Whats a naval arms race?
Naval arms race means building up the “Navy” (boats). “Naval arms race: Mahan’s thesis was highly influential and lead to an explosion of new naval construction worldwide. The American congress immediately ordered the building of three battleships (with a fourth, USS Iowa, to be built two years later). Japan, whose British trained navy wiped out the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima, helped to reinforce the concept of naval power as the dominant factor in conflict. However the book made the most impact in Germany. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II had been brought up amongst the Royal Navy, when he visited his grandmother, Queen Victoria. His mother said “Wilhelm’s one idea is to have a Navy which shall be larger and stronger than the British navy”. In 1898 came the first German Fleet Act, two years later a second doubled the number of ships to be built, to nineteen battleships and twenty–three cruisers in the next twenty years. In another decade, Germany would go from a naval ranking
