Castles of Steel

Massie tells the story of the great naval arms race between Britain and Germany in this book.

He shows the genius and folly which lay behind it and the megalomania of Kaiser Wilhelm that drove the contest. As with all of Massie’s books, the history is well researched and the storytelling compelling. I love this book.

This book is an amazing summary of naval strategy and warfare during the First World War and begins where Robert K. Massie’s last book, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War, ended.  

All key events, strategies, personalities, and technological developments of the Great War at sea are analyzed in detail, and the book also delves into the U-Boat Campaign of the First World War, which often escapes historical focus in overviews on the war at sea 1914-18.

The reader is presented with a fast-moving narrative that illustrates in understandable terms just how the Allies dominated the oceans… show more.

Massie is a university-trained “popular” historian, that is, he writes especially for the broad, history-loving public audience rather than for professorial specialists. In Castles of Steel, his term for the biggest ships of that day, he succeeds in surveying the entire war at sea in World War One: the Pacific, the South Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the U-boat (i.e. submarine) - infested sea lanes to Britain and France, and of course the critical North Sea, where Britain and Germany squared off against one another for the entire war (1914-1918), not just at Jutland. His fine, very well-written work… show more.