For what it's worth I love battleships and always have only now I see them for the badly flawed and fundimentally useless weapons systems that they effectively became after Tsu Shima in 1905 (or perhaps the Falklands in 1914).
Great credit to Phillipe, Calvinus and the WW1G developers for revisiting some the naval issues with the game. Thank you very much Gentlemen.
Tamas wrote:If the Germany Navy was to move out and roam the North Sea en force (ie. Control mission in the game) the Royal Navy would had been there to oppose them, and take decisive battle (the whole "being able to lose the war in an afternoon" thing)
Winston Churchill was above all a politician with a politician's sense of hyperbole and a weather eye constantly on how history would portray him and his "... lose the war in an afternoon." statement is a fine example of that in my opinion.
As far as I know nobody, no naval writers, theorists or talking-heads who have repeated the phrase endlessly as though it is a sacred mantra have ever actually analysed how this would actually happen. Worst case in the actual event was the potential loss of the BCF and the 2nd Battle Squadron during the Scarborough operations in December 1914. If all four of Beattie's battlecruisers and all six of Jerram's "super-dreadnaughts" were lost the RN instantly becomes the inferior force (counting capital ships only) in the North Sea but the strategic situation is entirely unchanged!
The Kaiser's battleships lack the endurance to operate in the Atlantic and a surface blockade of the British Isles from the West would be technologically impossible to impose with surface ships. There was no RAS in those days, no forward bases for the HSF to coal and at least two maritime choke points for the German surface forces to transit to establish their blockade of Britain's West Coast. Choke points where very angry RN light forces and submarines armed with ship-killing torpedoes would be lurking to extract revenge for their loss. Also cruiser warfare could never be decisive and a division of pre-dreadnaughts (which the RN had lots to spare) would deter any raider for attacking the resulting convoys.
For you have to know that convoying would have become immediate in the face of a percieved threat by major surface units. The attitude of the RN to convoying is widely misconstrued, convoys had been introduced immediately on the declaration of war wherever a percieved
surface threat existed.
The RN's resistance to convoying merchant ships in the open Atlantic and the Med against the U-Boat threat was because there were no effective counter-measures and it was widely believed that a single submarine could make multiple attacks so convoying made the U-Boat's hunting easier. That they were entirely wrong may be accurate in hindsight but given the RN's experiance of the
Aboukir,
Cressy and
Hogue disaster and the multiple losses to U-Boats off the Dardenelles the argument seemed reasonable at the time.
Meanwhile the AMC's of the RN's 10th Cruiser Squadron continue to patrol the GIUK Gap preventing merchant traffic from reaching Germany as though nothing happened.
In short, nothing the Kaiser's surface fleet could do would ever knock Britain out of the war
unless the country decided to cut its losses and quit. This would be a political decision and hardly the Commander Grand Fleet's responsibility so Churchill's oft-repeated remark is pure hype, written for dramatic effect and not a reasoned analysis. In the 19th Century, leaving a coalition after a major defeat was a common occurance but with so much blood, treasure and prestige tied up in the Great War, how realistic would a total collapse of Empire will to fight really be.
With all the variables built into the NW engine, I suspect that the game models the prospects of this sort of thing pretty well.
By 1914 the decisive naval battle was a chimera, an illusion that had ceased to have any relevence to the actual naval situation that had developed due to the advent of the submarine, the mine and the locomotive torpedo. Look past the battleship hype and examine what really happened and why it did.
I'll shut up now.
: if the RN get trapped in detail (which almost happened in real history during the Hartlepool raid), it may suffer a severe defeat. But it could work the other way round too...
