THE PRICE OF VICTORY

The author of the two earlier doorstops in this trilogy delivers a finale that will not disappoint.

Illness and surgery delayed Rodger, professor of naval history at the University of Exeter, after volume 2 in 2004, but after this tome’s first chapter, a masterful overview of Britain and the world after Napoleon’s fall, readers may regret that only 600 pages remain. Like every great power, including the U.S. today, patriotic Britons had no doubt that they were the master race and deserved the world’s respect. In fact, Britain enjoyed an impressive run. Rodger has no quarrel with the historical cliché that the Royal Navy ruled the seas in the century after 1815, enforcing peace while protecting a burgeoning trade and frantically adapting to technological advances (steam, breech-loading canons, screw propellers, ironclads, oil, submarines), social changes (peacetime flogging wasn’t stopped until 1879), and leadership; Rodger delivers vivid, often revisionist opinions of significant figures that do not exclude immortals from Wellington to Gladstone to Churchill. Readers may especially perk up at the book’s halfway point during the run-up to World War II, when American naval power arrived permanently on the scene. Rodger’s gripping account of World War II from the British point of view reveals that America’s takeover of world leadership was not entirely magnanimous. Some American leaders had long disliked Britain; many American policies empowered America at Britain’s expense, and some led to the U.K.’s postwar financial crisis. The book is dense with technical details, naval tactics, accounts of sailors and leading figures, weapons development, and often cutthroat political and strategic infighting. Despite this, navy buffs will have to share their pleasure with a general readership because Rodger regularly steps back to recount two centuries of world history, emphasizing the strategy, technology, and actions of rival powers.

Probably the definitive British naval history, exhaustive but with a wide appeal.