The Value of Victory is the third in Nicholas Rodger’s monumental trilogy on the historical past of the Royal Navy: the primary two volumes lined 660 to 1815; this ultimate instalment takes the story on from the aftermath of the Battle of Trafalgar by to the top of the Second World Struggle. It’s a interval wherein Britain sought to keep up naval dominance throughout a interval of considerable technological change. His function all through the trilogy has been to discover ‘the contribution which naval warfare, with all its related actions, has made to nationwide historical past’, and so his dialogue ranges past battles and admirals (although each function) to incorporate political, financial, and social contexts.
The emergence of recent know-how is central: iron and metal hulls, steam and oil engines, heavier armaments, torpedoes, telegraph and wi-fi signalling, and plane all reworked naval warfare. With these adjustments got here new methods and geopolitical considering, particularly the rise of naval intelligence. Rodgers additionally tracks the altering function of the Admiralty underneath the affect of various governments. Forms and coverage typically struggled to maintain up: the Anglo-German arms race earlier than 1914 led to just one main engagement, at Jutland in 1916, whereas commerce-raiding and financial warfare performed a a lot higher function throughout the twentieth century. Equally, plane carriers enabled new methods through the Second World Struggle, however these needed to be labored out because the warfare went on. Social attitudes additionally shifted, as seen within the altering relationship between class, technical experience, and rank – and the formation of the Wrens (Girls’s Royal Naval Service) in 1917.
Such broad points are leavened by Rodger’s sharp eye for particular person tales. Rear-Admiral Michael Seymour, analyzing a brand new Russian sea mine in 1855, sought to reassure apprehensive officers when he stated: ‘“Oh no; that is the way in which it will go off”, and shoved the slide in along with his finger’. Astonishingly Seymour survived, although blinded in a single eye. Lots extra vignettes might be plucked from the e-book’s pages.
Rodger is judiciously vital in locations: it typically appears that the Navy functioned regardless of Admiralty schemes, not due to them, and he’s forthright on the failings of key figures reminiscent of Admiral Sir John (‘Jackie’) Fisher. But that is nonetheless, at its coronary heart, a historical past informed from contained in the Navy, and from the highest; there are sections on the ‘decrease decks’, however a lot consideration stays on officers, commanders, and politicians. The place the Royal Navy is in comparison with different providers or overseas counterparts, the benefit nearly at all times rests with the house group; the Royal Air Drive is essentially blamed for interservice rivalries, whereas Rodger condemns related issues with the US extra explicitly.
The identical tendency seems in discussions of empire. ‘The Navy had not created, nor tried to create, an empire of territory and abroad rule’, Rodger argues, but that was largely as a result of by 1815 Britain already had management of huge territories, and the Navy’s actions adopted imperial pursuits. Conflicts with China are blamed on feckless diplomats and rogue adventurers, slightly than naval officers. The marketing campaign towards the slave commerce within the 1800s is offered as ‘largely ineffective, inconsistent and seemingly hypocritical’, ‘fairly inadequate to suppress the commerce’, however nonetheless a noble trigger wherein Britain sacrificed cash and sailors. This studying of the Navy’s function within the empires is a really sympathetic one.
But when not each reader shares that sympathy, they are going to nonetheless discover in The Value of Victory a whole and forensic treatise on the topic. The trilogy collectively represents essentially the most full such therapy ever written – a exceptional accomplishment.
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The Value of Victory: A Naval Historical past of Britain: 1815-1945
N.A.M. Rodger
Allen Lane, 976pp, £40
Purchase from bookshop.org (affiliate hyperlink)
Richard Blakemore is an Affiliate Professor of Social and Maritime Historical past on the College of Studying.
