[Pablo]

Originally Posted by moscowexile

To keep an overseeas empire, however, Britain needed a huge fleet: that's how the Royal Navy came about.

I'd always understood that Britain needed a huge fleet because it other people (Saxons, Danes, Normans, various royal factions) had been landing or trying to invade from the end of the Roman Empire up through the Spanish Armada. As an island nation with a relatively small population, the fleet had been its best defense against invasion against invasion by the large land armies of countries such as Imperial Spain or Napoleonic France since Elizabethan times. A fleet big enough to defend the homeland against invasion was also big enough to do some serious exploring, colonizing, and defense of the colonial sea lanes.

Ever since the end of Buonaparte's plan to make a French European hegemony, Britain had had a policy of maintaining a fleet that was at least twice the size of the next two biggest fleets combined. Any nation state that attempted to challenge British naval supremacy was deemed by British governments to be enemies, real or potential.

That's why the UK went to war with the German Empire in August 1914: the declaration of war made by the British goverment against the German Reich on August 3rd 1914 was not the result of the violation of Belgian neutrality by the German army in marching on Paris (that was just a propaganda trick to attain a position of moral supremacy) it was because German hegemony in Europe and the German Imperial fleet would be real threat to the "balance of power" that Britain enjoyed.

I'm not so sure. The other part of British strategy was indeed that no hegemonic European power could be allowed to control the coasts of what are now Belgium and the Netherlands; however, absent the provocation of Germany's invasion of Belgium and Belgium's decision to resist the Germans, a declaration of war on Germany would have bitterly divided the people and Parliament, which had no interest in sending British soldiers to die for France (with whom they had no treaty or alliance) in the slaughter of a general European war over Serbia, but they were willing to defend their commitment to Belgian neutrality. It wasn't just a progaganda trick.

Without the invasion of Belgium, I think it's pretty likely Britain would not have intervened in August 1914, just as it had not intervened in the Franco-Prussian War, when Bismarck specifically assured Prime Minister Disraeli that Germany would not attack Belgium. The German General Staff knew attacking Belgium would bring Britain into the war, but they just didn't care since they felt its army's contribution would be minimal at best. Oops.

Hitler believed that Kaiser Wilhelm II had made a serious error in provoking the UK with his warship building policy and his demands that the arriviste German Empire have a "place in the sun". If the UK had not been provoked by Kaiser Bill's naval policy, it could well have been that the German army would have wiped the floor with the French (as they had done during the course of 6 weeks in 1870-1871) and the Russians would have then been dealt with accordingly and would have sued for peace.

I think the effect of Kaiser Wilhelm's (or rather, Admiral Tirpitz's) naval policy was that it caused Britain to reconsider its centuries-old enmity for France in the face of German weltmacht, for no appreciable gain to Germany, rather than actually provoking Britain into declaring war. I suppose Germany's real problem was that they needed a first-class strategic thinker, like Bismarck, but all they could manage was Kaiser Billy.

There's a reasonably good recounting of all this in Robert K. Massie's book, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the coming of the Great War, which is currently in paperback at Amazon.com.

Pablo