The First World War was the first truly global conflict and the war at sea was no exception. In fact it was the campaigns at sea that took the war to the most remote corners of the globe. Actions took place as far away as the Pacific and Indian Oceans, although the most significant actions were primarily fought between British and German ships.
Early in the war, Germany began attacking British trade routes in a bid to force the army to despatch forces to its Imperial colonies – forces the army could not afford to remove from the Western Front. In late 1914, German raiders in the Pacific inflicted the first defeat for a hundred years on the Royal Navy at the Battle of Coronel and a solitary German cruiser caused chaos in the Indian Ocean, but by early 1915, Germany’s overseas squadrons had been defeated.
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