The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918 Read online

  The emphasis was on smartness, speed in hoisting sail, precise conformity to signal-book diagrams in fleet drills, pride in pulling races and inter-ship boxing and tug o’wars. Admiral ‘Pompo’ Heneage, who was born three years earlier than Queen Victoria and retired three years before she died, was the complete Victorian naval officer, but by no means the most eccentric nor exceptional in his concern for a ship’s cleanliness or smartness. ‘When inspecting ships he always wore white kid gloves,’ according to one naval writer, ‘and his coxswain followed him with a dozen spare pairs… He liked to put his hands on the tops of pipes running over his head, or into the most inaccessible nooks and crannies. If one speck of dust appeared on the immaculate gloves, he would turn to the Commander waving two fingers. “Dis is not de dirt of days,” he would observe, “nor de dirt of veeks, nor de dirt of months. It is de dirt of ages. Coxswain, gif me a clean pair of gloves.”’(4)

  Practice ‘shoots’ were not considered of first priority by the commanders-in-chief nor by their captains. The shine on the decorated tampion, which closed off like a cork the guns’ barrels, was more important; and it was not unknown for the meagre ration of practice ammunition to be tossed overboard for fear that gun-firing might spoil the brasswork.

  During this long period of decay, a handful of exceptionally talented officers somehow achieved positions of influence ashore and afloat. Among them were Philip Colomb, a questioning intellectual who wrote provocatively for service journals, and Admiral Sir Frederick Richards, a great reformer and administrator.

  Far above them all as an administrator, reformer, inspirer, persuader, manipulator, charmer, and politician was John Arbuthnot Fisher. Fisher, the counterpart and chief adversary of Alfred von Tirpitz, did more than any single officer to drag the Royal Navy out of its nineteenth-century sloth, inefficiency, and drowsiness, and make it fit to stand up to the superb force Tirpitz created.

  In his years of greatness a friend of kings and princes, politicians and newspaper proprietors, ‘Jacky’ Fisher entered the Navy in the 1850s, ‘penniless, friendless and forlorn’ as he later wrote. His family was certainly without power or influence, his father being an ex-army officer turned tea-planter of mixed fortunes in Ceylon. Fisher never saw him after the age of six, when he was sent to England to live with an uncle. It seems likely that Fisher’s exceptional qualities of intellect and moral and physical courage were inherited from his mother, who is described as having a ‘powerful mind, organizing capacity and taste for power’.(5)

  Within twenty years Fisher had made his mark as an ‘apostle of progress’ with a special interest in torpedoes, mines, gunnery, and advanced machinery like the water-tube boiler and the turbine.

  From captain of the Navy’s gunnery school, Fisher became Director of Naval Ordnance and Torpedoes in 1886, a department he found in a state of chaos and confusion. Within less than five years he had totally reorganized it, and successfully withdrawn from the Army its remarkably anomalous responsibility for naval guns. This performance was a preview in miniature of his future period as First Sea Lord. Fisher gathered about him a group of ambitious and patriotic officers attracted by his dynamism, self-assurance and extreme style: they were the cream of the Navy’s intellect, soon to be known as members of the ‘Fishpond’. And heaven help any non-member (he called them ‘the syndicate of discontent’) who opposed Fisher’s policies! Fisher inevitably made enemies with every reform but it was not necessary for him to have made as many as he did, or to be so unforgiving. Nonetheless it can fairly be said that when Fisher was appointed First Sea Lord in October I 904, six months after the signature of the Entente Cordiale, the Royal Navy’s course towards decay was reversed.

  Fisher recognized, ahead of many politicians, the deadly danger emerging from across the North Sea. He also knew that the men who would one day have to face it must be of the highest quality. With this in mind he transformed recruitment, manning, and status in the Navy. He introduced schemes to encourage promotion from the lower deck and at the same time abolished fees at naval colleges through which only the well-off had once passed. He introduced a nucleus crews system of reserves, based on French practice, and greatly improved the standing of the once-despised engineer officers.

  All this was recognized by his followers in the service to be of inestimable value. Fisher’s matériel reforms were more conspicuous. Ignoring the cries of fury from deprived commanders and far-flung diplomats, Fisher brought home numerous ships, most of which ‘could neither fight nor run away’ (as Fisher expressed it) and were scrapped. Even the Mediterranean Fleet was reduced to a shadow of the great fleet he had commanded from 1899 to 1902. Through influential friends and through his press contacts, Fisher concentrated the nation’s eye on Germany, and Germany alone, as the threat to Britain’s dominance at sea. The people loved it, and the Navy League flourished. By economies as ruthless as his reforms, Fisher reduced the Navy Estimates three years running. The Liberals loved him for that.

  Above all else, Fisher gave the nation the dreadnought. This statement requires qualifying for it can also be argued that the all-big-gun ship was inevitably the final stage in the design of the old ship-of-the-line. In the nineteenth century the battleship had passed through numerous developments, from the three-decker wooden walls, little improved from the mid-eighteenth century, to mixed sail and steam propulsion, to the ‘mastless’ ironclad. Guns had developed from smooth-bore 68-pounders firing solid shot, to the 16-inch, rifted, breech-loading guns of the Inflexible.

  As defence against the explosive charge of these massive shells, armour-plate had grown in thickness and resistance until (again in the Inflexible) it was responsible for 27.5 per cent of the ship’s total displacement. By the end of the century, a typical modern first-class battleship was armed with four guns of 12-inch calibre in two turrets fore and aft, and a mixed battery of medium-calibre guns, from 6-inch to 9.2-inch.

  By this time there was a growing consciousness of the threat of the torpedo and the mine. Cheap, nippy little torpedo boats, capable of speeds twice that of a battleship, could race in and send to the bottom a man o’war costing a million pounds and taking four years to build. This very real threat led to radical alterations in the design and defences of the battleship and to radical new thinking on tactics. Massive and cumbersome nets were carried and hoisted out like a steel crinoline by battleships at anchor. Battleships bristled with anti-torpedo boat light guns. It was deemed prudent to extend greatly the range at which lines of battleships fought one another.

  All these new fears for the security of the battleship appeared to be confirmed in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Japanese torpedo boats opened hostilities by attacking the Russian Fleet. The Japanese suffered critical battleship losses from mines. Both sides became increasingly preoccupied with the new underwater weapons.

  Other lessons one learned in this naval war which crystallized all the problems argued over by theoreticians for years. ‘Spotting’ the fall of shot accurately from ships firing mixed armament was seen to be almost impossible, the varying size splashes only confusing the spotter. According to the official British observer with the Japanese Fleet at the first-ever battle of ironclads, ‘when 12-inch guns are firing, shots from 10-inch pass unnoticed, while for all the respect they instil, 8-inch or 6-inch guns might just as well be peashooters’. To the astonishment of this same observer (and to the whole naval world when it was informed) the Russian battleships opened accurate fire at 18,000 yards: 3,000 yards was still the standard range of British battle practice at this time. It was clear that heavy guns could prove decisive long before medium-calibre guns could come into effective range.

  Here was proof for far-sighted naval designers that only the heaviest guns would count in naval warfare, and that future battles would be fought at ranges of between five and ten miles (as visibility permitted) with flotillas of torpedo boats attempting to get within range of the enemy in order to launch their ‘tin fish’. Clearly, then, only the heaviest and
anti-torpedo boat guns must in future be mounted in battleships.

  The Japanese and Russians were, naturally, the first to recognize the lessons of the battles they fought. The United States Navy Board drew up plans for two battleships mounting ten 12-inch guns before the end of 1904, and succeeded in getting authority through Congress to lay down only marginally smaller all-big-gun battleships early in 1905. In Italy the naval architect Vittorio Cuniberti had made public his design for a battleship mounting twelve 12-inch guns, and none smaller except anti-torpedo boat guns.

  The American ships were built at a leisurely pace, the Italians had not got the money to follow Cuniberti, the Japanese had not sufficiently developed their ordnance facilities and eventually produced a hybrid with mixed 12-inch and 10-inch guns. Only Britain had the facilities and need to produce an all-big-gun battleship without delay and set a pace which no other nation could match. Within a few days of his appointment as First Sea Lord, Fisher set up a Committee on Designs. It included a number of the best ‘brains’ in the Navy, all imbued with Fisher’s sense of urgency. Less than a year later, the Dreadnought was laid down at Portsmouth, and eight months after her launch was steaming on her trials.

  The effect at home and abroad was all that Fisher had hoped for. The Dreadnought, with ten 12-inch guns, had a broadside of twice as many heavy guns as any ship afloat. When few battleships could make 18 knots, the Dreadnought’s turbines speeded her along at 21 knots, and of even greater significance, she crossed the Atlantic at over 17 knots average without a breakdown. The German naval authorities were stunned by the superiority and speed of construction of this ship, and temporarily halted construction on battleships that would now be obsolete on completion. In the competition – the ‘battleship race’ – which was rapidly increasing in scale and intensity, the first round between Britain and Germany, between Fisher and von Tirpitz, had been won by the Royal Navy.

  At home there was great satisfaction and rejoicing. Models of the Dreadnought appeared in the shops, boys could recite every detail of her statistics, and wherever she could be seen crowds collected. But among navalists, and Fisher’s detractors, there was vocal criticism of the battleship. Her cost of construction was high and the cost of her loss in battle would be commensurately high. There were those who favoured smaller battleships with 10-inch guns, which could be built in greater numbers. Above all, if she made every battleship in the world obsolete, as Fisher loudly claimed, then Britain’s great superiority in numbers over Germany was wiped out at a stroke.

  Fisher fought back at what he regarded as counsels of doom and timidity, claiming that Britain could outbuild Germany and would have a dreadnought battle squadron before Germany could complete her first Dreadnoughtschiff In all the arguments that raged to and fro on the platforms, in the Press and West End clubs, the one undeniable and supremely important fact appears never to have been mentioned: the all-big-gun ship was as certain to come as day follows night, was already on the design boards of many foreign admiralties, was already under construction in the United States.

  What Britain had done under the ‘ruthless, relentless and remorseless’ (as he liked to claim for himself) methods of Fisher was to produce a world-beater overnight. The Dreadnought reasserted once again British paramountcy at sea, and in a style of theatricality which only Jacky Fisher could sponsor.

  THE ANGLO-GERMAN BATTLESHIP RACE

  Admiral Fisher’s attributes – The dreadnought race begins – Admiral Beresford’s vendetta against Fisher – The German Emperor’s intransigence – The dreadnought battle-cruiser – The ‘We want eight and we won’t wait’ campaign and Winston Churchill’s opposition – The Prime Minister’s committee to enquire into the conduct of naval affairs – Fisher’s resignation

  Admiral Fisher led the Royal Navy as First Sea Lord for five of the most critical peacetime years in the service’s history, working with a white hot intensity that sharpened his beliefs and prejudices, made him more bellicose than ever, and illuminated more brightly year by year the colourful characteristics that had made him the greatest naval administrator since Lord Barham.’(1) He became towards the end of his term of office a self-drawn caricature of the Admiral who had stormed into the Admiralty on Trafalgar Day 1904, the double underlinings in his cryptic Inters and quotations from the Bible more numerous, his exclamations and imprecations more extreme, his response to opposition ever more violent. Power, rather than Acton’s tendency to corruption, had always brought out the actor in Fisher. Sustained and supreme power turned the public figure of the man into a sort of naval Henry Irving bestriding the stage with exaggerated postures. But his effectiveness remained as sharp as ever, and it was not until his years in office were over that the toll they had exacted from himself and from others became fully apparent.

  Fisher was not a man of war. He hated war. He had seen it at first hand out in China as a young man and had barely escaped with his life. ‘War is hell!’ he repeatedly declared. But if it came his beloved Navy would be ready. Then half measures would be dangerous and futile. As an inappropriate choice of delegate to the first Hague Peace Convention (1899) which was intended to bring about a reduction in armaments and laws for reducing the awfulness of war, Fisher had shocked the assembly by exclaiming, ‘You might as well talk of humanizing Hell!’ ‘War is the essence of violence’, was one of Fisher’s oft-repeated aphorisms. ‘Moderation in war is imbecility. HIT FIRST. HIT HARD. KEEP ON HITTING!’

  Whatever this Hague Peace Conference may have accomplished, and Fisher regarded it as a waste of time, the second in June 1907 was accepted by everyone as a failure. For political and economic reasons alone, Britain was anxious to bring about a reduction in naval armaments and put a brake on the battleship race which had been accelerated by the construction of the Dreadnought. A proposal to bring this about was answered by Tirpitz: ‘…look at the facts. Here is England, already more than four times as strong as Germany, in alliance with Japan, and probably so with France, and you, the colossus, come and ask Germany, the pigmy, to disarm. From the point of view of the public it is laughable and Machiavellian, and we shall never agree to anything of the sort.’(2)

  It was this atmosphere of mutual distrust that this second conference was intended to reduce, but so choleric were Press comment and exchanges between the two nations’ statesmen before the delegates met, that expenditure on armaments was not even raised at the Hague. The only benefit to Britain stemming from the Hague Conference was a settlement of Anglo-Russian differences in Asia, which Germany regarded as the first stage leading to an alliance. This would leave Germany flanked on three sides by potential foes, increasing further her paranoia. Germany responded with an amendment to the 1900 Navy Law, which would effectively give the Kriegsmarine no fewer than fifty-eight dreadnoughts ten years hence.

  The high summer of 1907 marked the sombre starting-point of the headlong gallop to war seven years later. There were efforts to draw in the reins and audible laments, not all of them hypocritical. But as far as naval armaments were concerned, and they were the dominating factor, both powers were now hell-bent on a race to conflict.

  A counter-campaign in Britain against the new German increase called for ‘two keels to one’, a difficult target to achieve with a Liberal government dedicated to public welfare and the casing of the inequalities in the land. But as an indication of how deeply even the Liberal and Labour factions were involved in the nation’s naval preoccupation, the Manchester Guardian expounding the radical view accepted that naval rivalry with Germany was ‘rapidly becoming the principal outstanding question of European politics’(3) and that Britain should certainly construct four new dreadnoughts a year to Germany’s three.

  The Conservatives and the Conservative Press continued to be alarmed for the future. ‘Is Britain going to surrender her maritime supremacy to provide old-age pensions?’ was typical of the bellicose questions sounded out by the Daily Mail. Fisher’s enemies in and out of the Navy were now aroused to create a further co
ntest within the Anglo-German contest by organizing a campaign for his removal. The faction’s idol and leader was Lord Charles Beresford, once a national hero, now elderly and bloated by extravagant living. An Irishman of aristocratic lineage and immense wealth, Beresford had once been Fisher’s ally in the reform movement in the Navy. But the two men, of equally volatile temperament and very different background, had fallen out, and the split had widened when Fisher was appointed First Sea Lord and was then promoted Admiral of the Fleet, ensuring the extension of his term of office to deprive Beresford of any prospect of succeeding him.

  With its most important aim of ousting Fisher and replacing him with Beresford, an Imperial Maritime League was founded at the end of 1907. Lord Esher, whose support of Fisher was steady and whose influence was great in the land, gave to The Times a copy of the letter he wrote to the League defending Fisher. ‘There is not a man in Germany, from the Emperor downwards, who would not welcome the fall of Sir John Fisher,’ it concluded.

  This letter led to the most bizarre incident in this Anglo-German naval rivalry. When it was shown to the Kaiser, he sat down and wrote in his own hand a letter nine pages long addressed to Lord Tweedmouth, political head of the Navy as First Lord of the Admiralty. In extravagant language, the Emperor of Germany stated that he was unable to understand British fears about the rise of the German Navy, which was not being created to challenge British naval supremacy. He also described Esher’s opinion that Germany would be glad to see Fisher out of office as ‘a piece of unmitigated balderdash’.