Sarah Paine

They would convoy troop transports, but they wouldn't deal with the merchant marine until 1918.

Well, the Germans almost sank a terminal quantity of that stuff.

So the Navy is not thinking about the economic dimensions of warfare.

They're just focused on all the military things in World War I. In World War II, the British would be convoying even before they got in the war.

Another difference between the World War II and World War I, at the end of World War I, if you look at the disposition of German troops, they're abroad.

They're occupying Belgium, Luxembourg, parts of France.

Nobody's in Germany.

Yes, the Germans had really lousy meals during the war, but German civilians did not feel the full brunt of what their government had done.

And therefore, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt felt that it was really critical to have boots on the ground in Berlin to let the Germans know exactly what had happened to them and let them feel the war that they had inflicted on others in order to end it.

Even so, the Allies win this thing and they wreck the continental powers, but they almost wreck themselves in the process.

It's a pyrrhic victory for France and Britain.

It really weakens them.

So World War II is going to be a different event.

So that's the being in this continental situation and the lessons learned from the last time around.

and now for what the British did in World War II to deal with the continental problem.

The opening move of a maritime power in a really high-stakes war like this is typically blockade.

What you want to do is cut your enemy off from the oceans and force it to cannibalize its own resources and those of occupied areas.

And because of the geographic position of a maritime power, you can quite often do this to a continental power on narrow seas.

And Britons were well aware that Germany is a trading country.

Most of its trade goes by sea, and it's also on these narrow seas.