The Price of Victory by N. A. M. Rodger

The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain, 1815-1945

By N. A. M. Rodger

WW Norton 2025

Naval historian N. A. M. Rodger begins his new book, the long-awaited concluding volume in his naval history of Britain, by directly noticing the ‘long-awaited’ part. The first volume, The Safeguard of the Sea, appeared in 1997, and the second, The Command of the Ocean, appeared in 2004, and twenty years is a long time to wait for this final volume, The Price of Victory. “I have no excuse to offer,” he writes with wry humor, “save a serious illness and an exciting episode of brain surgery from which it took me several years to recover.”

A reader’s natural reaction might defensibly be twofold: first wondering if there’s been a noticeable lessening of quality, and then, after an immensely satisfying reading experience, smiling in gratitude because this third book is every bit as formidable and brilliant as the preceding two.

That brilliance is sharpened in a melancholy way because this volume, with its dates of 1815 to 1945, tells the protracted story of a downfall. The story of the 19th-century British Navy, so masterfully described in these pages, stands revealed at almost every turn as a slop-heap of waste, incompetence, hidebound blindness, and sodden alcoholism. And what effectively amounts to the end is always in sight.

The end is the “price of victory” mentioned in the book’s subtitle, and the price would be catastrophic: the loss of the greatest empire in human history, the slide of the world’s greatest navy into comparative irrelevance. The sheer centripetal pull is most visible in the book’s proportions, because very few events can compete with the Second World War in terms of dominating any narrative: the first 300 pages cover 123 years, and the last 300 pages cover seven, WWII and the epic fight against the Kriegsmarine. This was the Royal Navy’s finest and final glorious moment, and it’s been nearly 35 years since Correlli Barnett’s great book on the subject, Engage the Enemy More Closely, was published (also by WW Norton).

Rodger notes that the war was fought in a miasma of conflicting motives on the part of the Allies. The British people, he writes, were “largely unaware of the extent to which dislike of Great Britain was a core element of American patriotism.” During the war, “the Englishman in the street had little sense of the degree to which American assistance had sustained the common war-effort on terms that deliberately undermined the British economy.”

Again, it’s largely impossible to avoid seeing the cracks in the grand edifice of the Royal Navy, even when the narrative is concerned with plenty of other things. Rodger brings in an endless cast of well-drawn personalities, some famous like Captain Karl Donitz, Vice-Admiral David Beatty, and Admiral John Fisher, others even more famous, as with the inevitable Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War and understandably obsessed with his ships during the Second World War. But there’s still the waste, the blindness, and the incompetence, all of which are offset by valor while fighting the Nazis but squirmingly visible in spotlights like the Suez crisis or the Falklands War.

As in the previous two volumes, Rodger is a keen observer of changes in naval culture, particularly noting the concentration of attention that was a natural although not always consistent by-product of world wars. “The rising importance and influence of the chiefs of staff might at first appear to be a discreet, slow-motion seizure of power by the military, but this was neither the intention nor the effect,” he writes. “The experience of the Great War had taught thoughtful contemporaries that a rational wartime government had to take military expertise seriously.”

While spending all this time on the Second World War, he also forcefully asserts that its parameters are often curtailed into the artificial neatness of 1945, his own book’s termination date. “Although often cited as the end of the Second World War, it really marks the end only of the European part of the war,” he writes. “The war in the East, often but misleadingly called the Pacific War, was essentially a war for the control of China in which the Japanese were the prime aggressors.”

He cites the Chinese Civil War of 1949 as the real culmination of the conflict, and although readers might disagree (World War II was fought between the Allies and the Axis powers, after all; Japanese aggression after 1945 was no more a part of the war than was Japanese aggression in the Pacific and on the mainland prior to 1939), they’ll do so while being profoundly impressed with what Rodger has accomplished here. The standard critical nostrum would be to say The Price of Victory is well worth the wait, and although the nostrum is too cheap, it’s nevertheless wonderful to have this series complete and safe in harbor at last.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News