Importance To Royal Navy
The GIUK gap was particularly important to the British Royal Navy, as any attempt by northern European forces to break into the open Atlantic would have to do so either through the heavily defended English Channel, which is also one of the world's busiest seaways, or through one of the exits on either side of Iceland. When also considering British control over the strategic fortress of Gibraltar at the entrance to the Mediterranean, Ireland, Spain, France, and Portugal are the only European countries that have direct access to the Atlantic Ocean in a way that cannot be easily blocked at a choke point by the Royal Navy.
Read more about this topic: GIUK Gap
Famous quotes containing the words royal navy, importance, royal and/or navy:
“The Royal Navy of England hath ever been its greatest defence and ornament; it is its ancient and natural strength; the floating bulwark of the island.”
—William Blackstone (1723–1780)
“What is done for science must also be done for art: accepting undesirable side effects for the sake of the main goal, and moreover diminishing their importance by making this main goal more magnificent. For one should reform forward, not backward: social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“Not to these shores she came! this other Thrace,
Environ barbarous to the royal Attic;
How could her delicate dirge run democratic,
Delivered in a cloudless boundless public place
To an inordinate race?”
—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)
“The Navy is the asylum for the perverse, the home of the unfortunate. Here the sons of adversity meet the children of calamity, and here the children of calamity meet the offspring of sin.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)