ABSTRACT
Naturally enough, there was a good deal of reflection about the naval lessons of the First World War, aptly described by Archibald Hurd at the time as ‘the supreme contest in our history’.1 But, although hugely influenced by the experience of the First World War, the naval thinking of the interwar period was not, of course, distinctive and discrete in intellectual and conceptual terms. Some naval thinkers were newcomers to the field but they usually were well aware of, and were much influenced by, the views of those who had gone before. Many of the thinkers of the pre-war period were still active and therefore able to review their own initial conclusions against the background of four years of war at sea.
