EVEN the weather appeared to cooperate with HMS Dreadnought. It was raining on the morning of Feb. 10, 1906, but the clouds lifted by noon in time for Britain's King Edward VII to christen the world's biggest, fastest, and most heavily gunned battleship.
The huge steel hull decked with flowers slid easily down the way into the waters of the Royal Naval Dockyard at Portsmouth, England. By the time the enormous ship was completed, British engineers could also boast of finishing the state-of-the-art ship in record-breaking time - less than 12 months from laying her keel to the finished sea trials.
With Dreadnought, the age of the super battleship was born. And with it, too, began this century's first arms race - a race for naval supremacy between Great Britain and the German Empire. Robert Massie attempts, in this ambitious historical account, to portray the key personalities involved in an episode that he contends is of fundamental importance in understanding the origins of World War I.
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