Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  Yet Fisher left as much destruction in his wake as any man ever did. Rather than seeking consensus, he divided. Tirpitz was the opposite: he sought alliances whenever he could, though both he and Fisher would often sound out junior officers’ opinions over those of more senior men. Whichever way they went, they were bound to ruffle feathers. As obsessive as Tirpitz was in building his own vision of a German fleet, Fisher was just as dogged in protecting what he saw as Britain’s dwindling capability to maintain its imperial bearer of power.

  Fisher’s early life and career

  John Arbuthnot Fisher was born in 1841 in Ramboda, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), of British parents, the eldest of eleven siblings, four of whom did not survive their early years. His mother, Sophie (or Sophia), the daughter of a churchman, had in 1840 married a British army officer, Captain William Fisher, who was serving as aide-de-camp (AdC) to the governor of Ceylon, Sir Robert Wilmot-Horton. Fisher’s father had decided to buy a coffee plantation. It was not an auspicious beginning: the coffee market collapsed that year.

  Fisher grew up to be a stocky man. His rather bulbous eyes and pouting lips were not characteristics of classic good looks; nevertheless, throughout his life women found him attractive and he learnt how to best play his allure to his advantage.

  In 1847, aged just six, Fisher was sent to school in London; he never saw his father again. Whenever Captain William sent him funds (usually meagre), Fisher maintained occasional contact. He applied himself to his studies and to other interests: he enjoyed fishing and shooting, although one day he took a shot at the butler and claimed that he had mistaken the poor man for game.

  Fisher was lucky enough to be taken under the wing of the Ceylon governor’s wife, Lady Wilmot-Horton, a woman with a handsome fortune. In part, through her acquaintance with one of the last surviving of Nelson’s captains, Sir William Parker, Fisher was able to enter the Royal Navy. Fisher was also coincidentally supported in his application by another Nelsonian connection, the Lord High Admiral’s niece. At the time a senior officer usually had at his disposal a commission that he could give away how he liked. Parker had two commissions – one he gave to Fisher.

  From the grave, Nelson’s influence on the younger Fisher lived on. On 12 July 1854, when he was thirteen, his first ship’s posting was to HMS Victory. Though she was still an active warship (and had been made ready for the Crimea), life on the Victory was almost as it had been a half-century before. One of the more colourful surviving traditions was in the turning of the capstan, the spoked winch on decks that teams of sailors pushed around to heave in a ship’s anchor cable and raise the anchor itself: the rhythm of work was still set to a fiddler’s rhythmic tune.

  Just how little the Royal Navy had changed by 1854 becomes stark when one looks at the make-up of the seaborne force that was to bombard Sebastopol: of twenty-seven ships, only six were driven by screw-propulsion; the rest were powered by sail. It was small wonder that gunnery had advanced so little. Indeed, the bombarding force came off badly, with two of its ships being badly damaged and 340 sailors dead.

  After a short stay on Victory, Fisher transferred to Calcutta on 29 August. She was an 84-gun ship of the line, so-called because designed to fight in the line of battle (the ‘line of battle ship’ is the origin of the term ‘battleship’). Immediately, the teenage Fisher made his mark by the manner of his arrival. Maybe not fully aware that the man to whom he was addressing himself was an admiral, he handed the old, gold-braided gentleman before him his letter of introduction with such an air of self-confidence that he was invited to dine that same evening. The following January, Fisher set sail for the Baltic on Calcutta but by March 1855 he was already back in Plymouth and on the 2nd joined the 91-gun Agamemnon, also a ship of the line that combined steam with sail.

  In July 1856 Fisher was made a midshipman, joining a 21-gun corvette, the very next day heading out for China. Her Majesty’s Ship bore an auspicious name: Highflyer. On the ship, Fisher crossed paths with a man who left a deep impression on him, Captain Charles Shadwell. To the end of his life, Fisher wore without exception the cufflinks gifted to him by the captain. On them were inscribed the Shadwell family crest with the motto ‘Loyal a la mort’. Those cufflinks, and the gift of Shadwell’s library of leather-bound books, symbolised the deep bond that was to grow between the two.

  In June 1857 Fisher finally saw action, at the Battle of the Peiho Forts in northern China, near the city of Tianjin (once Tientsin). In his own words he was ‘armed to the teeth like a Greek brigand, all swords and pistols’.2 By October the duties of watch officer were his, a sure sign that he was being singled out for greater things. As the year came to an end, Canton fell. This was, needless to say, an extraordinary opening chapter for any sixteen year old.

  By 1859 Shadwell’s favourite midshipman became the captain’s aide-de-camp. It was a posting normally reserved for a more senior officer, so the move was unusual, but little was usual about young Jacky Fisher. He was once again back in the thick of it. When envoys were sent on their way to Tientsin to ratify the treaty ending the Second Opium War, Shadwell led a party ashore through the mudflats to try to capture the Taku Forts that guarded the entrance of the Peiho River. It turned into a rout and four of the seven gunboats were sunk. The badly wounded Shadwell was, unfairly, forced to resign, an easy scapegoat for thepress.

  The fighting had been fierce. In Fisher’s words:

  You sank up to your knees at least every step, and just fancy the slaughter going 500 yards in the face of that fire … right in front of you and on each flank … They had horrid fireballs firing at us when we landed. I saw one poor fellow with his eye and part of his face burnt right out. If a piece struck you, it stuck to you and regularly burnt you away till it was all gone.3

  Shadwell took care of his protégé. In 1860 when he passed on command to Rear Admiral Sir James Hope he made sure that Fisher was taken in under the new commander. Hope would be his second mentor, a man who would similarly and significantly shape his young protege’s career. He had, as he put it, ‘got into such a good berth’, that his shipmates were ‘very jealous’ of him. On his nineteenth birthday, 25 January, Fisher was examined for and awarded his commission as a lieutenant (under the acting rank of mate) on board HMS Cambrian.

  I went up on January 25th on board the Cambrian before the three captains, and they gave me a regular bounce-out. It took altogether three days and, as I told you last mail, I had the satisfaction of getting a first-class certificate. Well, I came on board the Chesapeake and handed in my certificate. After a short time the Admiral [Hope] sent for me and told me he was very pleased to see I had passed such a good examination, and that as a reward for it and on account of old Shadwell’s report of me, he should take me as his Flag Mate, and that he would take care to look out for me always.4

  In March, Fisher was offered a lieutenancy on Esk. He turned this down, as Esk was not bound for action. Four days later, on the 28th, he received his lieutenancy and instead joined a ship he described a ‘horrid old tub’, Furious. On Furious, Fisher obtained his certificates in gunnery and navigation, both first class, with 963 out of a possible 1,000 for navigation – some of the highest marks seen in years. For his efforts he was awarded the Beaufort Testimonial (named after Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, whose Beaufort Scale became for geographers the accepted measure of wind speed) – a prize for the best results in navigation. By the time he arrived back in Portsmouth a year later in 1861, his commanding officer, Sir W A Bruce was unequivocal in his praise: ‘As a sailor, as an officer, a navigator and a gentleman, I cannot praise him too highly’.5

  As a result, Fisher’s commission was also backdated by twelve months, which would make a considerable difference to his seniority in the ‘lists’ and the extra pay was very welcome. In January 1862 he was appointed to HMS Excellent as a gunnery staff officer. The Admiralty had by now started to focus on improving gunnery performance, to which end every gunnery lieutenant had to undertake six months of tr
aining at the Royal Naval College. Until he passed he remained only a lieutenant, third class. Not to anyone’s surprise, Fisher passed with a first-class certificate.

  He was starting to be noticed where it mattered. On a regular visit to the ship, an Admiralty board member was overheard asking whether Fisher was as good a sailor as he clearly was a gunnery officer. Not one to miss an opportunity at self-promotion, Fisher stepped up: ‘My Lords, I am Lieutenant Fisher, just as good a seaman as a gunnery man’.6

  In March 1863 he got the prize that he was after, that of gunnery lieutenant on Warrior, one of the most advanced ships in the fleet. Innovative for the age, the 14-knot ship was the world’s first iron-hulled seagoing armoured ship. She was well-armed and one of the first in the Royal Navy to have breech-loading guns. Fisher stayed with the ship for over three years.

  Born in 1849 in Küstrin in what was then Brandenburg (today Kostrzyn nad Odrą in Poland), son of Rudolf Tirpitz, Alfred was almost a decade younger than the man who would figure so prominently in his later life. Family tradition had it that the origins of the family’s name (thought to have been ‘Czern von Terpitz’) were Silesian and Bohemian, and that their ennoblement had been lost in the passage of the Thirty Years War.* Whatever the truth, Alfred Tirpitz would eventually return ‘von’ to the family name when he was ennobled by the Kaiser on New Year’s Day, 1900.

  While Fisher’s star was on the rise, Tirpitz did not shine at school, where he had not displayed any of the particular aptitudes that Fisher had. He did not stand out and found study hard, mathematics especially. The story goes that when his teacher complained to his father in a conversation that he lacked intelligence, Tirpitz’s attitude – when he found out about it – was one of delight. If the expectations were so low, he figured he wouldn’t have to work so hard. When he was fifteen in 1864, his overall grade was ranked mäßig (moderate) and his father started genuinely to worry that his son would not make it into university.

  Early on in 1865 Tirpitz decided that he had had enough. It was to be either the army or navy, but no more school. Curt von Maltzahn (with whom Tirpitz formed a lifelong friendship) had just joined the navy and this made up Tirpitz’s mind. In April, after his father had provided tutors with whom he could work to catch up, Tirpitz was able to enter Prussian military service as a cadet. Rudolf Tirpitz had not, in fact, been that keen on the idea of naval service for his son, but eventually reluctantly agreed. Much to his own surprise, Tirpitz passed the exams, fifth among twenty-four.

  Amonth laterhewas aboard Arcona, based in the recently conquered port of Kiel, captured by Prussia in the war for Schleswig-Holstein against Denmark, and in June, under the command of Captain Otto Batsch, he boarded the Niobe training ship purchased from England just three years previously. It speaks to both the quality of the candidates and to the education they received that six of Tirpitz’s classmates from the 1865 class on Niobe would reach the rank of admiral.7

  Once at sea Tirpitz visited the newly captured ports of Schleswig-Holstein, continued to the Skagerrak and from there to England. That October of 1865 Niobe made the open Atlantic trip in very heavy weather to the Azores. For the young cadet, it was exciting, but very much a baptism of fire. However, while the seafaring was gruelling, performance in the primary art, warfare, was unimpressive. In gunnery drills, shooting at a stationary target at 300m (330yds), they only managed two hits in thirty-six shots.

  Tirpitz’s first visits to Plymouth attest to the admiration he had for the Royal Navy: ‘As a sea cadet I soon found from my own experiences that Prussians were still esteemed in England … Our tiny naval-officer corps looked up to the British navy with admiration and our seamen sailed in those days quite as much in English-built ships as in German.’8 In fact, the nascent Prussian navy relied on the British for guns, dockyard repairs, coaling and supplies. None of these could be done in home ports – Germany did not have the resources.

  In 1866 Niobe continued to Cadiz and on to Lisbon where rumours reached them about the possibility of war between Prussia and Austria. Nervous that she had been spotted in the channel by an Austrian warship, the ship quickly made her way back to Plymouth and thence to Kiel, where it was learnt that the ship they had seen was, in fact, Norwegian. Tirpitz, manning the guns, felt a certain disappointment at having seen no action. When war was declared, he had to report to a new ship, the Gazelle. On it he saw no action either but, already a sea cadet, was now promoted to midshipman.†

  In his new life he was learning fast and becoming a man. Like Jellicoe, off the Tripoli coast he also nearly lost his life, launching a boat to rescue a fellow sailor who had fallen overboard. He was not a strong swimmer and when his own rescue boat capsized he almost drowned. By the time he was picked up he was unconscious.

  At the end of 1866 Tirpitz was appointed watch officer to another British-built vessel, the training-ship Musquito. In the company of Niobe and another, Rover, the three ships left for Plymouth. On the trip Tirpitz displayed his navigation skills when he confidently and correctly announced that the navigation officer was almost a hundred miles off course. Tirpitz had calculated the ship’s correct location to be off Cape Finisterre.

  Like Fisher, Tirpitz had also to be thrifty to get by. He discouraged his father from sending his usual 10 marks a month when he could.

  Tirpitz continued in his cadet training – in 1867 on Thetis, yet another ship bought from the British. It was badly run and a new commander, Lieutenant Commander Eduard von Knorr, was brought on board to clean things up. The captain’s wife even made unsuccessful advances on Knorr to try to win him over to the ship’s lax ways.

  The North German Confederation now included Hamburg and, as a consequence, had ‘the world’s third largest merchant marine’.9 In the new Reichstag, a ten-year programme was approved for the construction of sixteen armoured ships and a host of support vessels. The next year, in August 1868, Tirpitz was able to leave Thetis after he had successfully completed his artillery exam. He began two years in Kiel at the naval school, which had itself only just been opened two years previously by Prince Adalbert. The routine was packed: twenty-two lectures a week, each of them ninety minutes long. Tirpitz was also now starting to get more confident as his work improved. He passed eighth out of forty-six; two of the eight were already sub lieutenants.

  Fisher was promoted to the rank of commander on 2 August 1869, aged thirty-two. In November he was given command of Donegal, commissioned on the 25th. A year later, in June 1870 he was transferred to Ocean, the flagship of Vice Admiral Sir Henry Kellett, Commander-in-Chief, China.

  The young German navy was starting to grow and now possessed three armoured frigates, among which was König Wilhelm. At 9,800 tons she was, on paper at least, the world’s most powerful warship. On this vessel Sub Lieutenant Tirpitz reported, in May 1870, as watch officer: she had a crew of 750 sailors and mounted eighteen 24cm and five 21cm guns, but she was not well-maintained and the ship that could normally easily manage 14 knots was reduced to 10 knots because of the drag created by the heavy mass of barnacles (60 tons of them) that she was carrying on the hull.

  A year later, in May 1871 Tirpitz was able to get off König Wilhelm and join a small gunboat, Blitz, as first officer. It turned out to be a comfortable summer. The boat was used as a kind of chauffeur service by Prince Friedrich-Karl, a nephew of Kaiser Wilhelm I, and it gave Tirpitz an important entree into royal circles. At the end of the year, Blitz took up watch duty on the River Elbe. A long season of balls and shooting ensued.

  In summer 1871 Rudolf sent Tirpitz a copy of Captain Reinhold Werner’s pamphlet, The German Reich Navy. It got him thinking about what sort of navy Germany should build and why. Werner had also lobbied for the acquisition of Helgoland, a small but significantly-placed island off the Jade Basin, from the British, an exchange that Fisher later used as an example of British shortsightedness when it came to the emerging German naval threat. Heligoland, as it was known to the British, dominates the approaches to the German Jade
Basin and if in British possession during the First World War, while difficult to maintain, it could have been of enormous value.

  The minimal role that the new navy played in the Franco-Prussian war – apart from Knorr’s actions in the gunboat Meteor off Havana and the corvette Augusta’s commerce-raiding in the Bay of Biscay – left a deep mark in the minds of many German officers.* The proud traditions of Prussia’s military turned the navy’s growing sense of inferiority into an open sore.

  Aged thirty-two, Tirpitz was promoted to full Leutnant at the end of May 1872. That summer he was ordered into the North Sea to protect German herring boats off the coast of Aberdeen. He could learn first-hand that without sea power even the simple activity of herring fishing could be harassed and impaired by British supremacy on the water. This threat was barely concealed. At the end of the year, Tirpitz was transferred to an armoured frigate Friedrich Karl as watch officer. He was captained by the pamphleteer Captain Werner, whose works Rudolf had sent Alfred the previous summer. Tirpitz started to wonder if he was up to the challenge – such thoughts would never have entered Fisher’s mind, but Tirpitz often had moments of real doubt and suffered severe depression.

  With a corvette (Elizabeth) and a gunboat (Albatross), Tirpitz was about to embark on a year-and-a-half cruise around South America, Japan and the Caribbean on debt-collection assistance, a typical role in colonial navies. With him was Curt Maltzahn – seven years previously his inspiration to enter the navy – who now served under him.

  When Friedrich Karl had already sailed across the Atlantic, she was ordered back. The abdication in 1873 of the King of Spain, Amedeo, had put the property and lives of German nationals there at risk, and Friedrich Karl was to ‘fly the flag’ for the young Germany. She even landed a substantial shore party of 1,200 German sailors at Cartagena, giving Tirpitz some military experience. Surprisingly, Werner himself ended up in the dog-house: Bismarck accused him of exceeding his orders and he was replaced. When Friedrich Karl made her way back to Wilhelmshaven, Werner (who was acquitted of any misconduct) made his report on Tirpitz: ‘I only consider him suited for higher positions if he can prove that he fully understands how to be a better subordinate’.10