Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  British reactions

  In Britain, the passing of this first German Navy Law did not have the effect that Tirpitz feared it might have. British relations nearly broke down again with the French; the British were more concerned about the effect of the law on spurring on Russian and French construction rather than their own.

  The British had dealt with one regional threat – with victory in 1898 at the Battle of Omdurman – and another now reared: a French challenge to their claims in the Sudan. Four hundred miles to the south, at Fashoda (now called Kodok), a small force had been spotted, commanded by a Frenchman, Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand. French plans had been talked about openly for months, so the British were ready and waiting.

  With his troops, Marchand had marched northeast across half of Africa, from Brazzaville in the Bay of Guinea to Fashoda, south of Omdurman. The French thus moved eastwards across Africa from Senegal, and the British came south from Omdurman to meet the French threat. The French were interested because they thought that with control of the Upper Nile they would be able to exert pressure on Egypt by leveraging valuable water supplies. The Fashoda crisis bought to the surface the old Anglo-French imperial rivalries. The British even considered responding to the French threat with a bombardment of Brest.

  Luckily, Queen Victoria was quite against a war ‘for so miserable and small an object’, and Lord Salisbury rightly guessed that the French would not go through with their venture. When the British sent forces to intervene (Beatty and his gunboats by water, Kitchener by land), it was enough to convince the French that the British were serious and would take military action; on 11 December they pulled back. For the Kaiser it was a real disappointment. Anything that could split the French and the British apart would give him more room for manoeuvre and eventual expansion. Fisher came up with his own novel contribution to the affair: to rescue Captain Alfred Dreyfus from Devil’s Island and bring him back to France to act as a British-placed agent provocateur. It never happened, of course.

  With the Americans, by contrast, Britain’s relations were good. During the Spanish-American War, begun in 1898 when Cuba struck out for independence from Spain, Fisher frequently hosted his American naval counterparts in Hamilton, Bermuda. Tirpitz was helped by the fact that the French proposed substantial navy budgets at just the moment when the Reichstag debate was starting. The British, from whom he would have anticipated opposition, had their hands full in South Africa with the revolt of the Boers. It had been clear for the Germans that both the ‘impotence of Spain and France’ was a direct result of ‘their naval inferiority’.32

  At the Hague Convention of 1899, Fisher was sent to press for Britain’s interests in the question of naval arms. Few of the leading nations even wanted the convention. It was really the Russians who, having suffered countless military defeats in the Far East, wanted to slow down the arms race. Their military had fallen significantly behind. The Germans wanted no restrictions. They were pushing for expansion, while Britain and France hung between the two, with Fisher declaring that Britain’s continued naval supremacy was ‘the best security for the peace of the world’.

  Tepid British support for a slowdown was self-interested. Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s Foreign Minister, was sent an Admiralty memorandum that nicely summed up the British position: ‘From the standpoint of pure opportunism … our present naval position is so good that we might express our adhesion to the principle [of armaments limitation] on the condition that other countries were willing to do likewise’.33

  Fisher, however, never forgot – and it made an indelible impression on him – the visible militarism that the Germans displayed. His heart was not particularly aligned with the spirit of the conference: ‘You might as well talk about humanising hell,’ he said.34 His ‘sole object [he said] is peace. What you call my truculence is all for peace.’35 The thought was illustrated by an example of how he would treat neutral shipping if he thought that an enemy could benefit:

  Some neutral colliers attempt to steam past us into the enemy’s waters. If the enemy gets their coal into his bunkers, it may make all the difference in the coming fight. You tell me I must not seize these colliers. I tell you that nothing that you, or any power on earth can say, will stop me from sending them to the bottom.36

  Fisher was rewarded for Lord Salisbury’s decision on sending him to The Hague by being promoted to the Navy’s plum posting, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. Based in Gibraltar and Malta with his old flagship Renown, the command guarded one of the jewels of the empire, the Suez Canal. It was (in David Wragg’s words) ‘the most important seagoing appointment in the Royal Navy’.

  Fisher set about reforming the prestigious but moribund command with his usual gusto, setting up a committee of captains and commanders to tease out new thinking and challenge the traditions. It was very like what Tirpitz or even Hipper would have done. Fisher always put on a show, with the largest and highest pennant flying. He was a champion of opening up the Navy to the talents of the nation. For him an officer ‘who had not stooped to oil [his] fingers’ (in other words worked in the engine room) was useless.37 ‘Knowledge is power,’ he would say, ‘When you have been a kitchen maid no one can tell you how to boil potatoes.’ With Lord Selborne, First Lord of the Admiralty, he championed the cause. Cadets could now enter at twelve, and be thoroughly educated in naval and general subjects. Engineering and executive officers would train together to form a cohesive social unit. The challenges to social relations between decks that Fisher faced, the German navy faced in spades.

  The development of the torpedo, seen as the weapon of the underdog, now started to have an impact on gunnery. Ranges started to extend to 5,000yds (4,600m). Fisher trained his people relentlessly. Lord Hankey described how it went:

  It is difficult for anyone who had not lived under the previous regime to realise what a change Fisher brought about in the Mediterranean Fleet… Before his arrival, the topics and arguments of the officers’ messes … were mainly confined to such matters as the cleaning of paint and brass work … These were forgotten and replaced by incessant controversies on tactics, strategy, gunnery, torpedo warfare, blockade, etc. It was a veritable renaissance and affected every officer in the navy.38

  Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, Fisher’s most aggressive critic in later years, said that in being around him he had ‘learnt more in the last week than in the last forty years’.

  Tirpitz’s second Navy Law

  On the back of the first Navy Law’s success, Tirpitz was promoted to rear admiral in mid May 1899. The previous November, Tirpitz had already been thinking of a Novelle and had raised the idea with the Kaiser. Nevertheless, Tirpitz always wished to proceed with great care, finding alliances and feeling out potential adversaries.

  Wilhelm let the cat out of the bag a year later in a speech in Hamburg at the launch of Karl der Große (‘We bitterly need a strong German fleet’).39 Tirpitz was dumbfounded. Because the second Navy Law would bring about a really significant acceleration of the German fleet-building programme, he was trying to fly very low under the radar. The Kaiser’s words strongly hinted at what Tirpitz wanted to hide. Only because the British were so heavily engaged in South Africa did Tirpitz maintain the charade.

  That, along with Spanish America, helped him. South Africa gave him the emotional charge that was needed to rouse public opinion. The Spanish-American War showed that German ships would be under-armed; an increase in costly armour protection was needed to make sure that if ships were built they would be strong enough to achieve the objectives set for them.

  The Boer War brought German antagonisms with the British to the surface. As early as January 1896 Wilhelm had made his position clear. His open support for the ‘enemies of my enemy’ became even clearer when he congratulated President Paul Kruger on the defeat of Leander Starr Jameson’s British-backed raid on the Transvaal of 1895/6. The British reacted immediately and sent a flying squadron down to the Cape. Wilhelm yearned to be able to do t
his himself and now understood that he could never act like a great power without a navy to back him up. He told a British visitor at the time: ‘I realised that unless I had a navy sufficiently strong that even you would have to think a little bit before you told me to “Go to hell out of it” my commerce would not progress as I wanted it to, and so I determined to build a navy which would at least command respect’.40

  After the first Navy Law, private enterprise started to lobby more heavily, seeing a goldmine down the road. Krupp, who had himself been asked by Tirpitz to support him, sponsored the German Navy League (Deutscher Flottenverein), helping Viktor Schweinburg, editor of Krupp’s newspaper, the Berliner Neuesten Nachrichten, to found the Flottenverein, where its clear commercial interests could find a voice.41 Schweinberg expressed its purposes to be:

  the arousing, cherishing, and strengthening in the German people of an understanding for and interest in the meaning and purpose of the navy … The Navy League considers a strong German navy a necessity, especially for securing the coasts of Germany against the danger of war, for maintaining Germany’s position among the world powers, for protecting the general interests and commercial relations of Germany, as well as the honour and security of her citizens engaged in business abroad.42

  Tirpitz joined the Flottenverein (and officers and naval staff were encouraged to do so), but always maintained a tense oversight, worrying that its activities could upset his carefully laid manoeuvres – his ‘enthusiasm waned when he felt that it pushed his agenda to the detriment of his own nuanced approach’.43 Membership, the basis for the subscription to its newspaper, Die Flotte, started to grow slowly at first, then by leaps and bounds, stimulated by overseas crises and Anglo-German tension. There were a few thousand in 1898, 130,000 in mid 1899, 250,000 in early 1900 and almost a million by 1906.44 The company even published the original ‘nothing book’: it was called What Parliament Has Done for the Navy and was full of blank pages.

  Events in South Africa continued to help create the right atmosphere for Tirpitz’s and the Kaiser’s plans. In the first month of the new year of 1900 the British stopped and searched three steamers, suspecting that they were carrying supplies to the Boer forces. German public opinion was outraged. Tirpitz got all that he needed from this growing Anglophobia to put a second Navy Bill on the table: “Now we have thewindweneedtoblowour ship into port; the Navy Lawwill pass!

  On 12 June 1900 the second Navy Law did so, without much debate. A parliamentary commission recommended that rather than pass this legislation as a Novelle, the old 1898 law should be repealed and this new version take its place. On the day that the Novelle became law Wilhelm raised Tirpitz to the nobility in recognition for the successful passage of the laws.

  The new law aimed at doubling the fleet size – from nineteen to thirty-eight battleships, and to twenty armoured cruisers and thirty-eight light cruisers – by 1917. There would be two flagships, and four battle squadrons each with eight battleships, with a further four in reserve to be built over seventeen years. The cost was huge: 1,306 million marks (up from 410 million) or 81.6 million marks a year (up from 58.6 million). The planning was considerably more far-seeing and more dangerous than that allowed by the first law.

  The German legislation did not go unnoticed in Britain. Lord Selborne was alarmed:

  The naval policy of Germany is definite and persistent. The Emperor seems determined that the power of Germany shall be used all over the world to push German commerce, possessions and interests. Of necessity it follows that German naval strength must be raised so as to compare more advantageously than at present with ours. The result of this policy will be to place Germany in a commanding position if ever we find ourselves at war with France and Russia … Naval officers who have seen much of the German navy lately are all agreed that it is as good as can be.45

  Fisher finally attained the rank of full admiral in November 1901. He constantly pressured the Admiralty for more resources: after the course of Tirpitz’s second Navy Law, the Royal Navy was more and more of the opinion that the real future enemy would be Germany, not France or Russia.

  In the middle of 1902 Fisher went back to the Admiralty as Second Sea Lord. Like Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Fisher was concerned to integrate the new officer branches, specifically engineering officers, into the service. He started by including engineering cadets into the curriculum. While the Admiralty initially resisted Fisher’s idea, it eventually came around. Cadet training was extended from two to four years. New quarters were established at Osborne for the fuller ranks.

  While the British Cabinet still argued over who would be the enemy, Lord Selborne was still convinced of his reading of German intentions. In October he was unequivocal:

  The more the composition of the new German fleet is examined, the clearer it becomes that it is designed for a possible conflict with the British fleet. It cannot be designed for the purpose of playing a leading part in a future war between Germany and France and Russia. The issue of such a war can only be decided by armies on land, and the great naval expenditure on which Germany has embarked involves deliberate diminution of the military strength which Germany might otherwise have attained in relation to France and Russia.46

  The British now referred increasingly to the two-power standard: their benchmark for fleet strength was to be as powerful as the next two foreign fleets combined. They added that it was desirable to have at least a 10 per cent (or six-battleship) advantage over the second-nation threat. Concerned to restore more weight to the European and Mediterranean theatres, Britain signed an alliance with the Japanese in 1902, potentially releasing ships from the Far East, and started to work hard at cementing relations with the French.

  Tirpitz went to the United States for the third and last time in February and March 1902, accompanying Prince Heinrich. Along with him were two officers of the torpedo gang: Captain Georg Alexander von Müller, who worked in the Marinekabinett, and Lieutenant Commander Adolf von Trotha, from the Reichsmarineamt’s central department.

  Fisher went back to Portsmouth in 1903. This time Victory became his flagship, in his new role of Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth. At the end of October 1904, he took up the supreme command of the Navy as First Sea Lord. His arrival brought a whirlwind of reform and drastic, but much-needed, measures. He had prepared for the post and while he had no particular love for the French he was convinced that it was from Germany that danger came.

  Tirpitz did not want to act in ways that would underline the fact. When in June 1904 Edward VII visited Germany for Kiel Week – the Kaiser’s attempt at mimicking his grandmother’s rather grander affair at Cowes – Tirpitz was visibly upset with Wilhelm for putting on for the occasion such an ostentatious display of German naval power. It was unnecessarily provocative.

  Tirpitz and Fisher were now effectively ‘head to head’.

  The Fisher reforms

  In December, less than two months after arriving in Whitehall, Fisher initiated the most fundamental change in the distribution of British fleets since the Napoleonic Wars. Over the previous hundred years, the political alliances and structure of Europe had changed dramatically, but the Royal Navy had not kept pace. For Fisher, the threat had decisively moved north, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. The old Channel Fleet was renamed the Atlantic Fleet and moved to Gibraltar, from where it could steam northeast to reinforce the North Sea or to the southeast and the Mediterranean. The old Home Fleet was renamed the Channel Fleet and strengthened with ten battleships and support vessels. Fisher’s point was that a defeat in the North Sea would be catastrophic, in foreign waters a mere setback.

  To crew the new forces, Fisher cut drastically. Ninety ships were paid off and a further sixty-four put into reserve, at a stroke of the pen. They were, in Fisher’s words, ‘too weak to fight and too slow to run away’. The cuts and redeployments were unpopular within the service, Fisher becoming a kind of magnet of antagonism for Lord Beresford – Beresford continued to hold the threat of
a Franco-Russian naval alliance a higher danger than the one emerging to the north. He pushed for joint Army–Navy planning. The army was, he said, ‘a projectile to be fired by the navy. The navy embarks it and lands it where it can do most mischief! … We should be employing ourselves in joint naval and military manoeuvres.’

  Fisher was so perturbed about the growing threat of the German navy that he now started to recommend a ‘Copenhagen’ strategy of attacking the holed-up fleet in a pre-emptive strike. The King said that he was mad to think in such terms. At a diplomatic level the British were, at the same time, able to put a second alliance cornerstone into place: the Entente Cordiale between Britain and France was signed on 8 April 1904.

  Patrick Kelly points out that Tirpitz’s refusal to upset the apple-cart by insisting on not sending too large a fleet contingent to China during the Boxer Wars, or being more forceful about German rights to Chinese port access, was paradoxical. But Tirpitz did not want to allow premature grandstanding to get in the way. He was also opposed to a possible Russian alliance in 1904; in a naval war the Russians would contribute little to counter the British threat. This had been amply demonstrated in the Russo-Japanese War, which broke out in February 1904.

  In February 1905 an Admiralty Civil Lord, Arthur Lee, echoed Fisher’s private threats but did so publicly, declaring that Britain should ‘get its blow in first, before the other side had time even to read in the papers that war had been declared’.47 The comment did not make that much of an impact in Britain but it did cause waves of concern in Germany.

  Now Wilhelm reacted. He decided to use the colonial status of Morocco as a means of raising tensions between France and Britain, whose relationship was so dramatically and charismatically repaired only the previous year by Edward VII’s visit to Paris. The Kaiser visited Tangier in March 1905 to show his support for the Sultan, Abdelaziz, and his quest for independence. When Abdelaziz rejected French efforts to seek a compromise with reform, Wilhelm put forward the idea of a German-sponsored conference that the French Foreign Minister, Théophile Delcassé, rejected, in turn causing Germany’s Chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, to threaten war over the issue. Even as the French called up their reserves, they caved in and agreed to attend an international conference. Edward VII called it ‘the most mischievous and uncalled-for event which the German Emperor has ever been engaged in since he came to the throne’.48 The Kaiser’s behaviour only reinforced the feeling that the real enemy was not the traditional one directly across the channel. It was Germany.