Talk:Four Days Battle

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[edit] A Decisive Strategic Victory?

Dear 83.117.15.212, excellent source you gave! But can't you see the line of reasoning? Precisely the outcome of the St James's Day Fight shows Britain now couldn't even afford a victory unless it would entail knocking the Dutch out of the war by destroying at least the larger part of their fleet. So the Four Days' Battle was a major strategic victory indeed for the Dutch: it put Britain in a position of basically having lost the war unless it could smash the enemy fleet — a very unlikely event. By "strategic" we mean: "effecting the final outcome of the war". This is the fundamental sense of the word. Of course it's often used indicating a derived aspect of this: "effecting the size of the forces". Now in purely numerical terms British losses weren't too severe: a mere ten ships. They still had a powerful fleet afterwards. But this obscures the fact that in the real strategic sense for them the battle was a complete disaster. They had to scrape the financial barrel to put out a fleet again for a last effort at full force; when that effort failed, for the fleet a process began of inexorable deterioration. The Great Fire of London only hastened the inevitable. We also have to consider the British war aims: the Second Anglo-Dutch War was an unabashed war of aggression to reduce The Republic to the status of a British protectorate and to take over all Dutch colonial possessions in order to gain the coveted World Trade Primacy. All that proud ambition was shown to be an empty dream in July 1666. Just as we rightly consider all the tactical draws of the Third Anglo-Dutch War strategic Dutch victories as the Dutch fleet thwarted British intentions by merely surviving, so with even more justification we may call the Four Days' Battle a great strategic victory because the Dutch Navy not merely survived — though that would have been enough — but destroyed for Britain any reasonable hope of winning the war.

--MWAK 15:37, 10 July 2005 (UTC)