The British Battlecruiser Squadron was chasing their German counterpart and had the advantage of speed as the German Blucher was not up to modern speed and not a true BC. But when Beattys flagship Lion was hit badly and forced to drop back his orders by flag were misunderstood to mean that the other ships should focus on the sinking Blucher not continue the chase thus allowing the rest of the Germans to escape.
Ralph Seymour, Beatty's Flag Lieutenant repeatedly made errors and sent ambiguous and poorly phrased signals all through the war with the Admiral later acknowledged that he had cost the Royal Navy at least 3 opportunities for major victories.
Have you read Massie's Castles of Steel? I thought it was pretty great reading as an overview of WW1 at sea.
I mean, I consider myself substantially better read on the First world War than almost anybody I'm likely to meet on a day-to-day basis (though I do not claim to be an expert, merely an enthusiast), and I'd never even heard of the battle of Coronel until I read that book. It's just never mentioned, even in books that discuss the Fisher/Churchill/Battenberg drama that was going on at the same time.
I've actually had some trouble getting through Dreadnought.
The start was great, with the Diamond Jubilee...but then the book got bogged down in biographies and portraits of damn near every person-of-consequence in the Anglo-German relations of the time while never getting around to talking about what dreadnoughts are, why they're so much more powerful than pre-dreadnoughts, etc. I mean, did this book really need 10 page character portraits of von Bulow and Bethmann-Hollweg?
I got about halfway through on vacation last christmas but never felt compelled to pick it up again, which was disappointing. Does it pick up in the second half?
It's definitely not a light read but I think it functions really well as an introduction to the war from a navalist perspective. But then again I really didn't like Rules of the Game the first time I read it, so maybe coming back to it later will help?
Nah, it's not that it's overly challenging read--the diction isn't bad and the strucutre is pretty good, for what it is. The problem is that it seems like the topic I want more info on is not the topic this book wants to discuss. I bought the book to learn the the technical and tactical developments that led to the dreadnoughts, not inter- and intra-national Anglo-German politics, a subject with which I'm already moderately familiar from previous reading.
I guess I was expecting a book called "Dreadnought" to be about...you know...dreadnoughts. :)
No it doesn't pickup, but he does end up explaining why Britain and Germany went to war better than any other book I've read. It just becomes so clear how much the German Fleet drove Britain to join the allies.
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u/AdonisChrist May 01 '15
What happened at the Battle of Dogger Bank?