To Crown the Waves: The Great Navies of the First World War ed. by Vincent P. O’Hara, W. David Dickson, and Richard Worth (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: To Crown the Waves: The Great Navies of the First World War ed. by Vincent P. O’Hara, W. David Dickson, and Richard Worth Dirk Bönker To Crown the Waves: The Great Navies of the First World War. Edited by Vincent P. O’Hara, W. David Dickson, and Richard Worth. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 349. Cloth $37.95. ISBN 978-1612510828. The centenary of the outbreak of World War I has been a big boon for scholarship on what US diplomat-turned-historian George F. Kennan, in The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order (1981, p. 3), famously dubbed the “great seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century. New publications are legion. Conferences have abounded. Our historical understanding of the war has expanded. Perhaps most significantly, there have been a number of major books that have offered new comprehensive interpretations of the making, course, and consequences of this conflagration, reassessed its overall historical meanings, and sparked productive controversy. By contrast, neither interpretive ambition nor monumental narration characterizes this collection of informative essays on individual navies, though it will serve well as a useful overview and work of reference. Edited by three naval historians, who have already published a similar volume on World War II, this book offers seven solidly researched articles by an international team of authors on the navies of seven major belligerents: Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Russia, and the United States. An additional essay takes a brief look at the navies of Japan and the Ottoman Empire. Vincent P. O’Hara, W. David Dickson, and Richard Worth frame the entire volume by making two main arguments in their brief introduction and conclusion. They claim that maritime warfare proved decisive for the outcome of the war, that “it was on the waves that victory was determined” (2). They also argue that a pattern of “peacetime evolution” and “wartime revolution” characterized World War I [End Page 430] and that this pattern was ultimately driven by the imperatives of new weapons and technological change in times of war (322). The book’s main essays follow a common format and tackle similar topics defined in advance by the editors. The emphasis is on matters of strategy, operations, tactics, weapons, administration, organization, construction, infrastructure, logistics, and personnel. Each essay looks at both the prewar period and wartime. A series of maps showing the main bases of each of the seven navies, and a large number of tables nicely complement the descriptions that each contribution provides. Brief bibliographies direct the reader to literature on both the individual navies and the broader naval history of the war. The use value of the various essays is high. This holds true also for the pieces on Germany and Austria-Hungary despite a few dubious assertions, for example, about Germany’s alleged encirclement by Britain (9). All articles are full of dense factual information and important statistics. The common format makes for easy comparison. The range of issues is broad and directs attention to the entire gamut of operations, types of warfare, weapons, and underlying infrastructure beyond any single-minded emphasis on battle fleets and submarines, which too often shapes understandings of the war at sea between 1914 and 1918. To Crown the Waves is mostly successful in its chosen format despite several shortcomings. The thrust of the articles is descriptive or encyclopedic, not analytical or interpretive. The essays are weak on navies as social and cultural institutions. The sections in each essay formally devoted to personnel are extremely uneven. Strikingly, in the subsection on culture, the authors either offer little more than brief discussions of social composition and relations, or they simply omit this part of the structure given to them. In other words, the issue of command, cohesion, and consent—of the functioning of the navies as military institutions of domination, or Herrschaftsbetriebe, to use Max Weber’s term—does not come into clear view. This is a striking absence in a book about a war punctuated by mutinies and revolutions, and this lack haunts the chapter on Germany in particular. It is also noticeable that the bibliographies omit important literature. For example, neither the foundational work on...