ABSTRACT
The great battleship-centered build-up in naval materiel that started in the 1890s drew considerable support from writers such as Mahan and Colomb, whose historical accounts validated the battle fleet. Yet by the eve of the First World War, the next generation of navy men – creatures of the build-up – tended to scoff at such notions. The principal British writer on naval doctrine after Colomb, Sir Julian Stafford Corbett, author of Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (1911), like his predecessors drew “principles of maritime warfare” from history, only to have the sea officers of his day argue that technological and material superiority were far more important than “lessons” predating their own era. 1 A parallel development occurred during the same years within the armies of Europe, reflected in Germany's “Schlieffen plan” and other war plans of the great powers. On land as well as at sea, strategy prevailed over tactics amid an obsession with technology and the rapid mobilization of superior force. Appreciation of the past reached an unprecedented low.
