In a short war, one in which the Schlieffen Plan succeeded and was followed by the defeat of Russia, the United Kingdom’s great navy would have mattered even less than its little prewar army. But in the siege that the Western Front became, all the combatant powers desperately needed access to the outside world. Few of them, the island nation of Britain least of all, produced enough food to support their populations. None could keep their war machines in operation without imported raw materials.
