Archive Results For: WW1
Book Review-‘Fighting the Great War at Sea: Strategy, tactics and technology’ by N. Friedman
Readers with an interest in modern naval history will know of Friedman’s authorship of over 30 books, notably an eight-volume series on the design and development of US warship types, Fifty-Year War: Conflict and strategy in the Cold War (1999), and Network-centric Warfare: How navies learned to fight smarter through three World Wars (2009). Fighting […] Read More
Filed under: WW1
Subjects include: Battles & Tactics | Navies | Strategy & Diplomacy | Submarines | Weapons
Book Review-‘The Great War at Sea: A naval history of the First World War’ by L. Sondhaus
Two decades have passed since Paul Halpern’s A Naval History of World War One was published and became a corrective to the North Sea-centric studies fostered by Arthur Marder’s seminal work on the Royal Navy and the First World War. Now, with the conflict’s centenary, Lawrence Sondhaus has written an admirable successor with his The […] Read More
Filed under: WW1
Subjects include: Battles & Tactics | Navies
Book Review-‘The Last Days of the High Seas Fleet: From mutiny to Scapa Flow’ by N. Jellico
Nicholas Jellicoe is the grandson of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Jellicoe. Over the last few years he has thrown himself with great enthusiasm into the naval history of the First World War and his grandfather’s major role in it. I met him in Blackpool eight years ago to give him advice on launching his […] Read More
Filed under: WW1 | North Sea | Shipwrecks
Subjects include: Navies
Book Review-‘Scapa 1919: The archaeology of a scuttled fleet’ by I. McCartney, Osprey
The first thing to be said about this book is that it is not a traditional historical account of the ‘grand scuttle’, neither is Innes McCartney’s new book a traditional archaeological report, too many of which are hard going even for archaeologists. Instead the author has produced a hybrid publication which revisits the end of […] Read More
Filed under: WW1 | North Sea
Subjects include: Archaeology | Navies
Book Review – ‘Strategy and War Planning in the British Navy, 1887–1918’ by Shawn T. Grimes
The decades preceding the First World War may be considered a golden age of naval strategic thinking. During this time, the American Alfred Thayer Mahan produced his widely acclaimed The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660–1783 (1890), which brought sea power to the centre stage in political circles all around the Western world. In Britain, the […] Read More
Filed under: WW1 | Nineteenth Century | Twentieth Century
Subjects include: Administration | Navies | Strategy & Diplomacy
Book Review – ‘The Royal Navy and the German Threat 1901–1914: Admiralty plans to protect British trade in a war against Germany’ by Matthew S. Seligmann
The history of British naval policy at the start of the twentieth century has been keenly contested in recent years; Matthew Seligmann’s contribution to the debate takes its courage from close examination of the archival source on an aspect which has been largely neglected by previous scholarly efforts: the Admiralty’s engagement with the challenge of […] Read More
Filed under: Atlantic | WW1 | English Channel | North Sea | Irish Sea | Twentieth Century
Subjects include: Merchant Marines | Strategy & Diplomacy
Neutral Waters? British Diplomacy of Force in the Canary Islands at the Start of the First World War
At the beginning of the First World War, Britain had to confront a phenomenal challenge. Faced with the indisputable British naval hegemony, Germany launched the cruiser warfare, using armed merchant ships as auxiliary cruisers, as its first offensive weapon in the economic war, attacking trade from the South Atlantic, through which much of the British […] Read More
Filed under: Atlantic | Baltic | WW1 | English Channel | North Sea
Subjects include: Strategy & Diplomacy
The Battle of Jutland, Through a Looking-glass
The German High Seas Fleet’s sorties in strength after the battle of Jutland were few and inconclusive, but as a ‘fleet in being’ it remained a powerful threat. Britain’s Admiralty, alive to the tactical issues thrown up by Jutland’s titanic clash, was anxious to learn what had gone wrong. Luckily for the British, German veterans […] Read More
Filed under: WW1 | North Sea | Jutland
Subjects include: Battles & Tactics
The Convoy System in the Mid-Atlantic, 1917–1918
When in February 1917 Germany started the unrestricted submarine campaign, the number of merchant ships sunken by U-boats increased, reaching its peak in April that year. From that time the number of vessels sunk started to decrease. However, a more detailed study of the number of ships sunk while navigating the area between the north […] Read More
Filed under: Atlantic | WW1
Subjects include: Merchant Marines | Submarines
Articles The Archaeology of First World War U-boat Losses in the English Channel and its Impact on the Historical Record
This article examines how the archaeological record of 35 known U-boats sunk in the English Channel in the First World War compares with the assessment of U-boat destructions made by the Admiralty’s Antisubmarine Division (ASD) in 1919. Comparison of the two shows that only 48 per cent of the 37 assessments were correct. This divergence […] Read More
Filed under: WW1 | WW2
Subjects include: Archaeology | Navies | Submarines