Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Less than a hundred years ago Great Britain was enjoying a centuries-long reign as the world's greatest naval power.Having recently seen off the most formidable threat to its hegemony since the Napoleonic Wars, its fleet was the world's largest, unsurpassed in the number of capital ships and with more aircraft carriers and cruisers than any other navy.So daunting were the prospects of matching it that the other major naval powers used diplomacy to regulate competition rather than getting into a potentially ruinous naval arms race with the cost of these agreements being the locking in of Britain's naval dominance.Simply put, nobody wanted to mess with the Royal Navy.Today, however, the British navy no longer enjoys hegemonic status.For decades historians have examined this transformation from a variety of perspectives to explore how Britain lost its naval supremacy.In the latest contribution to this debate, James Levy searches for answers by identifying 1942 as the moment when he believes this hegemony vanished, and using the circumstances to understand why Britain was forced to give it up.It is a provocative, even feisty book that finds within the depths of the Second World War the point at which the British paid the price for a series of poor decisions, ones which forced them to cede their status to the United States.Many of these decisions predated the war and reflected the larger economic and geopolitical challenges Britain faced during the interwar era.Although still a formidable economic power capable of drawing upon the resources of its empire, Britain was still coping with the enormous financial strain resulting from the First World War.This made participation in the interwar treaty system restricting naval arms attractive, as British finances were in no condition to support the sort of naval building needed to maintain British dominance against the superior resources of the United States.This changed in the mid-1930s, as the combination of the reemergent German challenge and Japanese expansionism in East Asia led to the passage in 1937 of a new naval expansion program, one intended to provide parity with the combination of these powers.Yet the new program was more modest than the one desired by the Admiralty and was far from complete when the war began.Even without the completed program, in September 1939 the Royal Navy possessed a fleet second to none in the world.And for the first year and a half of the war, it was more than up to the task of maintaining Britain's naval hegemony.Yet from the start of the war the Royal Navy suffered losses, most dramatically with the sinkings of the Royal Oak and the Courageous in the first
Author: Mark Klobas
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4409730494