Simon Heffer
Warlords At Sea
Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea
By Robert K Massie
Jonathan Cape 865pp order from our bookshop
OUR MENTAL PICTURE of the Great War is dominated by the mud of Flanders, barbed wire, whizz-bangs, Tommy Atkins cheerfully swilling down cheap red wine behind the lines at Pozières and the rows upon rows of white crosses at Tyne Cot. If we do not forget that the war was also fought at sea, we expend very little consciousness on the memory of it. Nearly a million British and Empire men died on land: the losses at sea were measured in thousands. It is understandable, therefore, that the weighting should be so different between the two theatres of action.
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