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Over the last eighty years, the greater part of historical attention paid to the First World War at sea has been focused on two matters, the AngloGerman confrontation in the North Sea, which inevitably largely concerned itself with the battle of Jutland, and the successive U-boat campaigns against Allied and neutral shipping. Such concerns were wholly understandable. Jutland was only the second fleet action involving steel, steam-powered, warships, and it cast before the reader a host of questions that dominated the inter-war period in terms of professional naval study, while the German recourse to an unrestricted submarine offensive against shipping was similar but with the caveat that by its action Germany embarked upon a course that ensured defeat. One would suggest that the only other item on the naval agenda, at least for some four decades, concerned the Dardanelles, and on two very separate counts: it was an episode brought to the fore by the self-advertising charlatan named Winston Churchill (1874–1965) seeking personal exoneration from a debacle mainly of his making, and, for the United States and a Marine Corps seeking to ensure its raison d’être, it was the basis of study in considering how a war in the central and western Pacific against Japan would be fought. Matters Mediterranean, however, were seldom afforded much in the way of serious consideration except, perhaps, with reference to three matters: first, the episode involving the battlecruiser Goeben and third-class protected cruiser Breslau at the very start of the war; second, the chaotic state of inter-Allied arrangements within the Mediterranean theater specifically with reference to Introduction 190 from sarajevo to constantinople anti-submarine measures; and third, the Otranto Barrage, and the overwhelming evidence of Allied futility of effort in seeking to implement a wholly misguided concept of operations, again with reference to anti-submarine measures . Beyond the Mediterranean the battles off Coronel (1 November 1914) and the Falklands (8 December 1914) have commanded fleeting attention and no more, and indeed these two actions merit no more, though in terms of the prosecution of the war at sea outside European waters and the North Atlantic these two actions, and specifically the second, do hold a certain relevance. Over the last two or three decades the Mediterranean theater has been afforded , at least in Anglo-American historiography, a certain measure of attention previously denied it, but one would suggest that the story of the war at sea in the First World War cannot be related without reference to five matters that, generally, have been relegated to nickel-and-dime status over the years but which are crucially important in terms of an understanding of events and their impact. The first of these five concerns Russia, or, more accurately the naval wars in the Baltic and Black Seas. In the Black Sea there was the unfolding of a campaign in which the Russian fleet performed very credibly, and most certainly its performance contrasted very markedly with the Russian performance at sea in the Russo-Japanese war, but perhaps the real point of interest was in northern waters. Germany held a position relative to Russia in the Baltic that was the equivalent of the position Britain held relative to Germany in the North Sea, and with a very strange parallel: the German and Russian fleets checked their enemy but ultimately national defeat led to an unravelling of discipline and morale within these navies. Second, very little attention is ever paid to the role of Japan in this naval war. The reduction of Tsingtao has been the point of immediate attention in whatever consideration has been afforded matters Japanese, but the Japanese involvement in the war at sea was much more substantial than the reduction of the major German holding in China. Japanese troops were landed on the Shantung peninsula on the same day—30 August 1914—that New Zealand forces occupied Apia, on Upolu in German Samoa, and this was but one of a number of operations in the Pacific, some involving British, Dominion, and French forces and others Japanese. Australian forces occupied Rabaul in Neu-Pommern, on 11 September, all resistance coming to an end within two days, while the Japanese arrival off Yap as early as 20 August was but the prelude to the series of operations that resulted in the occupation of the Carolines and Marianas between 29 September and 21 October.1 In terms of post-war acquisition and the massive strengthening of Japan’s...

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