Winston sat stone-faced through Haldane’s report and, at the end, gloomily commented that the secretary for war had confirmed his worst suspicions. The German shipbuilding program scheduled to start in May, he pointed out to the cabinet, represented an “extraordinary increase in the striking force, in ships of all classes,” providing Tirpitz with five fresh battle squadrons, each attended by flotillas of destroyers and submarines, each “extremely formidable.”156
Meeting this challenge—keeping England afloat—was Churchill’s responsibility, but first he had to make peace within the Admiralty, a task he compared to “burrowing about in an illimitable rabbit-warren.” The relationship between civilian administrators and naval officers could hardly have been worse. The first called the second “boneheads”; the second referred to the first as “frocks” and shared the conviction of Douglas Haig, now a lieutenant general, that the word politician was “synonymous with crooked dealing and wrong values.” Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, the first sea lord, had been McKenna’s undoing. Wilson was, among other things, the chief obstacle to the creation of a naval war staff. He thought it would undermine his authority. The admiral was nearly twice Churchill’s age, but Winston was unintimidated. Believing that Wilson dwelt “too much in the past” and was “not sufficiently receptive of new ideas,” the new first lord decided to fire the old first sea lord. He didn’t know whom to appoint in his place, so he sent for Lord Fisher.157
Admiral Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher—“Jacky” Fisher to England’s adoring masses—had retired to Lake Lucerne with a peerage four years earlier. He was a legend, “the greatest sailor since Nelson,” and he was immensely old. In 1854, when he had joined the navy as a midshipman, British men-of-war still carried sails. He had been a captain, commanding a battleship, when Winston was born. His great period had been between 1904 and 1910, when, as first sea lord, he had scrapped ships which he said could “neither fight nor run,” conceived the dreadnoughts, introduced submarines and 13.5-inch guns, revised the naval educational system, and built 161 warships, including 22 battleships of over 16,000 tons. Quick-tempered, emotional, with burning black eyes and a curiously Mongoloid face, he liked to portray himself as “ruthless, relentless, and remorseless.” The description was accurate. Officers who had questioned his policies had been ruined professionally; he had branded them traitors and declared that “their wives should be widows, their children fatherless, and their homes a dunghill.” Nevertheless, he was indisputably a genius. If Germany and England went to war, the navy Tirpitz would fight would be Fisher’s creation.158
Churchill had met him in 1907, when both were visiting Biarritz. They had begun corresponding that April, and Fisher’s first letter, inspired by a sugar strike in the British West Indies, provides a fair sample of his style: “St Lucia quite splendid! Dog eat dog! You are using niggers to fight niggers! For God’s sake don’t send British Bluejackets inland amongst sugar canes on this job or we shall have to set up a War Office inside the Admiralty & goodness knows one War Office is enough! I enclose a very secret paper. Don’t let anyone see it. The best thing ever written in the English language bar the Bible & Robertson’s Sermons & letters from a Competition Wallah. Kindly return the print with your improvements in the margin—study it closely.”159 The enclosure has not survived. It could have been anything. The admiral was given to superlatives and overstatements; his letters were peppered with exclamation marks and words underscored two or three times. A prudent minister would have shunned him, but Winston was never that; he believed that his own vision, married to Fisher’s experience, would make a brilliant union.
In the beginning he was right. The admiral came hopping home in response to Churchill’s summons, and they talked for three days. Winston found him “a veritable volcano of knowledge and inspiration; and as soon as he learnt what my main purpose was, he passed into a state of vehement eruption…. Once he began, he could hardly stop. I plied him with questions, and he poured out ideas.” Fisher, for his part, was so excited that he ran a fever. His chief recommendations were to arm Britain’s battleships with fifteen-inch guns, increase their speed, convert the entire navy from coal to oil, and shake up the senior officers: “The argument for a War Staff is that you may have a d—d fool as First Sea Lord, and so you put him in commission, as it were.” Churchill adopted all these proposals, though his attempt to put the war staff under himself failed when Haldane persuaded the cabinet that a sailor, not a politician, should head it. The fuel conversion was a difficult step. Having made it, he took another, inducing the House to invest £2,000,000, later increased to £5,000,000, in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, thus assuring adequate reserves in the event of war.160
Handling the admirals was easier, but more delicate. The war staff was established in January 1912 and Wilson was relieved of his post. Winston had considered bringing Fisher back as first sea lord, then rejected the idea because another retired admiral, Lord Charles Beresford, the old salt’s sworn enemy, had become powerful in Parliament. At Fisher’s suggestion he settled on Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman. As second sea lord—Bridgeman’s prospective successor—he chose Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, a relative of the royal family. It was not a foresighted move. Prince Louis was a naturalized British subject and proud of it; when one of Tirpitz’s officers had reproached him at Kiel for serving under the Union Jack, he had stiffened and replied: “Sir, when I joined the Royal Navy in 1868, the German Empire did not exist.” Still, he spoke with a heavy German accent, and the time was coming when that would be enough to discredit him. Winston appointed one friend, David Beatty of his Sudan days, to be rear admiral and his personal naval secretary. His key decision was naming Admiral Sir John Jellicoe as second in command of the Home Fleet and thus heir to England’s most crucial seagoing command. Jellicoe was Fisher’s candidate for Nelsonhood. The old admiral wrote Churchill: “He has all the Nelsonic attributes. He writes me of new designs. His one, one, one cry is SPEED! Do lay that to heart! Do remember the receipt for jugged hare in Mrs. Glasse’s Cookery Book! First catch your hare!” After leaving London he wrote a friend: “I’ll tell you… the whole secret of the changes! To get Jellicoe Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet prior to October 21, 1914—which is the date of the Battle of Armageddon.” That was vintage Fisher. One moment he sounded demented and the next he came uncannily close to guessing the date of the approaching war.161
Churchill and Lord Fisher, 1913
Back in Lucerne, he wrote of Churchill: “So far every step he contemplates is good, and he is brave, which is everything. Napoleonic in audacity, Cromwellian in thoroughness.” He peppered Winston with letters signed, typically, “Yours till Hell freezes,” “Yours to a cinder,” and “Till charcoal sprouts.” But he was quick to turn. Three appointments offended him, and his response was savage. “I fear,” he wrote Winston, “this must be my last communication with you in any matter at all. I am sorry for it, but I consider you have betrayed the Navy.” The officers were close to the King; on no evidence whatever he blamed Clementine, saying she feared “the social ostracism of the Court,” and called the first lord, no longer his to a cinder, “a Royal pimp.” It is a sign of Churchill’s faith in Fisher that he ignored this. In reply, he sent him a stream of flattering billets-doux and telegrams. The old man boasted to his son, “I sent him an awful letter, and he really has replied very nicely that no matter what I say to him, he is going to stick to me and support all my schemes and always maintain that I am a genius and the greatest naval administrator, etc. etc…. However, there is no getting over the fact that he truckled to Court influence… and I have rubbed this into WC and he don’t like it!” Doubtless he loathed it, yet he persisted in his suit. By the spring he had decided that if Fisher wouldn’t come to him, he would go to Fisher. He, Asquith, and their families were planning a May cruise on the Enchantress; he asked Fisher to meet the yacht in Naples, where they could have “a good talk.”162
The voyage was one of Churchill’s working vaca
tions. He inspected the Gibraltar defenses, conferred with his admiral on Malta, and then docked at Naples. When his quarry came aboard, Violet Asquith thought Fisher’s eyes, “as always, were like smouldering charcoals.” Then “Lord F. and W. were locked together in naval conclave…. I’m sure they can’t resist each other for long at close range.” Lord F. did. He resisted the prime minister, too. His “advice wasn’t followed,” he said, so why should he give it? Yet he stayed. Violet’s next day’s diary entry opened: “Danced on deck with Lord Fisher for a very long time before breakfast…. I reel giddily in his arms and lurch against his heart of oak.” The turning point came on Sunday. Churchill had stage-managed the church service. The chaplain riveted his eyes on the seventy-one-year-old admiral and said solemnly: “No man still possessing all his powers and full of vitality has any right to say ‘I am now going to rest, as I have had a hard life,’ for he owes a duty to his country and fellow men.” Fisher wrote his wife, “It was an arrow shot at a venture [sic] like the one that killed Ahab.” The Fisher-Churchill axis was reestablished. In letters to the Admiralty, Fisher continued to protest, “I have had my hour,” but he was slowly being drawn back from retirement, and soon the first lord would conclude that despite all arguments against it, in a crisis he would want the eccentric old prodigy at his right hand.163
Through dynamic energy and a genius that surpassed Fisher’s, Churchill mastered the Admiralty and was ready when Armageddon, as the admiral had foreseen, arrived. By then, Winston wrote, he knew “what everything looked like and where everything was, and how one thing fitted into another. I could put my hand on anything that was wanted and knew the current state of our naval affairs.” He had been appalled to find that no plan existed for transporting a British expeditionary force to France. He drew one up. England’s Grand Fleet had no sequestered wartime anchorage. He chose Scapa Flow, a remote shelter among the Orkney Islands at the northernmost tip of the British Isles, where Britain’s dreadnoughts could keep an eye on Heligoland Bight, through which Tirpitz’s Flotte must pass in any sortie. In Parliament he won approval of his appropriation bills by vivid, lucid descriptions of abstruse technical matters. Describing the impact of a shell upon a warship, he told the House: “If you want to make a true picture in your mind of a battle between two great modern iron-clad ships, you must not think of it as if it were two men in armour striking at each other with heavy swords. It is more like a battle between two egg-shells striking each other with hammers…. really needs no clearer proof.”164
Churchill and Asquith at Camberwell Green
His inspections of ships continued to be popular with bluejackets. After his first year in office the monthly magazine Fleet, which echoed forecastle views, commented: “No First Lord in the history of the Navy has shown himself more practically sympathetic with the conditions of the Lower Deck than Winston Churchill.” The brass took another view. Churchill’s predecessors had given the sea lords free rein, but he regarded them as subordinates and issued them blunt instructions. When Bridgeman rebelled, he was swiftly retired, ostensibly on grounds of poor health, with Prince Louis replacing him. Tories protested in the House, and career officers were scandalized. Rear Admiral Dudley de Chair, who succeeded Beatty as navy secretary, was shocked by the first lord’s cursory judgment of men, often based on a few minutes of conversation. De Chair found him “impulsive, headstrong and even at times obstinate.” His tours of the fleet were also controversial. He encouraged junior officers and ratings to criticize their commanding officers. When a commander dared complain of this, Churchill proposed to relieve him and was dissuaded only when the second, third, and fourth sea lords threatened to resign in protest. At the end of a strategy conference, one of the admirals accused the first lord of impugning the traditions of the Royal Navy. “And what are they?” asked Winston. “I shall tell you in three words. Rum, sodomy, and the lash. Good morning, gentlemen.”165
No profession is more wedded to the folklore of the past than the armed services. Since the last major conflict on the Continent, technology had clanked out an astonishing array of contraptions suitable for war, and the generals and admirals of Europe, regardless of national allegiance, viewed them all with deep distrust. They belonged to that generation which called electricity “the electric,” and regarded it as newfangled. Being new was enough to make a device suspect. Haig thought the machine gun “a much over-rated weapon,” and believed “two per battalion should be sufficient.” Joffre of France refused to use a telephone, pretending that he did not “understand the mechanism.” The Stokes mortar was twice rejected at the British War Office and finally introduced by Lloyd George, who begged the money for it from an Indian maharaja and was as a consequence considered “ungentlemanly” by British officers. Kitchener dismissed the tank as a “toy.” It was, in fact, a pet project of Churchill’s. Winston wasn’t always right, however; Jellicoe was impressed by a flight in a zeppelin, and at his urging Churchill approved pilot models. Then he lost interest. As he said later, “I rated the Zeppelin much lower as a weapon of war than almost anyone else. I believed that this enormous bladder of combustible and explosive gas would prove easily destructible.” As a result, in 1914 the navy had no reconnaissance airships. He also failed to provide adequate submarine defenses in Scapa and the Firth of Forth, but that was because he became entangled in red tape; unlike H. G. Wells, who predicted that the “blind fumblings” of U-boats would limit them to the torpedoing of hulks in harbors, he was fully aware of their minatory potential.166
The new weapon which fascinated him most was the airplane. In 1910 General Ferdinand Foch had spoken for most professional officers when he ridiculed the idea of an air force in wartime. “Tout ça, c’est du sport,” he said contemptuously; as far as the French army was concerned, “l’avion c’est zéro!” In the British navy it was otherwise. As early as February 25, 1909, when he was still at the Board of Trade, Churchill had told the cabinet that aviation would be “most important” in the future and suggested that “we should place ourselves in communication with Mr [Orville] Wright and avail ourselves of his knowledge.” The following year he presented a Daily Mail check for £10,000 to two airmen who had taken off from the Dominion of Newfoundland and landed on a field in, as he put it, “the future equally happy and prosperous Dominion of Ireland”—poor political prophecy, but no other national figure had come to greet them. Arriving at the Admiralty, he had sought out the small band of adventurous officers who were the pioneers of naval aviation. In 1912 he founded the Royal Naval Air Service—a precursor of the Royal Flying Corps and, later, the Royal Air Force—to provide “aerial protection to our naval harbours, oil tanks and vulnerable points, and also for a general strengthening of our exiguous and inadequate aviation.” A larval helicopter was built; he inspected it. In tests it proved unstable, and prone to crash, after it had risen about three hundred feet. Winston proposed a hollow propeller containing a parachute. The suggestion was completely impractical, but his encouragement of experimentation elsewhere led to breakthroughs. Because of his efforts, England became the first country to equip a plane with a machine gun, and the first to launch an airborne torpedo. He coined the words seaplane, and flight to designate a given number of aircraft, usually four.167
To Clementine’s alarm, he decided to fly himself. He regarded his first ride, in 1912, as a matter of duty. Discovering that he enjoyed it, he made repeated ascents. The craft were primitive, the techniques slap-dash. On one bumpy trip, in the teeth of a gale, nearly three hours were required to cover the sixteen miles from Gravesend to Grain, and “after landing Churchill safely,” the pilot reported, “my seaplane ‘took off’ again, landing trolley and all over the sea wall, as it was being brought up the slipway, and was more or less wrecked.” The hazards whetted Winston’s appetite. In October 1913, at the Eastchurch naval flying center, he went up in three different craft. That evening he wrote Clementine: “Darling, We have had a vy jolly day in the air… it has been as good as one of those old
days in the S. African War, & I have lived entirely in the moment, with no care for all those tiresome party politics & searching newspapers, and awkward by-elections…. For good luck before I started I put your locket on. It has been lying in my desk since it got bent—& as usual it worked like a charm.” She wired her dismay from the Enchantress and then followed up with a note: “I hope my telegram will not have vexed you, but please be kind & don’t fly any more just now.”168
It was a postage stamp wasted. Churchill with the bit in his teeth was incorrigible. Deeply as he loved his wife, at that moment he loved the excitement of flying more. To the consternation of the barnstormers who had been taking him up, he declared that he wanted to be a pilot himself. He was too old, they protested; thirty-two was regarded as the top age for a novice, and he was thirty-eight. He invoked his powers as first lord, ordered them to shut up, and began taking lessons in managing controls at Apavon. One of his instructors, Ivon Courtney, later recalled: “Before our first flight together he said to me: ‘We are in the Stephenson age of flying. Now our machines are frail. One day they will be robust, and of value to our country.’ He had already done a lot of flying. ‘I want some more instruction,’ he said.” Aircraft were not equipped with headphones then; the two men sat in separate cockpits, Churchill in the rear, and shouted at each other, hoping their voices would carry above the wind. The instruments were encased in a box, but most airmen scorned them, preferring to rely on what they called “ear.” Winston, however, was fascinated by the dials and needles. He would crouch down, peering at them, “and,” Courtney wrote, “he was right to do so. He saw that one day the box of instruments would be more important than the pilot’s ear.”169
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