Frank Hipper wrote:If you only take into consideration military action, that's true to a certain extent. But not entirely.
If you take into consideration that hundreds of thousands of German civilians starved to death due to the British blokade that went on unabated, it's another story entirely.
If you take into consideration the massive shortages brought about by Germany's merchant marine being blokaded in port for four years, it's another story entirely. These shortages were so severe that German aircraft were being equipped with wooden wheels due to the rubber shortage, for an off the top of my head example.
A damn good point, but not one without an answer. If I may digress.
Mahan's thesis shares something in common with the ideas expressed by his hard-to-admit-any-influence intellectual protege, Giulio Douhet. The blockade in Mahan's view is strikingly similar to Douhet's view of the strategic bombing mission. The target was the enemy's economy, under the impression that choking the enemy populace's access to goods will force your adversary to concede the battlefield. Both Mahan and Douhet are partly right; depending on the self-sufficiency of the society being blockaded or hit from the air, in the end the enemy's economy will no longer sustain the war effort. Where both Mahan and Douhet go wrong is to say that wars are decided alone by fleet engagements which determine whether blockades hold or break and the strategic bombing of non-military targets. Just as we Jutland concludes nothing regarding the campaign in the North Atlantic, strategic bombing aimed at the Axis economies did far less to affect the land war than unrestricted submarine warfare. The blockade of Germany did little to change the balance of forces at the front. The stalemate persisted until the Americans added decisively to the strength of the Allies.
Corbett argued, much like modern air power theorists, that
interdiction of material directly related to the war effort could and would prove so effective in the short term that long term strategies aimed at starving the enemy would collapse against a successful campaign against a maritime power's commerce.
A major British defeat in the North Sea is unrelated to the U-Boat campaign in the Atlantic:
It appears as though you're saying that the British would devote their resources more to ASW operations than the fleet. Which on the surface would appear to be true, but there were no plans for expanding fleet numbers beyond the Hood class, anyway.
Right, but below the surface is a struggle between Mahanians in Jellicoe's camp, new thinkers in Sims camp, and Parliament--which is more interested in coming out ahead than in debating theories of sea power.
Jellicoe's focus may have been on the fleet, but he was far from unconcerned about the U-Boat threat. He simply had different ideas about how to deal with it.
Granted, my dismissal was simplistic.
You also ignore the fact that it was Jellicoe relaying his very grave concerns about merchant losses to Sims that opened Sims' eyes to the fact that Britain was in very bad shape.
Granted, Jellicoe did call on Sims. But then again, he didn't listen to him much.
Jellicoe did not ignore the U-Boat threat. Nor did he not come up with his own ideas on how to counter it, again.
Not his own ideas. Essentially he was forced to by events and politics to put Sims and some British officers together to come up with a defense. He was still predisposed to scoff at the necessity of an ASW mission.
NO ONE could remain grounded in reality and argue that strict adherence to theory, to the exclusion of all situations demanding flexibility, is how wars are fought.
Well, Jellicoe came pretty damned close. British Mahanians hoped they could find the decisive battle at sea necessary to force the Germans to concede control of the sea. Now they lost Jutland, but if the ratio had gone the British way you have to ask yourself how long it would take for Jellicoe to pursue an ASW mission.
Neither fleet was incapacitated by Jutland.
Granted.
Britain lost one modern battlecruiser and two on the verge of obsolescence, tragic losses in life, but inconsequential in terms of matriel.
Germany lost one modern battlecruiser and one pre-dreadnought battleship. Again, even being at the disadvantage she was, she could absorb these losses. Especially Pommern. German losses in light cruisers was something of a different matter, but not significant to the point of being a major handicap.
BTW, are you also reading from
Sea Power: A Naval History from the Naval Institute Press?
Only in the narrowest definition. Yes, it was a huge fleet engagement, but no one sought to press home their advantages or actually WIN the damned thing. You can't say that Mahan would promote timid tactics like a "battle turn away together" in furtherance of his theories.
No, but he might try and rationalize Jutland's outcome in the same manner you have, by declaring the action a success in that the blockade was sustained, despite the fact that the blockade was bleeding the Kaiser's economy so slowly that it did nothing to impact the German war effort. I also think he would've been more reluctant to "waste" money on an ASW mission than Jellicoe.
100% untrue.
No, it is true. Jellicoe did finally put a convoy system in place but only after he was circumvented by Prime Minister George. He had absolutely no idea about what to do with the threat before Sims got the Prime Minister to get him his attention again.
While battle fleets garner more than their fair share of attention and glamor, and Jutland represents to many the end-all be-all of big gun engagements (it wasn't, really.
), the fact remains that the fleets were, and are, tools to enable commerce. Something Mahan himself stressed.
Of course. But he recognized only blockades and considered the interdiction mission with contempt.
It was the British Grand Fleet's overwhelming strength that was the iron fist that enforced the blokade of Germany.
Germany's fleet was unable to meet that challenge, and permit their merchant fleet to sail.
Germany tried the pure guerre de course route, and failed.
Only because the British finally addressed it. Guerre de course is as successful only as the opposition is bad at defending against it.
Britain won in the North Sea through blokade, enforced by the battlefleet, and, again, there is no better example of the use of fleet action to, err...influence history.
Yet Britain could have lost the Atlantic and control of the sea if they didn't break from Mahan to address the U Boat threat.
The British denied Germany the ability to engage in commerce with the use of the Grand Fleet. This was of such importance to Germany's failure in the war that it can't be overstated.
Only because the German U Boat threat was addressed. Germany was hindering the British war effort with far greater success on the high seas than Britain was by blockading the economy of a continental power.
That is a very limited view, subs and destroyers achieved virtually nothing in the defeat of Germany, their achievements were in the defense of Britain. That defensive strategy alowed Britain to continue the war, but Britain's offensive strategy of blokade knocked Germany out of it.
I disagree. Destroyers took out Germany's weapon to break the Brits on the mainland. Had the convoy system not been adopted so successfully by the British, unrestricted submarine warfare very well could have spelled the death for Britain's war effort as it would do for Japan twenty years later--blockade or no. The United States decisively broke the backs of the Japanese war machine; the British did not for the Germans.
Proof to the contrary only when viewed with a myopic focus on the Atlantic...
Not myopic when you consider the most direct lifeline to British troops deployed on the mainland accessible to the German navy was the Channel and the Atlantic.
...the defense of British trade, and a complete disregard of of the application of fleet tactics and Germany's being starved through blokade.
The blockade strategy worked so slowly that its effect is negligible. If Jutland's significance is that it sustained a blockade that won the war for the British, it would be the first time in history a blockade was credited for such a victory.
Germany's submarines did nothing at all to lift the blokade, and the shortages of strategic materials that it caused were a direct factor leading to her losing the war.
See above comments about the efficacy of blockades.
The Confederate raiders had zero impact on the outcome of the Civil War.
Will guerre de course alone win wars for you against a major power that shares the same continent with you and industrially outperforms your economy? No. But will it delay the inevitable? Arguably it did during the Civil War for the reason you outline below and one other--the Conferates crippled the Federal merchant fleet. Now take two more or less evenly industrially matched states, one a martime power and another not far behind it and a continental power with a vicious predilection for unrestricted warfare. If Mahanians won the argument with Sims, the convoy system wasn't introduced, and the Americans never entered the war, is it conceivable that Germany could have beating Britain and France without having addressed the blockade? Not only is it conceivable, the German Admiralty still believed in January 1917, before the Americans stepped in, that they could sink enough tonnage to force the British to surrender even after the convoy system was adopted.
Their impact was in drawing dis-proportionate forces away from the theater of action to hunt for them, and to instill fear in insurance companies.
See above.
Fleet action DID equal control of the sea.
The North Sea.
Hahaha...okay, granted. Blockading the North Sea was dangerous to the Germans, but not nearly as dangerous as unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic was to the British. With submarines, even after the convoy system had been adopted, the Germans managed to level the playing field on the continent.
To ignore that is to ignore what Britain and Germany saw as the primary theater. And for Germany, Britain's control, through their fleet, was fatal.
Yet as we both know the fact that the North Sea was the primary theater does not mean that the war at sea couldn't lost elsewhere or that the Germans and Brits were entirely blind to the fact--despite Jellicoe's reluctance to see that way.
I tried, but I simply do not follow this...
If the British blockade meant everything, it would have been entirely successful in containing the fleet. However, submarines are not only blockade runners and commerce raiders, but they threatened to utterly frustrate the British on the mainland with a guerre de course defeat in the Atlantic. Therefore, if the blockade is successful and means everything, the U Boat doesn't exist.
The Confederate raider's gains were not material gains. At least not material in causing major disruption of supply due to numbers sunk.
And that almost all the war material the Union needed was already on the continent.
Their gains were primarily psychological. Mahan was correct in his interpretation.
What Mahan failed to do was ask himself what would have happened if the Confederate raiders never existed.
Correct, the scale of shipping means nothing here, but the dependance on shipping means everything.
Quite right, but every army with lines of communications stretching over the sea is dependant to some extent on those lines.
In that, Britain's case in WWI was unprecedented.
Good point, and Mahan would've been right to conclude that commerce raiding could not have decided victory in the Confederate favor for exactly the same reason Corbett could not do so for the blockade of Germany. And arguably because the dependancy on the sea as a lifeline for the troops deployed across the water was greater than in the previous century, Mahan may not have seen the significance of prior commerce raiding campaigns. But why did Corbett, who wrote his principles down before WWI as well and looked at the same examples as Mahan, perceive the value of guerre de course?
In a discussion of fleet action and it's impact in WWI, numerical superiority ruled German thought. It was as much a factor of Germany's refusal to sortie as anything else. Very significant.
Oh, I see what you're getting at. Granted.
Considering that the U-Boats did nothing to prevent the collapse of Germany, British satisfaction in keeping the HSF bottled up in port, along with nearly all other shipping, is warranted.
The U Boats are interdictors, an offensive weapon, not a defensive one.
Actually...
revprez wrote: As for "technological innovations," Mahan spent page after page decrying countless cases of smaller, weaker navies using commerce raiding to reach decision at sea, like ruling Lake Champlain an anomoly and Yorktown-Virginia Capes a British Blunder.
My bad. I should've wrote "smaller, weaker ships used for..."
Which, again, begs the question of who is suicidal enough to rely solely on theory in time of war?
Arguably Jellicoe, if he had won Jutland.
Flattery may get you everywhere, but only if you're trying to get in my pants.
Oh Lord, sorry man. Batting for the other team, and I'm a firm believer in using exits only as exits.
BTW, if this discussion had been cut out of this thread, is OT where it would still be most appropriate?
Rev Prez
