The Victory at Sea
by William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick
Summary
The Victory at Sea tells William Sowden Sims's own account of commanding American naval forces in European waters during the First World War, written with the journalist Burton J. Hendrick's help shaping a career naval officer's experience into a readable narrative. Sims had spent his prewar decades pushing the Navy toward better gunnery and closer study of British practice, and when the United States entered the war in 1917 the Navy sent him to London as its senior representative before giving him command of all American naval forces operating from Britain, with a promotion to vice admiral that same May.
The book centers on the fight against German submarines, which by 1917 were sinking Allied shipping fast enough to threaten Britain's ability to stay supplied and in the war at all. Sims describes building a working partnership with his British counterpart, Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly, at a moment when American and British naval cultures did not automatically trust each other, and the combined convoy and patrol strategy the two navies developed together to bring the U-boat campaign under control through 1917 and 1918.
Reading the book means following a commander's own version of how a coalition war at sea actually got organized, the meetings, the compromises with an allied navy, and the slow turn of a losing campaign into a winning one, rather than a dry operational history written after the fact by someone who was not there. It suits a reader interested in naval command as a genuinely collaborative, improvised craft rather than a story of a single strategist's brilliance.
Historical Context & Significance
The Victory at Sea won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for History, the fifth prize given in the category and the first to go to a book about naval warfare. Sims had built his prewar reputation as a reformer inside the Navy, pressing for the gunnery improvements he had studied in British practice, before the war gave him the command that made this book possible.
Hendrick, a journalist who had already written American business history in The Age of Big Business, brought the storytelling skill that turned Sims's command experience into a book able to reach a general readership rather than only naval specialists. He went on to win two more Pulitzer Prizes, both in Biography, for his volumes on Walter Hines Page. The prize recognized an account written from direct command experience rather than archival research, continuing a pattern the young award had already shown in its first few years of honoring participants and diplomats writing about events they had lived through as readily as historians working from documents.