"...at the outset of the crisis, France was, unequivocally, the primary naval power of the four major combatants. Germany had sixteen dreadnoughts on the eve of March 13, 1919, with another two having begun construction, and Italy had twelve in service with an additional laid down in 1917 and with construction anticipated to be complete in early 1920. France, on the other hand, had nearly as much as double the dreadnoughts as each, with twenty-five in service as the war began and another two in construction, and having also deployed their first "battlecruisers" earlier in 1918, the
Marseille and the
Nantes, and having laid down three more battlecruisers as a complement. When taken together with Austria-Hungary's eleven dreadnoughts, the Iron Triangle enjoyed a daunting advantage in pure tonnage over their opponents, especially when cruisers, destroyers, and pre-dreadnoughts were taken into account.
The issue for France and Austria, however, was one of geography. Austria's ports were entirely bottled up in the Adriatic, which could theoretically be closed by Italy, a state that had perhaps underinvested in cruisers but had a sophisticated submarine program inspired by Spain as well as a cutting-edge fleet of fast-attack torpedo boats known as the MAS craft; the idea was that in war, Italy could make the Strait of Otranto a living hell for the Austrians to try to navigate through with light naval vessels, submarines (referred to as U-boats in German and Austrian planning documents), well-placed minefields and even requisitioned fishing vessels strung in a line and laden with small explosives. This would, in theory, tie up the Austrians for some time and allow Italy to deploy her vessels into the heart of the Mediterranean, though for the first year of the war the
Regia Marina served primarily as a fleet-in-being.
Nonetheless, this fleet-in-being was a huge strategic problem for France, which had to keep ample naval assets deployed not only out of Brest to guard against Germany but also out of Toulon, aimed towards Italy, and Mers el-Kebir in Algeria or Port Said in Egypt to guard her southern Mediterranean holdings. In addition, the
Marine Imperiale as a matter of policy always kept at least two dreadnoughts deployed to the Oriental Fleet, which though primarily destroyer-based maintained harbors sufficient for dreadnoughts at Cam Ranh in Indochina and Takau in Formosa, with additional, smaller bases in Hainan's Port-Napoleon, the French concession of Busan in Korea, and the small Chinese port of Chefou in Shandong. Trying to cover this vast territory on both ends of the Formosa Straits was an exceedingly difficult task, and in the weeks before the war, the French Admiralty elected to deploy an additional three dreadnoughts to Asia along with substantive cruiser and destroyer escorts, in order to safeguard the region from potential opportunistic Japanese aggression and to better position themselves to quickly annihilate German forces in the theater, which paled in comparison to what France could put in the field or to sea.
Thus, at the start of the war, fourteen of Germany's sixteen dreadnoughts were in their North and Baltic Sea ports of Cuxhaven and Kiel; all of Italy's dreadnought fleet sat at anchover at La Spezia in Liguria or Taranto in Apulia; the Austrians were sitting in Pula, Fiume and Split with their fleet; and France had five dreadnoughts collecting in the East, thirteen at the ready in the Mediterranean between their various bases, and a further nine whose mission was to prevent any German operations "west of Calais" as the parlance became, an endeavor in which France expected to enjoy tacit British support for a demilitarized English Channel..."
[1]
- Battleship: The First Arms Race
(I want to thank
@Lascaris for his thoughts on realistic naval figures for all four of these powers.)
[1] You'll notice I don't mention Denmark here; that's by design, and we'll get to them, mostly when their small navy is at the bottom of the Baltic.