Castles of The Sea: An Introduction to Battleships

A quiet morning on the coast of Northern Germany.  Near the city of Kiel, it's May 31st.  You walk on the beach, too old to join the war going on in France.  As you stroll the quiet beach, you look towards the harbor and see a warship leaving, under a column of black smoke.  As you gaze, dozens more follow it out, massive and foreboding.  Ships coming steaming out of the harbor in an unending line, heading over the horizon and disappearing into the cold, brutal North Sea.

(Germany had built the 2nd strongest Navy in the world in the years preceding, the heart of which was called the "High Sea's Fleet")

A similar scene would have played out a few hours later in Scotland, home to the Britsh Grand Fleet. These fleets had been built to fight one another, and today was the day that the theorized battle would take place.  The Battle of Jutland would become the largest naval battle of it's time, with almost 250 ships taking part on either side.  

(The British Grand Fleet)

These ships were the result of an Arms race that had been raging between the UK and Germany for the better part of two decades.  The UK had control of the sea, and Germany wanted it.  

The battleships of World War 1 were direct descendants of the old, sailing ships of old.  Variously called "Dreadnoughts", "Battlewagons", or "Ships of the Line" these massive steel ships were the most expensive and powerful things afloat.  They carried massive guns that could fire explosive shells as far out as 10 miles.  

They were symbols of national pride, and the United Kingdom reigned supreme, with 28 battleships.    Millions of pounds were spent constructing these ships, and the trade that sustained the U.K. flowed behind these steel walls.  These ships were enormously expensive, beautiful to look at, and in the end completely ineffective.  

(The British Flagship, HMS Iron Duke)

They could be brought down by ships less than half their size, and were so valuable to their home nations they were almost never risked in open battle.  A single torpedo could sink a battleship, fired from a submarine or a small boat.  

That great battle that we talked about in the beginning?  The Battle of Jutland was completely indecisive.  As soon as each side realized they were heading straight into the middle of the entirety of the enemy fleet, they attempted to retreat, rather than risk losing their ships.  The Germany Navy would remained trapped in Harbor for the rest of the War, and the prestige of the battleship took a serious blow.  

The Trenches

World War One was not a war of movement.  Machine guns and barbed wire stopped even the most herculien effort to attack the enemy.  Charging machine guns was suicidal in the best circumstances, and as countless battles proved, completely ineffective.  Troops could no longer stand and fight on open ground.

With no way to move forward without being shredded by the enemy, and obviously unwilling to retreat, troops began to dig foxholes. These were lengthened and deepened, and eventually developed into a ditch that numerous men could lay in.  As the war dragged on, eventually they became so deep and permanent that they were called trenches, and soldiers spent almost all there time in one.

So how was this war going to be fought?  If soldiers spent all there time in a trench, how did they fight?  The answer lies in the 100 or so yards between trenches.  This area was known as No-Mans land, because no man could survive there.  It was pitted with craters from high-explosives, and laced with barbed wire. 

(This Photograph shows a fairly normal system of trenches.  The trenches in the top left are British, and the trenches to the right are German.  The space in-between is No-Mans Land.)

Soldiers were ordered "over the top" into No-Mans land to attempt to take over enemy trenches.  Going over the top meant that you were directly exposed to the other trench, and it's here that the terrible power of modern technology made itself felt.  

Machine guns, Poison gas, and barbed wire were all lethal weapons.  These weapons had never been used in war before, and their effects were unknown.  So to the Generals sitting many miles away from the front, who had been trained in methods that were written before these weapons existed, it seemed only logical to order frontal assaults on trenches. 

What were they trying to accomplish?  The Germans were trying to keep control of the large parts of France they had taken.  The British and French were trying to re-take their land.  For these reasons, the German trenches were built to be more permanent, and geared towards defense.  The Allied trenches tended to be simply dug out of the mud, and were not intended to be permanent.  

(A German trench on the Eastern Front.  Notice how much more coordination and planning went into it's construction, compared to the Allied trench above.)

So, to recap!  The Trenches were a product of the massive firepower of the machine gun.  No amount of soldiers could survive charging machine guns, so digging in was the only option for survival.  Because no side had developed any sort of ability to break through these defenses, the war stagnated.  

The War Begins

100 Years ago, Europe was a stick of dynamite in a match factory.  The elements for a massive, catastrophic war were all in place and constantly rubbing elbows, ready at an instant to strike out at each other.  The fact that World War I was preceded by one of the longest periods of relative peace in European history did nothing to moderate the violence.

To put things in perspective, the major political and military powers in Europe were standing toe to toe like massive boxers, weighing in for a fight.  In the middle of the continent were the Central Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy.  Germany had only recently become a unified nation, as well as Italy.  Austria-Hungary was a once proud empire that had fallen from grace, and was desperate to retain as much of its glory and poise as it could.

In the other corner of the ring, you had the Triple Entente powers of the United Kingdom, Imperial Russia, and Republican France.  These three nations had come together to limit the growth of a unified Germany.  The alliance was one that was tenuous at best, but with the massive land armies of the French and Russians, and the venerable Royal Navy commanding the world's oceans, they were not a power to be trifled with.

So what was the bell that rang in the war?  What match hit struck the fuse?  To quote Otto Von Bismarck, famous German state maker, it was "some damn, fool thing in the Balkans."  The Austria-Hungarians had annexed Bosnia Herzegovina, a former territory of Serbia.  When the Austrian Monarch to be visited the Serbian Capital of Sarajevo, he was assassinated.

(Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in the background, was shot and killed in Sarajevo, sparking World War I)

The powers of Europe fell like dominos into conflict.  Russia had an alliance with Serbia, so when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, the Russians joined into the conflict.  The Austrian alliance with Germany brought Germany into the conflict as well.  Not long after, the French also joined into the fray, due to their alliance with the Russians.  The British wavered in supporting their duties as a Triple Entente member, but Germany's invasion of neutral Belgium crystallized the British entry into the war.

Germany was faced by the two largest armies in the world to its east and west. The Russians, bear- like in their movements, were expected to take a long time to mobilize and call up their army.  The French were expected to be more ready for the fight and the swifter enemy.  The German plan called to defeat France quickly, so all attention could be turned to the Russian bear.  The Germans dashed through Belgium and the Netherlands and entered France.  The invasion reached the outskirts of Paris before it was stopped.  The war stagnated.  Instead of being thrown out of France, the Germans began digging a line of trenches, stretching across the entire border.  And so the war settled into a stalemate.

My First Post!!

100 Years, 4 Months, and 27 days ago, the world was blasted into the modern era.  It didn't happen in a single day, month, or year, but over the course of 4.  4 years of protracted, drawn out, bloody struggle that pitted Republic against Empire and man against machine.  July 28th, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.  The tripping of alliances dragged all of Europe in the bloodiest conflict ever seen. 

My hope is that I can tell this story in a way that gives it the gravity that it deserves.  100 years ago, our fore-fathers watched, in objective horror, as a continent full of bright, young, and enterprising people plunged into a bloody and savage conflict.  In so many ways, this war changed our world and altered the lives of all those to come.  In modern times, we watch as the Ukraine is dragged into Civil War, with the prospect of possible Russian invasion.  My hope is to teach this lesson of the past, so we might avoid a repetition of them in the future. 

I hope to be posting every week.  Posts will include the date, and what happened during the war on that date.  Also, I'm in the process of setting up a twitter page, a youtube channel, and an Instagram account to help get my message out there.  The links to those will be forth coming in future posts.  Until then, my friends!