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 probed and explored emerging techniques and principles in naval warfare which would be critical in future conflicts, and in particular the Second World War.

Naval warfare was in a state of flux when war broke out in 1914. Two important technical revolutions around the turn of the century had thrown the entire enterprise into a state of rapid flux. First, the advent of fast ships armed with torpedoes (supplemented by naval mines) had raised the possibility that expensive capital ships could be easily sunk by relatively cheap and expendable countermeasures. This threat directly provoked the second technical shift, which was the emergence of the all-big-gun battleship (inaugurated by the British Dreadnought) which promised to overcome the torpedo threat by fighting from astonishing ranges, measured in thousands of yards, thus firing safely beyond the reach of enemy torpedoes.

In 1914, dreadnought equivalent battleships were in short supply. Only Great Britain and Germany had any meaningful battlefleets to speak of. The enormous expense of these ships made them inherently very precious, and admirals on both sides of the war fretted endlessly about the idea that a wrong step - being caught out of position, running through a minefield, or being ambushed by torpedo boats - could almost instantly neutralize sea power through the loss of these expensive ships. Paradoxically, then, Dreadnoughts - which had been the measuring unit of sea power in the prewar years and were widely understood to be the most powerful combat system in the world - were subjects of extreme caution and strategic hesitation. Winston Churchill would famously refer to Admiral John Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet, as “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.”

The conduct of the main battlefleets in the war served to upend longstanding strategic sensibilities, exemplified in the writings of Mahan, which anticipated that decisive action by combatant battlefleets would determine the outcome of the war at sea. As it turned out, those fleets were now so expensive and precious that there was low tolerance to risk them in battle. This created a feedback loop of futility, particularly for the Germans. German naval policy in the prewar years had been focused maniacally on the idea that only a competitive battlefleet of Dreadnought equivalent ships could secure sea control for Germany, but once war broke out that same fleet represented such an enormous and irreplaceable investment of resources that it could not be risked in battle except in near perfect circumstances, which never presented themselves.

The German failure to generate strategic value with such an expensive asset dovetailed with new British blockading strategies, which flaunted established international law to interdict merchant shipping at great distances from the German coast. This bred extreme frustration in Berlin, which in turn provoked a new interest in unrestricted submarine warfare as a method to counter-blockade the British isles. Meanwhile, both the British and German navies would experiment with an entirely novel operational problem: how to amphibiously land ground forces against well defended enemy positions.

In short, naval operations in the First World War generally sort into two different categories. The first comprises those technical and operational forms which were disappointments: namely, economic blockade and battlefleets comprised of capital ships fighting in line. These were expected to be central elements of the naval war which exerted a decisive influence on the overall trend of the conflict, only to fail to live up to lofty prewar expectations. The second category consists of surprises: new operational tasks which received very little energy and investment in the prewar military buildup, only to assert unexpected potency and importance in wartime. These consisted primarily of long range submarine warfare and amphibious operations. For narrative purposes, this article is centered on the disappointments.

Taken collectively, the First World War - despite its enduring reputation as a sprawling land war par excellence - saw naval warfare evolve rapidly during the conflict, in ways that greatly surprised prewar planners and theorists. The popular Mahanian understanding of naval conflict, which placed economic blockade and decisive battle between concentrated capital ship fleets at the center of strategic logic, came unraveled. Both the battleship and the blockade proved to be indecisive and inadequate levers, while previously overlooked concepts like contested amphibious landings and unrestricted submarine warfare began to emerge as critical operational capabilities. At sea as on land, this war was not as expected.

Strategic Standoff: The British Blockade

Blockades and cargo interdiction had a long established place of pride in naval warfare, as the veritable raison d'être of naval forces as such. Britain won a series of wars against the Dutch and the French in previous centuries through the strangulation of enemy seaborne trade, and more recent blockades involving the United States Navy (against the Confederacy and the Spanish in Cuba) demonstrated that the principle was still in effect. This was a point of particular emphasis in the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who served in the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron in the American Civil War. For Mahan and his disciples, the ability to interdict enemy trade, conferred by the sea control which was won in pitched fleet battles, was the whole point of having a fleet to begin with.

That the Royal Navy would attempt some sort of blockade against the Central Powers was therefore an axiomatic element of war planning for most parties, but the particular form of the blockade was much more complicated than is generally appreciated. This was due to developments in both the technology and tactics of naval warfare and in the legal-bureaucratic sensibilities governing trade. Making matters even more complicated, Germany was Great Britain’s largest trading partner, and unwinding the mutual dependence of the two economies was not easy even after war had broken out. Furthermore, the British had to reckon with the interests and views of a variety of neutral countries, including the United States, in its efforts to choke off German commerce.

Above all, it was clear that a blockade of Germany would be fundamentally different from past efforts due to the advent of torpedoes and mines. The asymmetrical threat posed by cheap and plentiful torpedo boats against expensive capital ships was a well established concept dating back to the mid-19th Century, but the effect was made unmistakably real in the Russo-Japanese War, which saw both minefields and torpedoes put to effective use. During his tenure as First Sea Lord, Jacky Fisher came to the unequivocal view that a close blockade, which would station British ships on a permanent basis around the German coastline, was nonsensical given the treat posed by torpedoes, and any plan which relied upon long term exposure to German torpedo boats had to be excluded categorically. War plans drafted in 1910, for example, rejected outright the idea of a close blockade, though they were somewhat confused and contradictory as to what the alternative might be.

The inability of the Royal Navy to conduct a close blockade of the German coastline dovetailed with the emerging international consensus around the legality of blockading action. The 1856 Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law, in particular, had put important parameters around blockades. The purpose of that convention, above all, had been an effort by the French and British to abolish the ancient practice of privateering (once common), which had come to be seen as little more than thinly veiled piracy. The Paris agreement, however, had to find some way to distinguish between illicit piracy and a lawful form of blockade, and stipulated that blockades constituted a lawful act of war so long as they were effective, a parlance which referred to a blockading force permanently sealing off an enemy port.

The strange upshot of this was that, per the Paris declaration, a full close blockade was considered lawful, but a partial blockade was not. The logic is fairly easy to understand, in that it served to protect neutral ships and differentiate between a blockade and piracy. If a belligerent navy could station a sufficient force to declare the enemy port closed, this would be deemed lawful, and it would create no ambiguity as to whether neutral shipping could freely enter. The concept here was that a lawful blockade ought to be explicit and complete: either the blockading force could seal off and close the enemy port, or it could not. If it could not, then it was considered unlawful to interfere with neutral shipping.

A second concept which emerged, first from the Paris declaration and later from the 1909 London Declaration concerning the Laws of Naval War, was a growing distinction between types of contraband. This question related not only to the explicit seaborne trade of a belligerent, but also cargoes carried by neutral countries. Early attempts at defining “contraband” separated cargoes into those that were absolute contraband, which meant explicitly military products like munitions, and conditional contraband like raw materials and grain.

The biggest problem, from the British perspective, was the existence of neutral trading partners. In the prewar years, British war planning was heavily preoccupied with the predicted capacity of Belgian and Dutch shipping to make up the difference in German trade. There were even parties within the British government who went so far as to suggest that a blockade was a futile enterprise to begin with for precisely this reason. The British consul-general in Frankfurt, for example, wrote:

It would be a matter of great importance whether a blockade of the German ports could at the same time be extended to the Dutch and Belgian ports… If there are reasons for not so far extending the blockade a great part of the traffic intended for Germany would make for Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Antwerp, etc.; the goods would then enter Germany by way of the Rhine.

Although prewar thinking was fixated on the Dutch and the Belgians as the anticipated leak in the blockade, wartime revealed that the problem was far more expansive, and Germany was able to import significant quantities of critical materials though countries like Sweden and Denmark. By far the most important neutral, however, was the United States, which vehemently protested interference with its shipping. The British government would pursue a variety of diplomatic-bureaucratic workarounds in an attempt to contain neutral trade with Germany, but the results were less than impressive.

In short, changes to both the technical and diplomatic context of blockading created something of a strategic crisis for the British. On the one hand, the rise of torpedoes and modern naval minefields made a close blockade more or less untenable, and the Royal Navy was forced - after many debates and revisions of their war plans - to adopt a long-range blockade enforced at strategic standoff distances. Rather than loitering off the German coast to close German ports directly, the Royal Navy established screening lines at the Strait of Dover and in the North Sea between Scotland and the Norwegian Coastline.

The distant blockade solved the operational problem by keeping the Royal Navy’s screening fleets at standoff range from German bases, and it allowed the mass of the Grand Fleet to be stationed far to the north at Scapa Flow, where it was safe from surprise attack at anchor. It did nothing, however, to answer the question of how German access to world markets could be satisfactorily reduced without violating the rights of neutral countries. This, indeed, became a thorny strategic question which tormented the British war effort for years.

When war broke out in 1914, the plan for the distant blockade was immediately put into effect. Popular historiography of the war, in glossing over the naval dimension more generally, tends to take the effectiveness of the blockade for granted, evidenced by the food shortages which gripped Germany in the latter years of the war - particularly the infamous “turnip winter.”

In fact, the Royal Navy’s blockade of Germany, although achieved in its technical parameters, became a bitter disappointment and a source of great internal disagreement in Britain. It could not achieve its highest strategic objectives - neither crippling the German economy nor compelling the German High Seas Fleet to come out for a fight.

In technical terms, the blockading scheme was simple enough. A series of minefields were laid across the northern entrance to the North Sea, right up to Norwegian waters, and around the Strait of Dover. This created extremely manageable choke points for shipping which allowed British cruiser squadrons to stop and search merchant vessels passing through. On November 2, 1914, the British government declared that the entire North Sea was a “war zone” through which merchant ships could transit only if they followed specified routes through the minefields, where they could be detained and searched for contraband. As events turned out, almost all of these vessels were either allied or neutral: simply the threat of the Royal Navy sent the German merchant marine scurrying for safe harbor at the outbreak of war, and they spent the entirety of the conflict laid up either at home or in neutral ports. There was no meaningful effort by German shipping to test the blockade at any point in the war.

In 1915 (the first full year of the war), the Royal Navy would intercept some 3,000 ships in the North Sea, with only a very small number slipping through unmolested. Judged purely on the capacity of the British to interdict traffic, the blockade was nearly hermetic - and yet there was no collapse of the German economy or degradation of the German war effort. This failure was owed first to the ring of neutral countries which remained perfectly willing to prop up German imports, and secondly by the success of German scientists and engineers in finding substitutes for embargoed raw materials.

The former problem was chiefly diplomatic in nature, though it had a military component: namely the inability of the Royal Navy to penetrate into the Baltic Sea, which kept the sea lanes open for German trade with Scandinavia. The so-called “northern neutrals”, including the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, continued to trade intensively with Germany after the war began, with Sweden providing iron ore, Norway selling cooper and nickel, and the Dutch and the Danes exporting food.

The British did hope that the blockade, even if it did not create general economic collapse in Germany, might produce shortages in critical materials that could cripple the German war effort. These hopes were largely stymied by the success of German engineers in finding substitutes. One early projection by the British anticipated that the Germans would exhaust their stockpiles of manganese, which was an essential metallurgic input for gun manufacture, by late 1915. German chemists, however, were able to identify substitutes in addition to bolstering manganese stocks by recycling and refining old slag. Nitrates were another potential bottleneck, essential for the manufacture of both high explosives and fertilizer. Again, however, German chemists were able to devise a method for fixing atmospheric nitrogen. This method was more expensive than prewar sourcing (which primarily derived nitrates from bat guano sourced from South America), and it was never able to fully meet German needs: consequently, German agriculture suffered from lower availability of fertilizer. Nevertheless, the German army never ran seriously short on highs explosives, and by some estimates the German breakthrough in nitrate production managed to prologue the war by two years.

The upshot of all this was that the British blockade, while producing economic dislocation in Germany and greatly complicating many aspects of their economic management, was simply inadequate to bring Berlin to its knees. This bred a growing sense of frustration, particularly over the ongoing trade through neutral countries. By the middle of 1915, British policy was at war with itself, with the Navy advocating a more hermetic crackdown on neutral trade, and the Foreign Office, which prioritized friendly relations with neutrals, pushing back.

A March 1915 order attempted to tighten the blockade so that any goods suspected of being en-route to Germany could be seized, whether or not they were passing through neutral countries along the way, but the Foreign Office made repeated intrusions to weaken the enforcement, particularly in the face of American complaints. As one memorandum from Lord Grey, the Foreign Secretary, later put it:

Blockade of Germany was essential to the victory of the Allies, but the ill-will of the United States meant their certain defeat… Germany and Austria were self-supporting in the huge supply of munitions. The Allies soon became dependent for an adequate supply on the United States. If we quarreled with the united States we could not get that supply. It was better therefore to carry on the war without blockade, if need be, than to incur a break with the United States…. The object of diplomacy, therefore, was to secure the maximum of blockade that could be enforced without a rupture with the United States.

British enforcement was therefore roiled by a naval faction which advocated the strictest possible blockade, and the Foreign Office which continually intervened to neuter the blockade to preserve friendly relations with neutrals. More specifically, the Foreign Office instructed that detained ships were to be given “the benefit of the doubt” as to the destination of their cargoes, which in effect meant that neutral ships could be released after giving a simple guarantee (not subject to verification) that the contents were not bound for Germany. Thus, despite the March effort by the navy to button up the blockade, most neutral ships continued to be let through. Between March 1 and May 14, the Royal Navy halted and inspected 340 neutral vessels at the northern blockading line, of which only 6 were detained. Admiral Stanley Colville, who commanded the blockading bases in the Orkney and Shetland Islands, expressed his frustration:

It is inexplicable to me why cargoes are allowed to proceed to Copenhagen, and other ports, which it is obvious are intended for Germany.

It was not until the middle of 1916 that serious progress was made on tightening the blockade. The reason, put simply, was growing disillusionment with the Foreign Office’s approach, with both the Navy (particularly commander in chief of the Grand Fleet, Admiral Jellico) and the public growing increasingly vocal about what they saw as cowardice and unbecoming deference to neutrals on the part of Lord Grey.

Two polices implemented in 1916 finally went a long way towards remediating the deficiencies. The first was a system of “forced rationing” for neutrals, which essentially aimed to limit neutral imports to their pre-war levels, reasoning that any excesses were likely bound for Germany as their ultimate destination. The second policy, known as the black lists, prohibited business between British firms and neutral countries or firms suspected of trading with Germany. This formed an obvious precursor to modern systems of sanctioning. The black lists gave the British government enormous leverage to force neutrals to disaffiliate from Germany, not only by depriving them of access to British markets, but even more importantly by allowing the Admiralty to deny bunker coal to the ships of any blacklisted firm. Finally, the British established a system of certification whereby their embassies in neutral countries (most importantly the United States) could issue certificates to “innocent cargoes” which would allow them to pass through the blockading lines without being detained for inspection.

Taken together, these policies finally laid the groundwork for substantial strangulation of German trade as the war plunged on into 1917. Nevertheless, the early years of strategic paralysis and ineffectuality revealed the extent to which the world had changed from the heady days of the close blockade, when a squadron of ships could simply loiter outside the enemy port. It was not just that the technology of war had changed, forcing experimentation with long range blockading, but also the geopolitical substrate. The interconnectivity of the global trading system, with its myriad nodes and competing interests, confounded the British blockade in numerous ways, and left the world’s largest and most powerful battlefleet with little to do but sit in its harbor at Scapa Flow while its admirals fought the politicians.

Anticlimax: The Battle of Jutland

The naval theater of the Great War was, much like the sprawling fronts on the continent, subject to indecision and stasis. Unlike the front in France, however, which was locked up by the operational difficulties of exploitation and maneuver, the sea was inactive due to general lethargy and prohibitive force ratios which left the belligerents with little incentive to fight. The navies of Europe had, in the prewar era, sorted themselves into starkly differentiated power tiers which discouraged them from seeking or accepting battle. Just as the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet, based at Scapa Flow, was much more powerful than the German High Seas Fleet, the German fleet was in turn substantially more powerful than the Russian Baltic Fleet. The effect was that everybody was content to stay in the safety of their bases, with the weaker fleets having nothing to gain from coming out for battle. The Germans had, in effect, built a fleet that was simultaneously too weak to accept battle with the British, but in turn too strong for the Russians to accept battle in the Baltic. Similar conditions accrued in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, where the Russians held a preponderance of force over the Turks, and the French and British bottled up the Austrians.

On the German side, this general predisposition towards inaction was influenced by the outsized role of the Kaiser, who was torn between a desire to see the fleet take more aggressive actions and a strong personal aversion to losing ships. In August 1914, only a few weeks after the beginning of the war, several smaller German vessels, including light cruisers and a patrol boat, were sunk in a British ambush in the Heligoland Bight - a rather clever operation on the part of the Royal Navy, which entailed using submarines to bait German destroyers and catch them out at sea. Although the Battle of Heligoland Bight was strategically ancillary (involving, as it did, mainly cruisers and screening ships with no battleships taking part), the loss of vessels in combat seemed to have decisively spooked the Kaiser, who prohibited future fleet operations without explicit approval from himself. Tirpitz would later complain in his memoirs:

The Emperor did not wish for losses of this sort… The loss of ships was to be avoided; fleet sallies and any greater undertakings must be approved by His Majesty in advance. I took the first opportunity to explain to the Emperor the fundamental error of such a muzzling policy. This step had no success but on the contrary, there sprang up from that day forth an estrangement between the Emperor and myself which steadily increased.

Had such an order remained in place, it might have utterly neutered the German Navy for the remainder of the war. As matters played out, however, relentless lobbying from the admirals convinced the Kaiser to relax the instructions, authorizing the Commander in Chief of the High Seas Fleet (Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl) to make sorties on his own initiative, albeit with a strong admonition not to lose ships and to avoid operating too close to the British coast. In particular, German operations were impeded by a dogmatic assumption that the fleet had to remain within close range of its own bases, for a variety of reasons. These included the desire to fight within the range of German destroyers (which were viewed as an important equalizer against the larger British battlefleet), the need to be close enough to base for damaged ships to return safely for repair, and the fear that if the High Seas Fleet ventured too far out, it might be ambushed while returning home.

In effect, these assumptions, combined with the Kaiser’s tremendous aversion to losses, made the Germans even more cautious than the logic of the force ratios might have dictated, and trended the North Sea towards a stalemate. The Germans had built their fleet with an intention to fight in close proximity to their own bases and were unwilling to venture further out in force, while the British were content to remain at strategic standoff and sort out their blockade. British fears of a German invasion of Great Britain proved unfounded. Exercises conducted in the prewar years by the Royal Navy had revealed that it was possible for German ships to evade British patrols and reach Great Britain undetected and the prospect of a landing on the home island continued to weigh heavy, but this was unnecessary and showed that the British attributed far more strategic aggression to their adversary than was warranted. Early war German excursions were limited to attempts to shell and mine British naval facilities, but these attempts did little damage.

With the Kaiser finally making the decision to allow limited operations at the end of 1914, von Ingenohl planned a limited excursion designed to probe the outer edge of the German Bight. The operation was as limited in scope as one can imagine; the objective was to reconnoiter the shallow region in the central North Sea known as the Dogger Bank, clear out British trawlers (which the Germans believed were a source of reconnaissance and surveillance for the Royal Navy), and destroy any British patrol ships encountered. Admiral Franz von Hipper was tasked with the excursion and given the four battlecruisers of the High Seas Fleet, along with an armored cruiser. Because the Germans assumed that the British battlefleet remained stationed at Scapa Flow enforcing the blockade (with a secondary detachment guarding the mouth of the Thames), it was believed that the German battlecruisers could make the trip to the Dogger Bank, clear it out, and return home without encountering British capital ships. Instead, they were caught in the open by five British battlecruisers under Admiral David Beatty. What had gone wrong?

Although the Germans did not know it, almost from the outset of hostilities their communications had been compromised by British signals intelligence. In contrast to the Second World War, where British intelligence cracked German communications through extensive cryptographic research, in the Great War the coup was a matter of wonderful luck. Within the first weeks of the war, the British obtained several German naval codebooks. One codebook was seized from a German cruiser which ran aground on the Russian coast after it became lost in dense fog (the Russians passed it along to the Royal Navy). A second was obtained in the far east when the Australians captured the steamship Hobert, which remarkably had not been informed that the war had started. Thinking there was nothing amiss, the Hobert allowed Australian personnel to board under the guise of a quarantine inspection and promptly had her codebook stolen. Finally, the captain of a a sinking German torpedo boat in the North Sea threw his codebook overboard in a lead-lined chest, which was soon dredged up by a British trawler. Any one of these three incidents would have been an exceptional stroke of luck for the allies, but all of them together were a signals intelligence windfall that soon had the British codebreakers taking a leisurely reading of the German Navy’s wireless traffic.

The Germans were very slow to understand the extent to which the Royal Navy’s operations were driven by their signals intelligence, and the ensuing Battle of the Dogger Bank was no exception. The German plan to reconnoiter and clear the bank was driven by assumptions about British deployments, while the British were reading much of the German wireless traffic and, while not having a truly comprehensive picture, reacting with an informed look at German movements. Thus, Hipper’s battlecruisers found themselves ambushed on the open sea by their British opposites in what became the war’s first encounter between capital ships.

Schematically, the ensuing battle was extremely simply and represented little more than a chase, with the British battlecruisers catching the Germans astern and pouring fire on them from the rear. Technically, however, the fight revealed both surprising capabilities and unexpected deficiencies. To begin with, the range of effective fire surpassed all expectations. Whereas prewar British assumptions placed the extremes of firing ranges at some 15,000 yards, Beatty’s flagship, HMS Lion, opened fire at 21,000 yards and scored a hit at 19,000. Unfortunately, British optics and rangefinders were largely useless at such extreme ranges - a particularly disquieting notion, given a prewar British decision not to invest in a costly fire control system (the famous Pollen system) which promised improved accuracy at these extreme ranges. The result was a mixed bag for Beatty: his guns could do astonishing damage at previously unthinkable ranges, but the rate of fire and the fire control system proved unsatisfactory.

The outcome for the British was further diminished by problems of command and control. British fire ripped the Blücher, which was in the rear of the German line, to shreds, and she was soon drifting out of the line in a wreck. Unfortunately, German return fire had heavily damaged Lion, and Beatty’s flagship began to fall out of the battle. Lion was not mortally wounded and she would not sink, but Beatty lost communication with the rest of his battlecruisers and had to resort to archaic signal flags to transmit orders. Beatty’s Flag Lieutenant, however, failed to transmit the Admiral’s orders, so despite Beatty’s wish to continue the pursuit of the German line, the British fleet pulled away to finish off the flailing Blücher. As a result of this command and control foul up, the remainder of Hipper’s force was able to slip away to safety.

In his post-battle reports, Beatty overlooked the signaling failure but could not avoid the conclusion that the victory was less complete than it should have been. In his view, however, the key problem was that the British rate of fire was too low - a problem that he attributed to standing instructions to conserve ammunition. This may or may not have been a contributory factor, but curiously Beatty seems to have failed to realize that the fire control on his ships was insufficient at extreme ranges, and that overall the British gunnery was unimpressive. The Germans, meanwhile, opted to simply hope that they had sunk a British ship to make up for the loss of the Blücher. Two British Battlecruisers - Beatty’s Lion and HMS Tiger - had been badly chewed up, and the German post-action report announced, incorrectly, that Tiger had sunk, allowing the Germans to falsely claim a draw. Even this was not enough to save Admiral von Ingenohl, who was removed from his post of February 2nd and replaced by Admiral Hugo von Pohl.

Shortly before he was promoted to Commander in Chief of the High Seas Fleet, von Pohl had received a memorandum from Admiral Tirpitz. The role of the venerable old Tirpitz in the First World War was strangely minimal; in the prewar period he had been the respected and powerful architect of German naval building in his post as State Naval Secretary, but once conflict broke out he was relegated to the sidelines, for the State Naval Secretary had no operational command whatsoever. From his perch on the sideline, Tirpitz became something of a one-man peanut gallery, offering criticisms and suggestions of naval operations that he had no authority to implement.

In his 1915 memo to von Pohl, Tirpitz made an abrupt about-face on Germany’s strategic conception of the naval war. Whereas in the prewar period Tirpitz had preached the Mahanian ethos of decisive battle by capital ships, he now argued that the navy had to pivot towards operations aimed at crippling the British economy. As he saw it, Germany had four options:

1. An air offensive (using airships) aimed at the dockyards and warehouses around London, to disrupt shipping into the city.

2. An unrestricted submarine blockade, using U-boats to sink all possible shipping into Britain.

3. A robust submarine and destroyer operation against the Channel and the mouth of the Thames, operating out of the bases captured in Belgium.

4. Long range cruiser raids in the Atlantic, aimed at both sinking enemy shipping and drawing British warships out of the North Sea.

This radical course change was quite notable, if for no other reason than that it contradicted the entire premise of Tirpitz’s prewar building program. The old Admiral had for years systematically eschewed submarines and cruisers in favor of battleships, only to advocate plans premised on the former ship types within the first few months of the war. In any case, Tirptiz’s call for a more aggressive prosecution of the economic war against Britain dovetailed with a general trend which saw the German operational sensibility grow more aggression. The Imperial Admiralty Staff was pressing for an operation to draw part of the British Grand Fleet into the Heligoland Bight, though von Pohl was skeptical that the British could be coaxed into doing something so patently stupid.