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This WWI naval history vividly tells the story of the Royal Navy’s Northern Blockade and the battles at sea that brought Germany to its knees. At the outbreak of World War I, Britain established a naval blockade that greatly diminished Germany’s access to trade and vital resources. The Northern Blockade brought the German economy to its knees and greatly diminished home front morale. Patrolling the inhospitable waters between Iceland and Scotland, the 10th Cruiser Squadron played a vital role in winning the war on the Western Front. At the same time, the Royal Navy successfully countered Germany’s attacks on British commerce, preventing much suffering in Britain. Drawing on numerous first-hand accounts, Historian Steve Dunn vividly chronicles this long-running battle at sea. Beginning with the blockade’s initial formation, he recounts the changes in strategy on both sides, including the use of converted liners and armed merchant vessels as warships. He also vividly describes the final destruction of German surface vessel commerce warfare, culminating in the hard-fought battle between the raider SMS Leopard and two British warships.
Great Britain's economic blockade of Germany in World War I was one of the key elements to the victory of the Entente. Though Britain had been the leading exponent of blockades for two centuries, the World War I blockade was not effective at the outbreak of hostilities.
In A Scrap of Paper, Isabel V. Hull compares wartime decision making in Germany, Great Britain, and France, weighing the impact of legal considerations in each. She demonstrates how differences in state structures and legal traditions shaped the way the three belligerents fought the war. Hull focuses on seven cases: Belgian neutrality, the land war in the west, the occupation of enemy territory, the blockade, unrestricted submarine warfare, the introduction of new weaponry, and reprisals. A Scrap of Paper reconstructs the debates over military decision-making and clarifies the role law played—where it constrained action, where it was manipulated, where it was ignored, and how it developed in combat—in each case. A Scrap of Paper is a passionate defense of the role that the law must play to govern interstate relations in both peace and war.
A number of major blockades, including the Continental System in the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, the American Civil War, and World Wars I and II, in addition to the increased use of peacetime blockades and sanctions with the hope of avoiding war, are examined in this book. The impact of new technology and organizational changes on the nature of blockades and their effectiveness as military measures are discussed. Legal, economic, and political questions are explored to understand the various constraints upon belligerent behavior. The analysis draw upon the extensive amount of quantitative material available from military publications.
New naval history of the First World War which reveals the contribution of the war at sea to Allied victory.
This compelling book explores Germany’s campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare in World War I, which marked the onset of total war at sea. Noted historian Lawrence Sondhaus shows how the undersea campaign, intended as an antidote to Britain’s more conventional blockade of German ports, ultimately brought the United States into the war. Although the German people readily embraced the argument that an “undersea blockade” of Britain enforced by their navy’s Unterseeboote (U-boats) was the moral equivalent of the British navy’s blockade of German ports, international opinion never accepted its legitimacy. Sondhaus explains that in their initial, somewhat confused rollout of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915, German leaders underestimated the extent to which the policy would alienate the most important neutral power, the United States. In rationalizing the risk of resuming the unrestricted campaign in 1917, they took for granted that, should the United States join the Allies, German U-boats would be able to stop the transport of an American army to France. But by bringing the United States into the war, while also failing to stop the deployment of its troops to Europe, unrestricted submarine warfare ultimately led to Germany’s defeat. Because US manpower proved decisive in breaking the stalemate on the Western Front and securing victory for the Allies, Sondhaus argues that Germany’s decision to stake its fate on the U-boat campaign ranks among the greatest blunders of modern history.
During the first two years of World War I, Germany struggled to overcome a crippling British blockade of its mercantile shipping lanes. With only sixteen dreadnought-class battleships compared to the renowned British Royal Navy's twenty-eight, the German High Seas Fleet stood little chance of winning a direct fight. The Germans staged raids in the North Sea and bombarded English coasts in an attempt to lure small British squadrons into open water where they could be destroyed by submarines and surface boats. After months of skirmishes, conflict erupted on May 31, 1916, in the North Sea near Jutland, Denmark, in what would become the most formidable battle in the history of the Royal Navy. In Jutland, international scholars reassess the strategies and tactics employed by the combatants as well as the political and military consequences of their actions. Most previous English-language military analysis has focused on British admiral Sir John Jellicoe, who was widely criticized for excessive caution and for allowing German vice admiral Reinhard Scheer to escape; but the contributors to this volume engage the German perspective, evaluating Scheer's decisions and his skill in preserving his fleet and escaping Britain's superior force. Together, the contributors lucidly demonstrate how both sides suffered from leadership that failed to move beyond outdated strategies of limited war between navies and to embrace the total war approach that came to dominate the twentieth century. The contributors also examine the role of memory, comparing the way the battle has been portrayed in England and Germany. An authoritative collection of scholarship, Jutland serves as an essential reappraisal of this seminal event in twentieth-century naval history.
In his study of the Allied blockade of 1915-1919, Vincent examines the rationale and impact of this first large-scale use of food as a weapon in the twentieth century. Vincent demonstrates that the collapse of the German war effort was induced as much by prolonged hunger as by military reversal. Under blockade since 1915, the starving Germans were, by 1918, in a state of growing anarchy. Remarkably, however, the armistice ending hostilities specifically required the continuation of the blockade until such time as German signatures had been affixed to a peace treaty.
The Tenth Cruiser Squadron of the Grand Fleet had the task of patrolling the seas between Scotland and Greenland to intercept enemy ships trying to escape into the ocean and merchant ships who could be carrying goods destined for Germany. This was a task of great political sensitivity, since almost all the ships intercepted were neutrals, and requiring great physical endurance from ships and men in the violent North Atlantic. The Maritime Blockade of Germany in the Great War is a comprehensive collection of the records of the Northern Patrol. It consists of regular reports of the admirals in command, to which are added other relevant official records, and more informal documents. There are the chatty letters of Captain Vivian and HMS Patia, the appalling experiences of young officers placed in barely seaworthy sailing ships to see that they went into port for examination, the patehtic 'mutiny' by a bored, distressed and underpaid black gang, the diary of Able Seaman Style, demonstrating the tedium of the patrol, and the self-satisfied diary of Dr Shaw. There are also the casualities: ships overwhelmed by storms, sunk by enemy action, torpedoed. The ships of the Patrol were perhaps the most constantly active Royal Navy vessels in the Great War, a barely acknowledged yet vital component in the eventual Allied victory