Talk:High Seas Fleet

message: Re: the numbers of German vessels surrendered - see | Beatty's orders which shows that the expected numbers were 9 battle ships, 5 battle cruisers, 7 light cruisers and 50 destroyers. Hearsay evidence - two destroyes failed to leave port.
Fenton Robb 10:52, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Surrender

message: Should be more on pre-War politics.  Germany made a serious attempt at the beginning of the 20th century to build up a surface navy that would rival Britain's.  However, for Germany its navy and overseas colonies were more of a symbolic show-the-flag international prestige type of thing, rather than having any great practical importance, while Britain was a maritime power which was not self-sufficient in food production, and so was basically dependent on shipments of food from overseas to avoid starvation -- and this meant that Britain would do whatever it took to match and exceed Germany in the naval arms race, regardless of the cost, as a life-and-death matter.  In the end, when WW1 came, the German surface navy didn't seriously challenge British sea power outside the North Sea, and didn't really give Germany any great military advantage in the North Sea, but building up the navy had soured British-German relations in the years preceding WW1.  If not building up the navy would have meant that Britain wouldn't intervene on the side of France, Germany would have done a lot better not to build up its surface navy. AnonMoos 17:34, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Some additional info at Fleet Acts and scattered in various subsections of Causes of World War I. -- AnonMoos 21:14, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Also Tirpitz_Plan... AnonMoos (talk) 13:43, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

text: See Kaiserliche Marine for more info about the history of the HSF before WWI. Sandpiper (talk) 23:41, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Pre-war politics

message: "In October 1918, with the army facing defeat and the civil population starving, Scheer decided to launch a do-or-die attack on the Grand Fleet."
Can this sentence be substantiated? In Germany it is generally accepted that rumours ran abound within the ranks of the sailors that such an attack was planned (hence their revolt), but that the German High Command never prepared this kind of operation and thus its actual application can be considered unlikely. The German revolution would have been underway with or without the sailor's revolution which was just the catalyst.
84.154.3.52 (talk) 19:40, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Suicide attack

message: What about creating a section that would allow a user to quickly acess pages devoted to the vessels that composed the High Seas Fleet?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.115.86.14 (talk) 12:53, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a separate article about the order of battle at Jutland containing info for both sides. Sandpiper (talk) 23:41, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

text: Additionally, the order of battle varies with time... so it might be established for some specific (important?) moments. Maybe a "list" of these ships would be better for allowing "quick access" to a user (bsed on which sources?). Cheers, DPdH (talk) 04:24, 17 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Order of Battle? 

message: Per the request here, I've read through the article. While it's nicely written and fairly comprehensive, it does miss some topics which seem relevant. These include:
*The strategic and intellectual bankruptcy of the High Seas Fleet concept isn't really covered. While the problems with the concept up to 1906 are covered nicely, this analysis isn't taken forward. This strategy was a key factor in Britain becoming involved in World War I (and contributed to the tensions which caused the war), yet due to geography and Britain's shipbuilding capabilities never had a realistic hope of success.
*Coverage of the fleet's logistics would be interesting - for instance, did it have the range to operate outside of the North Sea as a coherent unit? Where were its bases, and how sophisticated were they? (etc)
*Likewise coverage of topics such as communications and intelligence would be good
*It would be good if the article could cover how the Germans manned the fleet and trained the large number of sailors (and officers) it required. Given that the various German states had historically not been naval powers, building such a huge fleet was a major change and would have generated massive training requirements.
*To reach FA status I'd suggest that the article should cover the legacy of the fleet (ie, what influence did it have on the war, how is it remembered and did it influence later developments? (such as Plan Z?)
*"Once the ships were interned, their guns were disabled through the removal of their breech blocks, and their crews were reduced to 200 officers and enlisted men" - was this 200 men per ship, or across all the interned ships? Nick-D (talk) 00:20, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks a lot, Nick, this is really helpful. I don't usually do these bigger picture topics and it's easy for me to get trapped in the tactical/operational stuff. I know off the top of my head that Herwig has a nice chapter on personnel/training/etc. as well as an explanation of the logistics (especially with regards to the overseas units) which should be integrated. And of course there's plenty of info on the arms race going off the rails for Germany in the run-up to WWI as well as the failure of the fleet as an instrument of war. I'll see what I can dig up on intel and communications. As for the last one, that's per ship - I can see how that is unclear though. Thanks again. Parsecboy (talk) 02:04, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: No worries. It's always great to see articles on 'big' topics like this being brought up to the highest standards. Nick-D (talk) 02:08, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

text: To be able to directly protect the Boers, the Germans would have needed to build a fleet large and powerful enough to directly challenge British naval domination -- which meant a fleet powerful enough to threaten to starve Britain, since the island of Britain was not self-sufficient in food.  German naval construction plans along those lines played a large role in driving Britain into the "Entente cordiale" with France in 1905, and ensuring that Britain would step in on the side of France in 1914.  If German policymakers had coldly and clear-sightedly prioritized the importance of protecting Boers vs. British neutrality in a continental European conflict, then they might have given British neutrality more importance than an intangible delight in shiny new naval hardware, or grandiose but extremely vague daydreaming colonial aspirations. AnonMoos (talk) 16:23, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some comments 

message: You have removed the paragraph concerning this operation: why?  It is fallaciously claimed by many authors the HSF never sortied after Jutland.  The three occasions when it did were 18-19 August 1916, 18-19 October 1916 and 23-25 April 1918; the first and the third have paragraph descriptions in this article, why not the second?Dfvj (talk) 06:40, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: It's too much detail, and more importantly, you added it without any sources (and by adding it, you broke citations that were in the article). This article should cover the operations of the fleet as a high level summary - only significant operations should be covered in any detail (which is why Jutland gets its own section, Albion gets an entire paragraph, etc.). The 18-19 October sortie deserves the same level of detail as the sorties Pohl conducted in 1915 (which is a single sentence) since they never had a chance of encountering significant British forces. Operations that had a reasonable chance of producing the Germans' desired result (the bombardment of 15-16 December 1914, the 18-19 August 1916 operation, and the 23-25 April 1918 sortie, being the chief examples) should have a bit more coverage, since the fleets might well have come to grips on those occasions. Parsecboy (talk) 12:12, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: All of the information in that paragraph came from Beesley, which WAS cited (admittedly at the end of the first sentence rather than the end of the paragraph, which was a style error).  I don't recall breaking any citations: to what, precisely?  I think you are wrong to dismiss the significance of the October 1916 sortie: British authors make much of the post-Jutland inactivity of the HSF (in order to argue Jutland was a moral victory for the RN); yet on this occasion, the British were fore-warned, yet declined to counter other than diverting mercantile traffic -- yes the weather had a lot to do with that, but it gives the lie to the Germans cowering before British might, doesn't it?  I've uploaded a parsed version of this paragraph to which I hope you have no objection. Dfvj (talk) 00:48, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: What you're arguing for is original research, and while I might agree with it–indeed one of my Masters' papers touched on that very issue—it cannot be included in the article. Again, this should be a high-level summary of the activities of the fleet, and while your argument is an important one, I don't know of any historians who have yet explicitly made it. Without making that argument, the operation loses its significance—it's just one more in a series of sorties by the fleet that resulted in no contact with British surface forces. Parsecboy (talk) 01:39, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sortie of 18–19 October 1916