These are my new trainers my Dad and Bern got me for my Birthday I really like them. I really like them a lot and I also really enjoy wearing them to. The trainers are called Skechers trainers and I’m really enjoying wearing them at the minute to I think my new trainers are very good to.

This is my new Alfred Hitchcock dvd boxset that Carl got me yesterday for my Birthday it has six Alfred Hitchcock scary film dvd inside it. I watched Stage Fright from 1950 last night and I thought that was really good I have the rest of the dvds to catch up on and I am really looking forward to seeing all the rest of them all because I have never seen them before.

I am looking forward to catching up with my new wrestling dvd’s tonight this week that I got for my Birthday I will be watching them this week. These are the three Wwe dvd’s I got for my Birthday.

I had a nice time yesterday afternoon at Earsdon Grange Care Home in West Monkseaton having some Birthday cake with my Mum and Gran on my Birthday in my Grans room. This is the Birthday cake we had it was very nice.

In the lead-up to World War One Britain and Germany were engaged in a naval arms race. Archivist Louise Bruton examines how the war heralded a new form of naval warfare that featured dreadnoughts, submarines and trade blockades.

In the years leading up to the First World War Britain and Germany engaged in a naval arms race. Britain had peaceably enjoyed its status as the world’s dominant naval force since the Napoleonic Wars but Germany now sought to contest that dominance. A new generation of ships became central to the naval race: the dreadnoughts. Named after the Royal Navy’s HMS Dreadnought, these ‘castles of steel’ came to symbolise naval power in the early 20th century.

The dreadnoughts represented a revolution in warship design and yet their construction was based on the centuries-old definition of the purpose of naval campaigning as being the head-on confrontation of two opposing battle fleets. During the First World War, not only did senior naval officers trained in the days of sail learn to command brand new ships and weaponry untested in wartime; they also witnessed a transformation in warfare that turned the war at sea from a traditional surface encounter into a complex balancing act of defensive strategies and covert tactics involving two new and unforeseen dimensions: under water and in the air.

Design for battleship HMS Dreadnought from The Report of the Committee on Designs

Original designs for battleship HMS Dreadnought, produced by the British Royal Navy in 1905.

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Trade blockade of Germany

Britain was quick to capitalise on its enduring naval supremacy and geographical position by establishing a trade blockade of Germany and its allies as soon as war began. The Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet patrolled the North Sea, laid mines and cut off access to the Channel, curtailing the movements of the German High Seas Fleet and preventing merchant ships from supplying Germany with raw materials and food. The North Sea became ‘a marine no man’s land, with the British Fleet bottling up the exits’, as Richard Hough describes it in The Great War at Sea 1914-1918.

The effect of the blockade on Germany’s civilians after four years of war was noted by British Army MajorGeneral Sir Aylmer Gould Hunter-Weston in December 1918 during a visit to Germany: ‘the food situation is very serious indeed…The Germans are living entirely on their food capital now – they have eaten all their laying hens and are eating all their milch [sic] cows… [there is a] real scarcity.’

Account of a journey through Germany after the Armistice from the private war diary of Major General Hunter-Weston

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Private war diary of Major General Sir Aylmer Gould Hunter-Weston recounting his journey through Germany in December 1918.

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Submarine warfare and defensive strategy 

The simultaneous torpedoing of HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy by a single German submarine in September 1914 shocked the Royal Navy and forced the Admiralty to recognise the threat that the U-Boats, as they became known, posed to the surface fleet.

Although the Allies had their own submarines, which were active in the Adriatic, the Baltic and the Dardanelles over the course of the war, defences against submarines were slow to be developed. The British Navy appealed both to its own personnel and to the wider public for ideas. Minefields, net barrages, depth charges and patrols were introduced but more often than not these defences could be evaded. U-Boats could roam virtually undetected, since the sighting of a periscope was the most reliable method of location at a time when sonar technology was still in its infancy.

In January 1916, in reply to an enquiry from former Prime Minister and then First Lord of the Admiralty Arthur Balfour, Commander-in-Chief of The Grand Fleet John Rushworth Jellicoe stressed the importance of playing to the Navy’s main strength – its size – to retain control of the North Sea: ‘…as to a possible naval offensive… I have long arrived at the conclusion that it would be suicidal to divide our main fleet…’ For the first two years of the war the Allies accordingly concentrated their naval efforts on a defensive strategy of protecting trade routes, developing anti-submarine devices and maintaining the blockade rather than actively seeking direct confrontation.

Conclusion

The war at sea was not characterised by monumental battles, glorious victories and haunting landscapes as was the war on land. The Battle of Jutland was the only full-scale direct action to occur between opposing navies and even this was indecisive. Yet the blockade of supplies to Germany weakened the country, directly contributing to the end of the war, as indeed the U-Boat campaign would have done in reverse had the convoy system not eventually succeeded in saving Britain from starvation. Control of the North Sea meant no less than the difference between independence and invasion. 

The war at sea was a test of nerves and ingenuity. Both sides had to master technologies and ways of fighting unimaginable just a few years earlier. It was a marathon of endurance and persistence, often thankless but always critically important.

I enjoyed meeting my Uncle Kevin and Auntie Lesley’s new dog Buddy yesterday on my Birthday. It was the first time I met him since Kevin and Lesley got him he is just a little puppy and it was nice to meet him.

Associate Professor Richard Fogarty stated how World War One was influenced by different races fighting together in a global war.

Race and racism were important aspects of World War One for two reasons. First, ideas about race had developed over the course of the 19th century to make the concept one of the most prominent preoccupations of modern Europeans. Second, several of the major belligerents at war between 1914 and 1918 possessed large colonial empires, where white Europeans ruled over Africans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders. These two factors came together because a large part of the justification for the possession of colonial territories was the supposed right of superior whites to rule over allegedly inferior non-whites. This in turn led several European combatant nations to make use of their colonial resources, both materials and men, to wage war. Thus, while purely military and political considerations often shaped strategy during the war, ideologies of race and racism also played a role, helping in particular to make the war a genuinely global one.

Race and nationalism

By the early 20th century, thinking about race was moving toward a more biological understanding of human difference and its significance, with an emphasis on physical features such as colour. But earlier conceptions of racial difference had not disappeared completely, and it was common during World War One for Europeans to speak of national or ethnic differences in terms of race. For instance, many believed that the war pitted the English and French ‘races’ against the Germanic, or Teutonic, ‘race’. Another area where this kind of national or ethnic understanding of race played a role was in the Balkans, where the war began. Despite numerous similarities and centuries of mixing that created many commonalities among the peoples of the region, ethnic differences loomed large in the self-understandings of many. Ethnic tension and nationalist aspirations helped ignite the war in 1914, when Serbian nationalists assassinated the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and these same factors were paramount in American President Woodrow Wilson’s calls for national self-determination during the war and at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

Race and colonialism

European colonial possessions, particularly in Africa and Asia, played the most important role in injecting race and racism into World War One strategy. The race factor was most visible in the use of millions of colonial subjects as workers and soldiers. Many Africans and Asians laboured and fought in their home territories, as they had done before the war. But hundreds of thousands travelled to new lands to contribute to the war efforts of their colonial masters. Some even travelled to Europe itself.   

France was the colonial power most enthusiastic about deploying its colonial populations, especially in Europe. Some 200,000 came to France to work in war industries, but even more, some 500,000, wore the uniform of the French army and manned the trenches of the Western Front. Even before the war, military officers like Charles Mangin (an important general during the war) advocated recruiting from the vast ‘reservoirs of men’ in Africa to strengthen the French army in the face of a larger and more populous Germany. When the war began in 1914, soldiers from North and West Africa began arriving in France and played an active role in the fighting. Eventually, soldiers from Indochina and Madagascar also served in France. These men were often very popular among the French people, although many in France regarded non-Europeans through a haze of racial stereotypes. For instance, black West Africans were popular and celebrated for their courage and loyalty, but also denigrated for their primitive savagery and mental inferiority.

The British army also deployed colonial soldiers. A force of nearly 140,000 Indians served on the Western Front in 1914, but they departed from the Front, and from Europe altogether, in 1915. British authorities were concerned about the effect of pitting non-whites against white Europeans in battle. Indians with such experience might be more difficult to rule after the war. So, in the end, the bulk of Indian soldiers who fought in World War One, some one million in all, fought in the Middle East against the Germans’ ally, the Ottoman Empire. West Indians also fought in the British army, in France and other theatres. Racial politics precluded arming South African blacks for combat in Europe, though more than 20,000 came to France as labourers. As was the case with France’s use of troops from its colonies, the participation of these men in the British war effort was visible to the public, reinforcing racial stereotypes in some cases, but also enhancing the awareness of the conflict as a world war.

Other combatant nations with extensive colonial possessions, such as Belgium and Portugal, did not make use of their colonial subjects in Europe, but they joined Great Britain and France in deploying indigenous people as both soldiers and workers within the colonies. Hundreds of thousands participated as porters carrying supplies and soldiers fighting to gain control over German colonies in Africa. The Germans did the same with their African subjects, though the Kaiser’s government complained loudly and publicly about the Allies’ introduction of ‘uncivilized’ warfare and racially inferior warriors into the conflict at home in Europe.

Race, religion, and global strategy

The most obvious case of colonial considerations helping to shape strategy in the war was the attempt of Germany to exploit the Muslim religious faith of some of its enemies’ colonial populations. This attempt took many forms, but one particularly active site of German activity was in prisoner of war camps. The German army made much of the ‘exotic’ soldiers it captured from among enemy troops, often subjecting Africans and Asians to anthropological study in the camps and using images of the prisoners in propaganda. The Germans also gathered together in one special camp, near Berlin, all the Muslim prisoners of war captured from the Russian, French, and British armies. This ‘Halfmoon Camp’, named for the Muslim symbol of the crescent moon, was the site of an aggressive propaganda campaign to convince these men to switch sides and fight against their colonial masters. After all, Germany was allied with the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and the Sultan in Constantinople had declared jihad, calling all the faithful to fight the Ottomans’ enemies. These efforts mostly failed, as did other German attempts to encourage the Muslim populations of the Russian Caucasus, British India, and French North Africa to rise up en masse in the name of Islam. But the effort was a serious one, and demonstrated the important role non-European peoples and lands played in geostrategy during the conflict.

Conclusion

Race and racism helped shape both the approaches of combatant nations to waging World War One, and the experience of the war for millions of people among the European public and in European colonies in Africa and Asia. From the colour of their skins, to the content of their religious beliefs, colonized peoples’ attributes were of major concern to those making decisions about how and where to wage war. In fact, the very racial and cultural differences of non-European peoples gave European colonial powers a sense of entitlement to their colonial possessions in the first place. Then, during the war, these differences justified making use of Africans and Asians as workers, soldiers, and objects .