Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  A single master gunlayer, posted high in the conning tower or on the foremast, would aim and fire simultaneously all the heavy guns on the ship. From this eyrie, above the blast and smoke of his own guns and the spray from the splash of enemy shells, with an excellent line of vision to the target, he and his assistant could observe the geysers as their own shells struck the sea near the enemy. They could calculate what adjustments were required, electrically transmit their orders to the guns, and then, when all was ready, press a key to fire all guns at once in a mighty broadside salvo. Broadside firing was an integral part of Scott’s concept: not only was the master gunlayer more likely to select the right target than blinded individual gunlayers, but once the target had been selected and range accurately measured, the simultaneous arrival of a blizzard of heavy shells would be far more devastating than even the accurate delivery of a single burst.

  Scott’s dream remained locked in his head when in 1910 he retired and went to work for Vickers. But he remained in constant contact with Jellicoe, who as Director of Naval Ordnance had recommended that all capital ships be equipped with Director Firing. Jellicoe carried his enthusiasm to the Home Fleet when, in December 1911, Churchill appointed him second in command. But the innovation continued to be rejected; Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet and Jellicoe’s superior, was one of many admirals who were determined to keep the old and—as they saw it—tried and true system of independent gunlaying. Director firing, they argued, was putting all one’s eggs in a tiny, exposed basket. What would happen if the electrical lines from the director’s perch to the guns were severed by shell fire—not to mention if the entire unarmored director’s platform were shot away?

  Scott knew he was right, and once he was out of the navy he could not be muzzled. He carried his case to Churchill and, with Churchillian persistence, insisted that the First Lord listen. Churchill warned that the Sea Lords were opposed, but in the end, Scott’s demand that his system be exposed to a competitive trial appealed to him. By command of the First Lord, the new 13.5-inch-gun dreadnought Thunderer was equipped with Scott’s director system. Her officers were dismayed—“We were by no means pleased66 at having this unpopular new system thrust upon us,” discreetly complained the ship’s gunnery officer—but worked diligently to master the techniques.

  On November 12, 1912, off Berehaven, the trial toward which Scott had worked finally took place. Two new dreadnoughts, identical except that one had director firing and one did not, were to fire under the same conditions of range, light, and state of the ocean. Thunderer’s challenger was her sister Orion, which, using the old system of individual aiming and firing, had the best gunnery record in the Fleet. The sea was up, giving each ship a roll to the side of five degrees. They raised speed to twelve knots and then, steaming in line, each trained its guns on its own separate towed target nine thousand yards away. When the order to fire was given, each dreadnought had three minutes to bombard its own target. Time after time Thunderer’s salvos, sometimes of five guns, sometimes of the full ten, rolled out and smothered the target. She fired thirty-nine heavy shells in three minutes, scoring thirteen direct hits, two ricochets onto the target, and ten “possible hits” in the water (close enough to have hit a real ship bigger than the towed target). Orion’s individual gunlayers could hardly find the target at all. The battleship fired twenty-seven times, scoring two hits, one ricochet, and one “possible.” The press, invited to observe, trumpeted the dimensions of Scott’s triumph: three times as many hits for Thunderer, said the Daily Telegraph; five times as many, said The Times; the correct figure was six times as many. Even after this test, “a very large number of officers67 remained sceptical,” wrote Jellicoe. “There was considerable opposition and the great majority of ships were not fitted with it.” In fact, progress was slow, but steady. At Jutland, only two of the thirty-six British dreadnoughts of Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet opened fire without benefit of Percy Scott’s ingenious system.

  As First Lord, Churchill focussed his prodigious energy and powers of concentration on the navy. He was fascinated by the development of technical innovations, which, incorporated into ships, could provide the fleet with a margin of superiority on the day of battle. But there was more. Churchill was a romantic with a historical vision on the grandest scale. He saw the great ships with which he had been entrusted as figures in a gigantic drama of human destiny. On them, on their sailors and officers, on the Admiralty, and on himself rode the enormous weight of Britain’s future. In a memorable passage in The World Crisis, he described these feelings:

  “I recall vividly68 my first voyage from Portsmouth to Portland where the Fleet lay. A grey afternoon was drawing to a close. As I saw the Fleet for the first time drawing out of the haze, a friend reminded me of ‘that far-off line of storm-beaten ships on which the eyes of the Grand Army never looked’ but which had in their day ‘stood between Napoleon and the dominion of the world.’ In Portland harbour the yacht lay surrounded by the great ships; the whole harbour was alive with the goings and comings of launches and small craft of every kind, and as night fell ten thousand lights from sea and shore sprang into being and every masthead twinkled as the ships and squadrons conversed with one another. Who could fail to work for such a service? Who could fail when the very darkness seemed loaded with the menace of approaching war?

  “For consider these ships, so vast in themselves, yet so small, so easily lost to sight on the surface of the waters. Sufficient at the moment, we trusted, for their task, but yet only a score or so. They were all we had. On them, as we conceived, floated the might, majesty, dominion and power of the British Empire. All our long history built up century after century, all our great affairs in every part of the globe, all the means of livelihood and safety of our faithful, industrious, active population depended upon them. Open the sea-cocks and let them sink beneath the surface, as another Fleet was one day to do in another British harbour far to the North, and in a few minutes—half an hour at the most—the whole outlook of the world would be changed. The British Empire would dissolve like a dream; each isolated community struggling forward by itself; the central power of union broken; mighty provinces, whole empires in themselves, drifting hopelessly out of control, and falling a prey to strangers; and Europe after one sudden convulsion passing into the iron grip and rule of the Teuton and of all that the Teutonic system meant. There would only be left far off across the Atlantic unarmed, unready, and as yet uninstructed America to maintain, single-handed, law and freedom among men....”

  fn1 The visit was to result in the decision to transfer Britain’s Mediterranean battleships to the North Sea and to leave guardianship of British interests in the Mediterranean in the hands of the French Navy.

  fn2 The first two ships of the 1909 “We Want Eight!” program, Colossus and Hercules, were equipped with 12-inch guns. The next six, Orion, Conqueror, Monarch, Thunderer, Lion, and Princess Royal, were given the new 13.5-inch guns.

  Chapter 42

  The Haldane Mission

  The Agadir Crisis presented Admiral von Tirpitz with an opportunity. In the same week that Kiderlen was sitting down to bargain with Jules Cambon, and as the Berlin bourse sagged, rose, and finally crashed, Tirpitz went to the Palace and asked the Kaiser to endorse a new Supplementary Navy Law. Press, public, and the Reichstag were aroused against England. Some Germans wanted a showdown: “We all know that blood1 is assuredly about to be shed and the longer we wait, the more there will be,” declared the Post. The showdown, Tirpitz urged, should come in the form of new ships. William embraced the idea and the Novelle was drafted. The “Risk Fleet” theory which had justified German shipbuilding since Tirpitz proposed the First Navy Law in 1898 “had fulfilled its purpose,”2 William declared. The new objective would be a 2:3 ratio of dreadnoughts with the British Navy. A third battle squadron of eight dreadnought battleships would be added to the two battle squadrons now building. To achieve this, a faster building rate (“tempo”) would b
e imposed. Instead of building two dreadnoughts a year beginning in 1912 and continuing for five years, the Imperial Navy would build three new ships every other year. The tempo over six years thus would rise from 2-2-2-2-2-2 to 3-2-3-2-3-2. By 1918, the High Seas Fleet would possess fifteen new dreadnoughts rather than twelve.

  Bethmann-Hollweg was aware that announcing a 2:3 ratio would alarm the British. They would react to the increased numbers of new ships and the admission that Germany was now building specifically against England; the German Fleet had always been described as being constructed “for our needs alone,” without reference to any foreign power. During the autumn of 1911, the Kaiser and the Admiral did their best to persuade the Chancellor of the wisdom of the 2:3 ratio. “It readily grants the English3 an important supremacy and cuts short the talk of ‘competitive building,’” William wrote to Bethmann-Hollweg. “It is at the same time a commitment to them, such as they have wished for, and surprises on our part are excluded, since the ratio is determined once and for all.... Whether they accept the ratio or not is immaterial.”

  Tirpitz argued a larger theme: “The purpose of our naval policy4 is political independence from England—the greatest possibility of security against an English attack.... To accomplish this... we must diminish the military distance between England and ourselves, not increase it. If we do not succeed, then our naval policy of the last fourteen years has been in vain.”

  Reports of a new Navy Bill and further expansion of the German Fleet reached England. Churchill, making his first speech as First Lord on November 9, 1911, offered conciliation and compromise. If no change was made in the long-established German building program, he said, Britain might be able to make large reductions in her Naval Estimates. Lloyd George agreed with the First Lord. “He [Lloyd George] felt that any effort5 should be made to heal friction with Germany and to arrive at a common understanding on naval strength,” Churchill wrote. “We knew that a formidable new Navy Law was in preparation. If Germany had definitely made up her mind to challenge Great Britain, we must take it up; but it might be possible by friendly, sincere, and intimate conversation to avert this perilous development. We were no enemies to German colonial development....” If the effort failed, the next step would be less difficult; “I felt I should be all the stronger6 in asking the Cabinet and Commons for money [for the Navy] if I could go hand in hand with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and testify that we had tried our best to secure a mitigation of the naval rivalry and failed.”

  In both countries there was support for resumption of the talks; in both countries there was opposition. Because of the opposition, the talks could not begin on an official level. Better that private, unofficial conversations take place between discreet nongovernmental figures. If these exploratory talks succeeded, official doors might open.

  Two men, private citizens and friends, one in London and one in Hamburg and Berlin, were eager to serve as a link between their governments. Both were businessmen: one a financier, the other a shipping magnate. Each was close to his own monarch. Although one was now a British subject, both had been born in Germany. And although one was now a Roman Catholic, both had been born Jewish.

  The King of England’s most intimate friend was born into a German Jewish family in Cologne in 1852. Ernest Cassel was ambitious, self-confident, and tenacious of purpose; throughout his life he displayed judgment, drive, and unimpeachable integrity. Cassel’s father, a bank official, took it as natural when his youngest son left school at fourteen to become a clerk and again when at seventeen Ernest emigrated to England with nothing but a valise and his violin. By twenty-two, Cassel had become London manager of the international financial house of Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt at a salary of £5,000 a year. At twenty-six, he married Annette Maxwell, a Roman Catholic Englishwoman, celebrating the event by becoming, on the same day, a naturalized British subject. Three years later, in 1881, when Cassel was twenty-nine, Annette Cassel died of tuberculosis, leaving her husband with one daughter, Maud. He never remarried.

  Cassel invested money in risky overseas projects with high profit potential. His specialty was railroads. He made a fortune developing Swedish railways that transported Swedish iron ore to ports for export. He acquired interests in Egypt, in Mexico, in South America, and in the United States, where railway building was heavily dependent on European capital.

  A frequent visitor to New York, he formed a lifelong friendship with Jacob Schiff, the American railroad financier of the house of Kuhn, Loeb. Cassel had many American friends, who admired not only his great success and financial wisdom but his blunt speaking and his willingness to share contacts and information.

  Penetrating the world of the landed aristocracy in England was more difficult. Wealth acquired in business closed as many doors as it opened. Cassel doggedly pursued entry into the patrician world. He rented, then purchased estates and country houses, showering invitations on the gentry and the peerage. He presented himself at the places they felt comfortable; he was seen at shooting parties, at the racetrack, at card tables. He learned to ride and hunt, although his seat was not firm and gates and hedges demanded courage. While he preferred the talented self-made men and women on the periphery of the social elite—Randolph Churchill and his son Winston, the Asquiths—he persevered with witless bores if their blood was sufficiently blue. He achieved success in 1901 when Maud married the Hon. Wilfred Ashley, a great-grandson of Lady Palmerston and heir to the stately Broadlands House in Hampshire.

  It was Cassel’s business reputation, not his social climbing, that brought him into contact with the Prince of Wales. The Prince liked self-made men; their conversation was generally more interesting. He liked men who were willing to spend their money on the diversions of life. Some—the Rothschilds, Baron Moritz Hirsch, Cassel—were Jews; others—Sir Thomas Lipton, the tea manufacturer and yachtsman, and Sir Blundell Maple, the furniture manufacturer—were not; the Prince did not care where or whether a man worshipped. Hirsch, who was born in Germany and had huge estates in Austria, was close to the Prince despite repeated snubs by both Continental and English aristocracy. Cassel met the prince through Hirsch; on Hirsch’s death in 1896, Cassel became his executor. He also took over Hirsch’s role as chief financial advisor to the prince. He assumed control of all of the Prince’s investments and made it possible for the Heir to ascend to the throne in 1901 free of debt. In gratitude, the new King made Cassel a Privy Councilor in 1901. At the ceremony effecting this promotion, everyone except the King was astonished when Cassel asked to be sworn in on a Roman Catholic Bible; at that moment Sir Ernest revealed that his wife on her deathbed had begged him to be received into the Catholic church and that he had been converted soon after she died.

  Cassel’s friendship with the King was based on harmony of opinions and tastes. During the later years of his reign, the King visited Cassel’s house in Park Lane almost every day for bridge. King Edward’s death in 1910 was a blow; a heavier one fell a year later, when Cassel’s daughter died, like his wife, of tuberculosis. Cassel was left with two granddaughters, on whom he lavished affection. By then he lived in Brook House, an enormous mansion in Park Lane filled with Old Masters, Renaissance bronzes, Chinese jade, Dresden porcelain, old English silver, and French and English inlaid furniture. It boasted an oak-panelled dining room capable of seating one hundred, six marble-lined kitchens, and an entrance hall paneled alternately with lapis lazuli and green-veined cream-colored marble. He also possessed three English country houses, a stud farm at Newmarket, an apartment in Paris, and villas in Switzerland and the south of France.fn1

  Alfred Ballin, who built the Hamburg-America Line into the largest steamship company in the world, was a Hamburger. He was born one hundred feet from the harbor of the great port on the river Elbe sixty miles inland from the North Sea. His career was bound up with ships, free trade, and peaceful, international competition, the elements which had brought the city prosperity for over five hundred years. Hamburg’s traditions as a free Hans
eatic city and its role as gateway to the cluster of German states to the south and east went back to the Middle Ages. Prussia, geographically close, with its harsh military structure and agricultural economy, seemed remote in customs and feeling from democratic, mercantile Hamburg. For much of its history Hamburg’s principal trading partner had been England. Well into the nineteenth century, there were more British ships in the harbor than vessels of any other nation, including Germany. Cargos of wool and coal came in from England; the ships refilled with grain and other foodstuffs for the voyage back. Then, after the middle of the century, a new cargo began passing across the Hamburg docks: people. As the population of the Empire increased, German peasants began leaving the land. In the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, waves of emigration passed through Hamburg and its sister port, Bremen on the river Weser. In 1881, 123,000 passengers sailed down the Elbe from Hamburg on a one-way trip to New York.

  The North Atlantic passenger trade was Albert Ballin’s proving ground. By 1886, at twenty-nine, Ballin was chief of the Passenger Division of the Hamburg-America Line (HAPAG). The competitive North German Lloyd Shipping Company, based in Bremen, predominated on the North Atlantic. NGL had forty-seven transatlantic steamships; Hamburg-America had only twenty-four. Ballin began to launch ships, among them a class of fast new luxury liners designed to make the voyage a pleasant rather than a disagreeable experience for those who could travel First Class. Ballin himself traveled frequently aboard his ships, always keeping an eye out for flaws. On board, moving from passenger to passenger, asking their impressions and recommendations while the nervous crew hovered nearby, he jotted entries in a notebook. One voyage to New York produced these items: “Notices on board7 to be restricted as much as possible; those which are necessary to be tastefully framed—no room for portmanteaux and trunks—towels too small—soiled linen cupboard too small—butter dishes too small—toast to be served in serviette hot.” By 1899, when Ballin was forty-two, his innovations and relentless attention to detail had brought him rewards: his company was the largest in the world, possessing more tonnage than the combined merchant marine of any nation other than Great Britain or Germany. Albert Ballin was appointed managing director, a post he held for the rest of his life.