World War I brought about a number of pretty specific special projects, most of them performed by the various armies in France/Belgium or in the Dardenelles or in the Italian theater of operations. However, there were some that were performed mostly by the Royal Navy and Marines. Such was the attack and blocking of Zeebrugge in mid 1918.

When the British, French and Belgians left the inland ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend in Belgium in 1914, they were not destroyed, thinking they would be quickly reoccupied. Well, that did not happen as the war quickly fell into the stalemate of trench warfare. This allowed the Germans to not only improve the defenses of this area, but use these ports as places to base submarines and surface attach boats. These German units harassed Channel shipping throughout the war and all attempts by the British, which included bombing the facilities with aircraft and off shore monitors, as well as sewing mine fields just off the entrance to these harbors had little effect.

Typically, there were plans put forth for years on how to deal with this, the one put forth time and time again was to use block ships sunk into the channels to these bases. This would, as theory went, cause the channels to silt up, while removal of the block ships would take a considerable amount of time, thus eliminating or greatly reducing the usefulness of these bases to German submarines in particular.

Eventually, a plan was accepted and on the night of 22 April, 1918, a force of over 1800 Royal Marines backed up by 70 support vessels assailed the harbor entrance facilities of Zeebrugge. The fighting was ferocious with many casualties on both sides. This action alone resulted in 11 Victoria Crosses.

The author, Stephen Prince takes us through the many initial plans to the final one as approved by the admiralty. Then the difficulty of getting things together without alerting the Germans as to what was going on. This was especially difficult when it came to training the men for the assault as secrecy was imperative to the success of the mission. Then the book takes a considerable amount of space as well as superbly drawn illustrations and maps to go through the various stages of the assault. This includes what went well and what did not. As you can imagine, the best laid plans are only good until the opening assault, when things started going awry. Despite all this several ships were successfully beached in the entranceway to the canals. However, they were not positioned as hoped and the Germans simply increased the width of the canal to go around them, so the delay was not as expected.

Like other books in the series, it is a gripping description of events and thanks to a bevy of photos and some superb artwork that includes maps and charts, we get a real idea of what went on during this assault Like the other books I've read in this series, it holds your interest and is well researched. It is a book I enjoyed and one that I can easily recommend to you.

June 2010

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