Great Britain

Germany’s Ocean Greyhounds and the Royal Navy’s First Battle Cruisers: An Historiographical Problem

“…First, Germany had too few auxiliary cruisers for it to be worth Britain's while to develop specific countermeasures against them; second, such raiders as Germany possessed would not be able to operate effectively because they could not re-provision themselves at sea; and, finally, building battle cruisers to hunt armed merchantmen would have been far too expensive to justify. 15 At initial glance, these seem like reasonable observations-until one looks at the archival records of the Royal Navy. 16 The question of numbers illustrates this well.…”

1914: The German War?

“…The despatch of the BEF to the Continent did not constitute an automatic response to war but remained very much a political decision to be taken in a crisis itself, as the events of August 1914 showed. 59 On the naval side, the past generation has seen Marder's synthesis collapse. On the one hand, it has been shown that the technological impulse of the RN was towards battle cruisers, rather than battleships, as the former were seen as the key element for a policy of global defence.…”