Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  Nevertheless, for the moment, Fisher had won: the superdreadnought sailed for Malta and home and all thought of another naval offensive at the Dardanelles was suspended. “We think that the moment for an independent naval attempt to force the Narrows has passed,” the Admiralty told de Robeck on May 14. “The army is now landed, large reinforcements are being sent. . . . Your role is therefore to support the army in its costly but sure advance and to reserve your strength to deal with the situation which will arise when the army has succeeded.”

  On the same day, the War Council held its first meeting since April 6. The atmosphere around the table at 10 Downing Street was, in Churchill’s word, “sulphurous.” The Times that morning had published allegations that the British army on the Western Front was scandalously short of artillery shells. Kitchener, defensive about these charges and still bitter about the withdrawal of Queen Elizabeth, complained that the Admiralty had let him and the army down. Fisher, unwilling to listen to charges of bad faith and near treachery directed at the navy, uncharacteristically spoke up. He had been “against the Dardanelles operations from the beginning,” and “the Prime Minister and Lord Kitchener knew this fact well,” he informed the council. “This remarkable interruption,” Churchill said, “was received in silence.” Fisher now saw himself surrounded at the War Council by his enemies and the navy’s enemies. Despite the fact that de Robeck had just been told that no new naval attack was under consideration, the First Sea Lord sensed that additional diversions of ships to the Dardanelles were in the offing. His own plans were wholly ignored. “I could see that the great projects in Northern water [that is, the Baltic], which I had in view in laying down the Armada of new vessels were at an end,” he told the Dardanelles Commission two years later. “If the huge commitment at the Dardanelles was to be continued, it was clearly better, in the very interests of the Dardanelles operations themselves . . . that they should be henceforth directed on the naval side by somebody who believed in them.”

  After the council meeting, Churchill, annoyed by Fisher’s public outburst, attempted to set it in context in a letter to Asquith: “I must ask you to take note of Fisher’s statement today that he was against the Dardanelles and had been all along. . . . The First Sea Lord has agreed in writing to every executive telegram on which the operation has been conducted. . . . I am attached to the old boy and it is a great pleasure to me to work with him. I think he reciprocates these feelings . . . [but] I cannot undertake to be paralyzed by the veto of a friend who, whatever the result, will certainly say ‘I was always against the Dardanelles.’ Someone has to take the responsibility. I will do so—provided that my decision is the one that rules.” Churchill then attempted to heal the breach with Fisher. Early in the evening, he went to Fisher’s office and for several hours the two men discussed the Dardanelles and what further reinforcements might be needed and could be spared. Fisher agreed to sending more monitors, which would permit bringing home more battleships. When they parted, Churchill said, “Well, good night, Fisher. We have settled everything and you must go home and have a good night’s rest. Things will look brighter in the morning and we will pull the thing through together.” Before leaving the Admiralty, Fisher told his secretary that the discussion had been amicable. “But,” he added, “I suppose he’ll soon be at me again.” After Fisher’s departure, Churchill remained working in his office. Going back over the list of ships to be sent to the Dardanelles, he added two new E-class submarines requested by de Robeck—two of the five to be completed in England that month. Churchill later said that he considered these additions a proposal, not an order, and he attached a covering note to Fisher: “I send this to you . . . in order that if any point arises we can discuss it. I hope you will agree.”

  At 5:00 on the following morning, Saturday, May 15, Fisher returned to the Admiralty. On his desk, he discovered the papers showing that Churchill wished to add two submarines to the list agreed on the night before. Something snapped inside Lord Fisher. At midmorning, the First Lord, hurrying toward the Admiralty across the Horse Guards Parade, was intercepted by his secretary. “Fisher has resigned and I think he means it this time,” the secretary blurted. He handed Churchill a letter:

  First Lord:

  After further anxious reflection, I have come to the regretted conclusion that I am unable to remain any longer as your colleague. It is undesirable in the public interest to go in to details . . . but I find it increasingly difficult to adjust myself to the increasing daily requirements of the Dardanelles to meet your views. As you truly said yesterday, I am in the position of continually vetoing your proposals.

  This is not fair to you besides being extremely distasteful to me.

  I am off to Scotland at once, so as to avoid all questioning.

  Yours truly,

  Fisher

  Regarding this letter of resignation as no more serious than those Fisher had written before, Churchill returned to the Admiralty to straighten things out. But the First Sea Lord was not in his office, nor in the building, nor in his living quarters. Churchill hurried back across the Horse Guards Parade to 10 Downing Street and showed Fisher’s letter to Asquith. The prime minister immediately wrote to the admiral: “In the King’s name, I order you to return to your post.” It took several hours to locate Fisher, but eventually he was discovered at the Charing Cross Hotel. He read the prime minister’s peremptory message and came to Downing Street. There, while waiting to see Asquith, he encountered Lloyd George. “A combative grimness had taken the place of his usually genial greeting,” said Lloyd George. “The lower lip of his set mouth was thrust forward, and the droop at the corner was more marked than usual. His curiously Oriental features were more than ever those of a graven image in an Eastern temple with a sinister frown. ‘I have resigned!’ was his greeting. ‘I can stand it no longer.’ ” Lloyd George and Asquith both urged Fisher to return to the Admiralty. Fisher refused. Asquith then asked him to remain in London and Fisher agreed. The following evening, Maurice Hankey found him at the Athenaeum Club trying “to escape from Winston.”

  There is something revealing about Fisher’s refusal to see Churchill in these crucial days. Fisher—fierce, cunning, autocratic, and articulate within the navy—was nearly powerless against Churchill. The result was that he acquiesced in decisions that he believed to be wrong and that rose up to haunt him. In Churchill’s presence, however, his confidence shriveled and he found himself unable to withstand the younger man’s brimming enthusiasm and relentless logic. Part of the difficulty was that Fisher genuinely liked and admired Churchill. Aware of this, Churchill routinely exploited it, employing a combination of deference, charm, and relentless argument to overwhelm the old man’s defenses. That day, for example, after seeing Asquith, the First Lord set himself to charm, wheedle, and bludgeon Fisher back into harness:

  My dear Fisher,

  The only thing to think of now is what is best for the country and for the brave men who are fighting. . . . I do not understand what is the specific cause which has led you to resign. If I did I might cure it. When we parted last night I thought we were in agreement. The proposals I made to you by minute were I thought in general accord with your views and in any case were for discussion between us. . . . In every way I have tried to work in the closest sympathy with you. The men you wanted in the places you wanted them, the ships you designed—every proposal you have formally made . . . I have agreed to. In order to bring you back to the Admiralty, I took my political life in my hands with the King and the Prime Minister—as you know well. You then promised to stand by me and see me through. . . . It will be a very great grief to me to part from you; and our rupture will be profoundly injurious to every public interest.

  Fisher’s reply reminded Churchill that his opposition to the Dardanelles campaign dated from January and that, since then, the drain on Britain’s naval resources had been constant. The additional reinforcements—the two submarines—added by Churchill overnight were only the last straw. “Y
OU ARE BENT ON FORCING THE DARDANELLES AND NOTHING WILL TURN YOU FROM IT—NOTHING. I know you so well,” Fisher wrote. “I could give no better proof of my desire to stand by you than my having remained by you in the Dardanelles business to this last moment against the strongest conviction of my life. . . . You will remain and I SHALL GO. It is better so. Your splendid stand on my behalf with the King and Prime Minister I can NEVER forget . . . but here is a question beyond all personal obligations.” On receiving this letter, Churchill wrote one last time, claiming “in the name of friendship and in the name of duty, a personal interview.” Fisher refused, saying, “Dear Winston: As usual your letter is most persuasive, but I really have considered everything. Please don’t wish to see me. I could say nothing. . . . I know I am doing right.”

  Up to this point, Fisher’s resignation had been a matter primarily for Admiralty concern: a policy disagreement, which would break the professional ties between two colleagues and old friends. But the news eddied down corridors into official chambers and then out into private drawing rooms, and within hours the admiral became a focus of popular attention. “Stick to your post like Nelson,” Queen Alexandra wrote to Fisher. “The nation and we all have such full confidence in you and they will not suffer you to go. You are the nation’s hope.” Messages poured in from the fleet. “I would far sooner lose some ships than see you leave the Admiralty,” telegraphed Jellicoe. Beatty added that Fisher’s departure “would be a worse calamity than a defeat at sea. . . . Please God it is NOT possible.” The press had the story: “Lord Fisher Must Not Go,” blared a headline in the Globe. Unfortunately for himself, Fisher had not waited for this groundswell to take effect. Caught up in his first feverish indignation, he had on the day of his resignation also sent an anonymous message to Bonar Law, hinting at what he had done. Early Monday morning, May 17, Bonar Law called on Lloyd George to ask him whether, in fact, the First Sea Lord had resigned. When Lloyd George said yes, Bonar Law said, “Then the situation is impossible.” He meant that once Conservative MPs learned that Lord Fisher was leaving the Admiralty and that Winston Churchill was staying, they would revolt. The unofficial party truce would end and the Conservative party would initiate a series of parliamentary debates attacking numerous aspects of the government’s war policy.

  Asquith quailed at this prospect. If his premiership was to survive, Bonar Law’s support was critical. When Lloyd George proposed as a solution that the Liberal Cabinet that had governed Great Britain since 1906 step down in favor of a new coalition government, which would include the Conservatives, the prime minister surrendered immediately. Bonar Law’s key condition for joining the government was that Winston Churchill be replaced as First Lord of the Admiralty. Asquith agreed to this. Bonar Law also demanded the sacrifice of Haldane, the Lord Chancellor, Asquith’s oldest friend in politics, and Asquith agreed to this, too.

  The news that he was to be replaced took Churchill by brutal surprise. The previous day, Sunday the sixteenth, the First Lord had offered Asquith his resignation, but the prime minister had said, “No, I have thought of that. I do not wish it”—and then had invited Churchill to stay for dinner. On this basis, Churchill had asked Sir Arthur Wilson to become First Sea Lord. Wilson had accepted, and the other Sea Lords had agreed to stay on. With a new Admiralty board in place, Churchill began preparing a speech for Monday afternoon in which he would report Fisher’s resignation to Parliament and name Wilson as the new First Sea Lord. But events were moving too quickly. Already by Monday morning, Asquith had agreed to Bonar Law’s conditions for forming a coalition. When Churchill arrived at Westminster that afternoon, assuming that he had Asquith’s support, he reported to the prime minister that he had successfully reconstructed the leadership of the Admiralty. Asquith listened and then said, “No, this will not do. I have decided to form a national Government by a coalition . . . and a very much larger reconstruction will be required. . . . What are we to do for you?” At that moment, Churchill understood that he was no longer to be First Lord.

  Ironically, from the beginning of the war, Churchill had urged the formation of a coalition government. The Conservative statesman to whom Churchill was closest was the erudite, aristocratic former prime minister Arthur Balfour. As an unofficial member of the War Council, Balfour had meshed smoothly into the meetings of that body. Churchill liked and trusted the elegant, articulate Balfour; he disliked, ignored, and, when contact was necessary, patronized the stolid, plain-spoken Bonar Law. Now Churchill learned that it was Bonar Law who was the arbiter of his fate and that his own removal from the Admiralty had been the sine qua non in discussions between Asquith and Bonar Law about the formation of a coalition government.

  Over the next few days, as the crisis played out, both Fisher and Churchill displayed their worst qualities. Fisher’s antipathy toward Churchill reached a peak in a letter to Bonar Law on the seventeenth: “W.C. MUST go at all costs! AT ONCE . . . because a very great disaster is very near us in the Dardanelles. . . . W.C. is a bigger danger than the Germans by a long way.” At some point, this frantic assault gave birth in Fisher to a larger, extraordinarily grandiose project. He decided that he did not actually want to retreat to Scotland. His country needed him and he would serve by returning to the Admiralty as an entirely new kind of First Sea Lord, an admiralissimo, who would assume absolute control of the navy.

  Unfortunately for Fisher, events were working against him. On Monday, May 17, even as Asquith was asking Churchill, “What are we to do for you?” Room 40 was decoding an intercepted German wireless message indicating that the High Seas Fleet was coming out. The First Lord hurried from the House of Commons back to the Admiralty to send the Grand Fleet to sea. At 8:00 that evening, he telegraphed Jellicoe, “It is not impossible that tomorrow may be The Day.” By dawn, however, hope for a battle was fading, and by 10:00 a.m. it was clear that the German fleet was returning to its harbors. Through these alarms, the all-night vigil, and the subsequent disappointment, the First Sea Lord—still formally in office, because Asquith had not yet accepted his resignation—was absent from the Admiralty. The other Sea Lords were shocked; Churchill told the prime minister that they took “a serious view of Lord Fisher’s desertion of his post in time of war for what has now amounted to six days during which serious operations have been in progress.” The king, a former naval officer who did not share his mother’s warm admiration of Fisher, grew red in the face when this incident was mentioned. “He should have been hanged at the yardarm for desertion of his post in the face of the enemy,” George V declared. “It really was a most scandalous thing which ought to be punished with dismissal from the service and degradation.”

  Fisher, still rampaging around London, but never setting foot in the Admiralty, did not realize that the wind had changed. Knowing by May 19 that Churchill was doomed, he persuaded himself that this was his moment of triumph; that he was the man the government must turn to. Thus deluded, he sent Asquith a set of conditions under which he would agree to return to the Admiralty and “guarantee the successful termination of the war.” Churchill must be completely excluded from the Cabinet. Balfour (who had angered him by supporting the naval attack on the Dardanelles) must not replace Churchill as First Lord. Whoever became First Lord must be restricted solely to political policy and parliamentary procedure. Sir Arthur Wilson must quit the Admiralty and a new set of Sea Lords be installed. Turning to the role he himself proposed to play, Fisher slid into megalomania: “I shall have complete professional charge of the war at sea, together with the absolute sole disposition of the fleet and the appointment of all officers of all ranks whatsoever, and absolutely untrammeled sole command of all the sea forces whatsoever. . . . I should have the sole absolute authority for all new construction and all dockyard work of whatever sort, and complete control of the whole of the Civil Establishment of the navy. These six conditions,” Fisher concluded, “must be published verbatim so that the fleet may know my position.” The only excuse for the breadth and tone of Fisher’s d
emands can be that he was attempting to elevate himself to the same level of untrammeled authority already occupied by Kitchener at the War Office. But no one else saw it that way. “I am afraid that Jacky is really a little mad,” said Arthur Balfour. Asquith’s reaction was that the memorandum indicated “a fit of megalomania.” He informed the king that “Fisher’s mind is somewhat unhinged, otherwise his conduct is almost traitorous!” Privately, to Hankey, the prime minister wrote “that Fisher, strictly speaking, ought to be shot for leaving his post.”

  Fisher’s role in the drama was over. On the afternoon of May 22, one week after he had read Churchill’s proposal to send two more submarines to the Dardanelles, he boarded an afternoon train for Scotland to hide himself away at the estate of his close friend the Duchess of Hamilton. During the train’s stopover at Crewe, a messenger approached and handed him an envelope. He opened it and read:

  Dear Lord Fisher,

  I am commanded by the king to accept your tendered resignation of the Office of First Sea Lord of the Admiralty.