by Hew Strachan
Operations against Russia remained a feature of German naval war planning in 1912–13 and 1913–14. But the mounting pace of Russian rearmament made the German approach increasingly defensive, an orientation confirmed in 1913 by Moltke’s decision not to continue planning for war against Russia alone.61 In August 1914 Germany enjoyed a naval superiority in the Baltic which it elected not to use. Its commander, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the Kaiser’s brother, was happy to subordinate his role to that of the High Seas Fleet in the North Sea, an arrangement which was formalized at his own request on 9 October. The Germans, like the Russians, emphasized coastal defence. The suitability of the Baltic for extensive minelaying made a mutual stand-off technically realistic, if militarily disappointing. In mid-August the German army felt that the fleet should be bombarding St Petersburg; in September Falkenhayn requested a naval demonstration off Courland.62
The case for the German navy’s concentration in the Baltic, even if not supported by either the Kaiser or Tirpitz, was reinforced by the defensive strength of Germany’s North Sea bases. In 1889 the opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm canal linked Kiel, Germany’s main Baltic base, to the North Sea, and by 1914 the canal had been widened to accommodate the passage of Dreadnoughts. (This had been Tirpitz’s precondition for naval readiness at the so-called war council of 8 December 1912.) Thus, concentration in one sea did not prevent a rapid redeployment in the other; thus too, Denmark’s position, dividing Germany’s fleet and Germany’s maritime interests in two, became proportionately less threatening and less significant. Germany’s North Sea naval bases, Wilhelmshaven and Cuxhaven, on the Jade and Elbe estuaries respectively, and also its principal commercial ports, Bremen and Hamburg, were naturally well protected. Shallow water made a submarine approach difficult. In 1890 Germany acquired from Britain (in exchange for Zanzibar) the island of Heligoland, guarding the Jade and the Elbe approaches; to the south-west the Borkum islands screened the mouth of the Ems. Even if the High Seas Fleet had been drawn east to the gulfs of Riga or of Finland, it is hard to see how Britain could have established a local naval supremacy for a period sufficiently long to exploit the opportunity in the west.
But the defensive strength of Germany’s North Sea bases also implied offensive weakness. The High Seas Fleet could not pass the shoals and sandbanks on the Jade or the Elbe at low water, and two high waters were required for the entire fleet to put to sea. Therefore, if the normal state of the fleet were to be in harbour, it automatically sacrificed operational flexibility. Secondly, when it entered the North Sea, it did so from its south-eastern corner only—what one German commentator was later to describe as ‘a dead angle in a dead sea’.63 Its other route, through the Belts, past Denmark, and out to Skaggerak, would have increased Germany’s offensive possibilities and brought it closer to the northern exits to the Atlantic; but Denmark, in the interests of its own neutrality and with German support, mined this waterway at the war’s outset. Therefore, if the Germans were drawn too far to the north of the North Sea or too far to the west they laid themselves open to being outflanked or to being cut off from their line of retreat.
Tirpitz’s acceptance of the Dreadnought challenge, coinciding with the first Moroccan crisis and Russian naval weakness after Tsushima, put the focus of Germany’s navy firmly in the North Sea. German naval building was centred on battleships designed to fight the Royal Navy in a fleet action. But in terms of grand strategy such a thrust was contradictory. Tirpitz’s navy was not the arm of a policy concerned with regional authority, with the European balance of power; that was the army’s task. The navy was intended to further Weltpolitik. In the pursuit of colonies it was not exclusively or even necessarily Britain’s opposition with which Germany had to contend; its potential challengers were as often other powers with commercial or imperial interests. German-American naval rivalry was fanned in the Pacific over competition for Samoa in 1889 and over the Philippines in 1898; German naval planning thereafter embraced first an invasion of the United States and then, with marginally greater realism, looked to the establishment of bases in the West Indies.64 The arms race with Britain, therefore, produced a fleet that was not constructed to fulfil the ultimate purposes and more distant objectives of German navalism.
But nor did it create a fleet that was capable of accomplishing its more immediate operational purposes. Tirpitz’s fleet was ‘not large enough to seek a decision, but too large to be squandered in offensive operations’.65 In 1894 he had reckoned a 30 per-cent superiority was required before Germany could take the strategic offensive against France and Russia.66 Against Britain his building programme did not even aim for parity, let alone superiority. And yet, paradoxically, the number of hulls was its determining factor. Tirpitz’s tight management of the naval budget was designed to prevent the cost per unit jeopardizing the overall number of units under construction. Quality could suffer as a consequence. Tirpitz was prepared for Germany to flag behind Britain in turbine development rather than risk the Imperial Naval Office taking an undue share of its research costs. Partly as a result of turbine problems, private German yards were lucky if the navy’s contracts covered their outgoings after 1908, and in the six years before the war Germaniawerft, Blohm and Voss, and Stettiner Vulcan were all building major ships at a loss. Similarly, Tirpitz screwed down the prices of armour plate and ordnance, endeavouring to break Krupp’s hold on the market to do so. In 1913 he was prepared to set the calibre of his new battle cruisers’ guns at 35 cm (i.e. 13.5–inch), not 38 cm (or 15-inch), rather than jeopardize the overall building tempo of the naval laws.67 Deficiencies relative to the Royal Navy were more important as domestic pressure for continued building than in terms of their implications for battle.
The justification for such apparent perversity was deterrence. As a result, Tirpitz’s strategic thought, when assessed in war-fighting terms, seemed unresolved and contradictory. This was particularly the case after 1911, when gunboat diplomacy failed at Agadir. The German navy now found itself forced to assess its capabilities in relation to Britain in terms of defence rather than of negotiation. Tirpitz had to argue that a 2 : 3 ratio in capital ships had military utility.68 He suggested that, as the Royal Navy was already large, more of its new building represented replacement rather than incremental growth than was the case for Germany. Somewhat less speciously, he also pointed to the problems which Britain would have in manning a larger fleet, when—unlike Germany—it did not have conscription.69 But these were still answers that pivoted on building rates rather than on operational solutions. Despite the setback of 1911, Tirpitz did not recast his thinking. In May 1914 he reckoned that the German navy would still need another six to eight years before it was ready;70 in reality—by Tirpitz’s standards—it would never be complete.
The confusion thus generated in the objectives of German naval policy was compounded by the divisions within German naval administration. Tirpitz was head of only one part of the navy, of the Imperial Naval Office, the Reichsmarineamt; his responsibilities were political and financial, to oversee the construction of ships and to lobby both in the Reichstag and in the press. Tirpitz enjoyed pre-eminence in German naval matters up until 1914, not least because these were the major policy objectives of the peacetime navy, as well as being those with the highest profile. However, in reality Tirpitz’s office was that of a primus inter pares.
The second arm of the navy’s administration, the Admiralty Staff, was established as a subordinate department in 1889, and gained independent status a decade later. Theoretically its functions, planning in peace and directing operations in war, were the same as those of the army’s general staff. But the chief of the Admiralty Staff did not command the High Seas Fleet: this was a separate appointment, with its own staff and consequently its own plans. With only brief exceptions, relations between the two departments, in peace and war, verged on the fratricidal. Between 1899 and 1914 the Admiralty Staff had seven chiefs and did not, therefore, enjoy the continuity of direction vouchsafed the Im
perial Naval Office or the naval cabinet. Tirpitz worked hard to neutralize yet further the staff’s potential importance. Many of those who served on it were his protégés, men who had first established their careers in the Imperial Naval Office and whose skills were honed as intriguers and dealers rather than as naval planners. In 1907–8 Tirpitz scored a succession of major triumphs over the Admiralty Staff. He wrested from it responsibility for naval education; he blocked a proposal that half the naval academy’s graduates should serve on the staff for three years; and he ensured that the special status of staff officers, with dual allegiance to their immediate appointment and to their staff background, was terminated. Thus, it was possible for Franz von Hipper, who had neither been to the naval academy nor served on the staff, and whose professional education was almost entirely technical, to end the war as commander of the High Seas Fleet. Tirpitz therefore blocked the Admiralty Staff’s development as the intellectual core of the service.
The third major department was the Kaiser’s naval cabinet, responsible for promotions and appointments, and headed from 1906 until 1918 by Georg von Müller. The Kaiser continued to exercise supreme command in naval matters when he had increasingly relinquished it in military affairs; Möller’s position therefore grew in significance as his own seagoing experience receded. But this did not make the naval cabinet the decisive body in naval affairs. The heads of each of the three major departments, in addition to five others, including each of the operational commands, had the right of direct access to the Kaiser. Tirpitz exploited the Kaiser’s weakness, encouraging infighting and fragmentation so as to establish his own indirect supremacy. In particular, by establishing close links between the Imperial Naval Office and the fleet commands, the ‘front’, he aimed to isolate the Admiralty Staff.
Tirpitz’s blocks to the development of the German naval staff impeded the possible reconciliation of the navy’s divergent objectives. Tirpitz set an overall policy of deterrence and of operational caution in order to preserve the fleet; thus strategy, for want of a better word, emanated from the Imperial Naval Office. Tactics, the task of thinking how actually to fight the Royal Navy, was the domain of the Admiralty Staff. Preoccupied in part with its own survival, it used a less conservative approach to the employment of the fleet as a means to counter Tirpitz’s attacks on it as an institution. Its tactical instructions, which were less dependent than those of the British on flag signals, emphasized the exercise of initiative at lower levels of command; they spoke of the need to annihilate enemy forces regardless of cost in terms more familiar in the manuals of land forces. Doctrinally, tactics and strategy were being prised apart: the former sought battle without using the latter to say what the purpose of the battle might be. Institutionally, the Admiralty Staff was sufficiently successful to ensure that the foundations of Tirpitz’s authority, although outwardly intact, in reality were progressively eroded, even before August 1914.71
The preliminaries of the second Hague Conference forced on Tirpitz a recognition of Germany’s vulnerability to British blockade, the attendant dangers of a protracted war, and the internal economic strains which would thereby be generated for Germany.72 Furthermore, between 1906 and 1908, with German naval construction in relative confusion and the fleet in absolute inferiority after the launching of the Dreadnought, naval war plans were cautious and defensive. But such thought, while likely to keep the German fleet intact, was totally inappropriate as a challenge to the power that enjoyed maritime supremacy: it would allow Britain to hold what it had, to tighten the blockade, and to win the long war that would result. In 1908 Friedrich von Baudissin, the chief of the Admiralty Staff, argued that time would work against Germany and that it must therefore adopt the offensive to force the British to fight. He canvassed the possibility of action between the German light forces and the British blockading line, which could lead to a major battle; he appreciated the possibility that the British blockade might be distant, but concluded that this would expose Britain’s eastern coastline, and open attacking possibilities, including a battle in the northern half of the North Sea for access to the Atlantic. Baudissin and his successor, Max Fischel, therefore challenged the caution of Tirpitz and his acolytes.
In 1909 a change in command enabled Tirpitz to counter Baudissin with the support of the High Seas Fleet. But in 1911–12 Tirpitz’s new building programme alienated the fleet: the ‘front’ now wanted a pause to assimilate the vessels it had already received, to bring the quality of training into line with the quality of technology. Tirpitz was correct in assuming that conscription conferred on the German navy at least one clear advantage over the British. By 1912 the Royal Navy feared that it would lack the crews to keep sufficient ships in commission, but significantly the shortage it anticipated was less in the overall manpower base and more in the technical skills acquired by long service.73 Tirpitz’s equation of quantity with quality was revealing. Nor was it just a question of manpower; shore establishments had been neglected in favour of ships, and new vessels preferred to repair facilities for those already in commission.74 The question of battle-fitness which preoccupied the High Seas Fleet accorded with the diplomatic objectives of Bethmann Hollweg, anxious to use naval arms limitation to neutralize Britain; the Kaiser and the naval cabinet also turned against Tirpitz.
But the alliance emerging within the navy, although it weakened Tirpitz, did not resolve the conundrums of German naval operations. In 1911 Fischel was succeeded as chief of the Admiralty Staff by August von Heeringen, who took Tirpitz’s side against the High Seas Fleet. A war game in that year showed that thrusts across the North Sea would not allow the Germans to engage and defeat fractions of the Royal Navy; the latter would be able to concentrate to meet the High Seas Fleet. Therefore any action against the British would have to be confined to German waters, and to ensure sufficient strength would have to rely on the light forces and the High Seas Fleet operating in conjunction with each other. However, such a strategy would only reap rewards if the Royal Navy posted itself in German waters. Both Tirpitz in 1906–7 and Baudissin in 1908 had appreciated that this might not be the case. Thereafter, the mixed messages from Britain resulted in confused responses—and ultimately wishful thinking—in Germany.
The Declaration of London, the result of the London Conference in 1908–9, suggested a triumph for German naval strategy. By adopting a tight definition of contraband, by prohibiting the blockade of neutral harbours, and by removing the belligerent right to seize conditional contraband under the doctrine of continuous voyage, the declaration eased the threat of the British blockade for Germany. More immediately, it required a blockade to be effective to be legal; in other words, it demanded a close blockade, not a distant one. The Admiralty Staff was now torn between planning on the basis of international law, which would require the British to approach the German coast, or of strategic sense, which suggested that they would not. Heeringen appreciated the difficulties which Britain would create for Germany if it adopted a distant blockade. Nonetheless, the operational orders to the fleet of November 1912 assumed a close blockade and a battle in the Heligoland Bight. In 1913 British naval manoeuvres persuaded the Admiralty Staff to veer towards the likelihood of a distant blockade. But it still reckoned on a residual British presence in German waters. A war game of its own suggested that even in the case of a distant blockade the British would post sufficient ships in the Bight to ward off a German strike against the British coast or against the BEF’s troop transports in the Channel. By 1914 German naval planning was not only defensive, but was even more so than it had been in 1908–9. There were no plans for sweeping aside the anticipated British blockade, whether close or distant. Its destroyers lacked the range to accompany the High Seas Fleet or sustain operations on the British east coast. Its hope that a skirmish in German waters would draw in more British vessels, and that their numbers would then be steadily reduced by submarines and mines failed to reflect the material constraints: Germany had only two minelayers fit for warlike operat
ions, and only eighteen submarines adapted for coastal defence.75
When war broke out Tirpitz’s hold on the navy seemed outwardly strong. Two of his protégés occupied key posts, Hugo von Pohl as chief of the Admiralty Staff, and Friedrich von Ingenohl as commander-in-chief of the High Seas Fleet. In reality both his personal position and his policies were bankrupt. On 29 July he tried to complete the pattern of his pre-war intrigues by proposing the formation of a naval high command with himself at its head. But he had already forfeited Wilhelm’s confidence. The Kaiser’s compromise, to instruct the chief of the Admiralty Staff to consult Tirpitz and the Imperial Naval Office when appropriate, seemed to boost Tirpitz’s position. In reality it weakened the authority of the Admiralty Staff without giving Tirpitz the supreme authority which he craved. Furthermore, the actual conduct of war meant that his power base, the Imperial Naval Office, lost primacy to the Admiralty Staff. The policy established for the High Seas Fleet, and endorsed on 6 August by the Kaiser, Bethmann Hollweg, Pohl, and Möller, was Tirpitzian in its ultimate objectives, to maintain the fleet intact as a bargaining counter in the peace negotiations. However, its means contradicted the rhetoric of fleet action with which Tirpitz had justified his pre-war building. The Admiralty Staff’s thinking had suggested that U-boats would steadily erode British strength, but at least until 1910 Tirpitz had taken a strong line against U-boat construction, and in 1914, like other naval leaders, he saw the submarine as an adjunct to the operations of surface warships, not as an arm in its own right.76 The orders to the fleet on 30 July, although allowing it to take on the enemy’s full fleet, preferred it to engage only portions. Tirpitz came to embrace this limited strategy, hoping thereby for at least some naval action which would ensure his own credibility and establish the navy’s continued claims in post-war budgets. But his advocacy lacked consistency or conviction. Pohl and Möller disagreed with him, and as these three made up the naval representation at general headquarters the navy’s voice was discordant as well as muffled. Both the Kaiser and Bethmann Hollweg (the latter, in the view of some historians, still hoping to minimize British involvement in the war and therefore reluctant to encourage action at sea) avoided Tirpitz. The grand admiral became isolated and marginal. As August turned to September, the army’s triumphs were accompanied by naval quiescence.77
