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REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD
Nicholas Rodger began his monumental history of British sea power, tracing its development from Anglo-Saxon times to the end of the Second World War, almost three decades ago. The second volume, which took the story from the Civil War to the aftermath of Trafalgar, appeared in 2004. The arrival of The Price of Victory, the third and final instalment, was delayed by a serious illness from which the author has now thankfully recovered. Professor Rodger has brought his subject to a triumphant conclusion.
It is important to be clear what is – and is not – to be found within the covers of this book. The title refers to the high economic cost incurred by the Royal Navy in fighting two World Wars – the price of the struggle to maintain Britain’s hard-won commercial and naval supremacy in the face of formidable new challenges. Indeed, the period 1914-1945 occupies almost two-thirds of the text. This is more, however, than an institutional history of the senior service. Rather, as the introduction makes clear, it is a study of the part played by naval warfare, in its various dimensions, in British history – an altogether more ambitious undertaking.
To that end, Rodger has extended his focus well beyond the familiar area of operations at sea. These still feature, of course, and the most important engagements – from Admiral Codrington’s destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino in 1827 to the Royal Navy’s role in the Normandy landings – are sketched in.
For a fuller battle narrative, however, readers will have to look elsewhere. Jutland is charted in just five pages, Admiral Cunningham’s March 1941 victory at Cape Matapan in one page. But the book does not set out to describe fleet actions in detail. Its purpose is to analyse and explain the forces that shaped the changing nature of war at sea. A great deal of The Price of Victory is therefore concerned with power relationships and structures, and with peacetime preparations, remote from the zone of combat.
Warfare State
One of the book’s strengths is the care with which Rodger explains the wider context of his subject. Substantial sections are devoted to the ways in which financial constraints, frequent (and not always well-designed) administrative reforms, and changes of government influenced the development of Britain’s sea-fighting capacity. Political leaders were aware of the national security challenges they faced in a hostile environment. Lord Palmerston told the House of Commons in 1846 that the Channel had become ‘nothing more than a river passable by a steam bridge’.
But it proved more difficult to develop a coherent defence policy in response. Failure to think in a joined-up way is a recurrent theme of the book. Questioned in 1888 about naval strategy, a long-serving member of the Admiralty Board could only respond feebly that ‘I imagine that what your fleet would have to do in time of war would depend very much on what your enemy did.’
By the late 19th century, as Britain gradually democratised, public opinion – which was reacting to perceived invasion threats – further complicated naval policy-making. The first significant example of this was the 1889 Naval Defence Act, which established the principle that the Royal Navy’s strength must exceed that of the next two powers. The outcome was an arms race with France and Russia, Britain’s presumed rivals at the time, replaced by 1905 with the growing power of imperial Germany.
Rodger describes, too, the interplay of domestic pressures and wider strategic concerns that influenced decision-making about naval defence between the two World Wars. In the threatening international arena of the 1930s, the Navy was critical to decision-making regarding Britain’s overstretched, vulnerable global empire. The point was made with brutal simplicity by the First Sea Lord, Sir Ernle Chatfield, in 1934: ‘We are in the remarkable position of not wanting to quarrel with anybody because we have got most of the world already, or the best parts of it, and we only want to keep what we have got and prevent others from taking it away from us.’
The industrial and technical infrastructure that underpinned naval expansion, from the advent of steam power in the 1820s onwards, is a related theme. Rodger takes up the concept of the ‘warfare state’ – originally coined 20 years ago by historian David Edgerton – to describe the symbiotic relationship between government, business, and science that reached its high point in Britain in the mid-20th century. Readers may feel inspired to explore in more detail the literature on the growth of the dockyard complexes at Woolwich, Portsmouth, Chatham, and Devonport – and perhaps to see for themselves the surviving shipbuilding and repair structures.
The development of ship design is another area where the book provides an excellent synthesis of the existing scholarship, supported by a comprehensive glossary of technical terms. This is especially valuable for the period of rapid change that separated the coming of steam-powered ironclad warships in the 1860s from the Dreadnoughts of the early 20th century. A formidable body of work, authored by specialists such as Andrew Lambert, David K Brown, and Norman Friedman, has appeared in recent decades. Rodger cuts an assured path through the voluminous literature, showing how perceptions of external threats and changing technology shaped official attitudes.
The emphasis throughout the book, understandably, is on capital ships. Battleship-building was traditionally seen as the measure of a Great Power, even after Jutland dented expectations of a decisive clash between High Seas fleets. Rodger also charts the ways in which submarines, torpedoes, sea mines, and aircraft changed warfare at sea. Less attention is given to smaller craft, such as the motor torpedo boats used in coastal defence during the two World Wars. More surprisingly, he says little about the Victorian gunboats – typified by HMS Gannet, now preserved at Chatham’s historic dockyard – that were used to project power across the empire.
A world afloat
One of the book’s main strengths is to be found in the half-dozen chapters dedicated to the social history of the Navy. This was to be expected from an author whose first major work was The Wooden World (1986), a detailed look at life in the Georgian Navy. Rodger modestly notes the difficulty of capturing the reality of wartime life at sea in a relatively short space, but he succeeds in evoking the experience of sailors, officers, and, in later chapters, Wrens and air crew aboard the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers.
Recurring themes are the cramped conditions below decks, the cold and discomfort of long sea patrols, and the ever-present anticipation of enemy attack. Training, discipline, and diet; relations between the ranks – all are to be found here, from the dawn of the steam age to the ending of global hostilities in 1945.
Rodger’s trilogy seems certain to become the definitive work on the subject. The extensive range of books and articles on which the final volume is based runs to 70 pages. Unusually for a work of national history, it also gives close attention to Britain’s naval opponents and allies. Rodger provides character sketches of key figures from other nations, including imperial Germany’s flawed naval mastermind Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and US fleet commander- in-chief Admiral Ernest King, whose difficult personality marred Anglo-American relationships during World War II. A useful section analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the British, US, German, and Japanese navies at the start of that conflict, going beyond a conventional comparison of ships and weaponry to examine the contrasting naval cultures. Royal Navy carriers and their aircraft are compared with those of the United States and Japan, too.
Both the specialist and the interested general reader will gain from The Price of Victory. It does much more than bring together the fruits of existing work. Rodger is unsparing of historians with whose interpretations he disagrees, such as those who show excessive partiality towards one service or the other in discussing relations between the Navy and RAF. There are fresh judgments as well on familiar topics. Rodger offers a searching assessment of the ‘father of the Dreadnought’, Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher – who is usually treated much more favourably by scholars – highlighting his unstable temperament, capacity for intrigue, and superficial grasp of technology. Rodger’s explanation of the disastrous 1940 Norway campaign also breaks with the consensus view, by focusing on the vulnerability of naval signalling to German interception rather than incompetent British leadership.
We may have had to wait two decades for this volume to appear, but it has been worth it. One regret is that Professor Rodger has chosen not to bring his story up to the present day. Instead, the naval dimension of the Cold War and end-of-empire era have been consigned to a brief epilogue. But with a text already running to 635 pages, to have provided a detailed analysis of the last 80 years would admittedly have made for an unmanageably long volume. This is a book to read, refer to, and reflect on.
The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945
N A M Rodger
Allen Lane, hbk, 976pp (£40)
ISBN 978-0713994124
