of resistance. He came fearfully close to it, but he never quite made it, and England’s situation even in her darkest hour reminds Commander Kemp of the remark made 150 years earlier by the Earl of St. Vincent, who was First Lord of the Admiralty when Napoleon was meditating a cross-Channel thrust. Being asked about the possibility of an invasion, St. Vincent drily said that invasion was a military question on which he was not competent to express an opinion; all he knew was that an invasion could not come by sea.

So in North Africa, where Rommel would have gone on to finish his conquest if the Axis had had real control of the supply lines across the Mediterranean; so also with Russia, to whom the flow of essential supplies was maintained in spite of appalling obstacles; and so finally with the great tide of soldiers and munitions that came from America, from Canada, and from Australia to tip the balance against the man who appeared to have conquered Europe. The story would have been very different if the seas had been a barrier for the Allied powers and not a highway.

That there were serious gaps in this highway from time to time is of course obvious. The straits to which the British were driven in the Mediterranean did at times look like the beginning of the end; the fearful losses in the North Atlantic sea lanes brought even Churchill himself to the verge of despair; and the story of the convoys to Russia contains chapters that still put a shiver down one’s back, even at this distance in time. But the gaps were always bridged, somehow, and the endurance and heroism that bridged them compel one’s dazzled admiration.

That Hitler was never able to exploit these gaps adequately was at least partly due, Commander Kemp believes, to the fact that Hitler had no real notion of what sea power meant. The one German in high command who might conceivably have won the war for him was, says Commander Kemp, Grand Admiral Raeder, commander in chief of the German Navy in the early years of the war and a man who understood clearly how a genuinely balanced navy—submarines, surface ships, and airplanes, working to a coherent plan based on genuine sea strategy—could have turned the tables. Hitler never comprehended what Raeder was talking about, displaced him finally with Doenitz, and in effect reduced the Navy to a submarine service. The German submarines did great things, but unsupported they were never quite enough.

For Britain’s failure to maintain her armed forces in the decades preceding the outbreak of World War II, this writer has strong condemnation. The explanation of the shabby deal at Munich, he insists, is to be found in the report Britain’s chiefs of staff gave Prime Minister Chamberlain when Germany was preparing to swallow Czechoslovakia. Without qualification, these men said that England was not ready for war and that any involvement in war with Germany

at that time would probably lead to defeat. In effect, Chamberlain was told that he had to avoid war at all costs. He did it, to the total destruction of his own reputation; and Commander Kemp feels that he could not possibly have done anything else.

Naturally enough, this book concentrates on the British side of the story. As a picture of the war as a whole it is of course inadequate; what the armies did, in Russia or in France or elsewhere, is merely sketched in, and the manner in which control of the seas was finally won is described largely—though by no means entirely—in terms of what the British Navy did. But that, after all, is the story Commander Kemp selected, and he has told it very well. He is insistent in pointing out that sea power is not just a matter of navies. “In modern war,” he says, “the true exercise of maritime power depends nearly as much upon the exertions of land and air forces as it does upon naval.” But it is still sea power.