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

by Robert K. Massie

  "Insinuations of a very gross character," persisted Churchill, "some of which transgress the limits of Parliamentary decorum; to cover the Order Paper with leading and fishing questions, designed to give substance and form to any gossip or tittle-tattle he may have been able to scrape together, and then to come down to the House, not to attempt to make good in fact or in detail… but to skulk in the background, waiting for an opportunity… I have not ever since I became First Lord of the Admiralty made any reply to the Noble Lord's scurrilous and continuous personal attacks, none. I sought no quarrel with him… but within a fortnight he made a speech in which he said I had betrayed the Navy… and ever since he has been going about the country pouring out charges of espionage, favoritism, blackmail, fraud, and inefficiency."

  "I deny that entirely," Beresford interrupted again. "I never used the word 'blackmail.' Give the date and the place."

  "Certainly," Churchill replied evenly. "In the constituency of the honorable member for Eversham-my memory is very good on these points-he used the great bulk of those offensive expressions, needless to say, unsupported by any facts or arguments… I have never taken these things too seriously. I am not one of those who take the Noble Lord too seriously. I know him too well. He does not mean to be as offensive as he often is when he is speaking on public platforms. He is one of those orators of whom it was well said, 'Before they get up, they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, they do not know what they have said.'… Under a genial manner… the Noble Lord nourishes many bitter animosities on naval matters."

  Ultimately, the House, which was familiar with Beresford's obsession with Fisher, sustained the First Lord. Significantly, even Bridgeman sided with Churchill, writing after the exchange in the Commons: "I do hope the whole business is now at an end, but I hear rumours of a deep-laid agitation against Churchill; I am using every bit of influence I possess to arrest it… I am afraid Beresford is difficult to hold and I unfortunately can do nothing with him."

  Churchill's relations with King George V were correct but cool. Having spent fifteen years in the navy and risen by merit to the rank of Captain before his brother's death made him Prince of Wales, George V shared most of the views and prejudices of the navy's senior officers. In the Fisher-Beresford contest, the King became a Beresford man, and accordingly was not pleased when Churchill made the former First Sea Lord his principal advisor. For his part, Churchill respected the monarch without placing much weight on his opinions. After a royal visit to the Enchantress, Winston reported to his wife that the King had talked more stupidly about the navy than anyone he had ever heard. Three times in three years, the two became entangled over the names to be given to new dreadnoughts. Traditionally, a First Lord proposed names and the King amended, counterproposed, and then agreed. In November 1911, immediately after becoming First Lord, Churchill proposed Africa, Assiduous, Liberty, and Oliver Cromwell for the four battleships in that year's Estimates. The King rejected naming a dreadnought Cromwell after the man who had chopped off the head of King Charles I. He accepted Africa and proposed Delhi, Wellington, and Marlborough. The four ships eventually went to sea with the names Iron Duke (which Churchill liked better than Wellington), Marlborough, Emperor of India, and Benbow. The following year, the First Lord proposed four names from England's warrior history for the four great fifteen-inch-gun, oil-burning super-dreadnoughts of the 1912 class. On his desk, the King read: King Richard the First, King Henry the Fifth, Queen Elizabeth, and-again-Oliver Cromwell. Lord Stamfordham, the King's Private Secretary, immediately wrote to Churchill that "there must be some mistake… that name was proposed for one of the ships of last year's program; His Majesty was unable to agree to it and… personally explained to you the reasons for his objection." This time, Churchill persevered. "Oliver Cromwell was one of the founders of the Navy and scarcely any man did so much for it," he wrote to Stamfordham. "It seems right that we should give to a battleship a name that never failed to make the enemies of England tremble." King George refused to budge and the First Lord declared, "I bow." The new ship was named Valiant, and of Churchill's original choices, only Queen Elizabeth went to sea. The other two dreadnoughts were named Warspite and Barham, and a fifth sister of the class, Malaya, was named after the colony that paid to build her.

  Churchill's final brush with the King on the subject of names occurred over two ships of the 1913 class. The First Lord proposed Ark Royal and Pitt. The King had various arguments against Ark Royal, but he rejected Pitt on an intuition derived from his own many years at sea. Sailors, he knew, tended to find obscene or scatological nicknames for the ships they served on; Pitt was much too easy and would have an inevitable result. Churchill, presented with the argument, grumbled that this suggestion was "unworthy of the royal mind." The 1913 dreadnoughts, the last of the prewar building program, were given names to please a monarch: Royal Sovereign, Royal Oak, Ramillies, Resolution, and Revenge.

  As peacetime First Lord, Winston Churchill's most significant achievement was the design and building of the Queen Elizabeth class of super-dreadnoughts. This division of five large, fast, heavily armored ships, powered by oil and carrying heavier guns than those on any previous dreadnought, played a decisive role at the Battle of Jutland, the long-awaited Armageddon of Jacky Fisher's dreams. Immeasurably superior to any earlier battleship, they continued to form the backbone of British naval strength well into the Second World War, when Winston Churchill, once again First Lord and then Prime Minister, had reason to be grateful for their presence.

  The dominant naval weapon of the era, despite the advent of the torpedo, was the great gun: the long-barreled naval cannon which fired a heavy shell down a rifled tube, lofting the spiralling projectile thousands of yards to plunge onto an enemy ship, piercing and penetrating heavy armor to burst inside turrets or hull, spreading fire, devastation, chaos, and death. The size and weight of one of these shells grew immensely as the diameter of the barrel and the projectile increased. Dreadnought, Fisher's first all-big-gun ship, was armed with ten heavy guns, each firing a shell 12 inches in diameter and weighing 850 pounds. In the building programs that followed, 1906 through early 1909, a total of sixteen dreadnoughts-ten battleships and six battle cruisers-were equipped with 12-inch guns. In the 1909 program, at Fisher's urgent demand, the diameter of barrel and shell was dramatically increased to 13.5 inches.* This addition of only an inch and a half in the diameter of the shell increased the projectile's weight from 850 pounds to 1,250 pounds.

  By the time Churchill arrived at the Admiralty, eighteen dreadnoughts with 13.5-inch guns had been launched, laid down, or authorized, although none had gone to sea. Nevertheless, as soon as he became First Lord, he immediately sought to go one size better. Within a few months, he would have to stand before the House of Commons and, in the 1912 Naval Estimates, ask for money to build five more giant ships. He decided to propose an even bigger gun, which would hurl a mammoth 15-inch, 1,920-pound projectile 35,000 yards. He took his plan to Fisher. "No one who has not experienced it has any idea of the passion and eloquence of this old lion when thoroughly roused on a technical subject," Churchill wrote. "To shrink from the endeavour was treason to the Empire," Fisher roared at Churchill. "What was it that enabled Jack Johnson to knock out his opponents? It was the big punch."

  Emboldened, Churchill ordered the new gun designed and produced. Redesigning dreadnoughts to carry the new weapons was complicated and risky. If the guns were enlarged, everything must

  * 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.

  be enlarged: turrets, armor, the ships themselves. This meant a significant increase in cost. And all this had to be done before it was known whether the new gun would work. "If only we could make a trial gun and test it thoroughly before gi
ving the orders for the whole of the guns of all the five ships, there would be no risk," Churchill wrote about his dilemma. "But then we should lose an entire year and five great vessels would go into the line of battle carrying an inferior weapon to that which we had it in our power to give them." Worried, the young First Lord went back to Fisher: "He was steadfast and even violent. So I hardened my heart and took the plunge." Forty of the huge rifles were ordered. One gun was rushed along four months ahead of the others to test it for stress, range, and accuracy in actual firing. Even so, Churchill and the navy were irrevocably committed. The first of the new ships, Queen Elizabeth, did not go to sea for three years. During all this time, Churchill waited in suspense: "Fancy if they failed. What a disaster. What an exposure. No excuse would be accepted. It would all be brought home to me-'rash, inexperienced,' 'before he had been there a month,' 'altering all the plans of his predecessors' and producing 'this ghastly fiasco,' 'the mutilation of all the ships of the year.' What could I have said?" The gun was a brilliant success, and British dreadnoughts which carried it were able to fire a shell 40 percent heavier than any that could be fired back at them. Even during his long, anxious wait, Churchill was entranced with what he was creating. In May 1912, he told the annual banquet of the Royal Academy that "everything in the naval world is directed to the manifestation at a particular place during the compass of a few minutes of a shattering, blasting, overbearing force." A few days later, describing the impact of a heavy shell upon a warship, he gave the House of Commons a graphic metaphor. In order to imagine "a battle between two great modern iron-clad ships, you must not think of… two men in armor striking at each other with heavy swords. It is more like a battle between two egg shells striking each other with hammers… The importance of hitting first, hitting hardest, and keeping on hitting… really needs no clearer proof."

  The new ships could deliver a knockout punch; it remained to provide them with armor and speed. In the Queen Elizabeths there was no skimping on armor; key areas such as the waterline and turrets were covered by thirteen and a half inches of solid steel. Churchill's ships could deliver and take a punch. Still, he was not satisfied. He wanted speed. The standard twenty-one knots of British dreadnoughts was not enough to overtake a fleeing enemy and bring it to battle. He needed battle-cruiser speed, twenty-five or twenty-six knots.

  Here, as in almost everything, he followed Fisher's constant cry: "Speed! Speed! Do you remember the recipe for jugged hare in 'Mrs. Glasse's Cookery'? First, catch your hare…" "The first of all necessities is speed so as to be able to fight When you like, Where you like, and How you like…"

  The battle cruisers had achieved their speed by sacrificing armor. This Churchill would not do. "I do not believe in the wisdom of the battle cruiser type," he wrote. "To put the value of a first class battleship into a vessel which cannot stand the pounding of a heavy action is false policy." The First Lord and his designers tried other avenues. They could give up a turret. All previous dreadnoughts had carried ten 12-inch or ten 13.5-inch guns paired in five turrets. A full broadside from the ten rifles of a 13.5-inch-gun ship, an Orion, a King George V, or an Iron Duke, weighed fourteen thousand pounds. But the great weight of the fifteen-inch shells in the new class gave a broadside of even greater weight, sixteen thousand pounds, fired from only eight guns. Two guns, an entire turret, were sacrificed and this two thousand tons devoted to propulsion machinery. More boilers were installed. Still it was not enough.

  The solution was oil fuel. Oil burned more fiercely than coal and gave off more heat. Steam created under higher pressure drove the shafts and turned the propellers faster. The ships moved more quickly through the water. Oil had other advantages. Oil could be transferred at sea from tankers to warships, dispensing with the constant need to go into port to take on coal.

  "The ordeal of coaling ship exhausted the whole ship's company," Churchill wrote. "… With oil a few pipes were connected with the shore or with a tanker and the ship sucked in its fuel with hardly a man having to lift a finger… Oil could be stowed in spare places in a ship from which it could be impossible to bring coal. As a coal ship used up her coal, increasingly large numbers of men had to be taken, if necessary from the guns, to shovel the coal from remote and inconvenient bunkers to bunkers nearer to the furnaces or to the furnaces themselves, thus weakening the fighting efficiency of the ship… For instance, nearly a hundred men were continually occupied in the Lion shoveling coal from one steel chamber to another without ever seeing the light of day or of the furnace fires."

  Oil fuel was already in use in many smaller ships. Submarines could not run on coal, and when Churchill arrived at the Admiralty, seventy-four submarines and fifty-six destroyers dependent exclusively on oil were built or building. Two American battleships, Oklahoma and Nevada, ordered in 1911, were to be oil powered. But America produced its own oil; the British Isles did not. Here lay the risk and gamble for Churchill. Converting dreadnoughts to oil meant giving them greater speed; it also meant basing British naval supremacy on a fuel obtainable only from overseas. Oil would have to be found, acquired, transported, and stored in enormous reserve tanks in quantities sufficient for many months of fighting.

  Even the vigorous Churchill could not accomplish all this by simple decree. He needed advice. He needed facts. He needed enthusiasm. He turned to Fisher and asked the Admiral to return to England and preside over a Royal Commission on Oil Supply. His letter was warm, blunt, stern, and supplicatory: "This liquid fuel problem has got to be solved… [It requires] the drive and enthusiasm of a big man. I want you for this, viz. to crack the nut. No one else can do it so well. Perhaps no one else can do it at all. I will put you in a position where you can crack the nut, if indeed it is crackable.

  "I recognize it is little enough I can offer you. But your gifts, your force, your hopes, belong to the Navy… and as your most ardent admirer and as the head of the Naval Service, I claim them now, knowing you will not grudge them. You need a plough to draw. Your propellers are racing in air."

  Fisher could not resist; he returned immediately and plunged into the work of the Royal Commission. Within six months, the Commission made its recommendation: the advantages of oil for the fleet were so overwhelming that a four-year reserve should be obtained and stored. Parliament authorized the spending of £10 million for storage tanks. Churchill simultaneously sent experts to the Persian Gulf to examine the potential of oil fields in that region. In July 1914, another £2.2 million was authorized to acquire a controlling interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. From the Queen Elizabeths forward, the new ships of the Royal Navy burned oil. The "lamentable exception," as Churchill termed it, was the 1913 Revenge class of fifteen-inch-gun battleships, which because of fears that wartime oil supplies would be inadequate were designed for coal. When Fisher returned as First Sea Lord at the outbreak of war, one of the first orders he gave was that Revenge, Royal Oak, Royal Sovereign, Resolution, and Ramillies-their hulls still on the building ways-be redesigned for oil.

  The navy benefitted from another important technical change during the Churchill years, although in this instance the First Lord served as referee rather than as instigator. Sir Percy Scott had never been satisfied with the state of Royal Navy gunnery. The greater range of the new guns created more problems in hitting the target. Artillerymen on land train their cannon around in the direction of the target, elevate the muzzle to achieve the proper range, and fire until the target is destroyed or they are told to stop. At sea, it has never been this easy. Besides the ceaseless roll of the deck, which requires constant changes in elevation, both firing ship and target ship are moving across the water, creating endlessly changing angles. Traditionally, solving these angles, estimating distances, feeling the roll of the deck were the task of the gunlayer, one to each great gun, inside the turrets of the battleships. In peacetime the system worked. Firing practice usually involved stationary targets, positioned at ranges no greater than two thousand yards. Under these conditions, the gunla
yers, peering down their barrels, could see where their shells were falling, make corrections, and-to the delight of senior officers and astounded spectators-pulverize the target. Sir Percy Scott considered this a dangerous exercise in fantasy. In wartime, he argued, individual gunlayers in the turrets would face not only the concussive blast of the guns, billowing heavy smoke, and spray resulting from high speed, but the fact that the target would be shooting back. At ranges four and five times greater than in peacetime, the individual gunlayer at turret level could not even see where his shells were landing. The result would be catastrophic: gunlayers who could not see, guns which could not be aimed, shells which could not strike-a fleet blind and helpless. Scott's solution was what he called Director Firing.

  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?