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Jutland, the U-Boat War, and the Battle for the North Sea
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Battle of Jutland was the largest naval clash in history — but the war at sea was decided not by battleships, but by blockades and submarines. This chapter explores how Britain strangled Germany from the sea, and how Germany fought back beneath the waves.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's the question that haunted every German strategist from the first weeks of the war: what happens when your enemy controls the ocean, and you don't? Britain's naval dominance wasn't a surprise.
Germany wasn't simply going to accept this. The Imperial German Navy, the Kaiserliche Marine, had been built at enormous expense precisely to challenge British sea power.
The raw numbers were staggering. Britain committed roughly one hundred fifty warships.
The submarine had existed before the war. What the war did was transform it from a novelty into a strategic weapon of the first order.
On the seventh of May, nineteen fifteen, the RMS Lusitania was sailing off the southern coast of Ireland when a German U-boat torpedo struck her. She sank in eighteen minutes.
In January nineteen seventeen, Germany made the decision. Unrestricted submarine warfare would resume.
Step back from the individual battles and the sinking ships, and a larger picture comes into focus. The war at sea was, in a real sense, the war's underlying contest of endurance.
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