Talk:Battle of the Adonáire Strait
The Battle of the Adonáire Strait was a decisive naval battle in the Sea of Canete during the second phase of the Great War. The Caphirian operation, sought to eliminate Urcea as a strategic power in the Sea of Canete, thereby giving Caphiria a free hand in seizing Halfway and cutting off the Urcean threat to Urlazio and potential to reinforce Veltorina. The Sarpedon Squadron, under the command of Návarce Lucás Cina, inflicted devastating damage on the Caphirian fleet that proved irreparable. Having initially underestimated the strength and capabilities of the Royal Navy, the Caphirians failed to significantly damage the Sarpedon Squadron during most of the day, providing what would have been a strategic victory for Urcea. By dusk, the pioneering use of ad-hoc torpedo bombers inflicted severe damage to the Caphirian navy, ending the battle and decisively delivering control of the Sea of Canete to the Royal Navy.
| Battle of the Adonáire Strait | |||||||
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| Part of the Great War | |||||||
| The Caphirian battlecruiser Bacchis burns after being struck by a torpedo | |||||||
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| Urcea | Caphiria | ||||||
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Sarpedon Squadron
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Center Flotilla
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| Casualties and losses | |||||||
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Background
Following the long Second Fratricide, the first phase of the Great War involving the Levantine powers, Urcea declared war on Caphiria. Caphirian military planners had long anticipated a direct conflict between the two powers, and at the center of Caphirian thinking was the necessity of destroying the Royal Navy quickly. It was assumed that Urcea would move to resupply its ally, Veltorina, while massively scaling up deployments in Dorhaven and Urlazio; Caphirian command understood that a failure to decisively cripple Urcea's ability to move supplies and troops by sea would lead to a long war that neither side could decisively win. Consequently, War Plan Purple was designed to include a first strike against the Royal Navy's Sarpedon Squadron by a concentration of forces pulled from multiple deployments. By defeating the Sarpedon Squadron, Caphiria hoped to seize Halfway, cutting off Urcea's artery into Sarpedon and also allowing the Imperial Naval Fleet to harass Urcean shipping in the Sea of Canete. Halfway would also give Caphiria a strong location to strike at the Navy of Burgundie at some point later in the war, and Caphirian planners assumed the Navy of Burgundie would be critically weak in Levantia due to a number of commitments abroad.
Many historians and scholars have analyzed Caphirian thinking going into the early stages of its war with Levantia, but Kiravian historian P.G.W. Gelema was given access to declassified Great War-era documents in the early 2000s. His study produced a number of assumptions that Caphirian military establishment held going into the battle, and his assumptions have become the historiographical standard for analyzing Caphirian naval planning going into the war. A summary of his assumptions are listed below.
- The primary faulty assumption held by command of the Imperial Naval Fleet was that the Great War would be a repeat of the Red Interregnum on the sea; in that conflict, the Urcean Navy was rendered largely useless and the primary fighting was between the Imperial Naval Fleet and the Navy of Burgundie, which Caphirians assumed would be the case following an "easy" victory over the Royal Navy. Consequently, the Imperial Naval Fleet had largely been constructed to counter the composition of the Navy of Burgundie and was largely unprepared for the kind of ships fielded by the Royal Navy.
- Caphirians believed that the Royal Navy's composition was largely gimmick-based and disconnected from the real learned experience of naval warfare. As an example of this, planners incorrectly assumed that the Leo the Great-class battleship, the center of the Royal Navy in the 1930s, would be structurally unsound in firing a broadside due to its unique three-turret structure. These assumptions were incorrect, and documents have shown that the Caphirians largely dismissed the influence of Burgoignesc naval thinkers who helped design the new Royal Navy in the years after the Red Interregnum and whose influence was still felt.
- It was commonly believed by most great powers that air power on the sea was not viable and that traditional gun-based warfare would remain dominant. Specific to Caphiria, it was believed that Urcea's reliance on reconnaissance from scout carriers was actually a disadvantage for the Royal Navy, as it was thought that any poor weather would render aircraft unable to provide reliable reports of enemy disposition. Declassified papers from the Royal Navy have indicated that weather was never a serious problem, and further revealed that Urcea's reconnaissance planes had relatively high-fidelity photography equipment capable of giving reliable intelligence.
- Many command-level officers in the Imperial Naval Fleet believed that the officers and crewmen of the Royal Navy were inexperienced and would make many critical mistakes during the course of battle and that some Royal Navy commanders would even decide to flee during the battle. Most scholars and historians believe that this attitude came more from the perceived supremacy of Caphirian arms than based on any real observation of the Royal Navy, as neither the Royal Navy nor the Imperial Naval Fleet had fought a major naval war in a generation and were generally equal in quality.
- Some command-level officers in the Imperial Naval Fleet had anticipated the potential use of some kind of air attack in desperation if the Royal Navy was doing poorly in battle; it was assumed that they would not employ such tactics if not "cornered". It was also believed, even if air power was used, that small-arms fire from the ships would be enough to destroy the "slow" wooden bi-planes still in use in the mid-1930s. During the battle, only a handful of small arms fire hit their intended bi-plane targets, and none of them were of large enough caliber to cause severe damage.
While these assumptions were assessed by historians long after the end of the war, similar conclusions were reached by Imperial Naval Fleet command in the months immediately following the battle which lead to a period of long reform for the Imperial Naval Fleet, reform that was not fully completed until the early 1940s.
Battle
Aftermath
Following the disastrous defeat at the Adonáire Strait, the remaining fifty-nine Caphirian ships - the capital ships of which were almost all severely damaged - managed to escape during the night and return to ports in Luria, where they were immediately subject to a blockade from the Sarpedon Squadron reinforced by ships from the Navy of Burgundie. The blockade would eventually pass, but the Imperial Naval Fleet would find itself restricted to operating in the Urlazian Sea for the remainder of the war. The loss was so catastrophic that the Imperial Naval Fleet would not launch another major offensive for the remainder of the Great War, though it would find success in some defensive operations beginning in 1939. The battle lead to the adoption of uniform standards for anti-aircraft weapons on ships for the Imperial Naval Fleet, with most ships properly equipped with AA guns by 1940.
Having cleared the Sea of Canete of the Imperial Naval Fleet, the Royal Navy established dominance in the area, allowing planned offensives in Urlazio to proceed along with resupply to Dorhaven and Veltorina. The open supply lines between Levantia and east Sarpedon significantly lengthened the war, as the Caphirians were unable to decisively expel the Levantines from Sarpedon despite lengthy strings of victory on land.
In the history of military technology, the Battle of the Adonáire Strait is considered a turning point in naval warfare. Every great power prior to the Great War had hypothesized and, to a lesser extent, tested the possibility of armed naval air power, but the technology available in the early 1920s ruled it out as a viable option. The overwhelming success of the jury-rigged torpedo bombers at the Adonáire Strait created a revolution in military thinking practically overnight, as most great powers began to scramble to build carriers and construct purpose-built naval bombers and torpedo bombers. The Battle of the Adonáire Strait is considered to be the beginning of the end of the big-gun battleship era, though large scale battleship encounters would continue until the early-to-mid 1940s.
Political and military impact (from Discord)
The Adonaire Strait disaster represented a rebuke to more than seventy years of Caphirian military policy of promoting the affairs of the Navy equal to those of the Army. The loss, therefore, was deeply upsetting to the wartime government, the upper classes, and the general public, though the public was sharply divided whether or not to blame the leadership or the concept of the navy at all.
These questions would be answered at a personal level at Caphiria’s highest rungs of power immediately following the battle. As the bulk of both sides forces began to slip into the engagement, Imperator Magasevetus, Prime Minister (???), and others gathered to receive a briefing. The atmosphere originally was cautious but excited but began to take a down turn as each capital ship loss began to be reported back, eventually leading to stunned silence among those gathered with the loss of the flagship Caphiria Mons. At this news, the Imperator reportedly stood, shrugged, uttered “Caphiri per terram” (a reference to XXX), and left the room in silence.
The day after the battle, the Caphirian government ordered the suspension of all capital ship construction and issued a prohibition on the direction of steel to be used for the construction of anything beyond submarines, including supply and troop ships. Air and ground manufacturers would receive a post-Adonaire boost of materials, leading to a slightly improved supply situation for the Legion by late 1938.