Book 33: Reading the Dardanelles Disaster in the Age of Hormuz (100 Great Books)

When a Strait Holds the World's Gaze

Anyone watching the Strait of Hormuz and trying to understand what it means when a narrow body of water becomes the centre of a global crisis would do well to begin not with a newspaper but with a book published two decades ago about a different strait and a different century. Dan van der Vat’s The Dardanelles Disaster is a book about what happens when great powers decide that a geographical chokepoint must be forced open and discover, at enormous cost, that the geography had opinions of its own.

Van der Vat was a Dutch-British journalist and naval historian who grew up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands and went on to become a foreign correspondent for The Times, opening bureaux in South Africa and Germany before moving to The Guardian as its Chief Foreign Leader-writer. He was not a military romantic. He had spent his professional life watching governments convince themselves they had no choice and then living with the consequences of that conviction. His first book, The Grand Scuttle, grew from a chance visit to the Orkney Islands, where he became fascinated by the 1919 scuttling of the Kaiser’s fleet at Scapa Flow, an act of naval self-destruction that nobody had yet properly explained. That set the pattern for everything that followed. Van der Vat was drawn to the naval episode that seemed purely military on its surface but revealed, on examination, a story about the catastrophic distance between what decision-makers believed they were doing and what they were actually setting in motion.