ABSTRACT
Britain’s Royal Navy ended the First World War triumphant. It had swept the seas of the German navy and successfully blockaded Germany and its allies, so making a major contribution to their economic dislocation and ultimately to their military collapse. It had achieved, if not another Trafalgar, then certainly a strategic victory over the High Seas Fleet at Jutland in 1916 sufficient to maintain control of the seas. The manpower of both the Old and New Worlds had been brought across oceans controlled by the most powerful fleet the world had yet seen, for the Royal Navy had managed, albeit with some difficulty, to defeat the menace of a new weapons system, the submarine. Moreover, it had pioneered another, aircraft at sea, in the development and use of which by 1918 the Royal Navy undoubtedly led the world.
