Abstract
Nothing is more habitual among writers on naval affairs, or has been more neglected in these pages, than their preoccupation with the perils of distant oceans.
The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea.
Flecker1
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Notes
Quoted in E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisi. (Macmillan, 1940) p. 234. Rebus sic stantibus’. is legal shorthand for the doctrine that the obligations of a treaty are binding in international law as long as the conditions prevailing at the time of the conclusion of the treaty continue, and no longer.
A recent exposition of left-wing thought on British defence policy raises, not for the first time, the idea of disengagement from NATO, but argues that ‘it is not in any effective sense on the political agenda in Britain’. See Dan Smith, The Defence of the Realm in the 1980. (Croom Helm, 1980).
Pierre Mauroy, ‘La cohérence d’une politique de défense’, Défense Nationale. October 1981, p. 22.
David Greenwood, Reshaping Britain’s Defences, Aside, no. 19, Aberdeen Studies in Defence Economic. (Centre for Defence Studies, Aberdeen 1981) p. 8.
House of Commons Defence Committee, Fourth Report Strategic Nuclear Weapons Policy. 36 (HMSO, May 1981) p. xviii.
See Walter Lacqueur, ‘Hollanditis: a new stage in European neutralism’, Commentar. (New York) August 1981, pp. 19–26. Professor Lacqueur is also a specialist in Finlandisation.
Although Tirpitz succeeded, as early as 1899, in squashing the half-baked German plans for an invasion of the British Isles, this contingency continued to preoccupy all the British authorities concerned up to the eve of the First World War. It featured in the British naval manoeuvres of 1912 and 1913, for instance, and the Army kept troops at home to deal with it throughout the war. See P. M. Kennedy, ‘The Development of German Naval Operations Plans against England 1896–1914’, in Paul M. Kennedy (ed.), The War Plans of the Great Powers 1880–191. (George Allen & Unwin, 1979).
Arthur J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, vol. (OUP, 1961).
Roskill implies that the Admiralty first addressed themselves to the problem in May 1940, when they were guided primarily by the precedents of the First World War. It is scarcely surprising that many weeks of argument followed between the Admiralty and the Commander-in-Chief Home Fleet concerning the best dispositions to adopt. Captain S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea 1939–1945 Vol. I: The Defensiv. (HMSO, 1954) pp. 247–53.
For Raeder’s order see Peter Fleming, Invasion 194. (White Lion, 1975) p. 36.
Quoted in Fleming, op. cit. p. 37.
Captain A. T. Mahan, Naval Strateg. (Sampson Low, Marston, 1911) p. 219.
General Sir Peter Whiteley, ‘Navies and the Northern Flank’, in Captain John Moore (ed.), Jane’s 1981–82 Naval Annua. (Jane’s, 1981) p. 112.
After the Russian Baltic Fleet, which the Admiral commanded, on its way to annihilation at Tsushima, had mistakenly fired on British fishing boats in the North Sea.
Herbert Rosinski in B. Mitchell Simpson III (ed.), The Development of Naval Though. (Newport, Rhode Island: Naval War College Press, 1977) pp. 54–5.
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© 1983 James Cable
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Cable, J. (1983). On the Fringes of Alliance. In: Britain’s Naval Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06657-5_10
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