Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  I. England holds...145 the fixed conviction that her position in the world, her power and her prosperity, depend on the fleet....

  II. Currently, the fleet has attained a strength that is equal to all demands. It suffices on its own to crush a combination of all states....

  III. England is firmly resolved to employ with all cunning and ruthlessness, the instrument of war which she possesses in her Fleet, according to the principle ‘Might is Right.’

  When the debate on extending the rules of the Geneva Convention to naval warfare was over, Sir Julian Pauncefote was able to report to London, “Thanks to the energetic attitude146 and persistent efforts of Sir John Fisher, all provisions... which were likely in any way to fetter or embarrass the free action of the Belligerents have been carefully eliminated.”

  In the end, the conference rejected the Tsar’s appeal and refused any general limitation of armaments, although it did ban three methods of warfare which it considered especially pernicious: the use of expanding “dumdum” bullets, the use of poison gas, and the dropping of explosives from balloons. Despite furious opposition from the Kaiser, the conference agreed to a permanent panel of arbitration; this became the International Court of Justice, sited, appropriately, at The Hague. Fisher left to take command of the Mediterranean Fleet, and three months after the peace conference ended, Great Britain went to war with the Boers in South Africa.

  fn1 Four of Fisher’s siblings died in infancy. Two of his younger brothers followed him to England and entered the navy. One, Philip, became a lieutenant and drowned at twenty-seven when his ship foundered and went down in a storm at sea. A second brother, Frederick William, became a full admiral and was knighted. But he was nine years younger than Jack, who left home before he was born. They scarcely knew each other, and William appears in Fisher’s correspondence even more rarely than his mother.

  fn2 During this winter, while Fisher was recovering, Lord Northbrook gave a party to which he was invited. Mr. Gladstone was present. The First Lord took Fisher up to the Prime Minister and said, “I want to introduce Captain Fisher112 who commanded the Inflexible, our biggest battleship with 24 inches of armor and four 80-ton guns.” Gladstone looked at Fisher for a moment and then said slowly, “Portentous weapons! I really wonder the human mind can bear such a responsibility.” “Oh, sir,” Fisher quickly replied, “the common vulgar mind doesn’t feel that sort of thing.” A witness observed the old statesman take another look at Captain Fisher and then permit himself a slight smile.

  fn3 Fisher’s antagonism towards Americans continued for another decade. In 1901, as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, he approvingly quoted the Kaiser’s pronouncement that “what the world had to fear123 were the Slavs and the Yankees.” “The Yankees are dead set against us,”124 Fisher quoted another source. “Only ¼ of the population of the United States are what you may call natives; the rest are Germans, Irish, Italians and the scum of the earth! all of them hating the English like poison.”

  Like many of Fisher’s opinions, especially outside the naval field, these views were subject to sudden, violent change. In 1906, Fisher’s only son married a Philadelphia heiress. Fisher went to America for the wedding and fell in love with everything he saw. His son’s father-in-law, he wrote to a friend in England, worked in a forty-story building filled only with clerks employed by his business. He went to a luncheon with “about 70 multimillionaires125 and... told them it was a damned fine old hen that hatched the American Eagle! They all stood up and cheered like mad!” His conclusions were not that different from Joseph Chamberlain’s: “Their language [is] English,126 their literature English, their traditions English, and, quite unconsciously to themselves, their aspirations are English. What damned fools we shall be if we don’t exploit this into a huge Federation of English-speaking peoples!”

  Chapter 24

  Ut Veniant Omnes

  H.M.S. Renown was not and never had been a first-line battleship of the Royal Navy. Laid down in 1893 and commissioned in 1897, she was one of three “light battleships” specifically built for colonial wars and foreign stations. Her ten-inch guns were insufficient to match European battleships, but would presumably suffice to sink European cruisers or heathen ships in distant waters. It was on such a remote station, North America, that Fisher had found Renown and fallen in love with her. She was his flagship there and he liked her silhouette, her broad teak decks, her high speed (eighteen knots) and sea-keeping characteristics, her captain, her officers, and her crew. And so, when Vice Admiral Sir John Fisher was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Britain’s principal battle fleet, he took with him to the Mediterranean as his flagship not one of Britain’s principal battleships, but H.M.S. Renown.

  It was highly irregular and tongues wagged. Captain Prince Louis of Battenberg, Assistant Director of Naval Intelligence, observed to a friend, “Renown... should not be1 the flagship; in fact, she ought to be in China. We want the biggest and best in the Mediterranean; J.F. of course, won’t part with his ‘yacht’ but it is quite wrong.” George, Prince of Wales, an old navy man, shared Fisher’s sense of the personality of vessels and supported the Admiral: “I must say your old ship2 is one of the most beautiful ships I have ever been on board,” he wrote. “She is absolutely steady and no vibration whatever at 13 knots.”

  Steady underfoot and handsome to the eye, Renown steamed through the Strait of Gibraltar and, on a westerly course, began to plow the blue waters of the Mediterranean. It was early September 1899. For the next three years, the ship would be the post from which a great fleet, the primary instrument of British influence in that ancient sea, would be commanded. Influence in the Mediterranean had been important to Britain since the early eighteenth century; Fisher himself subscribed to Mahan’s theory that command of the sea in any European war meant safety of the Home Islands and control of the Mediterranean. Since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, over a quarter of Britain’s imports and 30 percent of her exports had come from or gone to the Mediterranean Basin or passed through the canal. The highway to India and China, the lifeline of the Empire, passed through the Mediterranean. Two great naval bases, at Gibraltar and Malta, sustained the fleet which guarded the lifeline.

  The view from Paris was different. The axis of British interests in the Mediterranean was west-east: Gibraltar-Malta-Suez. France’s concerns lay on a north-south axis: between Marseilles and Toulon, in France, and Algiers and Tunis, the gateway ports to her vast North African empire. Beginning in 1888, the French Admiralty had moved its most powerful battleships from Brest and Cherbourg to Toulon. The British Admiralty, taking note, began to follow suit. British admirals in the Mediterranean had also to worry about the Russians. British policy for most of the century had been to support the Ottoman Empire against Russian pressure on the Straits. The instrument of this support was the British Mediterranean Fleet. Since 1894 and the signing of the Franco-Russian Alliance, there was always a chance that the French and Russian fleets would somehow merge to sweep the British Navy out of the inland sea.

  During the years of Fisher’s command, 1899–1902, the danger to Britain became immediate. The difficult and humiliating war against the small Boer republics had taken most of the British Army out of England and stretched the navy thin escorting troops and supplies and maintaining sea communications over seven thousand miles. Britain, militarily extended, was also diplomatically isolated. In some circles in Europe, there was talk that the time had come to settle accounts with the proud, insufferable British. Given these factors, during Fisher’s tour the safety of the Empire depended heavily on the readiness for war of the Mediterranean Fleet. Fisher’s purpose was to make war with England and confrontation with the British Mediterranean Fleet an uninviting prospect. He was aware of the great difference in the importance of sea power to Great Britain and to its principal potential adversary, France. “If... the whole of the French Fleet3 were sent to the bottom,” he said, “France would still remain a first class power. Her position.
.. depends on her Army and... France is independent of the sea for her supplies.... On the other hand, any disaster to the English Fleet would be fatal to the power of England.” “Preliminary failure in Naval War4 means the ruin of the British Empire,” he put it another time. “You can replace cavalrymen and artillerymen within a few months, but you can’t simply go around to the green grocers, and buy new battleships, cruisers and destroyers.”

  With so much dependent on the force he commanded, Fisher was determined not to be taken by surprise. His tactics emphasized getting in the first blow. “Success in war5 depends upon the concentration of an overpowering force upon a given spot in the shortest possible time,” he told his officers. “Our frontiers6 are the coasts of the enemy and we ought to be there five minutes7 after war is declared.” (Subsequently, he amended this to “five minutes before war is declared.”)

  Unfortunately, the stately British Mediterranean Fleet which Fisher inherited was anything but prepared for the role of naval lightning bolt. Fisher arrived determined to jolt the fleet out of its sleepy routine. He began with an inspection of every ship in his command. Within minutes of the Admiral’s barge coming alongside and the Admiral’s feet touching the deck, the ship involved would be a maelstrom of shouted orders, running men, and clanking machinery. “General Quarters”8 would sound, then “Out torpedo nets,” then “In nets,” “Lower all boats,” and “Abandon ship.” Sometimes these exercises lapped on top of one another so that wild-eyed officers had to decide which to begin with and which to let go. “When Fisher left the ship,”9 wrote Sir Reginald Bacon, commander of the battleship Empress of India, “she would resemble a wreck, with her upper deck a mass of ropes and debris.” The Admiral’s eyes, however, had followed everything and everyone. Aboard one destroyer, he saw the sign “UT VENIANT OMNES”10 in gold letters mounted on the bridge. “What does that mean?” he asked. “Let ’em all come,” replied the youthful lieutenant in command. Fisher beamed with pleasure and the story found its way into his talks and letters for months. But the blow could come as quickly as the smile: “As the Commander of one ship11 did not show the ability to cope with this volcanic inspection, he was discharged from his ship and sent home the same evening, most of his belongings having to follow in a subsequent steamer,” Bacon recalled. “At another inspection, a lieutenant in command of a destroyer exhibited gross ignorance of the details of his ship; he left the next day for China.” When Fisher discovered incompetence or inefficiency, he was merciless; it did not matter to him that he was ruining a man’s career “I am sorry12 for your wife and children,” he said to one departing officer. “But in war I should have had you shot.”

  Fisher began a series of lectures at Malta’s Admiralty House on naval strategy, fleet tactics, individual ship handling in preparation for battle, gunnery, and the use of torpedoes; all fleet officers, not merely ship captains, were invited. His listeners never forgot these hours, sitting in chairs before him, their bodies bathed in the dampness of ninety-degree heat. He was an electrifying speaker whose fiery language, sparkling wit, and sly digs at naval bureaucracy and tradition kept his audience laughing and applauding even as their starched white uniforms wilted into sogginess. “I went to a lecture13 by Jacky Fisher on Naval Gunnery and Strategy,” said one of his lieutenants. “He used hardly a single note and talked for two hours. Simply magnificent... His smile is irresistible.”

  In his lectures, Fisher did not assume superior knowledge and expound from a lofty pulpit of rank. He admitted that he needed information on many points and welcomed ideas and suggestions, however unconventional, from any officer. He was particularly anxious, he said, for any ideas regarding defense of the fleet against attack by torpedo boats. At The Hague, he explained, the German naval delegates had told him that Britain’s battleship squadrons were useless as, in war, they would inevitably be sunk by German torpedo boats. More immediately, he reminded his officers, they all had to be concerned with the twenty-two French torpedo boats based at Bizerte, only nine hours away.

  Fisher’s energy seemed limitless. He kept paper and pencil by his bed at night and rose every morning at four or five to put into effect the notes he had scribbled to himself during the night. Fisher never played any sort of game, but when the fleet was in port he exercised daily, pacing the ramparts fronting Admiralty House and overlooking his ships moored below in the Grand Harbor. (He preferred to pace back and forth rather than take walks, he once explained, and chose the flattest place he could find so that he would not always have to be thinking about where to put his next footstep; thus he could concentrate his mind on whatever he was wrestling with.) All had free access to him while he was taking his daily exercise and it was not uncommon to see the Commander-in-Chief walking the ramparts, deep in debate on some point of tactics or technology with a junior commander or lieutenant.

  Besides making himself available, Fisher encouraged original thought by offering cups for prize essays on cruising and battle formations. A special table was placed in a large room on the ground floor of Admiralty House and on it were different-sized blocks of wood, representing all the ships of the fleet. Officers were invited to come at any hour to work out tactics and play war games. When one young lieutenant brought him a carefully worked-out plan for defending the fleet against torpedo attack, Fisher immediately ordered his captains to practice these tactics at sea the following week.

  Flinging open the door to new ideas and hobnobbing with lieutenants instead of senior captains sent startling messages through the fleet. Fisher’s behavior was unprecedented; some found it disgraceful. Heretofore, admirals had consulted no one—or at the very most had looked to a flag captain for a confirming nod of the head. Fisher’s behavior, ignoring seniority and showing little interest in the views—or feelings—of senior officers who preferred traditional ways, was alarming to these older men. “It was brought home to them,”14 said Bacon, “that the brains which were to be useful to the Commander-in-Chief were not of necessity to be found in the heads of the most senior of officers.” When the older officers began to complain, the seeds were sown for a violent antagonism which would divide the Royal Navy. It was not just what Fisher did; it was how he did it. Looking back, Lord Chatfield, who was in the Mediterranean Fleet in Fisher’s era and later became an Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord, tried to see both sides: “Fisher had a practice15 of consulting young officers which was proper enough in itself,” he wrote. “But, regrettably, he spoke to them in a derogatory way about their superiors. It was his ruthless character and his scorn of tact that led to violent criticism and enmities that shook the Service.... Fisher’s greatness was not then realized. There were many who hated him and he hated them. His was not the method of leading smoothly, but of driving relentlessly and remorselessly. He prided himself on this policy, and boasted of it and of his scorn of opposition.”

  It was exactly this driving, ruthless search for efficiency, this remorseless hounding of the inefficient, which inspired and awed Fisher’s young admirers and acolytes. As Bacon remembered: “It is impossible16 to exaggerate the new ardor and the feeling of relief among younger officers. They felt that the day had dawned when mere peace ideas and maneuvers were about to give way to real preparations for meeting a war when it came.” Fisher’s credo—“the efficiency of the Navy17 and its instant readiness for war”—became the watchword of this band of reformers which, within the navy, came to be called the Fishpond.18 Their argument at the time hinged on dramatic improvements made in the Mediterranean Fleet during Fisher’s years of command. Later, they believed—and in time the navy and the nation came to agree—that it was because of their idol that the British Navy was ready for the Great War.

  The crux of the debate—past versus present, tradition versus reform, young versus old—was Jacky Fisher. How an officer felt about the navy, which ladder of success he chose to climb, focussed on this one, small, restless figure. Junior officers had to make a choice—and the choosing began during Fisher’s galvanic
years with the Mediterranean Fleet. His impact, and the change it made in one young officer of the fleet, can be traced through the letters of Captain Maurice Hankey of the Royal Marines, stationed on board Ramillies. Hankey’s first mention of the new Commander-in-Chief is made up of general rumor and innuendo: “The new Admiral—Fisher—has19 just joined the fleet; he is said to be a complete scoundrel.... He has got Siamese blood in him.” Then Hankey, who himself despaired at the complacency and lethargy he found in the fleet, began to hear interesting things about Fisher: “I fancy the new admiral,20 of whom the executive branch can say nothing too bad, is going to shake them out of their fool’s paradise a bit... [He] is very keen on dancing and in spite of the great heat and the scarcity of ladies is giving a dance next Saturday.” Soon afterwards, Hankey got his first look at Fisher: “I had not seen Admiral Fisher21 before; he is a queer looking cuss, but very affable and he capered about all the evening like a junior... [officer].” And then, before long, Hankey was fiercely defending his new hero: “The present admiral... doesn’t care a fig for the Admiralty and tradition and dares to look facts in the face as they are. He has already done incalculable good out here and may do more if he can keep afloat with the awful millstone of naval prejudice trying to sink him.”

  Forty years later, as Lord Hankey, the former marine, looked back on what he had witnessed: “It is difficult for anyone22 who had not lived under the previous regime to realize what a change Fisher brought about in the Mediterranean Fleet, and, by example and reaction, throughout the Navy.... Before his arrival, the topics and arguments of the officers’ messes... were mainly confined to such matters as the cleaning of paint and brasswork, the getting out of torpedo nets and anchors and similar trivialities. After a year of Fisher’s regime, these were forgotten and replaced by incessant controversies on tactics, strategy, gunnery, torpedo warfare, blockade, etc. It was a veritable renaissance and affected every officer in the Navy.”