Abstract
Too many general accounts of the First World War treat the Battle of Jutland (31 May–1 June 1916) as if it were the only significant naval action of the conflict, or certainly the last, after which the focal point of the war at sea shifted to unrestricted submarine warfare. While no other sea battle approached the scale or scope of Jutland, the war featured a number of consequential actions involving surface units, many of which occurred after 1 June 1916. Goldrick’s welcome addition to the literature sheds light on these operations, providing a detailed account of the last two and a half years of the Anglo-German conflict in the North Sea as well as the Russo-German conflict in the waters off the Baltic states.
Goldrick provides a comprehensive account of North Sea and Baltic operations, from Admiral Reinhard Scheer’s August 1916 sortie with the High Sea Fleet, through the German operation in the Gulf of Riga in October 1917, to the final actions prior to the Armistice in November 1918. He structures his study around a sweeping analysis of the British, German and Russian navies in the last two years of the war, measuring their accomplishments against their relative capabilities, with the goal of explaining instances in which each failed to succeed where it might have. Goldrick criticizes Germany for a general failure to employ its navy effectively, especially in 1914–15, before the combination of new British construction, the commissioning of dreadnoughts under construction in Britain for the Ottoman Empire and Chile, and the redeployment of battlecruisers home from the Mediterranean gave the Grand Fleet an even more overwhelming advantage in capital ships over the High Sea Fleet. The Germans then committed the ‘fundamental error’ of the unrestricted submarine warfare campaigns of 1915 and 1917–18, even though the campaign of restricted or ‘prize warfare’ succeeded during 1916 in ‘put[ing] a great deal of pressure on the Allies’ (277).
In his assessment of the British navy after Jutland, Goldrick is reasonably charitable toward both Sir John Jellicoe and Sir David Beatty. In addressing the standard question of why the Admiralty took so long to adopt convoys in response to the U-boat campaign, he is less critical than other scholars of the role of Jellicoe (First Sea Lord, from November 1916 to December 1917) and instead emphasizes the complexity of a question that is too often oversimplified. He points to the weaknesses of antisubmarine warfare at that time, speculating that the Allies would have been hard pressed to defend their transatlantic convoys had the Germans responded with mass attacks by packs of U-boats, as they would in the Second World War. He takes the standard British view that the arrival in London in April 1917 of the United States Navy’s liaison (and future American commander in European waters), Rear Admiral William S. Sims, was purely coincidental to the ultimate British decision to adopt convoys. Nevertheless, he gives Sims high marks for facilitating the Anglo-American cooperation that followed.
Goldrick questions whether mine warfare – an area in which the German and Russian navies were clearly superior to the British as of 1914 – might have been ‘the key missed opportunity’ for the British navy (278). Having adopted the strategy of distant blockade and attrition warfare at the start of the conflict, Britain failed to fully embrace mining and did not mass-produce a reliable mine, the H2, until 1917. He also takes the British to task for failing to do more in the area of naval aviation, but here he is too harsh, as they were responsible for virtually all breakthroughs in the use of air power at sea during the First World War; indeed, no other navy was even close. Regarding Allied operations in the Baltic, Goldrick feels there could have been a greater degree of cooperation between the British and the Russians (beyond the deployment of British submarines to Russian Baltic bases). As for the Russians themselves, he concedes that their focus on defending the Gulf of Finland was legitimate but concludes that their Baltic Fleet underperformed relative to its resources. A more active Russian campaign in the Baltic certainly would have strained German naval resources, and Goldrick speculates that their base in Flanders – a great asset in the U-boat campaign – would not have even existed had the Germans been compelled to allocate more resources to the defense of their extensive Baltic coastline and convoys of Swedish iron ore.
In his conclusion, Goldrick takes all three navies to task for failing to properly analyse and learn lessons from their own wartime experiences. While he does not characterise it as such, he strikes at the heart of the tragedy of the First World War, true for operations at sea no less than on land: that doctrine and tactics lagged behind the rapidly changing environment of combat. Too many insufficiently trained officers and ratings went to sea in too many insufficiently tested warships of all types. His best and most detailed examples of these failings are all on the British side, reflecting an Anglo centric perspective grounded in his research. While Goldrick’s work is based on an impressive array of archival sources, virtually all are British, some American, none German or Russian. The German navy too often appears as the mysterious ‘other’; the opponent whose means and motives cannot be known as well as our own. For the Germans (as well as the Russians), much of his speculation about what they could or should have done reflects a less nuanced understanding of the institutional and domestic political challenges they faced. Nevertheless, Goldrick’s overall conclusions are quite sound, and the finished product has considerable value. The maps and illustrations are a great asset. This book should appeal to a broad audience, while also being welcomed in scholarly circles for filling a significant gap in the literature.