Dreadnought
Page 84
The 1909 Naval Scare in Britain had other effects. There were those—Sir Edward Goschen, the British Ambassador in Berlin, was one—who were convinced that the building of the four additional dreadnoughts had a favorable impact on Anglo-German relations. In Berlin—this argument went—the decline in British dreadnought building during the early Liberal years bore out German theorizing that Britons were becoming soft and effete and would—in the natural Darwinian order—soon be replaced as rulers of the world by the virile Teutons. The British government’s decision to double its annual shipbuilding program, Goschen argued, replaced this growing contempt with respect and greater desire for friendship. A second effect was clearly apparent. The Two Power Standard, the historic guideline by which Great Britain had reckoned the sufficiency of its naval strength, was defunct. As recently as November 1908, at the outset of the Naval Scare, Asquith had restated that Britain required “a preponderance of ten percent over the combined strengths in capital ships of the next two strongest powers, whatever those powers might be.” In fact, the world’s third-largest navy, ranking not far behind the German Navy, belonged to the United States; no British politician or admiral envisaged war with the Americans. The 1909 Naval Scare marked the beginning of a one power standard for the British Navy; Britain was building only against Germany. Churchill, as First Lord, stated the fact officially on March 28, 1912, when he told the House of Commons that Britain’s standard was one of 60 percent superiority over Germany.
There were two further effects of the 1909 Naval Scare and the decision to build eight dreadnoughts in a single year. Alarm in Parliament and hysteria in the press as to the condition of Britain’s naval defenses prompted criticism of the aging First Sea Lord who directed the Admiralty and advised the government. Why, if Britain suddenly needed eight ships in a single year, had she built only two the year before? Justified or not, mounting complaints and criticism eroded Jacky Fisher’s credibility. No sooner had the 1909 Naval Estimates been voted than a government inquiry began to look into these matters. The Naval Scare also deeply affected the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George. The decision to build eight dreadnoughts in a single year upset his budget calculations. To raise millions of additional pounds, the Chancellor set himself to find new sources of revenue and the taxes he proposed became even more politically controversial than the decision to build additional ships. They led, in 1910 and 1911, to a tumultuous and historic confrontation between the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
fn1 1905 Estimates
Dreadnought
Invincible
Inflexible
Indomitable
1906 Estimates
Bellerophon
Superb
Temeraire
(one ship cut)
1907 Estimates
Collingwood
St. Vincent
Vanguard
(one ship cut)
1908 Estimates
Neptune
Indefatigable
(two ships cut)
fn2 Wilhemshaven Dockyard in Wilhelmshaven; Weser Works in Bremen; Vulcan Works in Stettin; Blohm and Voss in Hamburg; Schichau Works in Danzig; and Germania Works and Howaldt’s Works in Kiel.
fn3 An additional fact Tirpitz did not pass on either to the Kaiser or to Metternich: actual construction of one of the ships had begun on March 1, 1909. When William found out five months later he was furious: “His Majesty the Kaiser29 sees in this a justification, though only a formal one, for the English claim that building is being accelerated,” Admiral Müller, the Kaiser’s Naval Secretary, wrote to Tirpitz. “His Majesty has always emphasized that no acceleration of building has taken place.” Tirpitz denied any acceleration, claiming that “start of building30... is solely a private business matter for the firms. In my opinion, therefore, there was no reason to notify His Majesty. Schichau [the shipyard] began the ship in March at its own risk and with its own money to avoid dismissing workers.”
fn4 Six battleships, Colossus, Hercules, Orion, Conqueror, Monarch, and Thunderer, and two battle cruisers, Lion and Princess Royal.
fn5 The three German battleships of the class, Kaiserin, König Albert, and Prinzregent Luitpold, had two fewer twelve-inch guns than their predecessors. The weight saved was given to thicker armor to deal with the greater penetrating power of the heavier British shells.
fn6 In October 1911, McKenna and Churchill swapped jobs, with McKenna becoming Home Secretary and Churchill First Lord of the Admiralty.
Chapter 34
Invading England
The role of the navy in Britain’s wars was defensive; the offensive weapon was the army. And so the metaphor: the navy, the shield; the army, the spear; or, as Fisher modernized it: “the Army is a projectile to be fired by the Navy.” The navy’s primary mission was to defend the British Isles and the trade routes of the Empire. Yet, no matter how great its power, it could reach no farther than an enemy’s coast. Alone, it could not defeat a great Continental enemy; decades of war against the Sun King and against Napoleon had proven that. Naval officers admitted that Britain needed an army; their preference was for a small, highly professional expeditionary force which, given the mobility provided by dominant sea power, could strike suddenly at any point on a hostile coastline with an impact out of all proportion to its numbers. In conceiving the role of the British Army, however, British admirals and captains never imagined that it should be responsible for the defense of the Home Islands. Since the Armada, it had been the duty of the Royal Navy to sink the warships, troopships, and barges of any invading power before a single enemy soldier set foot on an English beach.
As the nineteenth century approached an end, some in Britain began to doubt the navy’s ability to perform even its defensive role. Much of this doubt was deliberately stirred by army officers. Was it wise, they asked, for Britain to put all her eggs in a single basket? “I know of nothing1 that is more liable to disaster than anything that floats on the water,” Lord Wolseley, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, declared in 1896. “We often find in peace and in the calmest weather our best ironclads running into one another. We find great storms dispersing and almost destroying some of the finest fleets that ever sailed. Therefore, it is essentially necessary for this country that it should always have a powerful army, at least sufficiently strong to defend our own shores.” Even if British battleships managed not to run into one another or were not swamped by storms, there was always the chance that they might be decoyed away from the Channel long enough for an invading army to slip across. For these reasons, the army suggested, the army ought to be larger.
The army’s initial defeat in the Boer War strengthened this argument. Heavy reinforcements of troops had to be sent from England, denuding the homeland of soldiers. The Continental press, vociferously pro-Boer, fumed against Britain’s “free-booting enterprise2 in South Africa” and urged a European coalition to take advantage of Britain’s vulnerability at home. That vulnerability was more psychological than real—the British Fleet remained on station in European waters—but it was keenly felt. “The Empire, stripped of its armor,3 with its hands tied behind its back and its bare throat exposed to the keen knife of its bitterest enemies,” was the graphic description of the celebrated journalist W. T. Stead. As there were almost no troops in England, the French might lure the Fleet away long enough to ferry across fifty thousand or a hundred thousand men and march into London unopposed. Even Lord Salisbury, who customarily ignored talk of any threat to Britain, took note. In May 1900, when his countrymen felt most exposed, he proposed the formation of private rifle clubs throughout the country; invaders were to be deterred by the prospect of amateur riflemen popping up from behind the hedgerows.
Despite the Prime Minister’s suggestion, the government maintained faith in the navy’s ability to prevent invasion. During the Boer War, the Fleet had, in fact, played its traditional role. Absolute command of the sea had made possible the uninterrupted transport of 250,000 sold
iers and their munitions and supplies over a route of six thousand miles. Meanwhile, talk in the Paris and Berlin press notwithstanding, no Continental soldiers had set foot in England. The First Sea Lord of the period, Sir Walter Kerr, explained with professional calm: “Unless our Navy4 was quite wiped out in home waters, the risk to an invading force would be enormous and I suspect this is fully realized across the Channel.” As it happened, no European government had any intention of challenging Great Britain, no matter how far away her soldiers might be. And no European fleet had the capacity to challenge the Royal Navy. The French Fleet, the only force which might conceivably have posed a threat, was throughout the span of the Boer War wholly unprepared for action. By December 1900, the sense of vulnerability in England had passed. The Naval and Military Record had regained a properly British sense of aloofness regarding threats from abroad: “The only difficulty we see5 in the way of an invasion of England—and it may arise through our insular prejudice—is that the French troops would have to be conveyed across the water.”
After South Africa, the British Army naturally wished to correct the organizational and material flaws which had led to its embarrassment at the hands of the Boer commandos. Many officers also wanted a general expansion to give Britain the army of a Great Power. In 1901, St. John Broderick, Unionist Secretary of War in Salisbury’s last Cabinet, introduced a plan for an army of 600,000 men structured in six army corps. One hundred and twenty thousand of these soldiers would be given the traditional role of an expeditionary force; 480,000 were to be assigned the new role of home defense. The reason, Broderick explained, was that something might happen to the navy. “Invasion may be an off-chance,”6 he declared “but you cannot run an Empire of this size on off-chances.” The War Secretary’s scheme met with general disapproval. “A great defensive army7 will never have anything to do in this country that is worth doing,” announced the Times. “Not thirty army corps8 could redress the balance if the fleet were swept from the seas,” Lord Rosebery declared in the House of Lords. Winston Churchill expressed the argument succinctly: “As to a stronger Regular Army,9 either we had command of the sea or we had not. If we had it, we required fewer soldiers; if we had it not, we wanted more ships.”
The army persisted. Field Marshal Lord Roberts, the famous “Bobs,” Britain’s greatest living military hero, winner of the Victoria Cross, veteran of India, victor in South Africa, and, from 1901 to 1904, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, became its advocate. Roberts’ fear was that if the shield of the navy were to be broken or misplaced, the British Army would pose no obstacle to an invading force from any Continental power. His proposal was to create a large British Army based on compulsory conscription. When the Unionist government of Arthur Balfour turned him down, he resigned from the army to devote himself to this cause. In 1905, he became president of the National Service League, a militant group favoring conscription. Freed from the restraints of office, Lord Roberts, over seventy, became a familiar figure speaking on behalf of conscription in the House of Lords and at public meetings. When, in the last months of his Premiership, Balfour assured the House of Commons that invasion was “not an eventuality10 which we need seriously to consider,” Roberts replied in the Lords: “I have no hesitation11 in stating that our armed forces, as a body, are as absolutely unfitted and unprepared for war as they were in 1899–1900.”
Roberts’ hostility towards Balfour was mild compared to his feelings about the new Liberal government which took power in December 1905. Looking to find money for social programs, Camp-bell-Bannerman and Asquith cut both the Army and the Navy Estimates. Soon, Lord Roberts was writing regularly to Mr. Balfour, who was the acknowledged authority in the Commons on defense as well as leader of the opposition. Roberts calculated that if, for one reason or another, the British Navy did not intervene, it would require only ninety-four hours for a Continental enemy to hurry seventy thousand soldiers across the Channel or the North Sea. Once in England, these invaders would be augmented by eighty thousand foreigners, all trained soldiers, already living in Great Britain. Many of the latter, he charged, worked in large hotels at the country’s chief railway stations, where they could step out on the tracks to tie up Britain’s transportation system.
Balfour was sufficiently impressed by Roberts’ warnings to suggest that the Committee of Imperial Defense reconsider England’s vulnerability to invasion. Before and during his Premiership, the potential invaders had been French; now they had become German. A subcommittee met and began to hear evidence. In April 1908, when Asquith became Prime Minister, the matter was taken more seriously. Because of his expertise, Balfour was asked to appear and to analyze the information gathered. In the presence of Asquith, Grey, Haldane, Lloyd George, and Lord Roberts, Balfour spoke for an hour. It was, said a witness, a “luminous” exposition, “quite perfect in form and language”12 which so “dumfounded” the committee that none of them, not even Roberts, could think of a single question to ask. “The general opinion was that no finer exposition of this question has ever been made.” Balfour’s opinion and the subcommittee’s conclusion was that the navy should be the first line of defense and that as long as its supremacy remained assured, England could not successfully be invaded.
Fisher, who had little respect for the army, had always been contemptuous of suggestions that the navy could not fend off an invasion. “The Navy,” he said on becoming First Sea Lord in 1904, “is the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th...13 ad infinitum Line of Defence! If the Navy is not Supreme, no army however large is of the slightest use. It’s not invasion we have to fear if our Navy is beaten, IT’S STARVATION!” As to enemy soldiers suddenly rushing across the North Sea and landing on an English beach, Fisher snorted: “I am too busy to waste my time14 over this cock and bull story.” It would take months of preparation to assemble transports and embark soldiers; this could not go unnoticed. As to seventy thousand men, Fisher pointed out that during the month of October 1899, at the beginning of the Boer War, the greatest maritime power in the world, possessing the world’s largest merchant fleet and using five great seaports, managed to send to sea only thirty thousand troops with less than four thousand horses. Fisher bristled that the Committee of Imperial Defence had bothered to meet to listen to Lord Roberts. At a Guildhall banquet in 1907, in one of the two public speeches Fisher ever made, the First Sea Lord ridiculed the idea of a German army arriving in England like a bolt from the blue. “You might as well talk15 of embarking St. Paul’s Cathedral in a penny steamer,” he declared. “No, gentlemen, you may go home and sleep quiet in your beds.”
Although the subcommittee’s conclusion and the government’s endorsement were decisive as far as policy was concerned, both remained secret and had no effect on the raging public debate over invasion. Despite the First Sea Lord’s assurances, despite the new dreadnoughts joining the Fleet, despite Haldane’s efficient reorganization of the army, English men and women still worried. Henry James, almost an Englishman, living at Rye on the Channel coast, worried that he might one day look out to sea and spot the light-gray ships of the German Fleet, training their guns on his house. “When the German Emperor16 carries the next war into this country,” he said, “my chimney pots, visible for a certain distance out to sea, may be his very first objective.” The Daily Mail gave advice to diners: “Refuse to be served17 by an Austrian or German waiter. If your waiter says he is Swiss, ask to see his passport.”
These worries were aggravated by a growing torrent of special literature—books, pamphlets, plays, and newspaper stories—based on the imminence of foreign invasion. With the growth of literacy and the rise of mass-circulation newspapers, a boom in sensational writing was on. Invasion literature erupted in the form of spy stories, imaginary-war novels, and invasion novels. For twenty years, from the beginning of the 1880s until 1903, when a colonial agreement with France was near completion, the fictional invaders had always been French. Britain’s diplomatic quarrel with France over Egypt was a factor, heightened in 1898 by
the war scare over Fashoda, but the roots of the antagonism went back centuries. In the late Victorian Age, the English explained it as purely a matter of France’s envy: “envy of England’s great Empire,18 envy of her freedom, envy of the stability of her Government, or her settled monarchy, or her beloved Queen.”
In 1882, a flurry of invasion fears titillated England. A scheme, proposed that year in Parliament, envisaged digging a twenty-mile railway tunnel from Dover to Calais. In the subsequent outcry, rational discussion of the commercial advantage of opening this avenue for trade was forsaken. On the surface, the sole issue became whether the Channel tunnel might function as a breach of Britain’s guardian moat. Underneath lurked other fears. A tunnel would mean the end of Splendid Isolation. It would force Britons to cast aside images of themselves as inhabitants of “this sceptred isle... set in a silver sea,” as defenders of “this fortress built by Nature19 for herself.” No stranger to England could understand. A generation earlier, Prince Albert, always enthusiastic about technology, had proposed a tunnel to Lord Palmerston; the Prime Minister, who never strayed far from the views of the average Englishman, replied “without losing the perfectly courteous tone20 which was habitual to him, ‘You would think very differently, Sir, if you had been born on this island.’” Most Englishmen still shared this view. In 1882, impassioned citizens descended upon the London offices of the Channel Tunnel Company and broke the windows. A mass antitunnel petition signed by Browning, Tennyson, Huxley, Cardinal Newman, the Archbishop of Canterbury, five dukes, ten earls, fifty-nine generals, seventeen admirals, and twenty-six members of Parliament solemnly declared that the digging of a tunnel “would involve this country21 in military dangers and liabilities from which, as an island, it has hitherto been happily free.” The uproar fired the imagination of writers. A torrent of pamphlets, tracts, and penny novels poured off the presses, with titles such as The Channel Tunnel, or England in Danger; The Seizure of the Channel Tunnel; Battle of the Channel Tunnel; Surprise of the Channel Tunnel; and How John Bull Lost London. A stock character appeared in this school of fiction: the French waiter, working in England, with a rifle hidden in his luggage. Trained as soldiers, he and his compatriots would seize their arms, sneak from their lodgings, and, in the dark of night, capture the English terminal of the Channel tunnel. The following morning, a conquering French Army would arrive in England by train. The tunnel itself would make the influx of a number of foreigners seem unsuspicious: “The great increase in prosperity22 that the Tunnel brought to Dover,” one novelist explained, “caused a large number of French restaurateurs, waiters, bootmakers, milliners, and pastrycooks to settle in that town.”