ABSTRACT
By the onset of World War I, the prolonged transformation of naval warfare had
culminated with the ascendance of the Battle Fleet. From the mid-nineteenth century
onward, the mighty navies of the world gradually but deliberately harnessed the
technological fruits of the Industrial Revolution to produce a new class of battleship
and to re-organize naval command and control in service of a new mission of long-
range combat at sea. The protracted fusion of new types of big-gun cruisers with
evolving changes in strategy, tactics, education, and training brought about the first
true revolution in naval warfare since the arrival of the line-of-battle ship in the
seventeenth century.1 But by the end of the war, the seeds of another revolution at
sea began to germinate.
