Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

by Robert K. Massie

  Forty years later, as Lord Hankey, the former marine, looked back on what he had witnessed: "It is difficult for anyone 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."

  Inspiring lectures and prizes for essays were only the beginning; the real revolution in the Mediterranean Fleet became evident when Fishejr took the ships to sea. Exercises were realistic: "… a night attack on Malta… landing 5,000 men from the Fleet… exercising the boom defense at Malta, putting it in place in two hours instead of two days,… [essential] with Bizerte only 9 hours off with 22 torpedo boats… It was pitch-dark night when we had the most exciting time… there was fighting going on all over the horizon with destroyers chasing cruisers and other destroyers… the destroyers all dashing about like mad in the middle of it all and torpedoing everything… [it was] the best thing I have ever seen and the most realistic… We finished part of the maneuvers yesterday. They were quite splendid and everyone is delighted with themselves. Beresford came on board to tell me he had made up his mind now not to re-enter Parliament, but to remain out with the Fleet his whole time as he had learnt more in the last week than in the last 40 years… I never had any sleep for 48 hours, nor did anyone else… we had a final battle between the two parts of the Fleet, one against the other, all hands firing like mad, and it was a splendid sight."

  Fisher's exercises stressed real wartime tactical situations: blockade of the French naval base of Toulon; moving the fleet along the Algerian coast from Malta to Gibraltar while protecting his battleships against French torpedo boats stationed along that coast. Underlying the exercises were two basic changes: he forced the fleet to move at higher speeds, and he persuaded and cajoled it to practice more accurate, long-range gunnery. When Fisher took the Mediterranean Fleet to sea, it automatically steamed at high speed. "Woe; to the captain and fleet engineer of the ship who could not maintain its speed. All the 'chiefs' were shaking their heads at the probable effects on engines and boilers, which they said were being rattled to pieces." Bacon quotes the captain of the small Third-Class cruiser Barham to illustrate what happened to a ship which might slow down the fleet. Barham had arrived at Malta from England with defective boilers. When the captain went to see the Admiral Superintendant of the Malta dockyard to arrange repairs, he found Fisher "sitting in the Superintendant's chair with the Dockyard Officers in a row before him, and they were directed to work day and night on my vessel's defects until completed. The Commander-in-Chief then visited Barham and while in the engine room, he asked me what I considered her sea speed to be. I replied 'Sixteen knots,' on which he said, 'If you don't do seventeen knots I'll hunt you down until you do.' His secretary, who was behind me, murmured sotto voce, 'He'll do it too' and always afterwards, the Barham was hustled along at seventeen knots."

  Fisher was able to lead his fleet at constant high speeds from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. He was particularly proud of one voyage of 740 miles at fourteen knots from Malta to Trieste, and having the entire fleet of forty-three vessels arrive at the exact moment his schedule had called for. "I have burnt 10,000 more tons of coal than my predecessor," he trumpeted. "I am sure it's the right thing to move the fleet at high speed always and to practise at the speed to be employed in action."

  The same passion was applied to gunnery. Where previously ships had fired individually at ranges of two thousand yards, Fisher had them steaming in company, firing at targets three thousand or four thousand yards away. The battleship Caesar began carrying out practice at six thousand yards. Fisher bought a fifty-guinea gold cup and offered it to the ship winning a competition in heavy-gun shooting. Ships began installing telescopic sights. Still Fisher was unsatisfied with the technology of his fleet's gunnery. "The other day I couldn't see a blessed thing on account of the smoke of the barbette guns, and so cursed the delay of smokeless powder."

  Exercises at sea taught Fisher something about the increased pressure placed on an admiral in a new age of warfare, when events were accelerated and the time for decision compressed by the advent of steam propulsion. "I had a tremendously long day yesterday," he wrote to Kitty in August 1900. "I was at it from 4 a.m. till 8 p.m. and hardly time to eat, but… it was very exciting and interesting with such a large number of vessels, nearly 40 in all, maneuvering about… it requires an Admiral to be like the four beasts in Revelations, full of eyes behind and before." "Suddenness is the characteristic feature of naval operations [today]," he wrote to Lord Selborne. "In former days," he instructed Joseph Chamberlain, "the wind affected both sides alike and 'a stern chase was a long chase' if one side did not wish to fight. But now within 20 minutes of seeing- not the enemy himself (he is out of sight)-but his smoke on the horizon, you are alongside each other and passing each other at a greater combined speed than the express trains on the South Eastern Railway!"

  At Trafalgar, Fisher continued, once Nelson had given his orders, he had nothing to do but walk "up and down the quarterdeck of the Victory, having a yarn with his Captain! He had got his ships alongside those of the enemy and had nothing more to do, and then it became a sailors' battle. But now it's the Admiral's battle. All is worked from the conning tower. You press a button and off go the torpedoes. Another electrical signal fires the guns, a third works the engines, and so on."

  Hard as he worked the fleet during maneuvers, Fisher was equally passionate about his duties as a host and a diplomatic representative of Britain. He gave banquets and balls on board his flagship, inviting Austrian officers and Hungarian aristocrats in Trieste and Fiume, and sent "the bill to the Admiralty afterwards without having first received their permission." He took the fleet to Constantinople, had three interviews with the Sultan, and received an order set in brilliants. Lady Fisher and two of their daughters who accompanied him received lesser decorations. To the ships of the fleet, the Sultan sent 640,000 Turkish cigarettes. In Morocco, Fisher entertained the Governor and twenty Moorish chiefs, "all such splendid men, all of them Othellos… I gave [the governor] a couple of revolvers, a case of eau de cologne, which he loves, and a quarter of a ton of ice… It is a fine sight, this immense fleet, and he told me that now he knew why England was so great and so feared by all nations…"

  Respite a dramatic improvement in the fleet's efficiency and readiness, Fisher was not content. He complained to anyone who would listen that the force at his disposal was grossly inadequate to carry out its mission. He bombarded the Admiralty with demands for more ships and predictions of doom if he didn't get them. He bemoaned his own prospective fate, if as he predicted, his fleet was beaten. "The admiral commanding the British Mediterranean Fleet… being the man who will probably preside at the Battle of Armageddon which will probably be fought off Port Mahon in Minorca… has to bear in mind that Admiral Byng was shot… for not getting a victory near that spot,"* he wrote to Joseph Chamberlain. "Who is going to be hung if we don't lick the French fleet?" he cried to a journalist. "I have the rope round my neck," he declared to Lord Selborne, the new First Sea Lord. Specifically, he wanted more cruisers and destroyers. "In this famous Mediterranean Fleet," he wrote to Chamberlain, "we only recently had three cruisers. The Admiralty total for war is 36 cruisers on this station! Were I a

  * In 1736, Admiral John Byng, sent with a squadron to relieve a French siege of Minorca, hesitated too long, forcing the British garrison to surrender. Byng was court-martialed and shot "pour encourager les autres" (to encourage the others), observed Voltaire.

  Frenchman I should watch with malignant glee the denud
ing of the English Mediterranean Fleet of its practised vessels to send them to China and the Cape… Please do not think me a pessimist but… 'God is on the side of the big battalions' and Nelson said truly, 'Only numbers can annihilate.' "

  Fisher's letters to Lord Selborne, the new First Lord, hammered at this theme: "I maintain it to be a cardinal principle that the Mediterranean Fleet should be kept constituted for instant war… [but] the fleet as now constituted is not prepared for war and cannot be exercised for war because we have an insufficiency of cruisers and destroyers." Selborne and the Admiralty attempted to quiet him by promising that, if war threatened, additional ships would be sent from England. Fisher was skeptical, doubting that the Foreign Office would permit this when relations became strained. To Lord Rosebery, he wrote: "Lord Selborne says 'Trust us to send you the ships when the time comes.' I don't trust them! They will be afraid to precipitate matters." Besides, even if the ships did come, Fisher feared that they would be useless or in the way. "Unless I have the use of these vessels to cruise with the fleet during peace exercises, I cannot find out their deficiencies or the best way of applying them in war. They will come upon us, crude, unorganized and unpractised in their duties… What a burden to throw on the Admiral, suddenly to pitchfork onto him a mass of crude material at the moment when all his time and energies are required elsewhere… I would sooner have 14 battleships always with me than the 18 or 20 they would pitchfork out when war was declared."

  If the reinforcing ships could not actually be sent in peacetime, then, Fisher told Lord Rosebery, he had a compromise proposal: "[The Admiralty] admit an immense number of vessels of every class must be added to the Mediterranean Fleet in the event of war. I ask that these vessels should be named, their captains named, that they shall be collected at one port at home-say Portsmouth-that the Admiral who is going to bring them out shall be appointed to take charge of them at once, that this Admiral should be put under my orders; he would see everything ready, he would know quite well that I would shoot him like a dog when he came out if there was the slightest deficiency in any one fighting requisite, however trivial. I give you my solemn word of honor, I would shoot him and he would know that for certain! See the result of this: I apportion all these vessels beforehand, knowing their qualities and the capabilities of their captains, instead of being harassed and overwhelmed with such a mass of work on the outbreak of war or when imminent." Fisher's prediction on this point was illustrated and underlined when the battleship Hood, newly arrived in the fleet, rammed a French steamer going out of Grand Harbor. "It was splendid for me that it happened," Fisher told Lord Rosebery, "as I had told them over and over again it was against all human reason to expect a newly joined ship to be worked with the precision and nerve of the rest of the Fleet."

  Fisher was insistent that he needed more destroyers immediately) The number of destroyers in the Mediterranean Fleet in 1900 was sixteen; Fisher demanded an additional thirty-two. "If more destroyers are not obtained," he warned, "we shall have the Boer War played over again at sea." "To steam a fleet at night without a fringe of destroyers is like marching an army without an advance guard, flanking parties or scouts."

  Fisher's demands were received at the Admiralty with irritation. Lord Walter Kerr, the First Sea Lord, whose duty was to decide where to station the vessels of the Royal Navy, began to bridle at Fisher's incessant claims and dire predictions. Kerr expressed "serious disappointment at having received such a wholly unscientific document from the Commander-in-Chief… The Commander-in-Chief has a habit, noticeable in some of his communications, of indulging in strong phrases to emphasize his arguments such as 'disastrous consequences,' 'imperative necessity.'… These must be regarded as the outcome of impulse rather than of calm and deliberate judgement and must not be taken too seriously… No one knows better than Sir John Fisher that the proposal… is an impossibility under existing conditions, yet he calmly proposes it… Their Lordships have a right to expect something better than a demand for impossibilities from an officer holding the position of

  Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean.''

  Fisher did not reduce his demands; he augmented them. Fifty-four destroyers, not forty-eight, was now the minimum. At the end of the year, he raised his demand to sixty-two. The Admiralty gave way only slightly; they sent him an additional eight, to raise his total to twenty-four. That was all, Fisher was told, that he would get in peacetime. Meanwhile, Lord Walter Kerr was bristling. Officially, he wrote: "I must call attention to a tendency the Commander-in-Chief has of endeavoring to impose his policy on the Government. He forgets that the Government is responsible for policy and for the forces placed at his disposal-it is his business to make the best use of them." Privately, Kerr declared of Fisher: "His reiterated demands; become tedious."

  Fisher aimed his belligerence, which could be venomous, at Kerr. 'The First Sea Lord is a nonentity because he tries to do everything and succeeds in doing nothing," he wrote to J. R. Thursfield, naval correspondent of the Times. Kerr was less interested in preparing for war than in the regulations for the cuffs of flag officers' full dress coats, he charged. Fisher also attacked Kerr's Roman Catholicism: "Walter Kerr… is a slave to the Roman Catholic hierarchy and he won't be allowed to leave the Admiralty however much he may wish it… I believe the Roman Catholic influence far transcends anything people have any notion of… In the Navy their one mainstay is Walter Kerr and they will make him die at his post." (The appointment of Kerr, who was practically the same age as Fisher, to the post of First Sea Lord seemed to preclude any chance of Fisher being given the top role in the navy.)

  During the Mediterranean years, Fisher made regular excursions behind the backs of his civilian and naval superiors to communicate his views to the press. A number of journalists interested in naval affairs, most notably Thursfield of The Times and Arnold White of the Daily Mail, received regular letters from Fisher, who fed them information on which to base articles pushing his views, most prominently the urgent need to reinforce the Mediterranean Fleet. Bacon, one of the ablest young officers in the Fishpond and later Fisher's first major biographer, put the best face he could on this practice, claiming that Fisher was "careful never to give away any secret information" and did what he did because he was "a firm believer in the need for the press to be fed with the truth and not with lies." Fisher's letters to Thursfield and White are filled with numbers and deployments of ships, proposed war plans, estimates of French tactics, and fiery denunciations of all who oppose his own point of view. Fisher's language was so colorful that many of his words and phrases were lifted and put into print despite his fervent injunctions to "Keep all this strictly private!" and "burn this!" Writing to Kitty, he defended his practice of leaks to the press by saying, "I… can't help it for it is all quite true and I should be a traitor if I did disguise my views, considering that the safety of the Empire is at stake." Nevertheless, his method was more than brash or outrageous; it was sly and unscrupulous. He would write to the Admiralty, deploring the "mischievous" article which Thursfield had written in The Times, especially the "unpleasant prominence" given himself, and then, a few days later, send off another letter to Thursfield packed with information, violent rhetoric, and chuckling asides about his chiefs. Eventually, some in London began to smell a rat. Lord Walter Kerr noted that one "warmed-over," "mischievous" article was written "in many instances in identical terms…[to]! the views expounded… by the Commander-in-Chief [that is, Fisher]."

  Sometimes, despairing of getting his way, Fisher thought of resignation. He would leave the navy and enter the House of Commons to press his charges against the Admiralty and attack the government for national unpreparedness. Or he would accept a post with' one of the great armaments manufacturers. In 1900, he heard that1 he might be offered the chairmanship of Elswick, a giant shipbuilding firm, a post which paid a salary of £10,000 a year. "It's a place I should revel in," Fisher confided to Arnold White. "I should immediately set to work to revolutionize naval fighting by
building on Speculation a battleship, cruiser and destroyer on revolutionary principles-oil fuel, turbine propulsion, equal gunfire all around, greater speed than any existing vessels of their class, no masts, no funnels, etc. And I should build them all in 18 months and sell them for double their cost… and put up Elswick's shares 50 percent."