Caprivi had thought to put Tirpitz in charge of dock work, to get him to learn more about construction. Instead, in the summer he gave him a posting in the Baltic Station as chief of staff to Vice Admiral von Knorr, ‘Red Eduard’ (as was he fondly known because of his proneness to blush), the hero of Havana in 1870. Knorr had the greatest respect for Tirpitz, but later commented that Tirpitz had used this posting merely to ‘gather things he could then use for later opportunities’.17
In May 1891 Fisher took up the important post of admiral superintendent of Portsmouth dockyards. The roles of Fisher and Tirpitz almost overlapped. Fifteen years later the skills and experience that Fisher gained here would strongly influence the record construction of Dreadnought. Here, he succeeded in cutting 30 per cent off the three-year construction time of Royal Sovereign. He used every trick in the book, including memorising the name of at least one worker in a team, so that it would seem that he knew many workers by name when he pulled the name out of the air to compliment the unsuspecting man. His attitude was that anything could be achieved if one just set one’s mind to it: ‘When you are told a thing is impossible, that there are insuperable objections, then is the time to fight like the devil’.
Tirpitz used his time thinking about policy issues in the navy. He wrote three papers, one arguing for a strong Oberkommando, another on the considerations for the purpose and design of the navy, and a third on fleet organisation and manning.18 It was more than likely that these papers directly influenced the choice to put him into the chief of staff role at the Oberkommando.
After leaving the Portsmouth posting, Fisher moved to the Admiralty in 1892 as the Controller of the Navy (Third Sea Lord on the Admiralty Board). In this position he was responsible for the ships and equipment of the Navy, and for the design, building and repair of the great ships of the fleet. The British Admiralty was a curious institution. It was, in fact, a board, both a civil (political) and professional institution designed to run the Royal Navy. At the time of Jutland, the professional naval group was headed by the First Sea Lord (1SL) who worked with a group of three other Sea Lords. Each had a specific role: the 1SL was the operational head of the Navy; 2SL was responsible for personnel; 3SL for warship design and construction and known as the Controller; and 4SL for logistics – supply, transport and warehousing. A secretariat was made up of two further admirals. The political head, appointed by the ruling government, took the title of First Lord of the Admiralty and was himself supported by a junior Member of Parliament and a naval assistant.*
Fisher championed the development of what he called the ‘destroyer, the torpedo-boat destroyer. When the leading torpedo-boat builders Yarrow and Thornycroft approached him to get his backing to develop more powerful boats to counter French designs, Fisher not only approved the idea but also took the challenge to other builders. He tried to have water-tube boilers introduced into new designs.
With these kinds of action Fisher also made enemies. He was bound to – he was challenging the comfortable, uncompetitive relationship that the Navy had always had with its suppliers. He wanted efficiency, competition and value for money. He bulldozed through what he saw as waste and corruption to get his way. His work and proximity to the Queen also won him royal recognition, and some protection. He became a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath.
In 1892 Tirpitz took up the position of chief of staff in the Oberkommando, moving his family to Berlin for the start of the year.19 In the OK, as it was known, he started to make his views on the importance of naval strength very clear. While Caprivi had been pushing for war readiness Tirpitz focused on the bigger picture. Naval strength meant, for him, a longer vision requiring patience and cunning. His arrival was felt immediately. Fleet exercises reduced the gaps between ships, to concentrate fire; lights were dimmed so that a little more of the disorientation of a night action could be felt. As expected, complaints abounded. Serious thinking about how to fight – whether at close quarters or in a longer-range artillery duel – started to be the order of the day. For Tirpitz, Germany’s future strength as a nation would be dictated by its industry, access to raw materials, colonial acquisitions and military might, naval especially.
A state which has oceanic, or – an equivalent term – world, interests must be able to uphold them and make its power felt beyond its own territorial waters. National world commerce, world industry, and to a certain extent fishing on the high seas, world intercourse and colonies are impossible without a fleet capable of taking the offensive. The conflicts of interests between nations, the lack of confidence felt by capital and the business world will either destroy these expressions of the vitality of a state, or prevent them from taking form, if they are not supported by national power on the seas, and therefore beyond our waters. Herein lies by far the most important purpose of the fleet.20
In the design of the Flottenbauprogramm (fleet construction programme), Tirpitz faced a choice between a fast cruiser force and a slower, more heavily armed battleship configuration. At best, the cruiser force would be able only to suggest the idea of German power around the world. It would never ultimately be able to demonstrate it.
By 1894 Tirpitz’s position on the issue had been concretely formed. In a paper, ‘General Considerations in the Determination of Our Fleet by Vessel Class and Vessel Types’, he rejected the cruiser programme. It would have no impact on the decisive battle that, in his mind, would take place in the North Sea. By reducing the number of cruisers and favouring more heavily armoured battleship construction, Tirpitz was clearly building a navy that would be able to be successful in ‘its most difficult task’, that of taking on a new adversary in the North Sea, and winning. At this point he did not name the British but it was clear about whom he was talking.
Winning for Tirpitz did not necessarily mean what it later came to be in the minds of the British public – far from it. If the sensitive ratio of superiority could be shifted just far enough, British supremacy was under threat through the ‘risk’ of alliance. British thinking was based on the defeat of a threat from the combined forces of the next two naval powers (the two-power standard). However, it was Germany’s potential combination with another naval power, a third-rate one, that could now pose a formidable threat to the British. This was the basis of Tirpitz’s ‘risk theory’: the idea that, in challenging Germany, Britain would be going out on a huge limb. Even if Britain managed to defeat Germany, enough damage would have been suffered by its fleet, he believed, that the British Navy’s oceanic dominance would be seriously jeopardised by the possible entrance of a second, albeit of tertiary importance, naval power on Germany’s side.
In the first part of the war at sea, German strategy was very much tied to an eventual fleet meeting, with an emphasis on actions in the North Sea, as well as in the far-flung reaches of the British Empire, thus dispersing Britain’s naval forces or trying to catch small, unsupported elements of the British fleet and overwhelm them. Tirpitz was clear that the best form of defence or deterrence would be an offensive role for the German fleet:
Advocates of a defensive fleet proceed from the assumption that the enemy fleet will come to them and that the decision must take place where they wish it. But this is only the case very infrequently. Enemy ships need not stay close to our coasts … but they can stand out to sea far from one’s own works. Then our fleet would have only the choice between inactivity, ie more self-annihilation and fighting a battle on the open sea.21
These were profoundly prophetic words.
In the Dienstschrift IX, a series of writings documenting tactical lessons from fleet exercises and published in 1894, Tirpitz took the opportunity to define the fleet size based on an assumed 30 per cent superiority over whichever would be the largest fleet: the Russian Baltic fleet or the French North Sea fleet. The resulting numbers provided for a seventeen-battleship fleet made up of two squadrons of eight, with a flagship. In support would be six first-class cruisers, twelve third-class cruisers and six torpedo flotillas.
With the replacement of Max Goltz by Eduard Knorr as commanding admiral, things started to go badly for Tirpitz. The two men clashed and eventually Tirpitz was removed from the OK, leaving in September 1895. In November the OK published its ‘Draft Plan for the Renewal and Expansion of Fleet Material’. Behind it lay Tirpitz’s thinking, and to achieve his 30 per cent margin Knorr wanted to spend around 420 million marks annually between 1896 and 1908, adding twelve more battleships and three armoured cruisers. Kaiser Wilhelm jumped in. He was in favour of battleship construction but would not countenance the loss of second-class cruisers from the programme.
In 1896 Fisher was promoted to vice admiral (Tirpitz had himself been made a rear admiral the year before) and the following year, 1897, was made commander-in-chief of the North America and West Indies Station, a post that he had accepted the previous December. Life was made a little easier as his wife was able to join him. While he was at sea on board his flagship, Renown, she stayed at Admiralty House in Bermuda. Renown was his first seagoing command since Inflexible. Fisher was happy. He had a ship that had all he wanted: the ‘lightest big gun and the biggest secondary gun’.22
He might have been happy with his ship, but his treatment of junior officers left much to be desired. He had a penchant for publicly humiliating subordinate officers if they slipped up over even the most seemingly trivial of matters. On one occasion he signalled his displeasure to an officer who had forgotten to include in an order that the men should wear their hats for an early-morning review. Fisher made sure that the whole squadron knew about it. He enjoyed the act of humiliating a fellow officer.
Wilhelm II had arrived at a point in his reign when a sea-change in Germany’s world standing was necessary. To bring this about he made two important appointments: Prince Bernhard von Bülow as Foreign Secretary and Alfred Tirpitz as Secretary of the Admiralty. Tirpitz’s task would be to give Germany the navy that it needed, while Bülow should initially calm the climate around him as his new weapon was being built and, once he had it, pursue the more expansionist foreign policy that Wilhelm had always wanted.
In March Tirpitz was summoned back from Asia and the Kaiser outlined the challenge: ‘We have a Navy Bill ready but we need you to put it into operation’.23 Tirpitz was strong enough to stand up to both the Kaiser and Admiral Wilhelm Karl von Büchsel, saying that their ideas lacked the structure of a policy framework.
Taking over from Friedrich Hollmann, Tirpitz had immediate aims to focus on the British threat and, of course, limit the influence of his old chief, Knorr, at the OK. Hollmann and the Kaiser wanted to build cheaper cruisers that would be more suitable for coastal defence. For those used far away – in China, for example – this made little sense, as Germany did not possess the necessary coaling stations.
In his memoirs Tirpitz declared that the sole purpose of the Bill was ‘the strengthening of our political might [and] importance against England’. ‘For Germany, the most dangerous enemy at the present time is England. It is also the enemy against which we must urgently require a certain measure of naval force as a political power factor.’24 His views had an extremely long horizon. Until his fleet was ready he would rely on Bülow’s maintaining the peace.
That being the case, the ‘fleet must be so constructed’, Tirpitz said, ‘that it can unfold its greatest military potential between the Heligoland and the Thames’.25 In Tirpitz’s mind the decisive battle of the battleship war – the Entscheidungsschlacht – would be in the North Sea where he could field a superiority that Britain could not easily match. His adversary’s resources would be always be stretched to the limit while his fleet would be fighting in home waters with few other responsibilities. The fleet that he had to build, therefore, would be made up of ‘home-water’ ships, for short distances. With the same reasoning, Tirpitz maintained that Germany should not try to match Britain’s worldwide strengths by building a cruiser-raider fleet: without strategically located coaling stations, this would be folly.
He had thus decided what the German navy’s role should be, where it should fight, and what type of ships it should be composed of. It should inflict just enough damage on the major adversary, the British, that they would face difficulties from either of the next most powerful fleets or a combination of them, and hence the importance of alliance strategy focusing on a partner who possessed a strong navy. This became a key diplomatic consideration of the decade.
Tirpitz went to work with his team with a fury. His leadership was Nelsonian: ‘My method of work always had Nelson’s “We are a band of brothers” for its motto’. Like Fisher he understood the power of press and public opinion. He saw as vital the need to publicise his ideas and create a groundswell of public opinion during legislative debates in the Reichstag. A special news bureau, a public-relations funnel, was created and a magazine, Marine-Rundschau, popularised.26
Tirpitz’s first Navy Law
On 19 August 1897 Tirpitz presented his new Navy Bill to the Kaiser. His aim was to get the Reichstag to pass a law that would, without its understanding it, limit its power as the years progressed by legally binding it to a pre-determined programme of new construction and ship replacements: ‘I needed a Bill that would protect the continuity of the construction of the fleet… it intended to make the Reichstag abandon the need to interfere each year afresh in technical details, as it had hitherto done when every ship had become an “exercise for debates’!’27
By defining the expected fleet size in terms of ships, men and active service, and the time in which this was to be reached and the replacement of existing ships (the working life for a battleship was, for example, set at twenty-five years), Tirpitz ‘knew that any Reichstag which passed such a law would necessarily tie itself more tightly in moral terms than it ever could have done by any monetary obligations’.28 But there were other purposes behind the law: to guard against the Kaiser’s constant interference as well as that of the navy itself. The Kaiser wanted to build a fleet that would show the Hag around the world. He maintained his core belief in the offensive need of such a fleet: ‘I believe that the enemy will not come and that we would wait with our fleet while France cuts us off from two-thirds to three-quarters of our imports by blockade in the Channel and off northern England’.29
Tirpitz’s plan initially foresaw a 1905 fleet of nineteen battleships (including the existing eight smaller coastal defence ships) and forty-six cruisers (eight armoured cruisers, and twelve large and thirty light cruisers). He did not include all the Kaiser’s wishes – for example, the medium-class Hertha cruisers. The building programme was based on a seven-year period from 1898 to 1905. Eight older battleships would still be operational in 1905, so the construction need was for eleven new ships across a ‘Bautempo’ (build rate) of 2:2:1:2:1:1:2 – two ships in years one and two, one in the third, and so on. Tirpitz was able to speed up his building programme by concentrating on fewer classes of ships but, surprisingly, with better protection – as Jonathan Steinberg put it, ‘a smaller but more powerfully armed fleet with fewer classes, costing less, more quickly’.
The task was huge: there was no officer corps, little shipyard infrastructure and a yet-to-be-built alliance with industry. To save money, Tirpitz limited ship size (battleships to 11,000 tons, cruisers to 9,000) and men (reduced to 1,100 from an annual intake of 1,700). The limitation in size was also restricted by the shallow-water facilities that Germany had and the existing width of the Kiel Canal. Wherever he could, Tirpitz looked for savings that he could hoard away into projects, such as the expansion of the dockyards in Wilhelmshaven, that would support the longer and larger vision that he had. Additionally, he moved the torpedo boat construction budgets to the regular estimate process and out of the legal framework of the Navy Law, saving 44 million marks. With that, the total budget amounted to 410 million marks, a small increase of 10 million per annum on what Hollmann had proposed.
With the Kaiser’s blessing, Tirpitz set up meetings with all the important parties whose suppo
rt would be needed: Treasury Secretary Thielmann, the Chancellor Hohenlohe, individual Bundesrat members, such as his old benefactor the Duke of Baden, and even the ageing Bismarck, who could wield considerable influence in the background. In the Reichstag the support of Ernst Lieber’s Centre Party was critical. Tirpitz agreed to meet the parliamentarian in secret to work out an agreement, even paying for his travel (and a little more) out of departmental funds.
In his relations with the Reichstag, Tirpitz would lean heavily on two men: Commander Eduard Capelle and Commander August von Heeringen. Both were ‘torpedo gang’ members.30 Tirpitz at first criticised Capelle for being nothing more than a ‘calculator’, but later came to see him as ‘indispensable’ in working with the budgets. Heeringen would head the Nachrichtenabteilung, usually known simply by its initial, N – the ‘section for news and parliamentary affairs’, in other words Tirpitz’s propaganda machine. Parallel to the budget work, von Heeringen published Die Seeinteressen des deutschen Reiches, showing how, since 1871, imports had doubled, exports tripled and German merchant shipping increased tenfold.
By March 1898, despite strong opposition from the Conservatives and the strongly anti-imperialist Social Democrats, who were very opposed to the vast amounts of money that these laws represented, the Reichstag accepted Tirpitz’s proposals.31 It accepted, at face value, Tirpitz’s proposition that the fleet had ‘the function of a protective fleet’, since he had put a cap on spending that was designed to put to rest their fears about Wilhelm’s ‘limitless fleet plans’. On 10 April 1898 the legislation passed into law.
Even if Tirpitz was clear about his battleships, he also clearly understood the role of scouting in the new German navy: ‘A battle fleet does not only consist of battleships but requires today, as it did in earlier times, scouting ships and escorts’. For the next decade Tirpitz single-mindedly pursued the same goal; his thinking was tied up in three more naval amendments – known as ‘Novelles’ – passed in 1906, 1908 and 1912 respectively. Each one followed a period of intense diplomatic tension.
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