Hearts of Oak: The Human Tragedy of HMS Royal Oak Paperback – July 1, 2010

Buyer beware: this book is absolutely identical to his book The Sinking of HMS Royal Oak. Only the title and some details of the cover are different, but it has a distinct ISBN #!

As for review of contents:

1) The author reiterates the ridiculous Keynesian claim that the Versailles reparation demands upon Germany humiliated and financially debilitated Germany such that it guaranteed WWII. And yet Germany paid only a total of 10% of a single year's GDP until it refused further payment. France, after the Franco-Prussian War actually paid 23-25% of a year's GDP, paying it off early (...). France paid far more, paid all that it had been forced by Bismarck to pay, and paid it off early. And France did this a generation before WWI, and had this humiliation to remember from the hands of Germany at the time of Versailles. The discussion presented in this text thus lacks historical perspective and uncritically perpetuates an invalid argument.

2) The author provided no maps of Scapa Flow, and yet had a plethora of comments about specific access routes and geographic features in your text. This is a glaring flaw.

3) The author states that the ship was nearly obsolete by 1939 citing it's WWI vintage - but all of the Queen Elizabeth Class battleships were also built in that vintage (they were actually the previous class!), and although they were aged by 1939, their relatively high speed meant that they could be effectively deployed and did good service. The flaw of the Royal Sovereign (or some say the Revenge) Class (Churchill: "the R's") was that they were initially designed as coal-burners, and, even in their last-minute design improvement to oil-burners, they achieved significantly lower maximum horsepower and thus lower knots' speed than had they been purpose-built oil-burners. Their hitting power, however, was identical. Churchill called the R's "both too slow to catch the enemy and too slow to run away".

4) Lastly, the book's only contribution is that it contains a number of individual accounts of survivors, and discussion of fatalities, including comments about their locations w/in HMS Royal Oak during the sinking, and yet it provided no diagrams of the ship so that a reader can relate to these positions. This greatly weakens the text. It would have been preferable had the author only provided these accounts, w/ the design maps and cross-sections to give them context, and excise the preceding pages, summarizing them in a page or two w/ references to whole texts that elucidate these summarized introductory topics.

And so, the book, Hearts of Oak, does have value in that it records a number of survivor accounts and also those of relatives of some of the fatalities, even if they are presented w/o adequate context. This effort is appreciated, but the prospective reader should know that this is NOT the final word, the definitive book, on the HMS Royal Oak sinking. The definitive book on the sinking of the HMS Royal Oak has not yet been written. When it is, it will most likely be written by a British naval architect w/ access to the original design diagrams. It will have detailed maps of Scapa Flow at the time (October, 1939), and will include the security critiques from WWI to the end of WWII. It will include photos of the topography, and will have labeled diagrams of the deck plans and of numerous cross-sections of the ship. It will also include a thorough review and candid assessment of the previous books on the sinking. It is also important to thoroughly discuss "the R's", as Churchill called them: their design concept, relation to the Queen Elizabeth and King George V (1939) class battleships, and the Admiralty's plan for their respective operational deployments. The U-Boat Type VIIB's capabilities relative to the other Types should also be discussed, as well as the relative capabilities of the torpedoes used by U-47 at the time. I believe that thus far, the book "U-47 in Scapa Flow: The Sinking of HMS Royal Oak 1939 (Raid)" is the best book on this topic so far.