Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  From submarines, Fisher passed to other types of ships. Five half-finished dreadnought battleships of the Royal Sovereign class, originally designed to burn coal, were reconfigured to burn oil. Two new British battleships, Repulse and Renown, funded but not yet laid down, each originally intended to carry eight 15-inch guns in four turrets, had been allowed to languish on drawing boards because so much time would be required for their completion. On December 19, following the dramatic vindication of the battle cruiser design at the Falkland Islands, Fisher demanded that the two battleships be radically redesigned and built quickly as fast battle cruisers. They were needed, he declared, to catch the newest German battle cruiser, Lützow, which had a design speed of 28 knots. In the two new British ships, 32-knot speed would be obtained by sacrificing one heavy turret with its two 15-inch guns and putting the weight thus saved into more powerful propulsion machinery. Armor also suffered; instead of the shielding that protected dreadnought battleships, the new battle cruisers carried only the armor of the early Indefatigables. Both keels were laid down on Fisher’s seventy-fourth birthday, January 25, 1915. He insisted that they be completed within fifteen months; in fact, Repulse required nineteen and Renown twenty.

  With these two big battle cruisers under construction, Fisher went further and ordered three fast 19,000-ton ships, Courageous, Glorious, and Furious. Courageous and Glorious carried four 15-inch guns and Furious, as originally designed, two 18-inch. Because Parliament had not approved more large armored ships, but had sanctioned additional light cruisers, Fisher designated these vessels “large light cruisers” and had them built under conditions of extraordinary secrecy. All were designed with 32-knot speed, a draft of only 22 feet—five feet less than any other British capital ship—and armor so thin that the Grand Fleet, which dubbed them Outrageous, Uproarious, and Spurious, could find almost no use for them. “They were an old man’s children,” said Churchill. “Nevertheless, their parent loved them dearly and always rallied with the utmost vehemence when any slur was cast upon their qualities.” Eventually, all three were converted into aircraft carriers.

  Fisher’s immense shipbuilding program also included new light cruisers and destroyers, and thirty-seven inshore monitors: 6,000- or 7,000-ton ships with slow speed and no special armor, but carrying two 12-inch or 14-inch guns. Useless in a sea battle, they were meant only to bombard enemy positions onshore. The First Sea Lord also ordered 200 steel-plated, oil-powered motor barges for landing troops upon hostile beaches. These early amphibious landing craft, forerunners of the flotillas vital to Allied operations in the Atlantic and Pacific in the Second World War, were designed to carry 500 infantrymen at a speed of 5 knots and were fitted with extended landing bridges that could be lowered from their bows onto a beach. Their appearance earned them the name of Beetles; soon, their purpose—along with the purpose of the new monitors and battle cruisers—would be revealed.

  Churchill rejoiced in his new First Sea Lord’s burst of energy. “Lord Fisher hurled himself into this business with explosive energy,” he was to write, “and in four or five glorious days, every minute of which was pure delight to him, he presented me with schemes for far greater construction of submarines, destroyers, and small craft than I or any of my advisers had ever deemed possible. . . . Probably never in his long life had Fisher had a more joyous experience than this great effort of new construction. Shipbuilding had been the greatest passion of his life . . . [and] here were all the yards of Britain at his disposal and every Treasury barrier broken.” No one was allowed to stand in his way. The army, still entirely made up of volunteers, had been recruiting in the shipyards, a practice that infuriated Fisher. To stop it, he went directly to Lord Kitchener and demanded an immediate “order to his subordinates to cease enticing away men from our shipyards. I told him that [if he did not], I would resign that day at 6 p.m. my post as First Sea Lord and give my reasons in the House of Lords. . . . [Kitchener] wrote the order there and then, without hesitation.” To all this activity, Churchill gave a green light: “I backed him up all I could. He was far more often right than wrong, and his drive and life-force made the Admiralty quiver like one of his great ships at its highest speed.”

  The grand purpose for which Fisher ordered the construction of three shallow-draft “large light cruisers,” dozens of inshore monitors, and scores of large landing craft was an operation that the new First Sea Lord was convinced would win the war: an invasion of the Baltic Sea by the British fleet and the subsequent landing of an army on the north German coast. Fisher had always believed that the British army’s greatest effectiveness lay in amphibious operations—as “a projectile to be fired by the navy.” He never liked the idea of sending the army to France to act as an extension of the French left wing; “criminal folly,” he had called it. As early as the 1905 Moroccan Crisis, Fisher—certain that Britain’s enemy in the next war would be Germany—was thinking of an amphibious operation to seize control of the Baltic. Since his visit to Russia with King Edward VII in 1908, he had nursed the idea of substituting “a million Russian soldiers” for British troops in a proposed landing on the Pomeranian coast “within eighty-two miles of Berlin.” This force would be disembarked “on that 14 miles of sandy beach, impossible of defence against a Battle Fleet sweeping with devastating shells the flat country for miles, like a mower’s scythe—no fortifications able to withstand projectiles of 1,450 lbs.!”

  Fisher had no difficulty infusing his enthusiasm into Churchill. As early as August 19, 1914, the First Lord had sounded out the Russian Commander-in-Chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, on the possibility of a combined Baltic operation. Churchill offered to send the British fleet through the Belts, the channel between Denmark and Sweden. This could not be done, he cautioned, until either a decisive naval battle had been won against the High Seas Fleet or the Kiel Canal had been blocked so that the German fleet could not shift rapidly between the North Sea and the Baltic. But once established in the Baltic, Churchill continued, the British fleet could “convoy and land” a Russian army on the German coast to take Berlin. The Russian reply was tentatively favorable. “We gratefully accept in principle the First Lord’s offer,” the grand duke wrote, adding that “the suggested landing operations would be quite feasible and fully expedient should the British Fleet gain command of the Baltic Sea.”

  Fisher’s return to the Admiralty temporarily linked the two powerful advocates of a Baltic naval offensive. When Churchill showed Fisher his correspondence with the Russian government, the admiral’s eyes shone with enthusiasm. The new First Sea Lord’s huge naval building program, begun during Fisher’s first week in office and launched with the First Lord’s endorsement, was filled with shallow-draft vessels designed to work in the shallow waters of the Baltic. But beyond their agreement on the grand objective of entering the Baltic, the two men differed. Fisher favored an immediate, direct naval attack on the Baltic without any preliminary effort to defeat the High Seas Fleet in battle; the German navy, he said, could be locked up inside Heligoland Bight by the laying of extensive minefields. Churchill remained dedicated to action in the Baltic, but he had reluctantly accepted that the British navy could not pass through the Belts without preliminary action to neutralize the High Seas Fleet—and that this action would have to consist of something stronger than laying minefields. Churchill’s idea was to “storm and seize” an island close to the German coast; this, he believed, would provoke the Germans to a major sea battle in the island’s defense; if it did not, capture of the island would provide a base to help blockade the High Seas Fleet. Three islands loomed largest in these plans: Borkum, off the Ems River; Sylt, off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein; and Heligoland itself. Unfortunately for Churchill, all of his island-seizing proposals were declared impracticable by Admiralty staff experts; it was one thing, they said, to seize an island, but quite another to hold it and keep it supplied at a considerable distance from England and a very short distance from the enemy. (One exception to the naysayers was Admiral Si
r Arthur Wilson, who vehemently advocated the seizure of Heligoland, although it was bristling with artillery, surrounded by minefields, and lay only thirty miles from Wilhelmshaven, the main base of the High Seas Fleet.) Even in the face of overwhelming professional disapproval—“a palpable reluctance . . . manifested by lethargy,” the First Lord called it—Churchill refused to give up. Oliver recalled that “Churchill would often look in on his way to bed to tell me how he would capture Borkum or Sylt. If I did not interrupt or ask questions, he would capture Borkum in twenty minutes.”

  Ultimately, the issue narrowed to a disagreement between Churchill and Fisher. “I am wholly with you about the Baltic,” Churchill wrote to Fisher on December 22. “But you must close up this side first. You must take an island and block them in; or you must break the canal or the locks, or you must cripple their fleet in a general action. No scattering of mines will be any substitute for these alternatives.” After the war, Churchill took a harsher view of Fisher’s views: “Although the First Sea Lord’s strategic conceptions were centered in the entry of the Baltic . . . I do not think he ever saw his way clearly through the great decisive and hazardous steps which were necessary for the success of the operation. . . . He talked in general terms about making the North Sea impassable by sowing mines and thus preventing the Germans from entering it while the main strength of the British fleet was in the Baltic. I could not feel any conviction that this would give us the necessary security.”

  While the two principal proponents of the Baltic plan continued arguing over means, an opportunity appeared at the Dardanelles, and the Baltic project faded away. This outcome came as a huge relief to the man who commanded the Grand Fleet and whose duty—had he been so ordered—would have been to lead his ships into the Baltic. Jellicoe’s general reluctance to risk his fleet was coupled with a specific condemnation of Churchill’s Borkum scheme. He could not understand, Jellicoe wrote, “how an attack on Borkum could possibly assist fleet operations in the Baltic or lead to the German fleet being driven altogether from the North Sea.” As for Sir Arthur Wilson’s idea of seizing Heligoland, Jellicoe wrote simply, “We one and all doubted Sir A.’s sanity.”

  During their first weeks together at the Admiralty and before the Baltic project began to divide them, a continuing, prolific, and mellow exchange of letters, notes, and memoranda flowed between the First Lord and the new First Sea Lord. Their relationship worked because, in addition to a shared fierce determination to defeat the enemy, each knew how to speak to the other, assuaging ego with compliments while still making the desired point. Churchill deferred to the old sea dog whenever he could, and Fisher responded in avuncular kind. On December 8, he offered Churchill advice when the First Lord returned from one of his numerous, much-criticized visits to France. “Welcome back!” Fisher wrote. “I don’t hold with these ‘outings’ of yours! I know how you enjoy them! Nor am I afraid of responsibility while you’re away! But I think it’s too venturesome! Also, it gives your enemies cause to blaspheme!” Despite these warm feelings, it was not long before signs of friction appeared at the summit of the Admiralty. Fisher’s ego had much to do with it. It was not easy for a First Sea Lord who had ruled and revolutionized the navy to see operational signals going out to the fleet, sent by the First Lord with the notation “First Sea Lord to see after action.” In addition, Fisher’s volcanic energy often overflowed established channels, and his huge outpourings on naval matters were combined with a limitless, incautious correspondence with people outside the service. Before long, his extreme language, his triple underlinings in green pencil, his capitalizations, his exclamation points, and his frequent threats of resignation were alarming as much as assisting the First Lord.

  Essentially, the two men were competing for control of Britain’s sea power. On this matter, both had miscalculated. The First Lord’s determination to restore Fisher had rested on the assumption that he could control and use the old admiral. Paradoxically, Fisher and others had agreed to his restoration on the grounds that he alone would be capable of controlling Churchill. When this failed to happen, the admiral began to complain. “My beloved Jellicoe,” he wrote to the Commander-in-Chief on December 20, “Winston has so monopolized all initiative in the Admiralty and fires off such a multitude of purely departmental memos (his power of work is absolutely amazing!) that my colleagues are no longer ‘superintending Lords’ but only the First Lord’s registry! I told Winston this yesterday and he did not like it at all, but it is true! and the consequence is that the Sea Lords are atrophied and their departments run really by the Private Office, and I find it a Herculean task to get back to the right procedure, and quite possibly I may have to clear out.” Beatty had caught a whiff of this discord. “The situation is very curious,” he wrote to Ethel on December 4, 1914. “Two very strong and clever men, one old, wily, and of vast experience; one young, self-assertive with a great self-satisfaction but unstable. They cannot work together. They cannot both run the show.”

  Long afterward, when because of the collision between the admiral and the politician, both men had been stripped of power, Violet Asquith, the prime minister’s daughter and a close friend of Churchill’s, asked him whether he had had any

  inkling that he was on the edge of a volcano in his relations with Fisher. He said “No,” they had always got on well, differed on no principle, he had always supposed him to be perfectly loyal, etc. Poor darling Winston. . . . He is quite impervious to the climatic conditions of other people. He makes his own climate and lives in it and those who love him share it. In an odd way, there was something like love between him and Fisher, a kind of magnetic attraction which often went in reverse. Theirs was a curiously emotional relationship, but, as in many such, they could neither live with, nor without, each other.

  CHAPTER 16 “The Requirements of the Commander-in-Chief Were Hard to Meet”

  Historically, the Royal Navy never seriously concerned itself with numbers when it went into battle. Against the Armada, Howard and Drake brought ninety ships to face Medina Sidonia’s 130. At the Battle of St. Vincent, Jervis had fifteen line-of-battle ships against Spain’s twenty-seven; at Trafalgar, Nelson’s twenty-seven annihilated Villeneuve’s thirty-three. In 1914, however, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, already concerned about the threat of submarines and mines and about his lack of a secure harbor, worried about the comparative strength of the Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet. Throughout his two and a quarter years of command, Jellicoe kept a jealous watch over his ships; any attempt by anybody to remove a vessel, for whatever reason, was fiercely resented and likely to provoke a storm of protest. In the months ahead, Jellicoe was to begrudge even the taking of navy machine guns for the Dardanelles campaign as “weakening the Grand Fleet in principle.”

  Now, in the course of a fortnight in late October and early November, the fleet had been dramatically weakened. First came the sudden loss of Audacious, then the withdrawal of three of Beatty’s battle cruisers to hunt Spee. Of these reductions in strength, it was the dispatch to the western Atlantic of the modern 13.5-inch Princess Royal that most upset Jellicoe. He argued that, instead of taking Princess Royal, Fisher should send the older, slower New Zealand, which, he believed, would suffice to deal with Spee’s armored cruisers. Enabled by bad weather to delay by one day Princess Royal’s departure from Cromarty, he boldly questioned the First Sea Lord, “Is Princess Royal to go? . . . strongly urge New Zealand instead.” “Princess Royal’s coal expenditure is not far from double that of New Zealand,” he explained. Jellicoe was Fisher’s protégé, his own carefully selected and nurtured choice as Grand Fleet commander, but this bit of insubordination did not sit well with the crusty First Sea Lord. “Princess Royal should have proceeded at once on Admiralty orders,” he signaled the Commander-in-Chief.

  Beatty fully supported Jellicoe’s effort to prevent the taking of one of his powerful Cats. Although, on November 6, his squadron was reinforced by the arrival of the new battle cruiser Tiger, Beatty refused to
agree that this new ship was a substitute for Princess Royal. “The Tiger is absolutely unfit to fight,” he wrote to Fisher. “Three out of her four dynamos are out of action for an indefinite period and her training is impeded by bad weather which might continue for many weeks at this time of year. . . . At present she is quite unprepared and inefficient.” In this state, Jellicoe chimed in, “she would simply be a present for the Germans.” Stripped of Invincible, In-flexible, and Princess Royal, Beatty was left with four battle cruisers—Lion, Queen Mary, Tiger, and New Zealand—to face Hipper’s four battle cruisers—Seydlitz, Moltke, Derfflinger, and Von der Tann. In a letter to Jellicoe, Beatty pointed out that the change in relative strength of the two squadrons might perhaps dictate new battle tactics. He had always assumed that his duty was to engage Hipper’s battle cruisers when and where he could find them. However, now that his own force lacked its previous clear predominance, he asked for a ruling as to what he should do if he encountered the German squadron. Jellicoe forwarded Beatty’s letter to the Admiralty, covering it with one of his own:

  We cannot rely on much if any superiority in gunnery in my opinion. The German fleet has shown itself to be highly efficient and their gunnery . . . has been markedly excellent. I can only repeat once more my request for the Princess Royal. . . . I can only inform Sir David Beatty . . . that he must do the best he can with the force at his dis-posal . . . but I hold a very strong opinion that we are running the greatest risk of losing an opportunity of inflicting a severe defeat on the enemy . . . by not adhering to the principle of concentration in the decisive theater.