With the media blitzkrieg heralding the 50th anniversary of the start of World War II, Robert Massie would appear to be a historian with a thankless, if not impossible mission: beating the drums for his book about the origins of World War I.
Yet the recent publication of Massie`s book, ”Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War” (Random House), was not as inauspiciously timed as it may seem, the author insisted during a Chicago stopover.
In Massie`s long historical view (a view he tracks at considerable length in his 1,007-page popular history), the battleground was set for World War II well before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
”World War II was simply the second chapter of World War I,” Massie said, noting the surge of Bolshevism and Nazism after the precarious Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
According to Massie, the chain reaction that ultimately led to the
”Great War(s)” began in the late 1800s with German Kaiser William II`s decision to challenge British naval supremacy. England responded to the kaiser`s aggressive behavior by building the Dreadnought, the battleship that Massie calls the ”ICBM of the Edwardian era.”
”The pivotal moment in this arms race,” Massie said, ”came when Jacky Fisher (the First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty) decided to throw all the dice on building this one ship. He thus rendered obsolete the whole British Navy, which was vastly superior to anything else, enabling the Germans to begin competing on a new level.”
The Dreadnought revolutionized naval warfare, Massie pointed out, dooming the ”wooden sailing ships that depended on the wind and fired round cannonballs. In a very few years, they were replaced by steel battleships powered by steam, coal or oil, with revolving turrets that fired explosive projectiles.”
Like Massie`s earlier biographical histories, ”Nicholas and Alexandra”
and ”Peter the Great,” ”Dreadnought” focuses not on diplomatic maneuvers or battlefield strategy but on the historic figures who had such crucial roles in them. The book`s huge cast prominently features Germany`s Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill, among several dozen others.
”The interesting thing for me in a book like this,” the author said,
”is how many of the personality traits we have in ourselves and see all around us: vanity, envy, comradeship, whatever.”
As Massie describes the critical events, World War I was in one large sense the result of a family feud between two descendants of Queen Victoria:
her son, Edward VII (or Bertie), who ascended to the British throne upon her death in 1901; and her grandson, Kaiser William II, who had become the emperor of Imperial Germany 13 years earlier.
”The uncle and his nephew really detested one another,” Massie explained. ”As long as Victoria was alive, she could control the kaiser. She spoke to him in a grandmotherly fashion: `Now, William, this is not the way sovereigns behave.”`
But after her death, Massie noted, the young and imperious William
”wasn`t going to listen to his Uncle Bertie. It was a very unhappy relationship, and a very important one, diplomatically.”
Massie hadn`t intended to publish ”Dreadnought” during the Pearl Harbor commemoration. But he spent 10 years writing the book, which grew to dreadnought proportions itself. At the outset, it was supposed to cover not just the naval preparations for World War I, but the war itself.
War will finally arrive in what is now the second installment, which, Massie vowed, will be published long before the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
”I`m determined not to get enmeshed in trench warfare,” he said. ”I`ve got these ships launched. Now I want to hear the guns go bang.”
– Writing under the pseudonym Roseline V. Schubert, Viki Davis of Palatine has won Whetstone magazine`s annual $300 prize for her story, ”In the Land of Milk and Honey.” Davis` story appears in Volume 8 of Whetstone, published by the Barrington Area Arts Council.
