The Great War at Sea: Blockade and Battleship

Treść źródłowa

The iconic imagery of World War One will always be centered on the trench and the howitzer: emblems of a futile and unfeeling ground war which consumed the young men of Europe by the tens and hundreds of thousands, exchanging battalions by the dozens for a few desolate miles of mud. This is not an unearned reputation, of course. The realities of industrial warfare were shocking, with both the slaughterous power of modern weaponry and the capacity of railways and modern communications to support mass armies upending prewar expectations, transforming Europe into a charnel house. There is limited room for historical revision in respects to the naval dimension of World War One. The Great War was predominately a land war fought by mass armies. Germany was victorious in the east, toppling Tsarist Russia through a mixed strategy of conventional ground campaigns and political subterfuge, in particular supporting a revolutionary antiwar millenarian named Vladimir Lenin. Although this mixed German strategy did largely secure the eastern flank and win a vast empire in East-Central Europe, the German victory was frittered away by a failure to achieve a decision in France before the arrival of American manpower, and by the collapse of the Central Powers in the Balkans. Broadly speaking, there is no “secret” history of World War One in this sense. Germany won in the east and was exhausted everywhere else. Nevertheless, the naval theaters of the Great War do hold considerable interest: not so much in that they fundamentally determined the outcome of the war, but in the way that they probe…