"British Mining Campaign in World War I" Topic

Antiaccess often is considered only as a form of sea denial for coastal defense. Yet it can work the opposite way, cutting off a coastal state and preventing deployment of offensive forces into the open sea. This has great potential when an adversary's access to the ocean already is restricted by geography. Antiaccess operations can be a vital contributor to achieving sea control, reducing the threat to shipping and releasing combatant forces for other tasks…

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This concept pre-dates WWII by at least a decade. The Japanese navy ran an entire campaign of port denial operations around Port Arthur in 1904 arguably, and a mine laid during one of these arguably tipped the balance of the Russo-Japanese War in favor of the Japanese, by sinking the battleship Petropavlovsk and killing Admiral Makarov. Makarov was a very close match for Togo, and while he was in command the naval war was a see-saw struggle; his successors were neither as competent nor as aggressive as he was, and Togo overmatched all of them despite numerical parity or inferiority.

The Russians and Germans both waged massive area denial mining campaigns in the Baltic throughout WWI, beginning at the very start of the Great War.

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