The battle was inconclusive, but for an Admiralty that took British victory as the natural state of affairs, that was as bad as losing. But at Jutland, off Denmark’s North Sea coast, the upstart German High Seas Fleet gave worse than it got against Britain’s Grand Fleet. The Royal Navy had been anticipating a clash with the German Imperial Navy since the beginning of the war, in the confident knowledge that it would prevail. Navy has fallen into some of the same vices that bedeviled the Royal Navy by the turn of the 20th century, and that were exposed at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Navy that has faced no peer in battle since World War II, and not even the prospect of an enemy since the Soviet Navy’s demise in 1991. The Great War’s maritime battle has much to teach a U.S. But for the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy, which had assumed it would win the glory it saw as its birthright, it was a single sharp shock-one with lessons that the U.S. If there was one thing shared in all these theaters, it was a leadership struggling to comprehend how quickly war had changed, and to reconcile the lessons they’d been taught with the grim realities of the ground. On the periphery of Europe, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk frustrated the Allied thrust at Gallipoli, while far away German cruisers wreaked havoc along the South American coast. In the south, Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops froze in the white war of the mountains.
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In the east, Russia and the Central Powers fought a war of movement over vast plains. But the grinding ground war between the entrenched armies in France wasn’t the only conflict.
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The popular imagination remembers World War I as a tale of trenches, mud, rats, and barbed wire.