With The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain: 1815 – 1945, N.A.M. Rodger concludes a trilogy of works on the topic in triumph. When the process of relocating World War II naval training facilities to the Irish channel, relatively safe from the Luftwaffe and U-boats, is riveting content, you know you’re in good hands. 

Recommended Stories

• Review of 'Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine' by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley
• Inside Scoop: Unpopularity plagues Democrats, media fail Kirk, candidate quality matters
• From cold to hot with Andrey Kurkov

The historian’s attention to detail was clear from the date range of his 744-page first volume, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain 660-1649. The intervening book, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649-1815, was nearly 1000 pages. But if you’re starting here, as many likely will, he announces his intentions tersely from the start: “Readers whose primary interest is in war at sea may be disappointed that nearly half the book is devoted to the background rather than the foreground of naval history, but this is quite deliberate, for there is no understanding battle and campaigns otherwise.”

There is not a single sortie or posting — let alone war — that you’ll fail to understand more clearly thanks to Rodger’s panoramic attention. It’s a history that concerns itself at points with literal nuts and bolts, but that effortlessly connects small and often unconsidered details to its larger portrait. He alternates between chapters on policy and operations, ships and weapons, and social history. The range of dates covered in each chapter constricts during wartime, yet many peacetime developments are the least familiar and most vital reading. 

The topics covered are nearly impossible to summarize. I will select a few deliberately at random. There are substantial accounts within of hydrographical research and naval mapping in the mid 19th century, dockyard improvements and expansion (both public and private), the unusual quality of Welsh coal compared to almost any other in the world, variations in officer and warrant officer training schemes, an explanation of the tidy sums that naval captains could often make from hauling cargo (and the deviations from course this required), and much, much more. 

Rodger offers close attention to the somewhat impossible act of prognostication that is ship design over these 130 years. If you’re designing a cruise ship, it’s likely to serve well for several decades, because your Carnival Cruise competitor won’t be trying to sink it. This is not the case for warships. Writing about ship development around 1900, he recounts the twin troubles of development and competition. A new design would generally take about 10 to 15 years from sketch to launch. These would tend to have a technical lifespan of 20 to 30 years, but a ship “might in fact be dangerously obsolete in the face of the latest weapons.” The problem isn’t solely that your foes might have better ships and better weapons; it’s also that the latest weapons might be impossible to fit into what you’ve churned out (turret guns were a running round-peg square-hole problem, difficult to place in existing and then even new ships for decades). 

Rodger’s account of the direction of the Royal Navy at the height of Britain as a sea power paints a portrait that is often shockingly bad. There were five boards overseeing its operations in 1815. Subsequent consolidation was a step in the right direction, but soon ensnarled administration in oceans of paperwork. The Admiralty Board was often the domain of junior politicians. 

Admirals themselves were often much more out to lunch than out to sea. “After eight years at the Admiralty Board, Vice-Admiral Sir Anthony Hoskins had no idea how the strength of the Navy compared to foreign powers, and did not seem to grasp whether politicians or naval officers were responsible for it. Asked about war plans, he could only suggest that ‘I imagine that what your fleet would have to do in time of war would depend very much on what your enemy did?”

There was a rich and warranted vein of suspicion of both the navy’s autonomy and profligacy in Westminster. It wasn’t just the figures you’d expect, such as U.K. Prime Ministers William Gladstone and Herbert Asquith, but also Benjamin Disraeli, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, and Winston Churchill. Local commanders, weeks or months from direction, often entangled Britain in conflicts (see the Opium Wars and much else). There was also a broader sense that they were immune or resistant to political control. Disraeli complained that “the whole system of administration is palsied by their mutinous spirit.” And yet the navy was simply too consequential for many economies. 

The navy was more popular with the public than with Parliament at many points. He frames Lord Salisbury’s Naval Defense Act of 1889, the first specific entail to the navy, as a clever mobilization of the newly expanded voting base to the Conservative Party. Asquith and Prime Minister Lloyd George’s liberal governments were intent on slashing naval expenditure; their People’s Budget of 1909 actually increased funding for the navy by 50%.

The navy was unquestionably sclerotically administered for much of the span of this study. Early training was a lengthy process that tended to accomplish very little. Captain’s lists were bloated; in 1877, there were 830 captains and 52 commands for them. A similar situation held for admirals. They had many of them, but few had any skills. The Crimean War proved a panicked search for Flag Officers whose experiences were largely dim recollections of the Napoleonic Wars.

And yet there were all sorts of shining moments. Adm. Alexander Milne, responsible for organizing naval transport during the Crimean War, a far-sighted plan for a network of coaling stations, and much else, was a figure of talent evident enough to serve as 1st Sea Lord under both Gladstone and Disraeli governments. The rise of specialist tasks also gradually mitigated the severe class divisions that once characterized the Royal Navy. In 1867, there were only two tracks to advance to warrant rank. In 1945, there were 24. 

Britain developed the world’s only comprehensive undersea cable network, an invaluable communicative asset. It rapidly adapted wireless and radar in the 20th century and pioneered fire control systems and naval aviation. Its accomplishments in cryptography are well-known. Rodger shines a considerable spotlight on the essential role of High-Frequency Direction Finding in the battle against U-boats in WWII. German submarines believed their short-wave radio signals were undetectable. They were not. 

One of Rodger’s sustained attentions is not merely that internecine squabbling was a repeat hurdle to the functioning of the navy, but that this has often been occluded by histories written by authors invested in these myths. As he writes early on, “perhaps the gravest distortion of reality in the naval history of the twentieth century comes from the obvious but uncomfortable fact that a high percentage of historians are not so much impartial seekers after truth as partisan loyalists of particular services or branches.”

Once again, wartime tended to be clarifying in terms of these disputes. Even if Britain was well-aware of the need to protect its shipping, as a country that supplied 35% of its own food in World War I would need to, the Royal Navy was still loath to dedicate its attention to this sort of babysitting. It was gradually dragged to the task. 

How? Exceptionally gradually, as Rodger writes, “in fact, there seems to have been no single inventor or single decision.”

By the time WWII arrived, the navy grasped that convoy security was one of its most important tasks, but its peers in the Royal Air Force certainly did not. Rodger provides a telling example: “[I]n the first, 1928, edition of the RAF War Manual, the chapter on ‘Aircract in Co-Operation with the Navy’ was left entirely blank – which was an accurate expression of the Air Ministry’s thinking on that subject.” The RAF was eventually induced to this unglamorous work, which proved rapidly effective in spotting U-boats. 

Rodger tends to approach even familiar topics in new ways. You don’t have to have read much to know that convoys were obviously helpful in combating U-boats, but Rodger stresses the reverse of conventional wisdom. His emphasis is on the merits of convoys in reducing the sheer number of locations where a U-boat could even find a ship. Evidence? A U-boat could usually see about 5 miles, at best 12. When ships were collected into herds, the fox often just couldn’t find any hens. 

FROM COLD TO HOT WITH ANDREY KURKOV

It is a struggle to provide more than the barest skim of Rodger’s account, given its density of engrossing content. Dipping into Rodger’s endnotes alone is a vision of boundless seas. There’s plenty of room for a talented historian to simply survey canonical studies on any given subject and recalibrate and recontextualize. Rodger goes far beyond. I was intrigued by his mention of recent studies about the errant aim of Italian battleship guns; the source was a 2020 essay on “Gunfire Dispersion of Large Italian Naval Guns” that concluded that these gun barrels were over-rifled, ensuring that their projectiles travelled in too straight a line to aim properly. 

Rodger has done all the work imaginable; it’s left for us to benefit. 

Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn.