A high-tension sea chase set in early 1941 that pits the warships of the British against the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and "Gneisenau" which have been able to escape trap after trap. What makes the British most frustrated is the fact that their enemy has on board a large Siamese cat named Attila, who provides his shipmates with extraordinary accomplishments that has enabled the Germans to escape time and time again. The Germans are wrecking havoc on British shipping and Winston Churchill has demanded that they be sunk before their toll on merchant shipping brings England to the brink of disaster.
The Grand Fleet was the main fleet of the British Royal Navy during the First World War. The actual strength of the fleet varied through the war as new ships were built and others were sunk, but the numbers steadily increased as the war progressed and the margin of superiority over the German fleet progressed with it. After America entered the war, US Battleship Division Nine was attached to the Grand Fleet as the Sixth Battle Squadron, adding four, and later five, dreadnought battleships. Author and Admiral John Rushworth Jellicoe fought in the Anglo-Egyptian War and the Boxer Rebellion and commanded the Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916 during the First World War.
While battles and wars and ‘the clash of civilizations’ are as old as time itself, there is little doubt that the conflagration of 1914–1918 was something unique and terrifyingly new. There was not a corner of the globe that did not feel its effects, some more than others, but the scope of its impact on economies, populations, food supplies, the character of governments in general and the day-to-day lives of numberless ordinary people, were such as the world had never experienced, nor expected. Little did anyone dream that the assassination of relatively minor figures of the Habsburg royal family, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, carried out by an unknown Serbian teenager on the street corner of an obscure town called Sarajevo that few had ever heard of, could possibly provide a spark that would plunge the entire European continent into an industrialized war of catastrophic destruction. But it did: the two shots that youth fired were surely ‘heard around the world’, and several million people would perish or be maimed as a result. The story of World War I has been told by many different writers, historians and participants in many different ways, especially so before and during the centennial of its events that just concluded. All the World at War stands apart from many of these standard studies. It presents a familiar story from points of view that many readers might find surprising: unexpected details, different perspectives, atypical and generally insightful observations from contemporaries (often obscure to modern readers), who witnessed the events and personalities that pushed the war along from phase to phase. The narrative is chronologically arranged, beautifully written, with something new or intriguing on every page. This is a unique and finely paced account of ‘The War to End all Wars’ that didn’t.
