Nelson the Commander
Page 36
The emphasis was on smartness, speed in hoisting sail, precise conformity to signal-book diagrams in fleet drills, pride in pulling races and inter-ship boxing and tug o'wars. Admiral 'Pompo' Heneage, who was born three years earlier than Queen Victoria and retired three years before she died, was the complete Victorian naval officer, but by no means the most eccentric nor exceptional in his concern for a ship's cleanliness or smartness. 'When inspecting ships he always wore white kid gloves,' according to one naval writer, 'and his coxswain followed him with a dozen spare pairs ... He liked to put his hands on the tops of pipes running over his head, or into the most inaccessible nooks and crannies. If one speck of dust appeared on the immaculate gloves, he would turn to the Commander waving two fingers. "Dis is not de dirt of days," he would observe, "nor de dirt of veeks, nor de dirt of months. It is de dirt of ages. Coxswain, gif me a clean pair of gloves."' (4)
Practice 'shoots' were not considered of first priority by the commanders-in-chief nor by their captains. The shine on the decorated tampion, which closed off like a cork the guns' barrels, was more important; and it was not unknown for the meagre ration of practice ammunition to be tossed overboard for fear that gun-firing might spoil the brasswork.
During this long period of decay, a handful of exceptionally talented officers somehow achieved positions of influence ashore and afloat. Among them were Philip Colomb, a questioning intellectual who wrote provocatively for service journals, and Admiral Sir Frederick Richards, a great reformer and administrator.
Far above them all as an administrator, reformer, inspirer, persuader, manipulator, charmer, and politician was .John Arbuthnot Fisher. Fisher, the counterpart and chief adversary of Alfred von Tirpitz, did more than any single officer to drag the Royal Navy out of its nineteenth-century sloth, inefficiency, and drowsiness, and make it fit to stand up to the superb force Tirpitz created.
In his years of greatness a friend of kings and princes, politicians and newspaper proprietors, ‘Jacky' Fisher entered the Navy in the 1850s, 'penniless, friendless and forlorn' as he later wrote. His family was certainly without power or influence, his father being an ex-army officer turned tea-planter of mixed fortunes in Ceylon. Fisher never saw him after the age of six, when he was sent to England to live with an uncle. It seems likely that Fisher's exceptional qualities of intellect and moral and physical courage were inherited from his mother, who is described as having a 'powerful mind, organizing capacity and taste for power'. (5)
Within twenty years Fisher had made his mark as an 'apostle of progress' with a special interest in torpedoes, mines, gunnery, and advanced machinery like the water-tube boiler and the turbine.
From captain of the Navy's gunnery school, Fisher became Director of Naval Ordnance and Torpedoes in 1886, a department he found in a state of chaos and confusion. Within less than five years he had totally reorganized it, and successfully withdrawn from the Army its remarkably anomalous responsibility for naval guns. This performance was a preview in miniature of his future period as First Sea Lord. Fisher gathered about him a group of ambitious and patriotic officers attracted by his dynamism, self-assurance and extreme style: they were the cream of the Navy's intellect, soon to be known as members of the 'Fishpond'. And heaven help any non-member (he called them 'the syndicate of discontent') who opposed Fisher's policies! Fisher inevitably made enemies with every reform but it was not necessary for him to have made as many as he did, or to be so unforgiving. Nonetheless it can fairly be said that when Fisher was appointed First Sea Lord in October I 904, six months after the signature of the Entente Cordiale, the Royal Navy's course towards decay was reversed.
Fisher recognized, ahead of many politicians, the deadly danger emerging from across the North Sea. He also knew that the men who would one day have to face it must be of the highest quality. With this in mind he transformed recruitment, manning, and status in the Navy. He introduced schemes to encourage promotion from the lower deck and at the same time abolished fees at naval colleges through which only the well-off had once passed. He introduced a nucleus crews system of reserves, based on French practice, and greatly improved the standing of the once-despised engineer officers.
All this was recognized by his followers in the service to be of inestimable value. Fisher's matériel reforms were more conspicuous. Ignoring the cries of fury from deprived commanders and far-flung diplomats, Fisher brought home numerous ships, most of which 'could neither fight nor run away' (as Fisher expressed it) and were scrapped. Even the Mediterranean Fleet was reduced to a shadow of the great fleet he had commanded from 1899 to 1902. Through influential friends and through his press contacts, Fisher concentrated the nation's eye on Germany, and Germany alone, as the threat to Britain's dominance at sea. The people loved it, and the Navy League flourished. By economies as ruthless as his reforms, Fisher reduced the Navy Estimates three years running. The Liberals loved him for that.
Above all else, Fisher gave the nation the dreadnought. This statement requires qualifying for it can also be argued that the all-big-gun ship was inevitably the final stage in the design of the old ship-of-the-line. In the nineteenth century the battleship had passed through numerous developments, from the three-decker wooden walls, little improved from the mid-eighteenth century, to mixed sail and steam propulsion, to the 'mastless' ironclad. Guns had developed from smooth-bore 68-pounders firing solid shot, to the 16-inch, rifted, breech-loading guns of the Inflexible.
As defence against the explosive charge of these massive shells, armour-plate had grown in thickness and resistance until (again in the Inflexible) it was responsible for 27.5 per cent of the ship's total displacement. By the end of the century, a typical modern first-class battleship was armed with four guns of 12-inch calibre in two turrets fore and aft, and a mixed battery of medium-calibre guns, from 6-inch to 9.2-inch.
By this time there was a growing consciousness of the threat of the torpedo and the mine. Cheap, nippy little torpedo boats, capable of speeds twice that of a battleship, could race in and send to the bottom a man o'war costing a million pounds and taking four years to build. This very real threat led to radical alterations in the design and defences of the battleship and to radical new thinking on tactics. Massive and cumbersome nets were carried and hoisted out like a steel crinoline by battleships at anchor. Battleships bristled with anti-torpedo boat light guns. It was deemed prudent to extend greatly the range at which lines of battleships fought one another.
All these new fears for the security of the battleship appeared to be confirmed in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Japanese torpedo boats opened hostilities by attacking the Russian Fleet. The Japanese suffered critical battleship losses from mines. Both sides became increasingly preoccupied with the new underwater weapons.
Other lessons one learned in this naval war which crystallized all the problems argued over by theoreticians for years. 'Spotting' the fall of shot accurately from ships firing mixed armament was seen to be almost impossible, the varying size splashes only confusing the spotter. According to the official British observer with the Japanese Fleet at the first-ever battle of ironclads, 'when 12-inch guns are firing, shots from 10-inch pass unnoticed, while for all the respect they instil, 8-inch or 6-inch guns might just as well be peashooters'. To the astonishment of this same observer (and to the whole naval world when it was informed) the Russian battleships opened accurate fire at 18,000 yards: 3,000 yards was still the standard range of British battle practice at this time. It was clear that heavy guns could prove decisive long before medium-calibre guns could come into effective range.
Here was proof for far-sighted naval designers that only the heaviest guns would count in naval warfare, and that future battles would be fought at ranges of between five and ten miles (as visibility permitted) with flotillas of torpedo boats attempting to get within range of the enemy in order to launch their 'tin fish'. Clearly, then, only the heaviest and anti-torpedo boat guns must in future be mounted in battleships.
The
Japanese and Russians were, naturally, the first to recognize the lessons of the battles they fought. The United States Navy Board drew up plans for two battleships mounting ten 12-inch guns before the end of 1904, and succeeded in getting authority through Congress to lay down only marginally smaller all-big-gun battleships early in 1905. In Italy the naval architect Vittorio Cuniberti had made public his design for a battleship mounting twelve 12-inch guns, and none smaller except anti-torpedo boat guns.
The American ships were built at a leisurely pace, the Italians had not got the money to follow Cuniberti, the Japanese had not sufficiently developed their ordnance facilities and eventually produced a hybrid with mixed 12-inch and 10-inch guns. Only Britain had the facilities and need to produce an all-big-gun battleship without delay and set a pace which no other nation could match. Within a few days of his appointment as First Sea Lord, Fisher set up a Committee on Designs. It included a number of the best 'brains' in the Navy, all imbued with Fisher's sense of urgency. Less than a year later, the Dreadnought was laid down at Portsmouth, and eight months after her launch was steaming on her trials.
The effect at home and abroad was all that Fisher had hoped for. The Dreadnought, with ten 12-inch guns, had a broadside of twice as many heavy guns as any ship afloat. When few battleships could make 18 knots, the Dreadnought's turbines speeded her along at 21 knots, and of even greater significance, she crossed the Atlantic at over 17 knots average without a breakdown. The German naval authorities were stunned by the superiority and speed of construction of this ship, and temporarily halted construction on battleships that would now be obsolete on completion. In the competition - the 'battleship race' - which was rapidly increasing in scale and intensity, the first round between Britain and Germany, between Fisher and von Tirpitz, had been won by the Royal Navy.
At home there was great satisfaction and rejoicing. Models of the Dreadnought appeared in the shops, boys could recite every detail of her statistics, and wherever she could be seen crowds collected. But among navalists, and Fisher's detractors, there was vocal criticism of the battleship. Her cost of construction was high and the cost of her loss in battle would be commensurately high. There were those who favoured smaller battleships with 10-inch guns, which could be built in greater numbers. Above all, if she made every battleship in the world obsolete, as Fisher loudly claimed, then Britain's great superiority in numbers over Germany was wiped out at a stroke.
Fisher fought back at what he regarded as counsels of doom and timidity, claiming that Britain could outbuild Germany and would have a dreadnought battle squadron before Germany could complete her first Dreadnoughtschiff In all the arguments that raged to and fro on the platforms, in the Press and West End clubs, the one undeniable and supremely important fact appears never to have been mentioned: the all-big-gun ship was as certain to come as day follows night, was already on the design boards of many foreign admiralties, was already under construction in the United States.
What Britain had done under the 'ruthless, relentless and remorseless' (as he liked to claim for himself) methods of Fisher was to produce a world-beater overnight. The Dreadnought reasserted once again British paramountcy at sea, and in a style of theatricality which only Jacky Fisher could sponsor.