The heroes that England expects

In September 1906 the Royal Navy commissioned the first of the Dreadnoughts, 18,000-ton super battleships with ten 12in guns and a top speed of 21 knots. Conceived in great secrecy, it was a bold answer to Britain's struggle to maintain naval supremacy without financial ruin. The new fleet was to be manned and paid for by scrapping many old battleships, now rendered obsolete. The financial pressures did not ease, because Germany decided to take up the challenge and for a while there was a costly and intensive arms race, with more keels being laid and even more powerful guns introduced.

By the start of the First World War Britain still had the larger and more powerful Navy. After all the effort that had gone into its construction, and that of the German Navy, the two barely engaged. The ships had become too vulnerable to be allowed too close to coastal waters. The British did not really need a confrontation as the Grand Fleet, stationed at Scapa Flow, was able to prevent any shipping reaching Germany, while the German High Seas Fleet was smaller and had good reason not to risk a fight. Eventually, in May 1916, patience ran out and the Germans moved to sea in the hope of luring out and eliminating part of the British fleet. Instead, the Grand Fleet moved out to challenge, and the result was the Battle of Jutland.

In the event, losses on both sides were substantial but not critical, with the Germans gaining the advantage in tonnage sunk and the British feeling cheated that they had allowed the High Seas Fleet to escape back to port when it was at its most vulnerable. Strategically for Britain, an effective draw was fine, because the blockade could be sustained, while a defeat would have been disastrous. As Winston Churchill said of Lord Jellicoe, in charge of the Grand Fleet, he "was the only commander who could lose the war in the afternoon". For evidence that this could be done, it was necessary to think back to the 1905 battle of Tsushima, in which 31 of the 38 Russian ships engaged were sunk or captured by a Japanese fleet of an apparently similar size, which suffered only minor casualties.

It is with Tsushima that the American historian Ronald Spector begins this excellent book. He explains the result by drawing attention to disparities in personnel, far less quantifiable than those in tonnage and firepower, armour and speed, yet in the end more critical. The Russian Navy was led by old aristocrats and the whole organisation was feudal, reflecting the society of which it was a part, while the Japanese system was meritocratic and its training was more rigorous. The Royal Navy in 1916 also suffered because the senior officers had been taken only from the upper classes, relying more on a bluff common sense and a belief in firm discipline and good appearance than any technical knowledge or strategic grasp. The real professionals were in the lower ranks. Fortunately for the Royal Navy, as Spector notes, the German Navy was "led by men whose outlook was even more parochial, narrow and reactionary than their own".

Spector is following recent trends in naval history by examining carefully the social dimension. This is to answer the question of how men could put up with the conditions and also to explain the variations in performance at critical moments, including the responsivenessof the engine room and the accuracy of the gunfire, as well as the tactics of the commanders. These were often large communities, some 1,000 men on the battleships, dependent on the professionalism of each other, often stuck well below deck, with no possibility of desertion, hearing the sounds of battle but aware that the first they would know of a direct hit would be when they were knocked sideways or consumed by their own furnaces and the explosions of their own ammunition.

Through the 20th century, surface ships had to cope increasingly with deadly threats from submarines below the water and aircraft above. Spector weaves into the narrative the voices of the ordinary seamen and their officers. He has a particular sureness of touch when discussing the Pacific War from 1941 to 1945, and the great carrier battles, and analyses effectively the dedication of the U-Boat crews, who suffered by the end of the war a casualty rate of some 65 per cent. He also knows his way around the Vietnam War, and is scathing on how, quoting Admiral Elmo Zummwalt, Vietnam became a "dumping ground for weak officers at the commander and captain level". The failures and frustrations of Vietnam combined with great upheavals in American society to produce a crisis of morale in the American Navy, including pressure to integrate what had been a virtually whites-only force.

Spector is perhaps less sure on some of the more recent encounters. The treatment of the Falklands is brief, and while he describes well the chain of incompetence that led the US cruiser Vincennes to shoot down an Iranian airliner in July 1988, he does not mention at all the May 1987 incident when two Iraqi exocet missiles damaged the USS Stark. These are small complaints, for this is a fascinating book, which does not claim to be comprehensive, and has been thoroughly researched and well written. He not only succeeds in demonstrating the importance of the social dimension but also that despite all the "rituals and regalia", navies have been "extremely adaptive, fast-changing organisations".