‘NOW we have our war. The next thing is to decide how we are going to carry it on.’ Not surprisingly this statement by Churchill warranted one of Richmond's characteristic denunciations in his diary, ‘The Duke of Newcastle himself could not have made a more damning confession of inadequate preparation for war.’ For Richmond, the ADOD, it typified what he saw as proof of the poor state of war readiness that affected not only the First Lord, but also the Admiralty as a whole. As he wrote later in the same diary entry, ‘all this should have been thought of before’. As has been shown in the previous chapter, much of it had been, even if only on paper.

Churchill had done both himself and his department a disservice by this statement. Thus, when on 4 August war broke out between Britain and Germany the Admiralty had a coherent plan of how this war was going to be conducted and won. The War Staff, in particular, had been involved in these plans in the period after 1912. These plans involved the implementation of a blockade against Germany which, it was foreseen, would deliver a massive economic shock to the body of the German economy and cause chaos. Indeed the view of the wartime British Naval Attaché in Scandinavia, Rear-Admiral Montagu Consett, himself a member of the War Staff in 1912, was that, ‘there is probably no case in history in which economic forces at the disposal of a nation on the outbreak of war have been so great as those that this country held in August, 1914’.