This chapter is about a war that did not happen. It was a war of daring British assaults on Esbjerg and the Kiel Canal; of great naval battles in the entrances to the Baltic; of an Anglo-French drive from the German Baltic coast to Berlin; of a German–Swedish invasion of Finland, followed by an advance on St Petersburg. That this war existed only in the minds of politicians, publicists and naval and military planners is no reason why it should be ignored. Belief in the possibility of armed conflict in northern Europe reflected the fears produced by a period of profound international disturbance. It was also the result of attempts to come to terms with rapid changes in military technology, the implications of which could in many cases only be guessed at. Moreover, the implementation of ideas ventilated in the pre-1914 period was actively considered during the war itself.

Many of the plans for war in Scandinavia were expressions of institutional rivalries between the armed services of the great powers. Those produced by the British and German navies (discussed in the next two sections of this chapter) represented prolonged rearguard actions against the growing predominance of the military, and of the continental European theatre. Naval officers who favoured action in Scandinavia shared the common ‘ideology of the offensive’ but wished to see it directed towards a theatre where, they believed, their own country or their own branch held the strategic advantage. Army officers in Germany and, to an increasing extent, in Britain as well wanted to avoid any diversion of resources or effort from the western and eastern fronts where, they believed, the best prospects for a successful offensive lay.