The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Wolves and the Greyhounds: A Novel of the Great War by Robert Schreiner

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

The Wolves and the Greyhounds: A Novel of the Great War by Robert Schreiner https://amzn.to/3LcWZcA A rogue German fleet has somehow disappeared. The Royal Navy must find them—before the unthinkable happens. At the outbreak of the First World War, the fearsome German East Asia Squadron eluded a Royal Navy task force, steamed into the vastness of the Pacific—and vanished. The possibility that the elusive German fleet might suddenly appear on any horizon paralyzed the British Empire and set in motion a frantic search for the enemy warships. The fates of two naval commanders—one British, one German—are inexorably drawn together as the world plunges into war. John Luce, a veteran Royal Navy captain, must face the greatest challenge of his career as he leads a ragtag squadron of obsolete British warships into unfamiliar waters in search of the rogue enemy fleet. His darkest fears are realized, and the hunters may now become the hunted. Captain Julius Maerker of the Kaiserliche Marine has assumed his new command with the East Asia Squadron. As war is declared, he finds himself serving in the shadow of a mercurial and fiery admiral, whose ambition will take the German fleet on an extraordinary odyssey and risk the lives of thousands of his men. In this epic wartime adventure, bold gambles and tragic miscalculations pull these two captains, their ships, and their rival empires into a desperate clash—culminating in the most decisive naval battles of the war. The Wolves and the Greyhounds brilliantly dramatizes a largely forgotten chapter of WWI that will captivate fans of historical fiction and military thrillers. About the author ROBERT SCHREINER is a former CIA Intelligence Officer. After leaving government service, he embarked on a subsequent career as a consultant and executive in the global private security industry. He is an avid amateur military historian who has traveled the world, routinely sneaking in side-trips to visit ancient fortifications and battlefields. He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee with his wife, two spoiled cocker spaniels, and an amusingly musical cockatiel.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

The free, whole, free, whole. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. There, ladies. Things that makes it official. Welcome to the big show. As always, the Chris Voss Show is the family that loves you but doesn ladies and gentlemen. There, ladies, things that makes it official. Welcome to the big show. As always, the Chris Walsh Show is the family that loves you, but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your family. So there you go.

As always, we bring you the most amazing authors and people on the show who write the most amazing books, the hottest things that come off the shelf, from novels to politics to fiction, nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, CEOs, billionaires, all the wonderful people who are on this show, and bring it to you, what, two to three shows a weekday, 10 to 15 shows a week. If you're not paying attention to listen to every damn show, don't make us come out there.

Anyway, we know you are because you consume 96% of it. But what's with cutting out of the 4% end? Is it because you're not rounding out the show? Is that what it is and you're skipping the next show? Don't do it. I might say something interesting in the last 4%. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on the show with his debut book. It's called The Wolves and the Greyhounds, a novel of the Great War.

It came out March 29, 2024. Robert Schreiner is on the phone. He's on the phone. He's on the Zoom phone, the StreamYard phone. He's on the show with us today to talk about his newest book, and everything went into it. And he has a very illustrious career that he pulls the wonderful stories and data from, I'm sure, to interweave his amazing new novels

and the stories inside of it. Robert is a former CIA intelligence officer. After leaving the government service, he embarked on a subsequent career as a consultant and executive in the global private security industry. He is an avid amateur military historian who's traveled the world, routinely

speaking, in side trips to visit ancient fortifications and battlefields. He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee, and his wife two spoiled Cocker Spaniels in an amusingly cockatiels he lives in the blue ridge mountains of tennessee and his wife two cocker two spoiled cocker spaniels and an amusingly musical cockatiel welcome to the show robert how are you doing well chris thank you very much there you go you got like a whole farm going on there at the house

you got the cockatiel and oh yeah we've got all kinds of animals here and yeah they rule the roost for sure the blue ridge Ridge Mountains of Tennessee, John Denver. So, Robert, give us a theory.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, it's robertschreiner.com is my website, and I'm also on the platform formerly known as Twitter as well as LinkedIn. So it's pretty easy to find me. Just look for Robert Schreiner. I'll pop right up.

There you go. You know what? You don't want to just realize everyone says that on the show. They go, I'm on Twitter for formerly known as Twitter, but no one says what it is. Right. I'm sorry. It just sounds so weird to say I'm on X. What does that mean?

Does that mean blank? What does that mean? So give us a 30,000 overview of your new book, the wolves and the greyhounds. Thank you. Yeah, The Wolves and the Greyhounds is a military adventure, a military thriller set in the early months of the First World War. It's actually based on true events that inspired me to write it. And at the time, the two essential superpowers in the world were Great Britain and Germany. And everyone knows about the British Empire. And that was really at its zenith at the time. The sun never sits on the British Empire. That was really that period of time. It was really an astonishing

network of colonies and even communications cables., of course, the Royal Navy that kind of held it all together and protected it. Germany under the Kaiser, they had aspirations to essentially equal that or even best it if they could. And Germany had a collection of colonies of its own across the world. They had colonies in Africa. They had colonies in Africa. They had colonies in the Pacific and Asia. And the German, you know, Imperial German Navy was, you know, in this arms race with the Royal Navy at the time to try to do the best that they could to protect their own colonies,

but also match the Royal Navy's might wherever they would potentially encounter them. And the events of this novel take place right as the First World War was being declared. And what happened to kind of kick off these events was that Germany's largest military presence, I should say, outside of Germany was their colony at Tsingtao, China. They had a large naval base there, and what was really their most vaunted naval detachment, which was the East Asia Squadron, was based there. And the Royal Navy knew as war was about to be declared, they knew that they had to potentially bottle up as many of the German naval assets and military assets as they could. And so a task force from Hong Kong sailed up to Tsingtao to encircle the colony and bottle

up the naval forces there. But when they got there, the port was empty. The Germans had managed to sneak out all of their warships and all of the support ships, and they completely abandoned the port. What that meant was that the Germans' most feared naval unit outside of German home waters was missing. Loose. On the loose. Somewhere. Exactly. And so the Royal Navy then embarked on this desperate search to find this naval unit before they showed up pretty much anywhere. They could show up anywhere in the world on

a shore unbeknownst to the, whether it was a British outpost or a colony or one of their other assets so the the wolves and the greyhounds starts at this point where the the germans have essentially sailed off into the pacific and the british are desperately trying to find them and it follows two naval captains one brit British and one German. And the book attempts to tell this story from both sides as equally as possible. And so there's a British captain who's basically, he becomes in charge of much of the effort to find them. And there's a German captain who is under the leadership of the East Asia squadron's leader, who is Admiral Graf von

Spee, who's actually pretty famous. The Germans named a whole number of warships after him. He was a legendary figure in German naval history. But he was also an interesting guy and kind of mercurial and an unusual fellow who might be kind of unpredictable. And so this captain is serving directly under him. And so the story follows each of their individual story arcs as they are inevitably drawn together in this story. Nice. So this is the sort of stuff that I really loved when I was a kid growing up.

I loved the old naval battles, war one and world war ii and eisenhower and macarthur and you know all the patent and all that sort of stuff and i love to build the ships you know the model ships when i was a kid and in fact my brother crushed one behind the door i'll never forget on purpose and and this was just a just a just a really interesting time's get into your background, and then we'll round back to the book. Tell us a little about your upbringing. I know you did some CIA stuff. What motivated you as you were growing up to enter some of the things that you did? And then when did you know you were starting to write and become a great writer?

I actually grew up as a foreign service brat. And it's one of these stories that sounds like it's out of perhaps a TV script or something. Actually, both of my parents worked for the Central Intelligence Agency as well. They met there. And this was in the early 60s. And they were married. And I came along a year later. And that was when my mother resigned from the agency. And she then spent the rest of her career as a mom. And my dad dad went on to become he actually retired as an office director within the within the CIA and as part of his job we traveled all over the world and so I grew up in Europe and in Asia you know our our posts were our main posts were in Vienna, Austria, London, England, and Bangkok, Thailand.

And so that was my childhood. We traveled all over Europe. We traveled all over Asia. I mean, it was amazing. It was really an extraordinary childhood, just an amazing opportunity. And so many diverse sort of cultures. Oh, absolutely. And in fact, I learned German sort of you know i i learned

german at an early age we were living in vienna i you know i spoke with a pretty solid british accent when i was a school kid in england it was i was immersed in those cultures and we got to see so many things much of my many of my childhood memories childhood memories are traipsing through castles in Spain or England or Germany or Austria or someplace, just seeing amazing things, visiting battlefields like Hastings or Normandy or Waterloo. And that really sparked my interest in military history. And I was always interested in writing writing so that started at an early age wow that must have been fun to go through see i was just having to build stuff at home and read books because we were in california so there's not a lot of battlefields of world war one and

two in california i think in the movie 1941 too they documented something with blushi about the invasion of la or something i don't know if this is true or not, but so that must've been extraordinary, but it, you know, the great thing about our lives and people who write novels like yourself or people write idiot business books like me about our lives is we're able to collect these stories and these fabrics of, you know,

different things that we're exposed to. And, and I imagine that was really helpful in helping build you into weaving this novel. Absolutely. You know, having those experiences and being able to see things from someone else's perspective. You know, I had friends from almost every nationality you can imagine growing up, and everyone else's perspective of not only modern current events, but also historical events is definitely colored by their background. And so our perception of, for example, the First World War and the Second World War as Americans, very different than that of an English citizen versus a German citizen or someone who was living in Asia at the time. And so those types of things are really valuable to round out sort of a worldview and be able to put a different perspective on something when you're

trying to, you know, write with a different voice, perhaps. There you go. And so when did you finally sit down and start writing this novel? I actually, it was sort of a long process. The initial spark for it was many years ago. I started writing it several years later, but it was, I actually happened upon it when our children were in high school. And they were, they all had the same history teacher three years in a row. They're all right one year after each other in school. And so they all have the same history teacher with the same project that was all about the First World War. And I was already kind of a military history geek. I had lots of books about

it. And so I was happily handing these over to the kids who otherwise would have rolled their eyes at anything that dad was interested in. But in this particular case, I was suddenly useful. And so I was able to give them some of these books. And as part of that, I'm going through them and kind of handing off things I thought might be helpful to them for their project. I happened upon this really brief one-liner about the Battle of Coronel,

which was this naval battle that occurred in November of 1914. And I thought it was really interesting. Partly, I was this military history person and I actually never heard of this battle. How is this possible? And it was, and the backstory to it, this amazing odyssey that the Germany's Asia squadron had embarked upon at the beginning of the war to find themselves off the coast of Chile, which is where this happened was just this, like, how could this possibly have occurred?

So I, you know, that piqued my interest initially. And then years later that it was still in my brain. And I thought, you know what, let me look into this. And I read more about it. And the more I read, the more I became convinced that this was a story that needed to be retold in a way that was more accessible than the average history book might give it that treatment. And so I thought, you know, a novel would be perfect. You can, I could tell this story from both the British perspective and the German perspective and fill in those gaps that might be in the historical record and it really adds some texture and, you know, depth to this. And that was really the spark. And it then took me several years to research it because you know the adage write what you know no one living now it was a you know naval officer in the first world war

joe biden was possibly i'm just kidding i love joe biden by the way and so was the rolling stones exactly yeah there you go so i had to i had to become as much of an expert in this subject as I could. And so I got resources from the Royal Naval College and from the Hoover Institution at Stanford and UCLA. And I mean, just wherever I could get this information, I got it. And it was amazing to me and actually humbling and gratifying that so many people, when I contacted them, were interested in this project and were overjoyed to be able to help. And like, oh, absolutely, we have something. And they were dusting off things that hadn't seen the light of day in nearly a century. And I got copies of just amazing things, you know,

ships, logs, and officers' journals, and just extraordinary finds. And I got out-of-print books, some of which have been written in the 20s and 30s. And so that was part of the research journey. And that took several years. And just for me to be comfortable enough with the subject matter, for me to feel authoritative enough to write this from a legitimate perspective, because I really wanted to do justice to this story. And I googled this, and they have pictures and film of this from this right there there are some photographs of the era uh like right after the the battle of cornell there there are some there's some photographs taken of the of the german squadron for example there's a

few photographs of some of the british ships that were involved so it's there is some historical record for sure there you go i mean quite exciting the and this is back in the day when you know things were different you didn't have the sonar radar i mean maybe maybe they had radar back then no you're right there was no radar and so in fact to to someone who like the average person looking at a warship from world war one to a warship in World War II, they might not notice a whole lot of differences. These, you know, the warships were, they're made of steel. They had turreted guns. They were, you know, comparable size. But the warships in World War I, to your point, they didn't have radar.

They did not have voice-to-voice radio. So they couldn't just, you know, key the mic and talk to the ship that was in their formation. They only had three options. They could use wireless systems, which essentially if you envision Morse code, the captain, for example, who wanted to talk to his sister ship in the formation would have to give an order to the wireless operators. They would have to encode that, send that message to the other ship. That other ship would have to decode it,

print that out and then deliver it to the bridge of the other ship. And so you can imagine in a, in a battle where seconds matter, if the message takes minutes to be delivered, that's not quick enough. And so they also relied on flag signals where they would run flags up the halyards, which is, and that's really a method that's thousands of years old. I mean, really, I mean, you can think back to the time of the ancient Greeks,

they were doing similar things on their ships. And then they would, they also potentially use lamp signals at night, but those were extraordinarily primitive communication methods compared to what they had only 25 years later in world war ii did they have aircraft carriers back then where they could send up planes to not yet by the end by the end of the first world war by 1917 1918 they were experimenting with that but at the beginning of the war in 1914 aircraft were still being it was still an experimental idea to even use aircraft in combat and they were mainly used for reconnaissance and the idea of launching an

airplane off of a ship would have been a fantastical concept at that point yeah so you didn't have any radar you didn't have any you know satellites where you could be like where's the german fleet at and where should we be at and all these different there's a picture here of somebody i think this is some one of the colonels from the battles of cornell on the falkland islands this guy looks like the salt of the salt of the earth these were these were amazing people who did extraordinary things with what we would consider relatively primitive technology. The other part of it is these ships of that era, they were still coal-fired steamships. Oh, wow.

They were all fueled by coal, which is a really heavy, cumbersome, messy fuel. And so a lot of times, these warship formations had to be trailed by colliers big cargo ships whose holds were just filled with lumps of coal and they would have to bring them alongside these warships and they would this go through this laborious process of moving lumps of coal from one ship to the other, and they would put them into these coal bunkers. Interestingly, the way that it was a brilliant design of the time, those coal bunkers on these warships were just inside the outer hull of the ships along the outside.

So they acted as an additional armor barrier. If an incoming round managed to penetrate the armor, the next layer of defense was this layer of coal in the in the coal bunker assuming it was still full of coal yeah that actually and so there were many accounts actually in the battles that are described in the wolves and the greyhounds there are many circumstances where incoming rounds both german and english managed to punch through the armor but were stopped by the coal bunkers and they were able to continue to steam on.

So again, it's a fascinating time in technology. So they're, they're, they're still, they're sailing on these steam ships that actually the technology for, in terms of, you think about,

you know, steam engines and coal fired steam, it really was reaching its pinnacle at the time. These, these warships, very large warships, were approaching high 20s, almost 30 knots in terms of speed, which rivals modern warships.

Really? And they were able to do this with steam engines. And so it really was something extraordinary for them to be able to do this at the time. That explains why some president was trying to take us back to coal or steam at one one time you don't have to do that with nuclear ships right you don't have to have a uh the thing following you around to refill your nuclear no you feel it once and it's good to go for the life of the ship that's right good to go those that's the best way

to go but yeah i mean you can imagine that you know i i used to have these dreams you know i watched all the movies of of world war one and world war you know i i used to have these dreams you know i watched all the movies of of world war one and world war two and and i used to have these you know dreams of the battle of midway and all the ships and stuff and and it was always so fun to play with that in my head i don't know if young men do that anymore do they i think i think they have video games now they have yeah i think video games have taken the place but i did the same thing i i used to you know kind of play with all that kind of stuff, airplanes and ships and all of that. And I think that exercise of your imagination is something that video games have largely supplanted at this point.

Yeah, because you don't really have to imagine anything. It's just delivered to you. Right, exactly. In amazing detail, too. Yeah, I mean mean it really is but i like video games but i kind of miss those days when you have an imagination you get together with your friends and you have the battle of whatever and you know there's always the i remember growing up what was the pt book with john f kennedy his story of his the pt boats and you know all that

just the craziness of that time was just fun so So the two captains in your book, I imagine it's historical fiction, right? So you're using different names, I guess? No, actually, I warred with that. I really wanted to try to be as accurate as possible. And in the historical notes in the book, I certainly mentioned the fact that in many circumstances, I used the actual names. And so it would be sort of like writing a book about Julius Caesar or Napoleon or someone who actually lived, but you're filling in the blanks, right?

Yeah. And so in this particular case, I used the actual names for many of the folks who were involved in these battles. So this particular captain, Captain John Luce, was in fact the commander of HMS Glasgow at the time. And Captain Julius Merker was in fact the captain of SMS Gneisenau on the German side. And they were real people of, you know, kind of they had these extraordinary lives

and we know something about them, but we don't know everything about them. And so that was part of my challenge as an author was to fill in those empty spaces where we don't have perhaps a ship's log or we don't know exactly what happened. But we can guess at their motivation. And we know a lot of cases we know what the outcome was. But how do we get there? And so I had access to, in some cases, ship's rosters.

I had access to some of the logs of some of the people who were involved. And some of those materials gave me immense insight into how people thought, how they viewed these activities and these events at the time. How cut off they were from their home commanders, either on the side know, home, you know, commanders, either on the, you know, the side of the British or the side of the Germans, how isolated they felt. And so I did, in fact, use a lot of their, you know, names, you know, actual real characters, I tried to find out as much about them as possible. And I humbly use them as characters in this book with the, you know, expectation that I might be taking liberties. And I apologize profusely for that in the historical notes. I don't think they're going to call and say they're upset or write in maybe bad reviews on Amazon.

So you'd be okay, I think. He misused my name, damn it, in World War I. Exactly. Perhaps their great, great, great grandchildren might have an issue with it. I think they would be honored to have their great,great-grandparents, whatever, taken and done. What do you hope people come away with reading the book? Do you hope they learn something about history or great characters, the novel?

Is there any sort of maybe some lessons you put in the book? Is there a wink and a nod to anything? What do you hope they come away with when they read the book? I certainly hope that people learn something from it. I certainly learned a lot in the process of writing it. That period of history, I think, in terms of naval combat, but combat in general, I think that when most people think about the rigors of war and the kind of grueling nature of warfare, a lot of that has been perhaps overshadowed by the Second World War and what happened at that time. But there are some certainly some of the deprivations that these folks went through during that period of time was, you know, I think it's worth knowing about.

I also thought in the process of writing it and listening, reading the actual thoughts of some of the participants, it was a different era in terms of how you viewed your enemy. And there was still some gallantry back in that day that I think we've generally lost. I think that in modern warfare, one of the first things that happens is that your enemy is dehumanized and it makes it easier for you to kill them. Back in that era, that wasn't what was going on. I think that they viewed each other possibly as more alike than different. They just happened, you know, if an enemy combatant in a foreign naval vessel, you know, is probably more alike you than they are not, even if they speak a different language. And they had, they shared different, you know, cultural backgrounds, but they also had

these commonalities in their life experiences and they really wanted to do the right thing. And, you know, that was, you know, one of the really striking things about this era and the story that I tried to portray was that they weren't demonizing their enemies. They were actually trying to treat their enemies with as much respect as possible. One of the typical things of the day was if an enemy ship went down, if you could rescue as many of the survivors as you could, you would absolutely go and do that. And you would treat them with as much respect and dignity as possible until they could be kind of shipped to, you know, they'd be shipped to a prison camp somewhere, but you would treat

them, you know, they were making sure they were fed and they'd have tea and, you know, warm blankets. And that was what was done at the time. And I think that that's something that is worth knowing that, you know, human beings, even when fighting against each other could still be human and i think in modern times i mean you see the the horrific stories of the you know the ukrainian russian conflict now and some of the just horrible atrocities being committed and it's just a wonder that one human being could do that to another. It doesn't necessarily have to be that way. And that was one of the things I really took away from my research and hopefully conveyed in this story was that they treated things differently back then. It was a slightly different viewpoint on how you viewed your enemy.

Yeah. I think Abraham Lincoln pioneered some of that. I think some of the rules that he made about prisoners of war and how to hold your enemies after winning in battle influenced, I don't know if it influenced much of it, but it seemed to be a time where we had a little bit more morality and backbone and things like that. Absolutely. The Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions, there was a time where people paid attention to that. I think that nobody cares anymore. And I think that's an unfortunate loss, especially when conflict seems almost inevitable. The fact that one of the first steps in conflict is to dehumanize your enemy so that it's almost nothing to kill them is really a terrible circumstance.

Yeah. You saw that in World War II with the Germans and the camps. And then there was the Japanese. I mean, there were, you know, awful Hanoi Hilton and Vietnam, things like that. So, yeah. But you kind of see that in, what was that old Greek movie about the bridge over the river quay was it yeah yeah and how the british officers tried to hold the decorum of of decency and and respect and you you know you saw how they tried to operate and so there's a romanticism to all this stuff like i

i still love it there's an old i don't know if you've seen it but imagine you have there's somebody who's gone back and they've colorized the old movies from World War II, a lot of the German stuff. And seeing the colorized versions of it brings a whole new dimension to it. It really makes it feel, I don't know, I love black and white, but it makes it, really makes it feel like more modern or more, more real. Like, it's kind of weird to watch right you're right it's i have seen some of that and it's it adds this texture and reality that otherwise looks more like this historical artifact where you can certainly much more easily imagine yourself

in that scenario if it's in color and it to me it helped imagine the horror of it because when you look at black and white you're like oh that's something that happened a long time ago you i think you can disassociate from maybe a little bit but when you see in color it just makes it be like oh these people were as bad as you know some of us today and things really haven't changed that much around here yeah i don't know that human beings have done a whole lot of evolution once we got done with evolution. That's the one thing I always say on the show. The one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. And thereby we go round and round. So give us your final thoughts on the book as we go out.

Tell people the final pitch out, where they can order the book, and dot coms and where they can find you. Certainly. It's available in most places where you can buy books. Certainly Amazon is probably the easiest place. It's available in both paperback and e-book, but also barnesandnoble.com and then in e-book format, all kinds of places. Apple Books, Google Play Books, Kobo, all kinds of places there. And in terms of.com, again, robertschreiner.com, and all of the links are there to find the book wherever your preferred retailer might be.

There you go. Thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much, Chris. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you. All right, Robert, and thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, linkedin.com, Fortress Chris Voss, Chris Voss won the TikTokity.

If you want to buy me coffee, because I just drank the one I had before me, you can go to buymeacoffee.com for Jess Crisvoss. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.