Talk:High Seas Fleet

Heligoland

Heligoland was a British victory

You present Heligoland as "inconclusive". Well, it certainly wasn't decisive for the outcome of the war, but it was a British victory according to the wikipedia article you link to. Incidentally, that article spells Heligoland with an "i".

Sensemaker

Surrender

Re: the numbers of German vessels surrendered - see | Beatty's orders which shows that the expected numbers were 9 battle ships, 5 battle cruisers, 7 light cruisers and 50 destroyers. Hearsay evidence - two destroyes failed to leave port.

Fenton Robb 10:52, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Pre-war politics

Should be more on pre-War politics. Germany made a serious attempt at the beginning of the 20th century to build up a surface navy that would rival Britain's. However, for Germany its navy and overseas colonies were more of a symbolic show-the-flag international prestige type of thing, rather than having any great practical importance, while Britain was a maritime power which was not self-sufficient in food production, and so was basically dependent on shipments of food from overseas to avoid starvation -- and this meant that Britain would do whatever it took to match and exceed Germany in the naval arms race, regardless of the cost, as a life-and-death matter. In the end, when WW1 came, the German surface navy didn't seriously challenge British sea power outside the North Sea, and didn't really give Germany any great military advantage in the North Sea, but building up the navy had soured British-German relations in the years preceding WW1. If not building up the navy would have meant that Britain wouldn't intervene on the side of France, Germany would have done a lot better not to build up its surface navy. AnonMoos 17:34, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Some additional info at Fleet Acts and scattered in various subsections of Causes of World War I. -- AnonMoos 21:14, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Also Tirpitz_Plan... AnonMoos (talk) 13:43, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

See Kaiserliche Marine for more info about the history of the HSF before WWI. Sandpiper (talk) 23:41, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Suicide attack

"In October 1918, with the army facing defeat and the civil population starving, Scheer decided to launch a do-or-die attack on the Grand Fleet."

Can this sentence be substantiated? In Germany it is generally accepted that rumours ran abound within the ranks of the sailors that such an attack was planned (hence their revolt), but that the German High Command never prepared this kind of operation and thus its actual application can be considered unlikely. The German revolution would have been underway with or without the sailor's revolution which was just the catalyst.

84.154.3.52 (talk) 19:40, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, it says so in my history book "Wars of Europe". I seem to remember reading it in Encyclopedia Britannica too. -Sensemaker

Order of Battle?

What about creating a section that would allow a user to quickly acess pages devoted to the vessels that composed the High Seas Fleet? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.115.86.14 (talk) 12:53, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

There is a separate article about the order of battle at Jutland containing info for both sides. Sandpiper (talk) 23:41, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Additionally, the order of battle varies with time... so it might be established for some specific (important?) moments. Maybe a "list" of these ships would be better for allowing "quick access" to a user (bsed on which sources?). Cheers, DPdH (talk) 04:24, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

What about the 1917 Baltic Operations?

Why no commentary on Operation Albion and the Intervention in Finland. To only where both these actions entirely successful, they also go some way to refuting the contention that the HSF was militarily and politically useless. 195.217.166.8 (talk) 13:07, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

I'll eventually get around to expanding this article, and when I do, those two will be covered. Parsecboy (talk) 13:12, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

The contention was not that it was "militarily and politically useless" as such -- but rather that if not building the fleet would have meant that Britain would have stayed out of the war, then the decision to build the fleet ended up having far more negative than positive consequences for Germany. Also, if the fleet was built mainly to satisfy Wilhelm II's semi-childlike glee in possessing shiny new military hardware, gold braid on his shoulders, and multiple medals on his chest (rather than on the basis of sober strategic well-informed military-political deliberations), then it was an extremely expensive personal toy... AnonMoos (talk) 15:48, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

I don't know if I'd agree with that analysis - the naval rivalry was more the symptom of growing Anglo-German tension rather than the cause. Germany was growing increasingly powerful after unification in 1871, militarily and economically, to the point where it supplanted Britain's traditional rival - France - as the dominant power on the continent. Britain considered treaties with France against Germany as far back as 1881, when the Imperial Navy consisted of a handful of assorted ironclads.

You are correct, however, that it was essentially a plaything for Wilhelm II. Parsecboy (talk) 16:31, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

There would have been tensions regardless, but if Germany hadn't directly challenged Britain in its special sphere of military predominance (and even seemed to be aiming at Britain's food supplies -- see previous comments above), then the tensions might not have been so great, and might not have resulted in driving Britain into the arms of France to the same degree that actually happened in 1904. If the German surface fleet was built largely to cater for Wilhelm II's personal vanity, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers by greatly solidifying a British-French alliance, and ended up at the bottom of Scapa Flow without ever having struck any very major or decisive blow on behalf of Germany, then it was really a luxury that Germany couldn't afford... AnonMoos (talk) 17:10, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

One might argue that the High Seas Fleet enforced half of the blockade of Russia that eventually led to its collapse (the other half enforced largely by Goeben in the Bosporus/Dardanelles), and therefore the fleet did place a decisive role.

I don't know; the US Navy began a program of major naval expansion at the same time, which didn't arouse any significant anti-American feelings in the UK. France's return to a Mahanian fleet (from the Jeune Ecole of the late 19th century) didn't cause problems either. Yes, part of the difference was that Tirpitz stated he intended to build "a dagger at Britain's throat," but certainly the return to battleship construction by France's navy, Britain's traditional maritime rival, should have provoked at least as great a backlash in England. Parsecboy (talk) 17:30, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

With the rise of a number of countries to a relatively advanced level of industrial and economic development in the last part of the nineteenth century, Britain's naval predominance would almost certainly be lessened -- however, Germany chose to prominently and conspicuously place itself on the sharp edge of the wedge (rather than merely being one of a number of nations increasing its naval strength as part of an overall long-term general trend), and it paid a diplomatic price for doing so. If there was no one with a significant voice in Germany's decision-making who was doing a coldly calculated cost-benefit analysis of whether or not the benefits to Germany would be worth the price, then that's kind of an indictment of the German system...

Also, the Baltic is not the High Seas, and Germany probably could have blocked off the Baltic with a fleet which was aimed much more towards Germany's immediate local strategic needs (as opposed to making an apparent attempt at challenging global domination). AnonMoos (talk) 16:08, 16 January 2011 (UTC)