WW1 Naval Warfare

The British blockade of Germany was unusual, a first-of-its-kind in the history of warfare. Traditionally, blockading ships remained at sea just outside enemy ports to attack any ship coming in or going out.

In WW1 the Royal Navy, while frequently patrolling the North Sea that separated Great Britain from German ports, remained in port most of the time. The mere existence of the powerful British fleet and its proximity kept the German High Seas Fleet at home.

Also, the Royal Navy had broken German codes and therefore knew when the German were coming out.

The Royal Navy also heavily mined international waters to prevent shipping from reaching Germany

It was the German way of saying "submarine" which properly should be called a "submersible." It is a shortening of "unterseeboot" to just uboat.

great britain

Britain

in 1915

The dreadnaughts and the cruisers were held well back to insure a counter strike ability. It was the destroyers (DD), destroyer escorts (DE) and motor torpedo boats (MTB) that provided the front line defense against a breakout by the German Fleet.

Count Leopold Berchtold was the Imperial Foreign Minister for Austria-Hungary during World War I.

The SS Lusitania

The Battle of Frommelles on 19 July 1916 lasted one day, infact only a few hours.

Captain Mahan organized the German navy of World War 1.

It's called a dogfight.

The western front was a field of trenches where the soldiers would hide and hope they didn't get killed. Every once and a while they would jump out run across "no mans land" and try to attack the enemies on the other side hiding in their own trenches. This would go back and forth between the two sides which created a stalemate in the war. After a few weeks the soldiers would go back to restcamp while a new batch got shipped up to the trenches. Then in a few weeks they would go back again. Basically it was weeks of terrifing experiences to weeks of extreme bordom and this just kept repeating.

23456 ships sunk

I think it was 16 but it may of been younger.

most days they would write but I don't know when or if they would have been sent

Germany's submarine fleet.

The RMS Lusitania was 787 feet long.

The British Navy won at Jutland by losing more men and ships than the enemy. Tactically the battle was a draw. The British lost more than the Germans but the Germans were crippled enough they would not send a fleet into the North Sea. So basically today the battle would be called tactically a draw and a British strategic victory.

The torpedoes of the US Civil War were water mines that were designed to explode when a Union ship happened to hit one of them. Later, the Confederates developed mines that could be set off from a river shore via a electric wire.

Britain for centuries had the most powerful navy in the world. The Germans had been building a navy but did not feel confident enough to risk losing their navy, and the war, in a single naval engagement. England is an island nation and depended, even then, on imports arriving by ship to feed its people, and also in wartime imports included raw materials to make munitions of war, and finished munitions from the US. Since Germany did not feel strong enough to risk a surface navy confrontation, to try to blockade the British this left submarines. The Germans mounted a submarine campaign to try to cut off imports into England, and starve England out of the war. They had declared the waters around Britain to be a war zone, and announced their intention to sink any ships they could within that area. (That this announcement appeared in a New York City newspaper right beside the announcement of the sailing of the Lusitania was later seen as particularly sinister). The Germans warned that anyone sailing into those waters did so at their own risk. So this was why the Germans were sinking ships in general. As for the Lusitania herself, she had been built partially with money from a government subsidy, and thus was subject to being requisitioned by the government for military use in wartime. The Germans had no way of knowing whether this had been done, and the Lusitania was sailing as a troopship or in some other military capacity. She was listed in "Jane's Naval Registry", a book listing all the ships of the world, a copy of which each German sub carried, as an "auxiliary cruiser" of the British Royal Navy. So the German captain felt justified in attacking a ship which was listed as a naval vessel and could easily have been about military tasks. The sub captain was in fact given a medal by the German government for doing so. And, though the British did not admit it for fifty years, the Lusitania was in fact carrying items which were contraband under international law governing blockades. These items included more than four million rounds of rifle ammunition, and tons of explosive guncotton for use in artillery shells, some of which may have produced the second and far more damaging explosion survivors reported, after the single torpedo the Germans fired exploded against the side of the ship.

The British stationed their fleet at Scapa Flow, in Scotland. This was so they could easily leave port and intercept any Germany attempt to get into the open Atlantic.

The full name in German is "Unterseeboot"

Was the Lusitania carrying ammunition