„The navies of the Baltic Sea Region during the Interwar Period: development of fleets, organizations and naval strategies 1918-1939“

The Estonian Maritime Museum is conducting an international academic conference focusing on the naval strategies of the Baltic Sea Region. The aforementioned conference will be held in Tallinn at 1.-2. June 2022. The first conference day (1st of June) will take palce at the Tallinn University (Narva mnt 29) and on the second day (2nd of June) will be onboard the icebreaker Suur Tõll. The presenters are invited from Germany, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and the United Kingdom.

The Interwar Period will be taken under closer examination which is an intriguing chapter in Europe`s history – the outcome of World War I saw the shifting of balance between great powers and simultaneously many new countries emerged from the Russian Empire. Because of the former dominant naval powers such as Germany`s and Russian navies were in ruins after 1918 a significant power vacuum occurred in the Baltic Sea Region. This created suitable opportunities for many smaller and newly independent countries to develop their own naval capabilities. Therefore a comletely new political situation arose in this area which ment that Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, Lihtuania and Poland saw the necessity to re-evaluate their overall military and naval situation amongst themselves.

Generally speaking the Interwar Period witnessed three types of navies in the Baltic Sea Region: 1. the navies of former great powers such as Germany and Russia (later Soviet Union) that started to rebuild their fleet`s for offensive purposes in early 1930`s, 2. Danish and Swedish navies main focus was to protect  their countires neutrality and 3. newly formed navies of Finland, the Baltic States and Poland sought to maintain their independence. It is noteworthy that none of the above mentioned countires could establish naval dominance for the greater part of the Interwar Period. To make things more complicated the United Kingdom and France also tried to increase their political and military influence in Scandinavia, The Baltic and Poland. The great powers themselves tried to avoid future wars by establishing a strict balance of power between themselves via numerous naval treaties, but on the background Germany and Soviet Union made preparations for war. Thereby all the smaller states situated near the Baltic Sea had to take this potential threat into account. In the eve of World War II all these navies had gone through many development phases and had their own primary objectives along with maritime defense concepts, but to a greater or lesser extent they were all effected by the upcoming war.

This conference would give us a unique opportunity to have an exceptional insight as how each nation prepared for naval conflicts, on what principles were their navies developed, did they manage to model their fleets according to their governments official maritime policies, who was considered the main threat, which countries and why concentrated on offensive or defensive warfare and did any co-operation exist between the numerous fleets situated near the Baltic Sea.