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    The Second World War (3): The war at sea
    The Second World War (3): The war at sea
    The Second World War (3): The war at sea
    Ebook129 pages1 hour

    The Second World War (3): The war at sea

    By Alastair Finlan, Mark J Grove and Philip D. Grove

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    About this ebook

    This volume provides a comprehensive guide to three major theatres of combat; the battles for the Atlantic, the war in the Mediterranean and the contest in the Indian Ocean. The war at sea was a vital contest, which if lost would have irreversibly altered the balance of the military forces on land. The sea lanes were the logistical arteries of British and subsequent Allied armies fighting on the three continents of Africa, Asia and Europe. The Second World War was ultimately won by land forces but it could always have been lost at sea.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJun 6, 2014
    ISBN9781472809834
    The Second World War (3): The war at sea
    Author

    Alastair Finlan

    Alastair Finlan is a Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. He is the author of numerous books on military culture, Special Forces and modern warfare, including Contemporary Military Strategy and the Global War on Terror: US and UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq 2001-2012 (Bloomsbury, 2014).

    Read more from Alastair Finlan

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      Book preview

      The Second World War (3) - Alastair Finlan

      Background to war

      The Second World War

      The Second World War was the most violent, all-encompassing conflict in human history, yet as wars go, it started slowly. Europe was, once again, the source of the war, which inexorably spread to Africa, the Americas, Asia, and their surrounding oceans. The clash of competing ideologies – between liberal democracies and militaristic fascist states – eventually dragged the Communist Soviet Union into the fight as well. For several politicians in 1939, with the bitter memory of the Great War of 1914–18 still fresh in their minds, the clarion of war was all too familiar. It was a highly reluctant Britain under the direction of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, after Adolf Hitler had ordered his armed forces into Poland just two days earlier.

      The origins of the Second World War can be traced back to the embers of the First World War, when an exhausted Germany agreed to an armistice with the Allies (Britain, France, United States, Japan, and Italy) out of which emerged the controversial Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919. A common sentiment amongst bitter German soldiers, including a young Austrian-born corporal called Adolf Hitler, held that the German army had been stabbed in the back by weak civilians in the fatherland, whose negotiations for peace had robbed it of the victory that was just around the corner. The reality was quite different: Germany was economically exhausted after four long years of fighting on several fronts.

      The fault lay with the nature of warfare in the twentieth century, particularly the advanced technology of the machine age. The First World War heralded a new type of warfare that stunned soldiers and politicians on all sides by its intensity, duration, and cost. Battles lasted weeks and months, instead of days as the Battle of Waterloo had in 1815, and incurred tens of thousands of casualties. The first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 cost the British army 60,000 casualties, of which 20,000 were fatalities. Chivalry, honor, maneuver and young men (in millions) died in the staccato stutter of machine-gun fire, barbed wire, and trenches, while generals on all sides struggled to solve the strategic conundrum of the static battlefield.

      At sea, British and German naval officers possessed the greatest accumulation of naval firepower in history, yet the test of war proved it to be indecisive and disappointing. The hallmark of naval power by 1914 was the battleship, and the rival fleets finally met at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, the outcome of which is still hotly debated today. The statistics were impressive: 28 British battleships and nine battlecruisers with a host of supporting destroyers under Admiral Sir John Jellicoe fought 16 German battleships, five battlecruisers, and smaller escorts commanded by Admiral Reinhard Scheer. On paper, it was a tactical victory for the Germans, who sank 111,980 tons of British ships and inflicted 6,945 casualties in return for a British tally of 62,233 tons sunk and 2,921 German casualties. Strategically, however, the Royal Navy emerged triumphant, for the balance of power remained firmly on the side of the British, whose numerically superior fleet (unlike the High Seas Fleet) was ready for operations the following day. Yet, it was no Nelsonian victory: glory was absent from this battle, replaced by a controversy about the failings of the Royal Navy that has raged to the present

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