Naval warfare of World War I

Naval Warfare in World War I was mainly characterized by the efforts of the Allied Powers, with their larger fleets and surrounding position, to blockade the Central Powers by sea, and the efforts of the Central Powers to break that blockade or to establish an effective blockade of the United Kingdom and France with submarines and raiders.

The naval arms race between Britain and Germany to build dreadnought battleships in the early 20th century is the subject of a number of books. Germany's attempt to build a battleship fleet to match that of the United Kingdom, the dominant naval power of the 20th-century and an island country that depended on seaborne trade for survival, is often listed as a major reason for the enmity between those two countries that led the UK to enter World War I. German leaders desired a navy in proportion to their military and economic strength that could free their overseas trade and colonial empire from dependence on Britain's good will, but such a fleet would inevitably threaten Britain's own trade and empire.

Ever since the First Moroccan Crisis (over the colonial status of Morocco, between March 1905 and May 1906), there had been an arms race, over their respective navies. However, events led up to this. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan was an American naval officer, extremely interested in British naval history. In 1887, he published The Influence of Sea Power upon History. The theme of this book was naval supremacy as the key to the modern world. His argument was that every nation that had ruled the waves, from Rome to Great Britain, had prospered and thrived, while those that lacked naval supremacy, such as Hannibal's Carthage or Napoleon's France, had not. He hypothesized that what Britain had done in building a navy to control the world's sea lanes, others could also do — indeed must do if they were to keep up with the race for wealth and empire in the future.

Mahan's thesis was highly influential and led to an explosion of new naval construction worldwide. The US Congress immediately ordered the building of three battleships (with a fourth USS Iowa, to be built two years later). Japan, whose British trained navy wiped out the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima, helped to reinforce the concept of naval power as the dominant factor in conflict. However, the book made the most impact in Germany. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II had been brought up amongst the Royal Navy, when he visited his grandmother, Queen Victoria. His mother said "Wilhelm’s one idea is to have a Navy which shall be larger and stronger than the British navy". In 1898 came the first German Fleet Act, two years later a second doubled the number of ships to be built, to 19 battleships and 23 cruisers in the next 20 years. In another decade, Germany would go from a naval ranking lower than Austria to having the second largest battle fleet in the world. For the first time since Trafalgar, Britain had an aggressive and truly dangerous rival to worry about.

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