The Great War - WW1
The War at Sea
When war broke out, Admiral Beatty, commander of the Royal Navy's battle cruiser squadron, exclaimed 'For thirty years I've waited for this day!' The German High Seas Fleet did not oblige the flamboyant Beatty. Most of the German Fleet withdrew to port. The losses the Germans sustained in the action off the Heligoland Bight on 28th of august, when Beatty's battle cruisers sank three light cruisers and a destroyer, reinforced the German high command's reluctance to risk its battle fleet in the North Sea.
The German Navy hit back on the 1st of November off the coast of Chile, where it's China Squadron, commanded by Admiral Graf Von Spee, destroyed a squadron of obsolescent British cruisers. Spee's success was short-lived, his two battle cruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, were hunted down and sunk off the Falklands Islands by a British task force led by the battle cruisers Invincible and Inflexable.
Meanwhile, the Germans continued to play tip and run in the North Sea. On the 16th of December their battlecruisers bombarded the coastal towns of Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby. Five weeks later, on the 24th of January 1915, on another sweep into the North Sea, a German force of three battlecruisers, five cruisers and 22 destroyers, commanded by vice-Admiral Von Hipper, was intercepted by Beatty's battlecruiser squadron. In the ensuing Battle of Dogger Bank the British sank the elderly cruiser Blucher and badly mauled the rest of Hipper's force before he slipped away.
Clash of the Grand Fleet
Confronted with the numerically superior Royal Navy, Vice-Admiral Scheer, who has assumed command of the German High Seas Fleet, hoped to entice elements of the British Grand Fleet into a series of isolated actions in which the British's strength would be worn down. However, the Royal Navy was able to anticipate the moves in this strategy thanks to the capture, early in the war, of the Germans signals and cipher books.
On the 30th of May 1916, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, commander of the British Grand Fleet, learned via intercepted radio messages that the German fleet was sailing from Wilhelmshaven. In the vanguard was Vice-Admiral Von Hipper's Scouting Force of battlecruisers and light cruisers, the bait to lead the British battle cruisers commanded by Vice-Admiral Beatty on to the guns of Scheer's battleships before Jellicoe could come to Beatty's aid. Jellicoe set his own trap. Unknown to Scheer, his 24 Dreadnought battleships were steaming south from Scapa Flow on an interception course while Beatty's squadron of nine battlecruisers, reinforced by four fast new battleships of the Queen Elizabeth class, sailed from Rosyth. Screened and supported by dozens of smaller warships, 37 British capital ships of the Dreadnought type were sailing against 23 of their German equivalents. It was the only occasion on which two modern Battle fleets have engaged each other in European waters.
In the first clash between the battlecruisers, which began at 3:48pm on the 31st of May, at a range of 18'000 yards, Beatty lost the Indefatigable and Queen Mary. At 5:26pm he turned back towards Jellicoe in an attempt to lure Scheer on to the guns of the British Grand Fleet. Scheer swiftly executed a 'battle turn away', in the process of which another British battlecruiser, the Invincible was sunk. In rapidly fading light the two fleets ran into each other again at 7:15pm. Once again threatened with destruction, Scheer withdrew to the west under the cover of a mass torpedo attack by his destroyers which forced Jellicoe to turn away to the east. When daylight came Jellicoe found himself steaming across an empty sea. The British had lost three battlecruisers, three armoured cruisers and eight destroyers; the Germans lost one old battleship, one battlecruiser, four light cruisers and three destroyers. The Germans could claim a tactical success but the strategic advantage still lay with the Royal Navy as the Grand Fleet remained in being.
The Battle of the Atlantic
By 1914 Germany had a submarine fleet of roughly 70 U-boats. German admirals and their British counterparts initially saw the submarine as an auxiliary to their main fleets, acting as scouts and harrying battleships. Little attention was given to the submarine's potential against Britain's merchant shipping lifeline.
At the beginning of 1915 the German Navy stepped up its U-boat operations after the declaration of a blockade on the British Isles. Surface hunters forced U-boat commanders to make periscope rather than surface attacks, a tactic which made it hard to identify neutral vessels. On the 7th of May a U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania, among the 1'200 civilian passengers were 124 Americans. Fear of drawing the US into the war prompted the Germans to bring a halt to unrestricted submarine warfare in September 1915.
Deadlock on the Western Front led to renewed demands for the reinstatement of unrestricted submarine warfare. On the 31st of January 1917 the Germans announced that all shipping, including neutral vessels, would be sunk on sight in the war zone of the eastern Atlantic, the measure which brought the Americans into the war. This did not unduly trouble the German high command, which had calculated that Britain would be starved into submission in five months, before US intervention could led be effective. The U-boats nearly succeeded. In April 1917, the month the United States entered the war, they sank over a million tons of shipping vessels. The answer, forced on an unwilling Admiralty by the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, was the convoy system. In the vastness of the Atlantic, 100 ships sailing in convoy, were as difficult for a U-boat to locate as a ship sailing alone and unprotected. An experimental convoy was run from Gibraltar on the 10th of May 1917, and by November the system had become fully operational, forcing U-boats to make underwater attacks. Convoy escorts were able to locate U-boats with the assistance of increasingly reliable hydrophones and attack them with depth charges. Mines were also improved and claimed many U-boats. By 1918 the average life expectancy of a U-boat based on the Flanders coast was only six voyages.