(2 of 2)
The man who did the most to spare Britain from Armageddon at sea was a hot- tempered banty rooster of a martinet with, as a female admirer put it, eyes "like smouldering charcoals." (He was, among other things, a superb dancer.) Gritty, inexhaustible and ruthless, Sir John Arbuthnot (Jacky) Fisher rose from midshipman to First Sea Lord (1904-10) and transformed the Royal Navy along the way. Fisher was a true visionary. He devised and named the class of small, fast warships that navies still call "destroyers." He predicted that torpedoes would supplant long-range guns as the navy's primary weapon and that submarines were the warships of the future. He ordered and supervised the construction of H.M.S. Dreadnought, which became the eponym for swift, heavily armed super battleships. And in a welcome addition to the quality of life belowdecks, he had baking ovens installed on ships to provide fresh bread in place of hardtack biscuits.
Relations among European powers warmed and cooled in the crisis-fueled game of diplomacy played during the Edwardian era, but both Fisher and Tirpitz had a clear sense of what the future offered. Nine days after becoming naval secretary in 1897, the German admiral cited Britain as his country's "most dangerous naval enemy" -- a view from which he never wavered. Fisher similarly saw Germany as Britain's inevitable foe. In 1911 he predicted that in October three years hence his protege Sir John Jellicoe would command British forces "when the Battle of Armageddon comes along." Fisher was right about the year, although World War I actually began in August. And Jellicoe was in command when the Kaiser's High Seas Fleet met its Armageddon in 1916, at the Battle of Jutland.
Dreadnought's author is no stranger to this era. In 1967 he earned critical praise with Nicholas and Alexandra, which in many respects was a more inviting book. It had a relatively manageable cast and an agonizing family tragedy -- the hemophilia of the Russian imperial couple's only son -- at its center. By contrast, Dreadnought is almost too sprawling a canvas. Time after time the narrative creaks to a halt while Massie pauses to introduce yet another admiral, politician or royal personage or to explain the background of the latest diplomatic spat involving Morocco. Even so, Dreadnought is history in the grand manner, as most readers prefer it: how people shaped, or were shaped by, events that consensus has declared to be landmarks. At his vivid best, Massie does not simply retell the past. He allows one, in a way, to relive it.