International Journal of Naval History

 From the Editors: Taking Up a Worthy Challenge - the Great War at Sea.

    The IJNH would like to take up the challenge posed by Rear Admiral James Goldrick, a scholar of the Great War at sea in his own right. In his review of Eric Osborne's study of the Battle of the Heligoland Bight published in the present issue, the admiral called for a ‘Great War Naval Project’ in response to the approach of the centennial of that conflict. This publication would like to collaborate with any group or institution intending to encourage the exploration of that terrible, formative struggle at sea. A re-assement is in order to identify the best in the literature and encourage both new scholarship and a valid and compelling picture of that era for the general public. As the admiral put it. . . 

It is not too much to say that The Battle of Heligoland Bight is symptomatic of our continuing inability to produce an effective marriage between academic naval history and more ‘popular’ work. Too much of what constitutes published history that is accessible is not accurate and, equally, too much of what is truly accurate is not readily accessible. In relation to the First World War in particular, we need to make a change and make it now. It is not fair to the wider public to allow their historical understanding to rest upon assumptions which are fundamentally mistaken or upon analysis which has long been overtaken by serious and discriminating research. Nearly a century after the outbreak of the Great War, there is an overwhelming case for an international effort to re-assess the conflict at sea from the basis of thorough historical research and with the benefit of the work that has been done in recent years on the years leading up to 1914. None of the official histories still constitute comprehensive, or even reliable sources and they do not, even considered together, present a credible narrative of a conflict much less bloody than the land war, but which had its own significance. We need to start a ‘Great War Naval Project’ that will set about such work and within a time span that will allow its first products to be available at the time of the centenary of the start of the First World War, now less than eight years ahead.

   The editors of this publication invite your response to editors@ijnhonline.org.