Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  It became obvious what was going to happen. “We shall be very close32 to that ship, sir,” Bourke forced himself to say. Tyron stood frozen in silence, his eyes on the approaching Camperdown. “May I go astern33 with the port engine?” asked Bourke. Tyron remained silent and turned to look at the ships behind him. “May I go astern full speed with the port screw?” appealed Bourke. Tyron turned to look again at the Camperdown, now only 450 yards away. “Yes,” he finally said. Bourke then cried, “Full astern both engines!” and followed immediately with “Close all water-tight doors!” Both orders had already been given on the Camperdown.

  Tyron was as convinced of his own infallibility as his officers were; perhaps he simply thought that his ships could not collide. As Camperdown’s ram struck Victoria on her starboard bow, the Admiral was heard to murmur, “It’s all my fault.”34 Both ships were still making five or six knots, and the impact of the blow forced Victoria seventy feet sideways in the water. She was mortally wounded: Camperdown’s ram, twelve feet beneath the water, had penetrated nine feet into Victoria’s innards. With both ships still moving, Camperdown’s ram, like a giant can opener, tore a wider gap as it wrenched free. When the ships came apart, the flagship had a hole nearly thirty feet across below the waterline through which water rushed into the ship. Most of the watertight doors were open on that hot Mediterranean afternoon and the command to close them had come too late. Victoria began to sink by the bow and heel over to starboard. Soon, the foredeck was awash and the fore turret rose like a steel island from the sea. Twelve minutes after the collision, the battleship rolled over and went down, bow first. Of a crew of almost seven hundred officers and men, 358 went down with the ship. Tyron went with them. One survivor was the Victoria’s second in command, Commander John Jellicoe, who had spent the day in bed with a fever of 103 degrees. On feeling the impact, Jellicoe had gone to the bridge and from there, down the side into the water.

  Twenty-two of the ship’s fifty-one officers were drowned along with the admiral. The other twenty-nine were court-martialed, along with Rear Admiral Markham. All were acquitted, although Markham’s career ceased to prosper. The grounds of his acquittal were that “it would be fatal35 to the best interests of the service to say that he was to blame for carrying out the orders of the Commander-in-Chief present in person.”

  In the years before the turn of the century, the Mediterranean Fleet, the cream of the navy, reached a peak of Victorian splendor. From its base in the Grand Harbor at Valletta, Malta, the fleet made seasonal cruises to the different shores of the inland sea. On the coast of Spain and the Riveria, in the ports of Italy and Greece and the exotic harbors of the Near East and North Africa, the great ships would silently appear from over the horizon to manifest the majesty and power of England. Anchored in rows, hulls black, superstructures a dazzling white, funnels buff yellow, flags flying stiffly in harbor breezes, boats plying back and forth, they made a colorful sight. Gold-encrusted admirals came ashore to call on local potentates and dignitaries, officers to attend balls, play polo, or hunt snipe and woodcock. Fierce competition in sail drill gave way to equally passionate competition between ships in boat races at fleet regattas or timed coaling contests. In 1880, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sir Frederick Beauchamp Seymour, led his officers through such a hectic round of balls, teas, receptions, polo, and other sports that he was known as “The Swell of the Ocean.”36

  The fiercest competition of all was in polishing the ships. Every metal surface in the Mediterranean Fleet blazed like the sun. Battleship and cruiser crews devoted enormous energy to burnishing the great guns. Massive armored watertight doors were taken off their hinges and filed and rubbed until they gleamed—and, incidentally, were no longer watertight. On some ships, even the little ring bolts on deck were polished and fitted with little flannel nightcaps to protect them from salt air between inspections.

  This cult of brightwork originated in the need to keep the men busy. When sails gave way to steam, the time given to tending the rigging, furling and mending sails, straightening and coiling ropes was given instead to polishing. Like holystoning, which continued on the wooden decks of steel ships, it was absurd; the process made men’s hands and clothes filthy with metal polish and as soon as salt spray hit the gleaming metal, copper turned green again and brass blue. In the early nineties, as the last sailing ironclads were replaced by modern battleships without masts, the paint-and-brightwork cult reached a peak. A sparkling ship reflected well on the captain and his second in command, the commander, and commanders spent large sums out of their private pockets, often far more than they could afford. “It was customary,”37 wrote Sir Percy Scott, “for a Commander to spend half his pay in buying paint to adorn Her Majesty’s ships as it was the only road to promotion.”

  Appearances were often deceiving. “When I went to sea38 in 1895,” wrote Vice Admiral K.G.B. Dewar, “snowy, white decks, enamel paint, shining brasswork, and an air of spic and span smartness became the criteria by which ships were judged. In my first ship [the cruiser] Hawke, scrubbing, painting, and polishing absorbed an enormous amount of time and energy.... The basins on the Gunroom bathroom had to be polished till they shone like mirrors, the doors being locked to prevent them being used.... Thus, on a sunny Mediterranean day, the Hawke glistened and sparkled on the waters of that ancient sea, but she was infested with rats which contaminated the food... ran over the hammocks and swarmed into the Gunroom at night. No attempt was made to get rid of them, beyond the dirks of the midshipmen accurately employed.”

  One aspect of shipboard life which no one worried much about was gunnery; the few officers who did worry were ridiculed as fanatics. As one former officer explained: “Had anyone suggested39 that fighting efficiency lay in knowing how to shoot the guns and not polishing them, he would have been looked at as a lunatic and treated accordingly.” The most persuasive reason was that firing the guns, like using the steam engine on sailing ships, spread dirt and grime. “It was no wonder40 the guns were not fired if it could be avoided,” wrote Sir Percy Scott, acidly, “for the powder then used had a most deleterious effect on the paintwork and one Commander who had his whole ship enameled told me that it cost him £100 to repaint her after target practice.”

  Gunnery could not be wholly avoided as Admiralty orders decreed that target practice be held at least once every three months. “No one except the Gunnery Lieutenant41 took much interest in the results,” recalled Admiral Sir Reginald Tyrwhitt. “Polo and pony racing were much more important than gun drill.” Nevertheless, the ammunition had to be disposed of. On the designated day, the flagship hoisted the signal: “Spread for target practice,42 expend a quarter’s ammunition and rejoin the fleet.” Ships then steamed off in all directions and did what they liked. Many simply loaded the guns and pumped three months’ allowance of ammunition at the horizon. A few ships quietly dumped the shells overboard. There was little risk; admirals understood the nasty way that gun smoke dirtied a ship. Indeed, when flagships engaged in target practice, their admirals often remained ashore to escape the din.

  The fleet’s attitude towards gunnery and the range at which ships fired both were legacies of Nelson’s day. On board H.M.S. Marlborough, the Mediterranean Fleet flagship of the 1860s, “it was considered43 that anyone could fire a gun and that the whole credit of successful gunnery depended upon the seamanship of the sailors who brought the ship into the requisite position,” reported Lord Charles Beresford, who had been a Marlborough midshipman. The optimum position was close range; if possible, alongside. “We used to practice44 firing at a cliff in Malta Harbor at a range of a hundred yards,” Beresford recalled. After practice, he would be sent ashore to collect the used cannonballs and bring them back to the ship.

  A decade later, Midshipman John Jellicoe, on board the frigate Newcastle, found that practice ranges still had not risen to much over a thousand yards. “Gunners looked along the barrels45 of their guns and fired at what they saw in a way which
had not changed since Nelson’s day,” he said. Technically, the gunners did not have a choice, as no system of controlling long-range firing had been developed. In fact, it seemed, no such system was really desired in the British Navy. Ships were expected to fight at close range; close action was more decisive and better suited to British pluck. Once British captains had brought their ships within close range, their gun crews would pour shell into their enemies with such élan that they would either surrender or be destroyed. Long-range firing would ignore these traditional and successful tactics.

  There were, of course, objections to this revered naval dogma, some based on historical fact. In the War of 1812, only eight years after the death of the great Nelson, British pluck had not been enough to win in the face of superior gunnery emanating from a supposedly negligible foe, the Americans. Within a few months of the outbreak of war, three veteran British frigates were humiliatingly defeated by hard-hitting American ships in single-ship actions. The defeats were not hard to explain: the American ships were newer, bigger, and better manned than the weather-beaten, foul-bottomed Royal Navy ships. More important, the American crews served their guns more efficiently. These actions, which in America created a new public interest and pride in the young United States Navy, horrified the British Admiralty and public. Powerful British flotillas sailed across the Atlantic and stifled the upstart Americans by weight of numbers.

  Beyond facts, there was logic: suppose an enemy admiral irritatingly refused to oblige the British naval tradition of close action. Suppose he perversely trained his own gunners to shoot accurately at six thousand or seven thousand yards. Then the British fleet might all be sunk and British sailors could exercise their pluck only by swimming about in the sea. This was the nightmare of one British naval officer who crusaded all of his life for accurate long-range gunnery. Percy Scott was a short, round-faced boy who entered the navy in 1866 and two years later arrived as a midshipman on board the fifty-gun frigate Forte. The Forte’s commander was a jolly soul, kind to his midshipmen and deeply concerned about appearances. “He gave us midshipmen46 plenty of boat sailing, took us on shore to play cricket, and encouraged sport of every kind,” Scott recalled. “He made us dress properly and in appearance set us a fine example. He took a long time over his toilet, but when he did emerge from his cabin it was a beautiful sight, though he might have worn a few less rings on his fingers.” The commander’s ship was to be as beautiful as his person. The Forte was “absolutely transformed.47 All the blacking was scraped off the masts and spars and canary yellow was substituted. The quarter deck was adorned with carving and gilt, the coamings of the hatchways were all faced with satin wood, the gun carriages were French-polished, and the shot were painted blue with a gold band around them and white top. Of course, we could not have got these shot into the guns had we wanted to fight, but that was nothing....”

  In 1881, the British Navy was called upon to fight. Scott was present at the bombardment of Alexandria and he was appalled by what happened: “[The Egyptians] had forty-two modern heavy guns48 varying from 10 inch to 7 inch.” They were bombarded by “eight battleships carrying eighty guns from 16 inch to 7 inch,” not counting lighter calibers. “The fleet fired in all 3,000 rounds at the forts and... made ten hits. One would have thought that this deplorable shooting would have brought home to the Admiralty the necessity of some alteration in our training for shooting, but it did not. They were quite satisfied in that it was better than the Egyptian gunners’ shooting.”

  In 1886, Scott was promoted to commander and sent as second in command to Edinburgh, the most modern turret ship of the day. He seized the opportunity to institute regular gunnery practice. “But the innovation was not liked,”49 he said; “we were twenty years ahead of the times, and in the end we had to do as others were doing. So we gave up instruction in gunnery, spent money on enamel paint, burnished up every bit of steel on board and soon got the reputation of being a very smart ship. She was certainly very nice in appearance. The nuts of all the aft bolts on the aft deck were gilded, the magazine keys were electroplated and statues of Mercury surmounted the revolver racks.”

  Ten years later Scott was given command of his own ship, the 3,400-ton cruiser Scylla of the Mediterranean Fleet. He came on board, hoping that fleet gunnery had progressed during the time he had been away. Instead, he found that nothing had changed; paintwork was still what counted. And with paintwork, cleanliness. Admirals, writing reports after the all-important annual inspections which could promote—or fail to promote—ships’ captains and commanders, stressed cleanliness: “Ship’s company of good physique,50 remarkably clean and well-dressed; state of bedding exceptionally satisfactory. The stoker division formed a fine body of clean and well-dressed men.... The ship looks well inside and out and is very clean throughout....” This report on H.M.S. Astraea, Scott noted bitterly, “contained no reference51 to the fact that Astraea was one of the best shooting ships in the Navy, nor did her captain and gunnery lieutenant get one word of praise for all the trouble they had taken to make the ship efficient as a fighting unit of the fleet.”

  Percy Scott was a practical sailor, not a visionary. What he wanted was a navy trained to use the more powerful guns with which technology was providing it. He wanted British gunners trained to hit the target, and to hit it often, at ever greater ranges, in all kinds of weather and sea conditions. To him, it was ludicrous and dangerous that in 1896 the crew of the modern steel battleship Resolution was still being mustered on deck for cutlass drill, training to parry and thrust, for the moment their ship would grind alongside an enemy and they would swarm over the side in boarding parties.

  Alone, Percy Scott would have made no difference. He would have been shunted aside as a fanatic who disturbed the tranquillity of the peacetime navy. But Scott was not alone, and he was promoted to stations where his obsession could benefit the Fleet. He became commanding officer of H.M.S. Excellent, the navy gunnery school at Portsmouth; later he was assigned to a role in which he could exercise his talents: Inspector of Target Practice for the Fleet. The man who promoted Scott was a naval visionary, a man obsessed not just with gunnery, but also with naval strategy, tactics, ship design, and organization of personnel. Throughout his fifty years of service, from cadet to Admiral of the Fleet, he pressed for change. As First Sea Lord before the First World War, he revolutionized the British Navy.

  Chapter 23

  Jacky Fisher

  John Arbuthnot Fisher, England’s greatest admiral since Nelson, was not cast from the Nelsonian mold. Whereas the hero of Trafalgar was a calm, quiet man whose private arrangements were a national scandal, Fisher, the tempestuous builder of the modern Royal Navy, rushed through life from one seething, volcanic controversy to the next, all the while serving at home as the exemplary head of a model family. A more important distinction, of course, is that Nelson was a fighting admiral, while Fisher, although he commanded fleets at sea (most notably the Mediterranean Fleet, from 1899 to 1902), never did so during wartime. His role and his great service to the navy and his country were as an administrator and reformer. In this sense, Fisher can better be compared to St. Vincent than to Nelson, for it was the magisterial and autocratic John Jervis, Earl St. Vincent, England’s First Sea Lord during the Napoleonic Wars, who appointed Nelson to command and provided him with the ships and men to vanquish the French. Similarly, Fisher appointed Admiral Sir John Jellicoe to command the Grand Fleet during the Great War and provided Jellicoe with the vast agglomeration of ships—battleships, battle cruisers, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines—with which Great Britain guarded the exits from the North Sea, shielded her coasts, and foiled the purposes of the German High Seas Fleet.

  Fisher (who behind his back was known universally as Jacky) was First Sea Lord from 1904 to 1910 and again from 1914 to 1915. During these years, he dominated the Admiralty, ruled the Royal Navy, and dictated British naval policy. It was a time of tension and growing danger. As the German navy laws ground inexorably forward a
nd new German battleships slid one after the other into the water, Fisher was convinced that only he could prevent a naval defeat of England with consequent starvation or invasion of the homeland and ruination of the Empire. His priorities were clear: he did not want war, but if—through international misbehavior or political blundering—war was to come, Fisher wanted the British Fleet poised to “hit first, hit hard, and keep on hitting.”

  It was, in almost every sense, his fleet. For fifty years, from naval cadet to Admiral of the Fleet, Jacky Fisher had stood for change, reform, efficiency, readiness. Over the years, as the navy converted from sail to steam, from wooden hulls to iron and steel, Fisher was first to demand reforms in technology, in personnel handling, in tactics and strategy at sea. He was a leading proponent of improved naval gunnery: firing at longer ranges, with greater accuracy and faster rates of fire. Yet he believed that the torpedo would eventually supersede the great gun as the primary naval weapon. He believed in large, fast surface ships with heavy guns, and he supervised the design and construction of the Dreadnought, the first all-big-gun battleship. Yet he was convinced that the submarine was the warship of the future and he urged the Royal Navy to invest in these sneaky undersea craft and develop tactics for them to sink battleships. He introduced destroyers and gave them their name. He began substitution of turbines for reciprocating engines and he urged the use of oil fuel rather than coal. Even on what seemed the smallest matters, Fisher demanded change. Remembering the hard, weevily biscuits which he had eaten as a cadet and midshipman aboard sailing ships, he converted the fleet to fresh bread baked daily in ovens aboard the ships.