Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  The Kaiser’s fervor drew others into the sport. As the social significance of Kiel Week grew, the hotel capacity of town and countryside was outstripped, and the Hamburg-America line annually dispatched one of its large transatlantic liners to serve as a floating hotel. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm of the German noblemen and industrialists who turned up on sailboats at Kiel Week was suspect. The Kaiser’s brother, Prince Henry, himself a naval officer and an excellent yachtsman, stated bluntly: “There’s no doubt about it,16 our people buy yachts and race them only to please my brother.... Half of them17 have never seen the sea. But if they go to the seaside and read about the Emperor’s yacht... and if the wealthy merchants who know nothing of the sea become yachtsmen to please the Emperor, then it stirs up interest and we can get money for the Navy.”

  With all his ardor, William never fully achieved his goal. Germans might learn to jibe and come about (or hire English skippers who could do it for them), but Kiel never managed to radiate the social allure of Cowes. The German regatta was too formal, too heavy with court functions. There were too many glittering receptions and ceremonial dinners with heel-clicking generals and admirals, too many trumpets, brass bands, military marches, and goose-stepping soldiers. It was beyond the Kaiser’s power to reproduce the casual garden-party atmosphere of Cowes, where the only music came from a string orchestra playing music-hall tunes and the nearest thing to a uniform were the blue blazers and white flannel trousers of the yachtsmen. Nor could William act the offhand seigneurial role created by his uncle. Gradually, the disappointed Kaiser realized that the beautiful Englishwomen who fluttered like butterflies around the genial figure of the Prince of Wales at Cowes would never travel across the North Sea to add luster to Kiel. He had better luck with rich Americans. William was always fascinated with enormous wealth, especially when it was self-made, and American millionaires such as J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Carnegie, who had become yachtsmen, were flattered to be invited to Kiel Week.

  Even at Kiel, the Kaiser never achieved the absolute ascendancy he desired for his Meteors. His British skippers sought to win races, but on Meteor III at Kiel, William’s captains’ chances for victory declined dramatically when the Imperial owner seized the helm. The Kaiser cajoled and seduced them, slapping them on the shoulders in good fellowship, offering them cigarettes from his jeweled cigarette case. Using these tactics, he often succeeded and they ceded command. Meteor III usually paid the price. “If the Kaiser steered himself,18 we regularly hit the buoy,” Bülow recorded.

  In 1904, the fastest boat at Kiel Week was the new American schooner Ingomar, owned by millionaire Morton F. Plant and skippered by Charlie Barr, the finest American racing captain of the day. At the owner’s request, Charles F. Robinson, Rear Commodore of the New York Yacht Club, took seagoing responsibility for the boat when she raced. In the 1904 regatta, Ingomar competed daily against Meteor III, but no race was more dramatic or significant than the first. Fifteen large yachts left their moorings in the harbor that morning in the fresh Baltic wind. Soon after the race began, Ingomar began to overtake the Imperial yacht with the Kaiser on board. The American boat was on a starboard tack, which gave her an indisputably legal right of way.

  “Nevertheless,” wrote Brooke Heckstall-Smith, a British yachting expert who was on board Ingomar, “as we approached Meteor19... the Imperial yacht showed no signs of giving way! Not a word was spoken on our vessel; the silent crew lay flat on the weather deck. Morton F. Plant stood on the stairway in the companionway, his head just above the sliding hatch, his elbows resting on the coaming, a cigar in his mouth, a panama hat pulled over one eye.... Charlie Robinson, clad in his faultless flannel suit and showing his most elaborate silk socks, was reclining across the counter, chewing gum.... Captain Barr stood at the wheel.... I was crouching to leeward, my eyes riveted on Meteor.... Young Baron von Kotwitz, a German naval lieutenant who had been sent on board by the Kaiser as a pilot, was sitting on the deck with his mouth half open... wondering whether we had all gone stark raving mad... [and] were really going to send his All Highest Emperor to the bottom of the sea.... Closer and closer the yachts came together. Our gigantic Oregon bowsprit was pointing straight at the Meteor’s bow.... We should hit her fair slap amidships.... There was a fine breeze; we had every stitch of canvas on, including the jib topsail.... It was a silent, tense and terrible moment. Then Barr’s voice rang out to me: ‘Mr. Smith, Rule!’ It was my duty to declare the Rule in a tight place; Barr knew it as well as I did, but it was a definite agreement between us that the responsibility was mine. ‘Ingomar, right!’ I replied instantly. ‘Mr. Robinson, what am I to do?’ shouted Barr. ‘Hold on!’ came Charlie’s instant decision.... I was prepared for a deuce of a crash. I heard old Morton F. Plant shout to his friend who was representing him: ‘By God, Charlie, you’re the boy. I’ll give way to no man!’

  “At that moment, the Meteor’s helm was put down. Our bowsprit was within three feet of her rigging. Our helm was jammed down hard also, as quickly as the wheel would turn. Both vessels ranged alongside one another as they shot into the wind....

  “When we got back to Kiel, an admiral came alongside with a message from the Kaiser to say that His Majesty was to blame and regretted the incident.... But... we all felt that if we had allowed the Kaiser to bluff us that first day by giving way to him when we were in the right, he would only have taken advantage of us and bluffed us still more.”

  That summer at Kiel, Ingomar defeated Meteor III every time they raced.

  fn1 The German people never read this Imperial reminiscence. Bülow listened to his master speak and quickly scribbled an alternative text for the press. When the Kaiser saw the new text, he complained to his Chancellor, “You have left out the best bits.” “Believe me, Your Majesty,”7 Bülow explained, “if you describe our fleet, built with such heavy cost, sometimes with danger, so sentimentally, as the outcome of your own personal inclinations and juvenile memories, it will not be easy to obtain further millions for naval construction from the Reichstag.”

  Chapter 9

  Tirpitz and the German Navy Laws

  The German Navy, like the German Empire, appeared late in the history of Europe. Fifteenth-century Germans had gone to sea in fighting ships; the Hanseatic League once sent out against Scandinavia a war fleet of 260 vessels. But the Thirty Years War, which killed half the population of Germany in the seventeenth century, eroded the power of the great Hansa ports, Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, and Rostock, and, for two hundred years, there were no German warships. In 1849, the German Confederation, the loose agglomeration of states formed by the Congress of Vienna, discovered a Leipziger who had learned seamanship in the America merchant marine and gave him command of twelve small fighting ships. Three of these vessels engaged a Danish ship off Heligoland until shots from the British-held island warned that the fracas was in British territorial waters. Great Britain did not recognize the Confederation’s right to have a navy; Lord Palmerston, British Foreign Secretary, decreed that ships flying a German flag be treated as pirate vessels.

  Prussia, strongest of the German kingdoms and principalities, traditionally had little interest in the sea, reserving its enthusiasm for soldiers and artillery. Then, in 1853, King Frederick William IV bowed to the appeals of his cousin, Prince Adalbert, and agreed to the establishment of a Prussian Admiralty. Adalbert, whose zeal stemmed from visits to British warships in England and the Mediterranean, was granted the title Admiral of the Prussian Coasts after the King had refused the rank of Fleet Admiral, “because we do not have a fleet.”1 Adalbert began with no ships, no officers, no seamen, no naval bases, and—on the North Sea—no seacoast. This last deficiency was rectified in 1854, when Prussia persuaded the Grand Duke of Oldenburg to sell a five-square-mile plot on Jade Bay, where, over the next fifteen years, the naval base of Wilhelmshaven was constructed. In 1865, after defeating Denmark, Prussia annexed Kiel Fjord in the Duchy of Schleswig. Prince Adalbert’s navy now possessed two designa
ted “war ports”: Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea and Kiel on the Baltic.

  Adalbert began acquiring ships. He proposed a fleet of twenty armored vessels. A smaller program was authorized; the ships—as Prussia possessed no naval shipyards—would have to be purchased abroad. In 1864, Prussia’s first ironclad, Arminius, was launched in England. Three years later, the ironclad Friedrich Karl was bought from France. In 1869, Prince Adalbert’s navy acquired the 9,700-ton ironclad König Wilhelm, one of the largest warships in the world. This vessel, built on the Thames, remained Germany’s most powerful ship for twenty-five years.

  Adalbert needed officers. He began by using men trained in the navies of England, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and the United States, or lured from the German merchant marine, or transferred, often against their will, from the Prussian Army. For the future, however, Adalbert wanted native Prussian naval officers, trained from boyhood. He established a training school aboard the corvette Amazone, but had difficulty attracting recruits. Most Junker families saw little use for a navy and withheld their sons. Prince Adalbert’s task became more difficult when the Amazone went down in a storm, drowning most of the cadets on board; the year following, only three candidates applied.

  By the summer of 1870, Prince Adalbert had assembled a squadron of four ironclads based at Wilhelmshaven. His troubles had not ended. The Franco-Prussian War, which resulted in overwhelming victory and military glory for the Prussian Army, brought disgrace to the Prussian Navy. When the war began, the Second French Empire was, after Great Britain, the strongest naval power in the world. French squadrons easily blockaded the German Baltic and North Sea coasts and seized forty German merchant ships. The Prussian ironclads remained at anchor, forbidden to fight against this overwhelming strength unless the French tried to force their way up the Elbe or Weser to attack Hamburg or Bremen. (The single naval action of the war took place three thousand miles away when the German gunboat Meteor fought a French dispatch boat off the coast of Cuba.) The greatest wartime danger to the passive squadron at Wilhelmshaven was that German mines, placed across the harbor entrance to protect German ships, would break loose and drift down among the anchored vessels.

  The navy’s behavior earned it contempt from the Prussian Army. German naval personnel were denied permission to count Franco-Prussian War duty as “war service” in their personal records. Admiralty officials found it difficult even to justify a navy. France, reputedly the greatest military and naval power on the Continent, had been swiftly defeated by the Prussian Army with no contribution from the Prussian Navy. If French naval superiority could do nothing to prevent France’s humiliation, what was the point of Germany, now the supreme military power in Europe, having a navy? Bismarck had little interest in fleets; indeed, he once quoted approvingly the decision of the Prussian King Frederick William I, “who sold his last warship2 to create one more battalion.”

  It was a sign of the navy’s low repute that, when Prince Adalbert retired in 1872, German Army generals commanded the German Navy for the next sixteen years. The first, General of Infantry Albrecht von Stosch, with a character “sharp as jagged iron,”3 administered the navy like an army corps, applying the harsh parade-ground zeal of a Potsdam Guards regiment. Completing his inspection of one warship, he announced in a loud voice: “Sheer slop!4 From the commander to the lowest ship’s boy.” He insisted on full uniform at all times until an officer costumed in tunic and sash fainted on the bridge of a German warship in the tropics.

  Stosch settled on coast defense as the navy’s role. As France and Russia were the assumed enemies during his eleven-year term (1872–1883), he drilled his sailors to oppose a French or Russian landing on German beaches. In accord with this strategy, ironclads were distributed along the coast as floating forts. Designed to fight in coastal waters, these vessels were of shallow draft, which made them unsuitable for action in the open sea, where heavy swells would roll them back and forth. Stosch also persuaded Bismarck and the Reichstag to approve a ten-year building program of eight German-built, seagoing ironclads, to be used in sudden sorties against a blockading enemy fleet. (The money was obtained more easily because one quarter of it came from the war indemnity levied against defeated France.)

  Stosch was replaced in 1883 by General Georg Leo von Caprivi, the future Chancellor. Caprivi, obsessed by the possibility of a two-front war with France and Russia, was determined to conserve “every man and every penny”5 for the great land battle. In Caprivi’s mind, the ideal vessels for this purpose were small, inexpensive torpedo boats weighing only eighty or ninety tons, carrying three torpedo tubes; such boats could dash out among approaching enemy warships and troopships and torpedo them. Kaiser William II, assuming the throne in June 1888, was not interested in a navy of torpedo boats. William, indignant that during five years at the Admiralty Caprivi had built no big ships, embarrassed that Germany in 1888 spent less money on its navy than any great European power except Austria, accepted Caprivi’s resignation three weeks after his accession and appointed a naval officer, Admiral Alexander von Monts. Within six months, Monts designed, and eventually the Reichstag approved, four ten-thousand-ton battleships—Brandenburg, Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm, Worth, and Weissenburg, the only modern battleships to enter the German Navy during William’s first ten years as Kaiser.

  William might proclaim—as he did in Stettin in 1891—that “our future is on the water,”6 but few Germans agreed with him. This stemmed, in part, from the traditional Prussian belief that money spent on defense should be spent on the army. It also resulted from the Reichstag’s reluctance to gratify any of the monarch’s grandiose designs, especially those which seemed to enhance his personal rule and encroach on the parliament’s own already limited constitutional privileges. But the primary reason for the inconspicuous success of the German Navy during William’s first decade was the confusion in the Kaiser’s mind and among senior naval officers as to how the navy should be administered and what its strategic purpose should be. In 1888, when William took the throne, the navy was administered by a single office, the Admiralty. In 1889, when Admiral Monts suddenly died, William abolished the Admiralty and split its functions between two offices: the High Command (Oberkommando), responsible for strategy and actual command of the fleet, and the Imperial Naval Office (Reichsmarineamt), charged with designing and building warships and wringing the funds for this purpose from the Reichstag. Admiral Eduard von Knorr, the Chief of the High Command in the 1890s, reported directly to the Kaiser, as Supreme War Lord; Admiral Friedrich von Hollmann, the State Secretary of the Navy Office during these years, was a Minister of the Imperial Government who reported to the Chancellor. The problems and frustrations were inherent: the Navy Secretary decided what ships to build without asking the High Command what ships it needed to implement its strategy. To complicate this administrative impasse, William at the same time created a third senior post: a personal naval aide on his private staff, titled Chief of the Naval Cabinet. This officer, Admiral Gustav von Senden-Bibran, inevitably became a private channel for dissident officers wishing to gain the Kaiser’s ear. The result was constant bureaucratic warfare, which angered the Kaiser and confused the Reichstag.

  The problem was conceptual as well as administrative: the Kaiser and the admirals could not agree on the purpose of a German Navy. William’s ambitions were global. He wanted a fleet to inspire worldwide respect, to defend German colonies, and to protect German merchant ships on the high seas; for this purpose a large fleet of cruisers equipped for foreign service seemed more useful than squadrons of battleships riding at anchor in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. Hollmann’s strategy was based on coastal defense and commerce raiding: he wanted cruisers. Senden believed in battleships. He accepted Mahan’s thesis that without a battle fleet as the hard core of national sea power, even swarms of cruisers would eventually be gobbled up by enemy battleships. Knorr waffled, frustrated that administratively it was Hollmann who decided what ships should be built. In fact, the real opposition to H
ollmann and cruisers, the true intellectual proponent of battleships and a mighty German battle fleet, was a navy captain serving in the High Command. His name was Alfred Tirpitz.

  Later, when the massive figure of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz with his bald, domed head, his famous forked beard, his reputation as the Father of the High Seas Fleet, was instantly recognizable in Germany and the world, no one remembered that during Tirpitz’s first thirty years in the German Navy he had been a maverick. Tirpitz at the height of his power was—after Bismarck—the ablest, most durable, most influential and most effective minister in Imperial Germany. He was described as aggressive, ruthless, domineering, and obsessive. His favorite drink, it was said, was “North Sea foam.” Having worked his way to the top, he had little use for young aristocrats who expected to rise on the strength of their names. Once, when a ballroom mariner asked the Admiral about his chances for promotion, Tirpitz replied, “You have very white hands for a man who hopes to command a cruiser.” There were many complaints about Tirpitz. “You’ll have to get along with him,” the Kaiser always responded. “That’s what I have to do.”

  Tirpitz had climbed the ladder rung by rung. He had served aboard a sailing ship and an armored cruiser during the Franco-Prussian War, had commanded a torpedo-boat flotilla in the Baltic, a cruiser in the Mediterranean, and a cruiser squadron in the Far East. Ironically, never during fifty-one years of naval service did Tirpitz hear a naval gun fired in combat. His life was spent, nevertheless, in constant battle. He fought, not in North Sea gales, but at desks in Kiel and Berlin, in the chamber of the Reichstag, in the Kaiser’s audience room at the Neues Palais or the imperial hunting lodge at Romintern. He was obsessive in his belief in German sea power and in his desire to create a fleet of mighty battleships. He thought only about the navy. He had no political or religious principles; he was willing to accept battleships from conservatives, Catholics, or socialists. In one argument with the Foreign Ministry, he said, “Politics are your affair.7 I build ships.” When the wisdom or the direction of his shipbuilding was challenged by others, even an Imperial Chancellor, Tirpitz demanded and received the Kaiser’s support and overrode the Chancellor.