To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  The long-term consequence of the December 1913 conference would be to throw the strategy of distant blockade into disarray once more. It endorsed a submarine blockade of Germany’s ports and the procurement of E-class submarines to effect it. However, the fact that war broke out in the following summer meant that the navy still had too few submarines—and was still too Dreadnought-dependent—for such a policy. Distant blockade was endorsed by default.

  The fluctuations in war planning were compounded by their implications for the navy’s bases. Portsmouth and Plymouth on the south coast, developed when France and Russia were the likely enemies, were replaced by Harwich, Rosyth, and Cromarty on the east coast after 1905. But the emphasis on additional ship construction and the need to repay the loans contracted for the southern bases left insufficient funds for new shore facilities: Harwich was suitable only for light craft, in 1914 development at Rosyth was just beginning, and both it and Cromarty were open to submarine attack. A possible alternative, the Humber, was also vulnerable to submarines, and in any case drew insufficient water. In the event, Cromarty and then Rosyth were to play host only to the battle cruisers. Neither was big enough for the Grand Fleet whose major base was established at Scapa Flow. The choice of Scapa was consonant with the decision for distant blockade but with little else. No more than an anchorage, without defences, and exposed to severe weather conditions, it lacked good internal communications to the south of England and lay at the furthest possible extremity from Britain’s traditional naval orientation.

  The decision for distant blockade, and the subsequent selection of bases, gave the fleet a less offensive and provocative stance. But in most minds blockade remained a defensive means to an offensive end, to bring the German fleet to battle; it was not primarily an end in itself. Blockade as it subsequently came to be understood and applied, as the conduct of economic warfare, was not totally neglected by the pre-war navy, but—once again—it was the victim of divided counsel rather than the fruit of sustained analysis.

  The trade division of the Naval Intelligence Department, recognizing British dependence on overseas imports of food, came also to appreciate Germany’s comparable vulnerability. In 1906 Germany reckoned to import 20 per cent of its annual grain consumption.47 The opportunity for offensive action therefore existed, and was confirmed by Britain’s geographical position athwart Germany’s sea lanes and by British naval supremacy. Between 1905 and 1908 the Naval Intelligence Department gave sustained attention to a war on German trade: it concluded, in the words of its director Sir Charles Ottley, that ‘the mills of our sea-power (though they would grind the German industrial population slowly perhaps) would grind them “exceedingly small”—grass would sooner or later grow in the streets of Hamburg and wide-spread death and ruin would be inflicted’.48

  MAP 14. THE NORTH SEA AND THE BALTIC

  Such talk was totally in keeping with Fisher’s espousal of deterrence, and indeed the First Sea Lord was attracted to the notion of economic warfare for that very reason. But his enthusiasm lacked consistency. In 1909 he presided over the disbandment of the trade division, the navy’s ‘think-tank’ on blockade, and in 1910 he engineered his succession by Wilson, who thought economic warfare could not work because Germany would be able to compensate by trading through the neutral powers on its borders.

  Even more confusing was Fisher’s attitude to the declaratory aspect of deterrence, the need to make threats clear to a potential opponent for the deterrent to be effective. The Declaration of Paris of 1856 had applied a narrow definition of contraband designed to encourage neutral trade in wartime. Thus, enemy goods carried on neutral ships were not liable to capture; furthermore, the definition of conditional contraband, that is to say, goods that were not munitions of war but which could have indirect military applications (such as food for belligerents), was unclear. One of the upshots of the Hague Conference of 1906–7 was an effort to clean up this area of maritime law, and in 1909 the Declaration of London extended neutral rights by giving contraband a narrow definition, establishing a long free list, and by keeping food as conditional contraband (to qualify it had to be consigned to soldiers, not civilians). The Declaration of London reflected British interests as a commercial maritime power, as the home of 48 per cent of the world’s merchant shipping; it did not reflect British interests as a belligerent. The latter consideration provoked sufficient outcry, in the context of the 1909 naval panic, to cause the House of Lords to block Britain’s ratification of the declaration. But most extraordinary was the behaviour of the Admiralty. Ottley and his colleagues, having advocated economic warfare in a strategic context, supported the Declaration of London and its encouragement to neutral trade. The argument that Germany could circumvent a blockade by trading through its border neutrals thus received indirect confirmation from those best qualified to oppose it, and most interested in doing so. For the army, seeing blockade as the alternative to continentalism, and the Foreign Office, persuaded that Germany could continue to trade through border neutrals, the Admiralty’s confusion was an extraordinary opportunity. Moreover, it militated against the deterrent impact of the threat of economic war on Germany, since it publicly suggested that commercial blockade was not part of Britain’s armoury. The only rationalization of the Admiralty’s, and of Fisher’s, position is hard-headed cynicism: that in the event of Britain being at war the declaration would be neglected, in the event of neutrality it would be enforced. Whatever the situation, in the last five years before the war’s outbreak naval thinking on economic war went cold.

  The fact that Britain was not totally unprepared to begin economic war against Germany in August 1914 was the achievement of Maurice Hankey, a former member of the Naval Intelligence Department, and from 1908 assistant secretary and then secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Hankey had the full confidence of Fisher (although the latter had less faith in the body which Hankey served). The trust was certainly justified in so far as Hankey saw strength in naval terms: ‘my belief in sea-power’, he wrote after the war, ‘amounted almost to a religion. The Germans, like Napoleon, might overrun the Continent; this might prolong the war, but could not affect the final issue, which would be determined by economic pressure.’49 Hankey’s pre-war work took two complementary directions. First, in 1910 he began the preparation of the ‘War Book’, a document designed to set out in detail every step to be taken by the government and its departments in the period preparatory to and on the outbreak of war. The first version of the ‘War Book’ appeared in 1912, and it was revised annually. One of its major aims—despite the procrastination of the Treasury on insurance—was to set out the legal and financial measures to be taken in the initiation of economic warfare. Secondly, Hankey steered the inquiry of 1911–12 on trading with the enemy to a position which put to one side the commercial interests of British business and declared that on the outbreak of war all trade with Germany should cease, and even that the major neutral ports serving Germany—Antwerp and Rotterdam—should be blockaded. All this was partial and incomplete; the Committee of Imperial Defence lacked the executive powers or the central authority to give its proposals bite; the ‘War Book’ was far from being a war plan; but Hankey kept the idea of economic warfare alive, and in some areas and in some respects the implementation of blockade in August 1914 was both immediate and effective.

  However, as even Hankey realized, the full impact of blockade on Germany itself would be progressive and slow. France and Russia might be defeated on the battlefield long before the grass was growing in the streets of Hamburg. Nor would an early and annihilating victory over the German fleet in the North Sea postpone the advance of Germany’s armies. Maritime strategists, therefore, cast around for a strategic option that would have immediate consequences on the European mainland. The development of amphibious operations, the idea that the army was a bolt fired by the navy, had by 1910 a distinguished body of historical and intellectual support. Until at least 1905 the army imagined that, if it went to war
in Europe, it would do so as the cutting edge of sea-power. Sir Charles Callwell, who was recalled to be director of military operations at the War Office in 1914, had cited the Peninsular and Crimean Wars as examples of the correct application of sea-power, allowing British armies to strike a continental enemy at points of Britain’s own choosing. Julian Corbett, an eighteenth-century historian by vocation, was the navy’s chief exponent of this method of limited involvement in continental warfare. Corbett influenced both Hankey and Fisher. Hankey himself, as an officer in the Royal Marines, was by profession predisposed to think in terms of amphibious warfare. Fisher in 1905 supported a suggestion made by Ottley that the Committee of Imperial Defence should establish a committee on combined operations. The timing was wrong, the army’s attention was just beginning to turn to independent operations on the continent, and no committee was created. Fisher nonetheless continued to canvass amphibious options for the Baltic—the seizure of a naval base in Schleswig-Holstein or a landing in Pomerania to threaten Berlin, the latter possibly in conjunction with the Russians. The directorate of military operations reviewed the possibilities in 1907 but condemned them in 1908, and the general staff’s opposition was relayed to the Committee of Imperial Defence in December 1908 and again in March 1909. The army itself was too weak to fight German troops unaided, and the decisive land battles would be fought on France’s frontiers irrespective of whether the British Expeditionary Force was dispatched. As pertinently, Fisher’s proposals made no sense in terms of the navy’s structure. By scrapping large numbers of old vessels and concentrating on fewer capital ships of high quality, Fisher had ceased to possess an armada of ships appropriate to troop transport. He lacked the minesweepers and escort vessels to cope with the naval defences of the Baltic. And the loss of a single Dreadnought to torpedo or mine would be relatively far more costly (and more likely) than that of a lighter but better-adapted craft.

  Without the army, the navy switched its attention from the Baltic to the North Sea. Most developed were plans relating to the estuaries of the Ems and the Elbe. But the navigational problems were immense, and the ineffectiveness of naval gunfire against shore batteries eliminated several possible options. Wilson’s enthusiasm for the seizure of Heligoland as a destroyer base, in addition to its other objectionable features, presumed the availability of an army division. The scheme did not find favour within the navy, but Wilson was of course his service’s spokesman at the Committee of Imperial Defence. It was singular perversity to persist with an option on 23 August 1911 which the army had been rubbishing for at least the previous three years.50

  Wilson’s humiliation did not mean that the navy abandoned its consideration of combined operations. It did, however, recognize that it needed sustained staff-work to make them a viable option. In 1913 Hankey advocated the exchange of officers between the navy’s and army’s staffs with the intention of promoting a greater awareness within the army of the needs of maritime strategy. The assistant director of naval operations, Captain Herbert Richmond, went further: with Churchill’s and Battenberg’s support he called for the re-creation of the Committee of Imperial Defence’s subcommittee on combined operations. The war broke out without anything having been achieved, but with amphibious warfare still on the navy’s agenda.51

  In 1914, in none of its three possible areas of operations—fleet action, blockade, amphibious landings—did the Royal Navy have a viable war plan. This fact, extraordinary enough in itself, is amplified by the observation that Britain—although perhaps the most culpable—was not unique in this regard. The obvious manifestation of pre-war rivalries, the naval arms race, was not accompanied by much thought as to what those navies would do with themselves in the event of war. Russian naval construction is a case in point.

  In 1904 lack of sea control had proved strategically decisive: it had allowed the Japanese to get ashore in the first place. Fortuitously, the Russian navy’s losses at Tsushima were of a generation of vessels outdated by the Dreadnought. Russia was therefore under pressure to initiate a major construction programme on a number of counts. But it did not follow that the new fleet had to be of ocean-going Dreadnoughts. In geopolitical terms Russia was a land power, whose military efficiency could be undermined if resources were diverted from the army to the navy. In the shallow and enclosed waters of the Baltic in particular, capital ships were highly vulnerable and coastal defence promised to be sufficient: mines had sunk two out of seven Japanese capital ships at Port Arthur and could be just as effective against the Germans in the Gulf of Finland. When, in 1906, the naval minister Admiral Birilev favoured this approach, he enjoyed the support not only of the war minister and the chief of the general staff but also of Stolypin.52

  But Birilev was dismissed. The naval general staff, formed in 1906, wanted Dreadnoughts, and so did the Tsar. Moreover, the treasury was anxious to make the state yards financially independent,53 and was therefore susceptible to the argument that they needed a minimum order of two Dreadnoughts at a time to be viable. Birilev’s successor, Admiral Dikov, duly drew up a programme envisaging four squadrons each of eight battleships, four heavy and light cruisers, and thirty-six torpedo boats and smaller units. The Council for State Defence threw it out, in the process forfeiting the Tsar’s confidence and sealing its own demise. The Council of Ministers approved a revised programme, phased over ten years, beginning with the laying down of four Dreadnoughts in 1909. The financial prudence of Kokovstov was circumvented by I. K. Grigorovich, the minister of the navy from 1911: he ended the chief of the naval staff’s direct access to the Tsar, so making himself the navy’s sole intermediary with the head of state, while at the same time managing to win the support of the Duma.54 Between 1907 and 1913 Russian naval spending rose 178.4 per cent, outstripping that of Germany.55

  The Duma’s enthusiasm for the navy was prompted by the closure of the straits in 1911 and 1912. Their vital commercial importance meant that the rhetoric of Russian navalism, and the grand designs of the Russian naval staff, were increasingly focused on Turkey and the route to the Mediterranean. But not until 1910, with its order for the next three Dreadnoughts, did Russia set about creating a naval presence in the theatre where it might have had influence. Its declared objective was a Black Sea fleet at least half as strong again as those of the other states which maintained navies in the area. Immediately this meant Romania and Bulgaria as well as Turkey; but from 1912 the Black Sea arms race had the potential to interact with that of the Mediterranean, and so Germany and Austria-Hungary might also come into play.56

  In the event, none of Russia’s Black Sea Dreadnoughts was completed for use in the war. The money allocated to the navy had to go into the creation of plant before it could go into the building of ships. There were no yards big enough for the construction of Dreadnoughts on the Black Sea, but the neutralization of the straits meant that they had to be built there and not on the Baltic.57 Moreover, in one respect Dikov’s 1907 programme was sensible: if Russia espoused navalism, it had to create three separate battle squadrons—one each for the Black Sea, the Pacific, and the Baltic. By the time awareness of the first had been heightened, it had to compete with the pre-existing claims of the latter. But the outcome was unrealistic: the distribution of inadequate resources over too many theatres. The first Dreadnoughts, the four laid down in 1909, were intended for the Baltic. Germany, not Japan or Turkey, took priority in the plans of the Russian navy. Grigorovich believed that a major fleet in the Baltic would cement the Entente. He argued that, if the Russian navy forsook coastal defence for forward defence in the Baltic, it could hold the balance between the British and German fleets.58 But, in spite of the convergence of Grigorovich’s arguments with Fisher’s designs for amphibious operations, Anglo-Russian naval planning never developed. In 1912 the Russians decided to block the entrance to the Gulf of Finland with mines, and to cover them with coastal batteries. The Baltic fleet was to manoeuvre behind this barrier, using Reval as a forward base. It was a plan which made Dreadnough
ts redundant; one proposal advanced in 1913 was for them to be sent to the Mediterranean so that eventually they could find an excuse to force the straits and so be based where they could be used, at Sevastopol. As it was, when war broke out the docks at Reval had not been developed, the coastal batteries were incomplete, and not a single Dreadnought was ready.59 The operational role of the navy in the Baltic became that which common sense directed, coastal defence. The islands across the gulfs of Finland and Bothnia, linked with mines, screened St Petersburg and the land operations of the North-West Front. In 1914 such naval clout as Russia had was in a sea where it could not use it rather than in the Black Sea, where it was likely to want to use it. No more graphic illustration is needed of the difference between arms races and war plans.

  Germany proved no more of an exception to this general rule. Its navy began its life as a Baltic fleet, the Kaiser aspiring in 1892 to being able to defeat Russia and Denmark. The subsequent primacy of the North Sea was in itself a reflection of the Russian Baltic fleet’s obliteration at Tsushima. By the same token, Russia’s recovery as a Baltic power meant that by 1913 the tempo of German battleship building was not set solely by the higher-profile rivalry with the Royal Navy. The original rationale of the latter was, after all, to browbeat Britain into some sort of naval alliance; thus, the corollary of Tirpitz’s ‘risk’ strategy was the likelihood of Russian and French hostility. Every realistic German naval plan before 1914 concentrated on a clash with Russia and France rather than Britain.60

  The logic of Germany’s military planning also suggested that the Baltic, not the North Sea, should have been the main deployment area of Germany’s High Seas Fleet. Free navigation in the Baltic was an important means to trade through the neutral powers of Scandinavia, and in particular gave direct access to Swedish iron ore. The weakness of the German 8th army in East Prussia, plus the recurrent fear (however far-fetched) of Russian landings on Germany’s Baltic coast, meant that for both Schlieffen and Moltke the navy could play an important ancillary role in diverting and pinning Russian troops. Russian naval weakness after Tsushima removed the threat but reinforced the opportunity. In 1911 consideration was given to mounting a feint landing at Riga to tie down a Russian corps.