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

by Robert K. Massie

  On April 30, 1913, Lichnowsky first met Winston Churchill at a dinner in honor of the King. The First Lord immediately declared that "the German fleet was the only obstacle to a really intimate understanding between the two countries." Lichnowsky thought Churchill "thoroughly pleasant and genial, but-he wrote to Bethmann-"as he is very vain, and is bent, come what may, on playing a brilliant part, it will be necessary for us to humor his vanity and to avoid doing anything that might make him look ridiculous. I should not feel inclined to overestimate his influence on the Government's foreign policy. Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith… regard him as impulsive and flighty." Churchill was indeed determined to play a part. In October 1913, the First Lord told a meeting of Liberal women in Dundee that strengthening the Royal Navy was essential to peace. Britain's naval supremacy, he declared, accounted for the steady improvement in relations with Germany. "It was the feeling of insufficient security and not calm confidence in their own strength which gave rise to irritation between the nations of the earth. If men knew they were secure against any risk of attack, a feeling of calm security spread through the country and it caused freer and better relations with other nations."

  Churchill's speech, telegraphed to Berlin, drew enthusiastic applause from the Kaiser, who seized on the First Lord's thesis as a vindication for the German Navy. "What a triumph for Tirpitz!" wrote William II. "Best thanks for the compliment, Winston Churchill! For me and all who with me framed and extended the Navy Law… no more brilliant justification could be imagined or expected… A fresh proof of the old theory I have so often maintained that only ruthless, manly, and unafrighted maintenance of our own interests impresses the English and is at length compelling them to seek a rapprochement with us; never the so-called accommodation which they only and invariably take for flabbiness and cowardice. I shall therefore go on ruthlessly and implacably with the execution of the Navy Law down to the smallest detail in spite of all opposition… England comes to us, not in spite of, but because of my Imperial Navy!!"

  At the end of May 1914, the Admiralty announced that in June major units of the British Fleet would be making ceremonial visits to Baltic ports. Vice Admiral Sir George Warrender would lead the Second Battle Squadron, four of the latest dreadnoughts including King George V, Ajax, Audacious, and Centurion, into Kiel. Rear Admiral Sir David Beatty would take the First Battle Cruiser Squadron, including Lion, Princess Royal, Queen Mary, and New Zealand, up to Kronstadt, the naval harbor of St. Petersburg.

  For a while, it seemed that Winston Churchill also might come to Kiel to meet his counterpart, Admiral Tirpitz, on the deck of a dreadnought. Ballin and Cassel, undeterred by the failure of the Haldane mission two years before, hoped that if the two men got together, the First Lord might persuade the State Secretary to moderate the arms race. Cassel reported that Churchill was excited by the prospect of grappling with Tirpitz. On May 20, Churchill proposed to Grey that he make the visit, suggesting that he might discuss limiting the size of capital ships and reducing concentrations of ships in Home Waters; reopen the question of a Naval Holiday; and banish the secrecy surrounding naval shipbuilding in British and German dockyards. "This policy of secrecy was instituted by the British Admiralty a few years ago with the worst results for us for we have been much less successful in keeping our secrets than the Germans," Churchill wrote to Grey. "We should give naval attaches equal reciprocal facilities to visit the dockyards to see what was going on. This would reduce espionage on both sides which is a continuing cause of suspicion and ill-will." Grey was dubious about a Churchill visit, fearing that more harm than good might result if he unleashed the First Lord on Admiral von Tirpitz. In Berlin, the Kaiser vetoed an invitation unless Asquith first asked for one. If this occurred, the First Lord "would be greeted with pleasure." Grey was unenthusiastic and Asquith did not ask. Churchill did not accompany the battleships to Kiel, although until the last minute a harbor mooring buoy was reserved for the Enchantress.

  On the early morning of June 23, the gray shapes of the Second Battle Squadron emerged from the mist ten miles off the German Baltic coast. When they entered the port, the mist had evaporated and Kiel Harbor was bathed in sunshine. Yachts and naval launches circled the ships, and the shore was black with spectators. Sir George Warrender and his captains boarded the German flagship, Friedrich der Grosse, to be welcomed by Admiral Friedrich von Ingenhol, Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet.

  They went ashore to the Royal Castle, where Prince Henry and Princess Irene greeted them in unaccented English. In the afternoon Prince Henry visited the British flagship, King George V, and described her as "the finest ship afloat." The following day, Admiral von Tirpitz arrived from Berlin, hoisted his flag in the battleship Friedrich Karl, and invited the English officers to his cabin. Again,

  English was spoken, and Tirpitz, sipping champagne, described for his guests the development of the German Navy. That afternoon, all ships in the harbor, British and German, thundered twenty-one-gun salutes as the Kaiser arrived, on board the Hohenzollern, which had passed through the Kiel Canal. Airplanes and a zeppelin circled overhead; this ceremony was marred when one of the planes crashed into the sea. Proceeding to its anchorage, the gold and white Hohenzollern passed the mammoth King George V, whose decks and turrets were lined by sailors in white and by red-jacketed marines. Once the Imperial yacht was anchored a signal fluttered up, inviting all British senior officers aboard. In full-dress uniform, the British admiral and captains climbed the Hohenzollern's accommodation ladder and were received by the enthusiastic Emperor. On June 25, the Kaiser, wearing the uniform of a British Admiral of the Fleet, paid his first and only visit to a British dreadnought. Admiral Warrender served lunch. His guests were led to his private dining room, paneled in mahogony and furnished with comfortable leather chairs and sofas. They ate at small tables set with flowers, and listened to an orchestra playing works by German composers. War-render gave a speech hailing the spirit of good-fellowship between the British and German fleets. William was in high spirits; he made jokes, poked fun at the top hat of a diplomat present, and asked whether sailors in the British Navy ever swore.

  That same day the yacht regatta began. For the rest of the week the harbor and the sea approaches to Kiel were flecked with sails. On Friday the twenty-sixth, the Kaiser invited Warrender, the British Ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen, Prince Henry, and Tirpitz to race with him aboard the Meteor. Meanwhile, officers and sailors of the British squadron were fraternizing with German officers and with the townspeople of Kiel. German officers in white waistcoats, with gold braid on their trousers, sat drinking whiskey and soda in the wardrooms of British ships, while young British officers attended tennis matches, tea dances, dinner parties, and balls, where they flirted with German girls. Married English officers were invited to the homes of married German officers. The town of Kiel provided competitive games for English seamen: soccer matches, relay races, tugs of war. Every day, the German Admiralty offered hundreds of free railway passes so that English sailors could visit Berlin and Hamburg. In a somber moment, British and German officers stood bareheaded at the funeral of the pilot killed as the Hohenzollern entered the harbor.

  There were moments when the fact that the two fleets had been built to fight each other could not be ignored. British officers heard whispers that the Kaiserin and her sons had not come because they so disliked England. German officers who seemed carried away by British good-fellowship found Commander von Miiller, the German Naval Attache in London, at their elbows, hissing urgently; "Be on your guard against the English. England is ready to strike; war is imminent, and the object of this visit is only spying. They want to see how prepared we are. Whatever you do, tell them nothing about our U-boats!" The only evidence of British "spying" was shaky. Fuddled old Lord Brassey, an ardent yachtsman and friend of the Kaiser's, set off for shore one day with a single sailor in a dinghy from his yacht, Sunbeam, and found himself inside the U-boat dock of the Kiel building yards, which was closed to civilians. A
rrested and kept under guard until identified, he was released in time for dinner. Admiral Warrender offered Admiral von Ingehol and his officers complete freedom of all British ships except for the wireless room and the fire-control section of the conning towers. The German Admiral was forced to refuse, as he could not respond by showing British officers through German ships. When Tirpitz and Ingehol came to lunch on board King George V, Warrender repeated his invitation. Tirpitz refused, but Ingehol consented to go inside one of the 13.5-inch gun turrets, which was rotated and the guns elevated for his inspection.

  On Sunday, June 28, the Kaiser went racing again aboard the Meteor. At two-thirty that afternoon, a telegram arrived in Kiel announcing the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Admiral von Muller, Chief of the Naval Cabinet, ordered a launch and set out to find his master. "We overhauled the Meteor sailing on a northerly course with a faint breeze," Muller wrote. "The Kaiser was standing in the stern with his guests, watching the arrival of our launch with some anxiety. I called out to him that I was the bearer of grave news and that I would throw the written message across. But His Majesty insisted upon knowing at once what it was all about so I gave him the message by word of mouth… The Kaiser was very calm and merely asked, 'Would it be better to abandon the race?' "

  The character of Kiel Week changed. Flags were lowered to half-mast, and receptions, dinners, and a ball at the Royal Castle were cancelled. Early the next morning, the Kaiser departed, intending to go to Vienna and the Archduke's funeral. Warrender struggled to preserve the spirit of the week. Speaking to a hall filled with sailors from both fleets, he spoke of the friendship between the two countries and called for three cheers for the German Navy. A German admiral called for three cheers for the British Navy. The two admirals shook hands. On the morning of June 30, the British squadron weighed anchor and left the harbor. The signal masts of German warships flew the signal "Pleasant journey." From his flagship, Warrender sent a wireless message back to the German Fleet: "Friends in past and friends forever."

  CHAPTER 45

  The Coming of Armageddon: Berlin

  Winston Churchill gave his final peacetime Naval Estimates to the House of Commons on March 17, 1914. He spoke somberly of the situation in Europe:

  "The causes which might lead to a general war have not been removed and often remind us of their presence. There has not been the slightest abatement of naval and military preparation. On the contrary, we are witnessing this year increases of expenditure by Continental powers on armaments beyond all previous expenditure. The world is arming as it was never armed before. Every suggestion for arrest or limitation has so far been ineffectual."

  Weapons were accumulating in the armories of states harboring bitter antagonisms. France had waited forty-four years for revanche and the rejoining of Alsace and Lorraine. Russia, defeated in the Far East in 1905, humiliated in the Balkans in 1908, could not afford to suffer further abasement; if another challenge were offered by Austria and Germany, it would be accepted. Austria-Hungary, facing disintegration from within, believed it could save itself by striking down the external source of its difficulties, the Kingdom of Serbia. The Hapsburg monarchy had Germany's pledge of support.

  Germans were ready for war. Britain's gradual adherence to the Triple Entente made more real the nightmare of Encirclement. Britain, for the moment distracted by Ireland, had fears in Europe- primarily of the German Fleet-but few antagonisms. Indeed, her traditional antagonisms with France and Russia had been resolved. Whether, or for what reasons, Britain would fight remained unclear. In Churchill's words, "the vials of wrath were full."

  "I shall not live to see the world war," Bismarck said to Ballin in 1891, "but you will. And it will start in the East."

  By the summer of 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had shrunk from the days of Hapsburg magnificence, but it still was larger than any Continental power except Russia. The lands ruled by the Emperor Franz Josef were a patchwork of provinces, races, and nationalities spread across Central Europe and the upper Balkans. Three fifths of the Empire's 40 million people were Slavs-Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins-but the Empire was ruled by its two non-Slavic races, the Germanic Austrians and the Magyar Hungarians. The structure of government, a dual monarchy, reflected this arrangement: the Emperor of Austria was also the King of Hungary; Austrians and Magyars controlled the bureaucracy; there was place for the Slavs neither at court nor in the government.

  Austria-Hungary's nemesis, a nation of free Slavs, the young, independent Kingdom of Serbia, was set close by the sprawling, multinational empire. Serbia's existence acted as a magnet on the restless populations of Austria's South Slav provinces: Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Montenegro. Inside Serbia and in the South Slav provinces, nationalists longed to break up the Hapsburg Empire and weld the dissident provinces into a single Greater South Slav Kingdom. Belgrade, capital of Serbia, was a center of inflammatory Slav propaganda distributed inside the Empire.

  Ultimately, either the Emperor Franz Josef or his heir, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, would decide how Austria would meet the Serbian challenge. If he lived long enough, it would be the Emperor, but in 1914 Franz Josef was eighty-four. His reign of sixty-six years, the longest in modern Europe, had been marked by a sequence of political defeats and personal calamities. The bald little gentleman with muttonchop whiskers had come to the throne in 1848 as a slim, wavy-haired youth of eighteen. He was still a young man when the northern Italian provinces, Lombardy and Venice, were stripped away. Defeat by Prussia in 1866 led to expulsion of Hapsburg influence in Germany. In 1867, Franz Josef's brother, blond, dreamy Maximilian, briefly installed as Emperor of Mexico, was executed by a firing squad on a Mexican hillside. Franz Josef's only son, rakish Crown Prince Rudolf, killed himself and his mistress in a suicide pact at Mayerling. Franz Josef's wife, Empress Elisabeth, once the most beautiful princess in Europe, withdrew after six years of marriage and wandered Europe for four decades until she was struck down by an anarchist's knife. Franz Josef's response to blows was to tighten his emotions and steel himself for further shocks. Facing political challenge, he vowed to maintain the authority of the Crown and the integrity of the Empire. He had no intention of appeasing the South Slavs by modifying the structure of government and giving them a voice.

  This conciliatory course was proposed by Franz Josef's nephew and heir. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a ponderous, glowering man with brush-cut hair, had offended his uncle by marrying a Bohemian of insufficient rank, Countess Sophie Chotek. The old Emperor insisted that the Archduke renounce the throne for any children he might have from the marriage; Countess Sophie, wife of the future Emperor, although created a Duchess, was forced in public processions to walk behind the forty-four Hapsburg Archduchesses. Franz Ferdinand himself was restricted to ceremonial functions; he was allowed to inspect army barracks, attend maneuvers, and occasionally to visit provincial capitals. Time was on his side, but he worried that when, eventually, he came to the throne, the disintegration of the Empire would be irreparably advanced. His solution to the problem of nationalist agitation in the South Slav provinces was to reconcile those populations by a radical reconstruction of the structure of the Imperial government: transformation of the Dual Monarchy into a Triad, in which the South Slavs shared power with the Austrians and Magyars. For these views, the Archduke was warmly disliked, especially by the Magyars, who did not relish the thought of diluting their own powerful grip on the Imperial administration.

  Meanwhile, another solution for Austria's troubles was growing in popularity: eliminate the source of Slav agitation by crushing Serbia. To the conservative ruling class of the Empire, a preventive war seemed preferable to the kind of decomposition afflicting the Ottoman Empire and more bearable than the protracted negotiations and painful compromises that would be necessary to transform the dual structure into a triad. "Austria," reported the French Ambassador in Vienna on December 13, 1913, "finds herself in an impasse without knowing how she is to escape�
�� People here are becoming accustomed to the idea of a general war as the only possible remedy." The principal advocate of preventive war, General Count Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, Chief of the General Staff of the Austrian Army, spoke of Serbia as "a dangerous little viper"; he longed to crush the "viper" in its nest. Twice, Austria had mobilized against Serbia, during the Bosnian annexation crisis of 1908-1909 and during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. Each time, Conrad had been held back; in 1908, because "at the last moment His Majesty was against it"; in 1912-1913, he complained that he had been "left in the lurch" by Germany.

  By 1914, as Conrad knew, the Hapsburg monarchy was too weak to undertake initiatives, military or diplomatic, without assurance of German support. But Conrad also knew that German support must be forthcoming.

  The continued existence of Austria-Hungary was vital to the German Empire. Austria was the Reich's only reliable ally. If Austria disintegrated, Germany would face Russia, France, and possibly England alone. In the Wilhelmstrasse, therefore, the preservation of Austria as a Great Power became a cardinal point of German policy. Some German diplomatists worried about this virtually unqualified support for the Hapsburg monarchy. In May 1914, Baron von Tschirschky, the German Ambassador in Vienna, uttered a cry of near despair: "I constantly wonder whether it really pays to bind ourselves so tightly to this phantasm of a state which is cracking in every direction." Tschirschky's cry was ignored. "Our own vital interests demand the preservation of Austria," declared Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg.

  The Austrian government understood and was prepared to exploit this German predicament. For months, the Kaiser and General von Moltke, Chief of the German General Staff, had given Austria explicit, hearty encouragement to take action against Serbia, even if it meant a German confrontation with Serbia's ally, Russia. On October 26, 1913, the Kaiser had a conversation in Vienna with Count Berchtold, the Austrian Foreign Minister. William began with high-flown talk of the "world historic process," declaring that a war was inevitable in which the Germanic peoples would have to stave off "a mighty impulse of Slavdom." "The Slavs were born to serve and not to rule, and this must be brought home to them," he continued. Specifically, in the case of Serbia, "If His Majesty Francis Joseph demands something, the Serbian Government must yield, and if she does not, then Belgrade will be bombarded and occupied until the will of His Majesty is fulfilled. You may rest assured that I stand behind you and am ready to draw the sword." As he spoke, William moved his hand to the hilt of his sword. The interview concluded with another pledge. "His Majesty ostentatiously used the occasion to assure me that we could absolutely and completely count on him," said Berchtold. "This was the red thread which ran through the utterances of the illustrious Sovereign and when I laid stress on this on taking my departure and thanked him as I left, His Majesty did me the honor to say that whatever came from the Vienna Foreign Office was a command for him."