The Imperial War Museum Book of the War at Sea 1914-1918: The Face of Battle Revealed in the Words of the Men Who Fought

by Julian Thompson, Imperial War Museum

For the British navy, the First World War was a massive learning curve as, for the first time, she went into battle with an untried weapons system, mines, submarines, aircraft, and airships. In spite of this, the navy never failed to provide the shield which enabled the British Army to play a key part in the Western Front. Based on eyewitness accounts of the action, General Julian Thompson has written a gripping history that recreates the war at sea through the experiences of those who fought, and sometimes died.

Genres: Naval History, World War I, History

466 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1996

About the author

Major General Julian Harold Atherdean Thompson, CB, OBE is a military historian and former Royal Marines officer who as a brigadier commanded 3 Commando Brigade during the Falklands war.

Thompson, who was British commander on the islands during the final phase of the conflict has written extensively on the Falklands conflict and British military history. He is also a visiting professor at the department of War Studies, King's College, University of London.

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an unusual but effective history of naval warfare in the First World War written largely from the perspective of the men (and they were all men) who fought in it. It relies heavily on hitherto unpublished testimonies lodged in the Imperial War Museum in London.

It is one of several such books published by the Imperial War Museum (I shall despair when some left-luvvies in government insist on a name change) covering other areas of military or naval operations such as special operations, the war in Burma and the 1939-1945 naval war.

The author, Julian Thompson, was a serving officer in the Royal Marines who commanded the Brigade that undertook the initial landings to repossess the Falklands in 1982, eventually leaving the service as Major-General. This experience shows in the selections he makes.

Do not expect a conventional narrative history along the lines of Correlli Barnett's naval history of the Second World War, 'Engage the Enemy More Closely'. The book has some difficulties alongside its many strengths because it assumes some knowledge of the navy and of events.

Without that understanding, you might find it difficult at times to connect some of the narrative dots and feel faced with a succession of 'incidents' whose context is unclear. Nevertheless, if the strategy is unclear, the tactics are perfect - each incident reads like a true adventure.

Because Thompson is rightly generous with his extracts from logs, diaries, reports, memoirs and letters, we are faced with a great deal of naval slang, technical terms and general jargon. The book probably needed a lot more annotation and 'background briefing' to be fully comprehensible.

However, placing these issues to one side, what is left is dramatic and powerful. What strikes one immediately is the high level of education amongst British naval officers, including young midshipman and even ratings. The material is articulate, often almost literary.

It is also remarkably honest. Young midshipmen, it seems, were often obliged to keep a journal and the contributions at every level are not afraid to articulate strong emotions including negative ones even if the dominant motif has to be the legendary 'stiff upper lip'.

This is only about the British side of the game. An equivalent book covering the German High Seas Fleet and U-Boat warfare would be equally interesting. But it is true that, challenged only by Germany in any meaningful way, naval warfare in 1914 was very much a British business.

This is another world. I get a glimpse of its values in a largely degraded form when I look at my old grammer school magazine from the mid-1960s (transformed post-68 into another culture at exceptional speed) - sporting prowess, literacy, never letting the side down, service, amateurism.

These were exceptionally self-sacrificing human beings prepared to take remarkable risks for shared ideals and to ensure they did not lose face with their peers once they embarked on a career which had little time for philosophical questioning of ways and means.

It seems unimaginable now that anyone in the age bracket of these young men would willingly do what they did, not merely being prepared to lose lives in rather horrible ways but putting up with dreadful weather conditions and discomfort for days on ends in the air, on the sea and under it.

This is where the book scores - in taking us into battle situations and allowing us to taste the fear and understand the motivations of young warriors under orders. Thompson does not hide just how ramshackle in terms of capability and tactics was the great navy in 1914 but, in the end, it won.

The Germans were, equally, worthy enemies - often more professional and, frankly, intelligent at times but making strategic mistakes and tactical errors more often than their rivals. The struggles between the two are heroic because they were so closely matched. It was a clash of titans.

There is breadth of experience here as well. The First World War saw the first significant use of naval air power (largely for reconnaissance), the emergence of the submarine and early attempts, not remarkably successful, at large-scale amphibious operations as well as the convoy system.

The British were, as so often, ahead of the game at sigint, the famous Room 40, even if the Admiralty buffoon who was in charge of it seemed incapable of knowing how to use its product properly. Thompson seems aghast at the lack of secrecy concerning its very existence.

The Admiralty was not a fast learner (the Germans often seem quicker off the mark) but it did learn in its dogged way so that the amateurism could turn steadily into the highly professional fleet that defended the seaways in the Second World War and supported the invasion of Europe in 1944.

The centre-piece is the Battle of Jutland (at which my grandfather 'fought' as a ship's carpenter on HMS Lowestoft) where Thompson is still nursing old navy wounds at the lack of appreciation of what the British Navy achieved in enforcing the uselessness in war of German naval power.

The achievement of the British Navy was not only this German bottling but the maintenance of food supplies to an over-populated island (a trick repeated in the Second World War) and retaining command of the Channel to ensure free movement between the UK and the Western Front.

Unrestricted submarine warfare was the central naval weapon in the German armoury used with desperation because the Germans had no other option. It was the British blockade, however, that starved out Germany and, late in the day, Britain learned the necessary convoy techniques.

If you want to0 know what it felt like to be shipwrecked more than once in one day as one young midshipman did or to work through minefields in a smelly submarine or spend hours in an airship in gale force winds, then this is the book for you.

The stories are detailed, endless and often truly exciting. The book closes with the raid on Zeebrugge. I defy anyone not to be stunned by the courage, almost to the point of insanity from a 21st century point of view, of men, most of whom knew they were going into a death trap.

And this is what is psychologically interesting especially in a time of cultural anxiety about a mere pathogen. These young men were living at a higher level of intensity than anything we can experience today. The risk was death, the reward was clearly a deep sense of meaning.

We can see, as we read the accounts of action, with laconic descriptions of the bodily mayhem all around them, the shock of survival bringing a downer that begs for another fix of action, that, if you survived, you would have felt as if you had actually lived.

In Japanese warrior culture, zen came to be the natural philosophy of the samurai. This book helps partially to explain this. Given the long stretches of boredom inherent in war, the battle is a moment of radical presentism, perception of time changes, reality itself changes.

Several times, we read of intense bouts of action that read in terms of events that took a long while to unfold only to discover that everything happened in a matter of minutes, sometimes leaving over a thousand men at the bottom of the sea.

The ability to react fast and efficiently (which did not always happen as some admit in the testimonies) could mean the difference between life and death. Officers ask after other men's wounds not knowing they are wounded. Officers with legs blown away carry on giving orders.

And all the time there is that awareness of what they were fighting for - that there was a normality of wives and girlfriends whose protection they were charged with. Fascism did not come to Britain in part because the British won, the sacrifice paid off for the imperial collective.

Reading these accounts, we have to remember that precisely analogous experiences were happening on the other side of the battle - that Germans were acting heroically in split seconds and protecting their loved ones. Losing led easily to rage at defeat and feeling betrayed at home.

If you are prepared to let the grand narrative be pushed aside for the testimonies and experiences (or, alternatively, you have Wikipedia open to make your own notes on obscurities), then this book might be an eye-opener to anyone who has only read about battles in conventional histories.

While the conventional histories are vital to understanding how societies as a whole behave, testimonies like those chosen by Thompson are essential to understanding how mentalities change and what may be contingent and what may be eternal in the human condition.

Experience in other fields suggests to me that the male instinct for 'presentist' action is an eternal merely repressed by the 'feminisation' of society in times of peace. Considering how we are coping in a natural existential crisis (very badly), we may not easily now cope with a human threat.

Today, our entire society seems to be falling apart because we have structured it to find a pathogen an existential problem. The generation that survived the First World War barely registered in historical terms the Spanish 'flu that was as severe as COVID-19 and took out the young not the old.

This not about making value judgements as to which is the best response to a natural threat (on balance, given our technology and sophistication, ours is) but it is to wonder at our complacency concerning the need sometimes to laugh death in the face to ensure the survival of the collective.

Thompson clearly is still smarting at the negative narrative that, until recently, followed the performance of the Royal Navy in the First World War, a sentiment echoed by Lord West, a Falklands contemporary, in his BBC series on the Twentieth Century Navy.

Both men have made their case well. Historians have since come up with a far more reliable narrative in which the British Navy's strategy (if it was a bit slow on tactics) 'saved' Britain and enabled the Army to fight in France. I am convinced by this revisionist position..

The 'false narrative' had come from the quarter you would expect it to come, the weasels of the media aided and abetted by opportunistic politicians ... so, in some respects, nothing has changed in that respect in over a hundred years.