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The War at Sea
From the naval point of view, World War I was essentially a struggle between a group of powers which had to obtain their means of waging modern war from within the heart of the European continent and another which were able to obtain these means overseas. For a time, the second group did include Russia, but that nation collapsed when the maritime powers, Great Britain and France, were unable to overcome geography and reach her with waterborne resources. Great Britain lies like a breakwater across the sea communications of Germany, whose access to the maritime world is through the North Sea, the Strait of Dover, and the English Channel, waters dominated for centuries by the British Navy. British trade routes, on the other hand, were free from direct German naval threat with the exception of those to Scandinavia. Nevertheless, the geography of the peninsula of Europe enabled Germany to keep the main water routes to Russia closed despite British seapower. The war at sea in World War I became primarily a contest between the navies of Great Britain and Germany. The former received assistance from the French and United States navies, but the navies of Italy and Austria did little more than counter each other in the Adriatic Sea. The Russian Navy, weak in morale, was locked in the Baltic and Black seas, while the navy of Turkey consisted mostly of two ships of the former German Mediterranean Squadron and their crews. The navy of Great Britain had been its first line of defense for centuries, but the German Navy was a relatively new creation, a product of German nationalism and overseas aspirations. It was essentially a surface navy, designed to challenge the seapower of Britain in the narrow waters of the North Sea. In the end, it contested this power on the oceans with the submarine and came close to winning the war. Prussia began laying the foundations of German naval power in 1853-1854, when it purchased from Oldenburg a small piece of territory on shallow Jade Bay in the southeastern corner of the North Sea. A port, Wilhelmshaven, was constructed there at great expense and completed in 1869. By annexing Holstein in 1864 after the war with Denmark, Prussia also obtained the excellent port of Kiel. A canal between Kiel and the Elbe River estuary connecting the Baltic and North seas was completed in 1895. By 1914 this canal had been deepened and widened so that the largest ships of the German Navy could transit it. The growth of the German Navy was stimulated by trade competition with Great Britain and by a growing antagonism toward that strong maritime power. Bills for increased naval construction were enacted in 1898, 1900, and 1905, the last calling for a fleet built around 40 battleships to be completed by 1917. A navy that could challenge Great Britain was thus created over opposition of the Imperial General Staff and of liberal elements in the Reichstag. It was primarily the work of Adm. Alfred von Tirpitz, who was the first trained seaman to serve as secretary of state for naval affairs, and who had the support of Emperor William II. This expansion of the German Navy could not help but affect Great Britain. While the modern British Fleet had been building since 1889 as an answer to the current naval ambitions of France and Russia, these two countries no longer presented a threat to Britain after 1904. Instead, the rising German Navy forced the British into an alliance with them. The development of the Triple Entente permitted the area of activity of the British Fleet to be transferred from the Mediterranean Sea and the English Channel to the North Sea, and a major naval ship-building program was inaugurated to maintain a 60 percent superiority over the Germans. The armament and speed of warships were improved, and oil was adopted as fuel. This progress culminated in the design of the five powerful battleships of the Queen Elizabeth class, which were armed with 15-inch guns and could make 27 knots. In both Britain and Germany the capital ship monopolized naval planning to the exclusion of more modern types, such as the destroyer, the submarine, and the airplane. The British Navy stressed speed and the largest possible caliber of guns in order to retain initiative and the offensive, while the Germans emphasized hitting power and strong construction at the expense of speed and radius of action, which they considered secondary for a navy built primarily for attrition operations in the North Sea. The skill of their naval designers and the competence of their officer corps made the German Navy, ship for ship, a formidable rival to that of Great Britain. In many technical features of gunnery and damage control, the Germans were superior. War planning in both countries, however, left much to be desired. Navies had gone through a long period of technological changes but had experienced little combat to test the strategic and tactical effects of these changes. In Germany, Admiral von Tirpitz, in his efforts to keep the navy independent, had allowed the General Staff to ignore his service in their war plans. No provisions were made for such joint operations as seizing the Continental side of the English Channel or stopping the flow of troops and supplies from England to France. At the same time, the German Navy, in its concentration on the capital ship, failed to develop the full potentiality of the torpedo, the mine, and the submarine, obvious weapons of a lesser naval power. In Great Britain the two services also made their war
plans separately. The admirals expected to conduct a close blockade
of Germany and to employ ground forces in amphibious operations on the
German coast, ignoring the development of steam navies and high-powered
ordnance, which would make such plans difficult to carry out. They also
ignored the fact that British military leaders were thinking about something
entirely different. The latter, despite their country's control of the
seas, were worried about invasion, and they made plans for employing
their forces offensively, not in exploiting the mobility and freedom
of action of seapower but rather' in reinforcing the French Army on
the Continent. This revolutionary change in British strategy stemmed
from staff conversations with the French that began in 1906. Although
these conversations never reached the form of agreements or plans, they
committed the small British regular army of seven divisions to employment
in France in the event of war with Germany. When war finally came, these
seven divisions were followed by millions of men.
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