Paul Halpern is a refreshingly independent thinker. No one else has managed to write 500 pages on the subject of 1914-18 naval warfare without mentioning Admiral Alfred Mahan.
And although he has had to compress mightily to fit that history within 500 pages, he still finds it worthwhile to mention such illuminating, if pointless, incidents as the Royal Navy's cattle raids in Turkey in 1916.
World War I was, as has so often been noted, the great divide between the premodern world and the modern one. Nothing says so more eloquently than this little anecdote about how the Royal Navy, owner of the most advanced machines yet seen on the planet, thought it necessary to practice the kind of warfare that Homer's Greeks had .
Although Halpern, professor at Florida State University, says he has had to neglect the crucial topic of logistics to fit his history into a manageable volume, in fact he presents a better discussion of the influence of bases, ships and supplies than most general histories do.
His excellent chapter four, on the usually underserved Pacific war, demonstrates this.
The allotment of ships and the location of bases in late 1914, along with certain decisions about troop movements, determined why some islanders today eat canned corned beef and look to New Zealand for jobs and higher education, while others eat Spam and look to the United States. And why other islanders had to suffer great hardships in 1941-45.
It depended upon whether Japan or the British Dominions swept up the multitudinous islands controlled by Germany. 'These expeditions were minor footnotes to the war,' writes Halpern, 'and one might legitimately ask if it would not have been better for the German islands in the Pacific to have been left to "wither on the vine" until they could be seized at a later date after other, more pressing problems had been resolved.'
But these minor events had major consequences in 1944. They determined that some islanders would be starved by blockade and blasted by naval and air bombardments, while others were not.
Halpern's description of the 'minor' events is fuller than in any other general history I know. Despite a crowded agenda, he exploits to the full the romantic stories of the naval war in the Pacific, like the famous raid of the cruiser Emden, and the horrifying stories, such as the Battle of Coronel, where a ship manned with hundreds of reservists from a single Scottish town went down with all hands.
