and avoidable.

If any book on the events leading to WW1 has to be read, this is it.

for more information click here

Must-Read history

Another Must-read historian, most famous for Nicholas and Alexandra, this one by Massie gives the gripping tale of the Victorian-era arms race to build steel navies as the elixirs of empire. The arrogant British could not stand the thought of a rival fleet controlled by the German Kaiser, whom primarily they considered a poor relation. For his part, Wilhelm II always felt compelled to show his mettle to an extended family he admired and from whom he wished acceptance.

The story is filled with larger-than-life personalities like strategists Winston Churchill, Jackie Fisher, Alfred von Tirpitz, and the brash young task force commanders Hipper and Beatty who clashed famously at Jutland, while the sober Grand Fleet Admiral Jellicoe (whom Churchill called "the only man who could lose the war for us in a day") won the strategic victory and unjust ignominy by turning away from the battle.

The decision of the British to go with oil fired engines aboard all-big-gun ships was manifest in HMS Dreadnought, the prototype for all that came afterwards. Oil for the navy had everything to do with the development of the middle east along the tragic lines of British imperial designs. The bill for this fateful strategy is still being paid every day, to this day.

THIS is the story that James Cameron should turn into an epic movie, rather than comic book drivel like Avatar. "

for more information click here

Wrist-cracking but worth it

There's a "v" missing from Robert K. Massie's name. It should be Massive. "Dreadnought" is so heavy it's hard to read. Persistence pays, however. Massive makes it worth one's time.

Without condemning the history by calling it novelistic, it is, nevertheless, constructed as a tale of plot and character.

The characters are at the top of society. In this version of power politics, hardly anybody below the rank of baron appears (especially among the Germans). You would scarcely know that there were any socialists, peasants or shopkeepers in Europe in those days.

In one sense, "Dreadnought" can be read as an extended footnote on Arno Mayer's "The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War." This is very much history as the story of great (or not so great) men, although Massie does lay out the importance of geography: Britain depended for survival on supreme sea power; Germany, having chosen a path of local empire, had an army that could accomplish that without particularly alarming the British.

"Dreadnought" is the story of how Germany -- in great measure at the whim of its flawed Kaiser -- threatened Britain by building a pointless navy; while Britain slowly came to the conclusion that it could no longer, as it had a hundred years before, frustrate the dominance of one power on the continent by gold and by playing the powers off against one another.

Massie lays this thesis out in endless detail and spends many pages explaining how sea power works.

If there is a serious shortcoming in the book, it is that he expends less effort in explaining the inevitable (as I see it) failure of the Bismarckian constitution. Bismarck is usually described, by Massie and others, as a colossus who bestrode Europe. He was a colossus without feet, however.

Even Bismarck said he was the only man who could make his system work. This raises the question: What did he imagine would happen to Germany once he was gone? The French have a saying: The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Massie is not the kind of historian who speculates about alternative paths, but Germany in Bismarck's time was doing very well; there is no particular reason to suppose that she could not have dominated Europe without the military bullying and insolence she choose to use.

But then, Germans without insolence are hard to imagine. Bismarck could not -- or did not -- make any effort to create a modern state; he was content to erect a papier-mache superstructure on what was still the garrison state of King Frederick. Even a less-conceited, volatile and stupid kaiser than William II could hardly have done much with it. In that respect, the early death of his father, a more moderate, even liberal man (for the times) seems less consequential.

There is nothing new here, no sensational unknown documents have come to light, and Massie's interpretation of events is the conventional one. (He never discusses other historians' views, but he does make mincemeat of A.J.P. Taylor's "Origins of the Second World War." Taylor was correct about the impact of railroads, which straitjacketed the general staffs of all the armies, who could not mobilize without going to war. There was no way to pour armies to the end of the rail lines and just leave them there. They had to march. But Massie proves that the Germans -- except the kaiser, who had buyer's remorse -- were hell bent on aggression. It would not have mattered if they could have left their armies motionless on the border; they had no intention of doing so.)

Massie concludes with Sir Edward Grey's famous remark as war began that "the lights are going out all over Europe."

But nearly a hundred years have passed since then, and we know something Grey did not, or could hardly have glimpsed more than generally:

The gravest danger to peace is not ideology, nor religion and certainly not the presence of large armaments (a wrong conclusion a reader could easily get from Massie, though he never states it as an explicit rule; that is not his style). After having observed Germany in the `20s and `30s, Japan in the same period and -- to a much lesser extent -- Muslims today, we can now see that the gravest danger to peace is a society that learns the tools of modern violence without picking up modern notions of self-governance.

Germany in 1914 had the most modern technic but a medieval grasp of power and politics. Japan in the `30s was not quite as modern, relatively, as Germany had been but was just as backward politically. The Bolshevik and Chinese Communist revolutions might seem to in part contradict this understanding, but neither country was so very modern in technic, and those regimes, for better or worse, had a more modern approach toward politics than Imperial Germany.

Luckily for the rest of the world, today's Muslims have only the haziest grasp of modern technic, but they are even more backward in their notions of governance and politics. On the other hand, the technic of today is immeasurably more destructive than what Germany commanded in 1914, so that if the Muslims in their political childishness were able to buy or steal the tools, they could do a lot of damage -- and, we may be sure if reading history is anything more than a mere pastime, they would.

for more information click here

Wonderfully insightful history

One of the best books I have read recently- a poignant, but fascinating combination of concise but illuminating sketches of the personal histories, motivations, and idiosyncrasies of a wide range of the political actors, their relationships and roles, and a well-paced, and absorbing compilation of the apparently inexorable flow of events towards the horrible cataclysm of World War 1. A fine companion to the other classics covering this period of History -Barbara Tuchman's 'Guns of August', and 'The Proud Tower'.

"A classic [that] covers superbly a whole era...Engrossing in its glittering gallery of characters."
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Robert K. Massie has written a richly textured and gripping chronicle of the personal and national rivalries that led to the twentieth century's first great arms race. Massie brings to vivid life, such historical figures as the single-minded Admiral von Tirpitz, the young, ambitious, Winston Churchill, the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow, and many others. Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tratedy in his powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, DREADNOUGHT is history at its most riveting.

for more information click here