Power at Sea, Volume 1: The Age of Navalism, 1890-1918 Review

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(More customer reviews)As someone who does research in the time period discussed in the book, I pick up anything that's new to see if there's any new research. Unfortunately, there's nothing new in this book, and in all honesty, I can not figure out how this book was published by a university press, considering the poor notation and poor logic behind some of Rose's arguements.
The book sets out to be a popular narrative of the naval affairs from 1890-1918, but is spotty in its coverage. For example, the Spanish-American War gets only a skimming over, as does other significant events in World War I, such as Dogger Bank, Coronel and the Falklands, Gallipoli, and the exploits of SMS Koenigsberg and SMS Emden in the Indian Ocean. Mahan gets a brief mention, but Sir Julian Corbett gets no such love. On the other hand, expect the requisite narrative regarding Jutland, as well as chapters on the Imperial Japanese Navy and the US Navy.
However, this is not the greatest flaw in this work. It ostensibly states how it will cover social aspects of navalism, but the deepest it gets is statements about how harshly officers treated enlisted sailors and the public's reaction to the Anglo-German naval race. Rose has trouble keeping his story straight. He pumps up the role of naval fleets running up to the war, and then laments their uselessness after the war breaks out because they spent the most of their time in port. Perhaps if he had read Corbett, he would have seen their uselessness in port with regards to blockading, but I digress. He also seems to have an affinity for what-if scenarios, as he goes on for at least five pages talking about various ways in which the Germans could have sunk the British reinforcements in August of 1914, and even seriously discusses Jacky Fisher's idea regarding landing troops in Pomerania and marching on Berlin, of course without looking at trivial things like the Swedish-Danish mining of the Kattegat or what the German fleet would do this whole time.
In addition, Rose lambastes the design principles of Dreadnoughts, and in the process states how German guns were better than British guns because they were lighter than their direct British counterparts, then in the next paragraph says how German guns were inferior to British guns because they couldn't make bigger guns than the British. He never gets around to sorting that out, much like he never gets around to explaining how many British Dreadnoughts were sunk by torpedoes after stating how vulnerable they were to them. He also talks about how British ships were so vulnerable to plunging fire because of a lack of deck armour, then fails to point out that British deck armour was equal to their counterparts in other navies.
Speaking of proof, if I hear another "Well, as another scholar has noted..." without a footnote, I may just scream. Rose has a nasty habit of backing up his statements with the credentials of another scholar, without actually citing them. Speaking of citing, the notes in this book is frankly high school level. Rose goes for long sections without footnotes making statements like the ones given above, then goes through a slew of notes over the next several paragraphs covering innocuous statements. As for the bibliography, it is a useful guide to secondary sources, but it is extremely unsettling to see a statement saying how it is highly selective and how they were the works that influenced his line of thinking in writing the book. An actual bibliography covering the works he used in the writing of the book as sources would have been much better.
Rose has two more books covering the rest of the century, but at present I am rather gun-shy about actually reading them if this book is any indication of the quality of the other two. In the end, if you want a good read about the time period, especially in terms of an Anglo-German view, I would definitely go for Robert Massie's classics Dreadnought and Castles of Steel. They read just as easy, have much better notation and research, and provide the in depth coverage of the important events that they deserve.

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