Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  Tirpitz was not one to be silenced by officers senior to him if he felt that his ideas were right. Another officer’s conclusions were different, but based on the same observations, Admiral Gustav von Senden foresaw the greatness ahead: ‘Tirpitz has too big a head of steam not to be a leader. He is ambitious, not choosy about his means, and of a sanguine disposition … He has never had a superior who could match him.’11 The rest of the year saw him take a short position on Musquito, from which he transferred with the captain and the crew to Nymphe, escorting Prince Friedrich-Karl on his tour of Scandinavia.

  Tirpitz prepared for his entry to the naval academy. Initially he struggled, but with the notification of his promotion to lieutenant commander in the autumn of 1875 soon gained the confidence needed for success. He was also able to survive financially without his father’s subsidy, and started to think of marriage. The next year, 1875, as a battery commander aboard Hansa, Tirpitz was able to show off his new skills in full view of Admiral Albrecht von Stosch, despite being momentarily blinded in one eye following an accident.

  Von Stosch was one of the two most important men who shaped the new German navy. He started the young navy’s modernisation right after the Franco-Prussian war, in 1872 creating the new navy academy in Kiel and founding two new corps more reflective of the times: the Machine Engineer Corps and the Torpedo Engineer Corps. Before he left office in 1873 he had embarked the navy on a ten-year building programme that his successor, Leo von Caprivi, took over. Caprivi, a distant relative of Rudolf Tirpitz, was also an army man. His hand was evident in the furtherance of the navy’s torpedo arm, with the introduction of the first torpedo division in Wilhelmshaven in October 1897 and the second in Kiel. He is also credited with far-sightedness in launching the first work on the Kiel Canal, completed ten years later, in 1895, although the story of the Kiel Canal has been somewhat mythologised. Commercial pressure led to its rebuilding and re-routing, not innovative naval planning. In Mürwik, the site of today’s German navy’s officer training school, the busts of Stosch and Caprivi stand side by side with Hipper and Scheer. But not Tirpitz: his later life caused his fall in favour.

  In May 1876 Tirpitz took up a position in Wilhelmshaven as battery officer on the frigate Kronprinz. He did not like the town, describing it as ‘desolate’, but he did not, at least, compromise his performance. His squadron commander, Batsch, now a rear admiral, noted his proficiency and used his influence to get Tirpitz transferred to the Kaiser, an 8,900-ton, English-built ironclad frigate. Years later, when he was at the Oberkommando in Berlin, he again served under its commander, Max von Goltz.

  Tirpitz was now about to initiate a critical phase in his career, reporting to Berlin to the Torpedo Experimental Commission. It had been set up a few years earlier by Admiral Stosch under Commander Alexander von Monts with a hundred of the newly designed torpedoes purchased from the English inventor, Robert Whitehead, and his armaments company, the Firma Stabilimento Tecnico in Fiume, Italy. Tirpitz was in charge of warheads and detonators.

  Unlike Fisher, at this early stage Tirpitz was not convinced by the new weapon. The ‘whole torpedo storyseems to me to more and more regrettable’.12 Nevertheless, he became adept with the weapon and soon concluded that ‘compared to the gun it is a very cheap means of destruction. As torpedo officer on Zieten, he scored three direct hits on a stationary target at a (what seems now ludicrously short) range of 730m (800yds). Stosch called Tirpitz’s after-action report ‘exemplary’.

  Before Fisher was appointed to the ironclad Hercules in January 1877, his career had run in parallel with that of Tirpitz. He had been transferred in 1872 to head of torpedo instruction on Excellent, which was the navy’s gunnery school. Even though the technology was young and not yet widely trusted, it gave Fisher, like Tirpitz, the opportunity to develop a name for himself as an expert in what he considered to be one of the most potentially important technological developments of his day. Four years later, in 1876 he wrote, ‘the issue of the next naval war will chiefly depend on the use that is made of the torpedo, not only in naval warfare but for the purposes of blockade’.13 Tirpitz had been somewhat more sceptical but became as strong a convert to the new weapon as Fisher. In some ways he went further, putting as much, if not more, emphasis on the development of the launch platform, the torpedo boat. It was looked down on by the more establishment officers, but its affordability as a weapons system was much of its appeal to Tirpitz.

  The new weapon, which by Jutland could hit targets at 14,000m (15,300yds), was still in its infancy and had teething problems. With a single screw it tended to run in a curve and had a tendency to sink. No one had thought that the lower salinity levels compared to the Fiume testing waters would make a difference, but they did, considerably lowering torpedo buoyancy. Tirpitz started to think about the design of the actual boats from which this new weapon would be launched, and about how to make them smaller, cheaper and faster to build.

  Stosch was pleased with how Tirpitz was systematically developing the torpedo’s potential. When Tirpitz succeeded in getting Whitehead in 1878 to take back a number of the earlier defective units, Stosch promoted him to director of torpedo development on Zieten. His previous commanding officer, Eduard von Heusner, was sent to the Admiralstab in Berlin to be head of the torpedo department. The twenty-nine-year-old Tirpitz felt fortunate to be ‘uninterruptedly in positions of independence’, and he recognised that the weapon would be significant only after years of focused development.

  Careers at mid-point

  Fisher now started a period of being moved from posting to posting. He was appointed to Hercules in January 1877 where he served until March. On the 2nd he took up the important position of flag captain to Vice Admiral Sir Astley Cooper Key, Commander-in-Chief, North America and the West Indies, on the armoured battleship Bellerophon. It was a prestigious command. Two new commands followed in 1878, first to Hercules and then to Valorous. The moves continued into 1879. Fisher went for a short time to the Pallas, where his attention was focused on committee work revising a gunnery manual, until he took up another command on Northampton at the end of September. The training regimen that he gave his men was hard. In fact, Fisher was notorious. It is said that in ten days he made his crew practise torpedo runs 150 times ‘when the whole navy had only done 200 in a year’.14

  Around the same time, midsummer 1880, Tirpitz participated in the first public torpedo demonstration in Germany. He was able to sink an old target vessel at 200m (220yds) with two hits. It was a promising start in the development of the new weapon. Based on his success, Stosch decided immediately to equip some large battleships with steam launches. The following day Tirpitz hit the Barbarossa amidships at 400m from a speeding boat; it was also the first hit from an underwater tube.

  It was clear that this performance by Tirpitz, as Stoschs protégé, had made his boss look good in front of Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the Kaiser’s brother and the crown prince. Through his superior Graf Schack von Wittenau, Stosch sent Tirpitz his congratulations: ‘To lead and carry out a military manoeuvre with such skill as you have is excellent’.15

  Breaking the Whitehead monopoly was important for Tirpitz and it reflected in his later dealings with contractors. He awarded a contract to Schwarzkopf to develop a German torpedo at its depot in Friedrichsort. It would be cheaper, faster and longer-ranged than Whitehead’s weapon.

  Back in England, Fisher took up command of Duke of Wellington in January 1881 before transferring to the battleship Inflexible, newly commissioned in July. The ship, seven years in the making, was one of the largest gunned and most heavily armoured in the Navy. But she was also an anomaly. Her muzzle-loading guns were slow and her sails rarely used. Even though she had such innovations as electrical lighting and torpedo tubes, the internal design of the ship was a nightmare – so maze-like that crew regularly became disorientated and lost. Fisher came up with the novel idea of painting the many decks and areas of the ship in different colours, with direction arrows h
elping guide the sailors running around in confusion below.

  During this time, Inflexible was in the Mediterranean. Fisher had an opportunity to meet Queen Victoria when she visited Menton. With her was a grandson, Prince Heinrich. The Queen did not like the Navy and made no bones about it – the Admiralty had stupidly refused to make Prince Albert an Admiral of the Fleet and the insult stuck – until she met Fisher. As was his way with women, Fisher was able to win her over with devotion and flattery.

  During the siege of Alexandria in July 1882, Fisher took command of a landing party and eventually ended up being billeted in the Khedive’s palace, the Ras-el-Tin. A British force had been sent to protect its financial interests against a populist rising aimed at removing the Khedive, whose ties to the British and French were resented. Many thought that Seymour, the commanding admiral, had overplayed the threat, but the unilateral action (the French refused to participate and moved its fleet to Port Said) pushed Britain into a military occupation which lasted until 1936. Needing reconnaissance information, Fisher designed a rather unusual solution: armour-plated protection mounted on a train. Its originality and effectiveness won Fisher press exposure in Britain and catapulted him into the public eye. But he became badly ill. His bouts of malaria would give his face a curious hue: his skin toned yellow, tinted with the effects of the fever. He was not well-off and could not afford to go home at his own expense. In the end, none other than the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Northbrook, intervened: ‘we can get many Inflexibles, but only one Jack Fisher.

  In September the same year – 1881 – Tirpitz was promoted to commander. The promotion had been long awaited, but it was made immediately on the spot after he had successfully torpedoed Elbe at 400m. From Blücher, Tirpitz had carried out the demonstration in front of Hohenzollern, Wilhelm’s royal yacht. As a result, the 1883 construction plans were changed to include ten large and twelve small torpedo boats, a number that Tirpitz himself would never have recommended for the same class construction. He felt that more testing was needed, but it was a sign of a growing confidence in this new weapon’s platform.

  Early in 1883 Jacky Fisher was invited to the Queen’s private residence, Osborne House in the Isle of Wight, a house that she and Prince Albert adored, a place where she could learn languages, and he could paint. This was a mark of how far Fisher had come. The Queen made allowances for Fisher, even permitting him to wear trousers (instead of the normally mandatory tights) for dancing, which he did with vigour and barely restrained enjoyment. Even his often slightly risqué jokes were appreciated by the sovereign: ‘With royalty he always had a marvellous talent for taking light-hearted banter to the very edge of that delicate boundary between respect and disrespect’.16 When the French visited Portsmouth in 1891 he told the Queen, concerned about the need to bolster friendship with the old enemy, ‘Yes, Your Majesty. I have arranged to kiss the French admiral on both cheeks!’ – at which point the Queen roared with laughter. In April he took up the command of Excellent, which he held for two years.

  In March 1883 Stosch offered the Kaiser his resignation. His successor was not, as many expected it to be, Admiral Batsch. It was another military man, Leo von Caprivi. Many in the German navy were upset at not having one of their own, but for Tirpitz it was a stroke of good luck. He overtly referred to the new navy head as ‘Uncle Leo’, as the count was, in fact, a distant relation of his father’s, but that is where the relationship between the two men ended, even if Caprivi was a great supporter of the torpedo and Tirpitz’s natural ally. Caprivi’s ideas were very much opposed to those of Tirpitz. Because of the construction time needed for thelarger ships, he pushed all his efforts into smaller-ship development, away from the big-gun fleet. Tirpitz now had a superior who believed that the torpedo boat was almost a substitute for larger capital ships: Caprivi favoured a fleet for coastal defence with torpedo boats, rather than one that could take the battle to the enemy. He assumed that the enemy would come to him at a time of his choosing.

  At the end of 1884 Tirpitz married Marie Auguste Lipke, the daughter of the liberal politician Gustav Lipke; they were to have four children. Gustav helped the couple substantially, paying for a house in Kiel. Tirpitz’s admiration for the English and everything English, meanwhile, ran deep. He was fluent in English, read the English papers daily and felt it important that his two daughters, Use and Marie, be educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

  Fisher had married twenty years earlier, taking as his wife a Portsmouth girl, Frances Broughton, daughter of the Reverend Thomas Delves Broughton. Both Tirpitz and Fisher were self-made men and had waited till they felt financially confident enough to take on heavier responsibilities, but both marriages were happy ones (Fisher stayed together with Frances till her death in 1918).

  In Sankt Blasien, in the country house that he built on land that was given by the Grand Duke of Baden, Tirpitz spent much of his time thinking about the right type of boat to construct, and for this he could choose from different suppliers in Britain and in Germany. He was, like Fisher, never in great health but, unlike Fisher, was seen by his family as a hypochondriac. He suffered from a bad back, rheumatism and problems with his lungs.

  Contracts were awarded to British and German shipbuilders and comparative trials were held in September with the British firms of Thornycroft and Yarrow as well as with Weser, Vulkan and Schichau.* The weather was appalling, but for Tirpitz this was a plus – more like battle conditions. Tirpitz himself took command of one of the damaged Schichau boats that had a bent propeller, eventually bringing her to safety in Danish waters. But he was so dirty and shabby after the sea trials that he and the torpedo boat’s commander, Lieutenant August von Heeringen, were initially refused hotel rooms. Tirpitz was thenceforth known as ‘der Kossackenhetmann’, the Cossack chief.

  In June 1885 Fisher’s command of the Excellent came to an end. Again, his health was bad and he took the time off to visit the spas in Marienbad. In June and July he briefly commanded Minotaur in the Baltic, but spent the rest of the year back on Excellent and did not to return to a seagoing command for another dozen years.

  Tirpitz’s exploits at sea with the torpedo boats had placed him centre stage. He went to Berlin to take over the Admiralstab posting as head of the torpedo department. He formalised the position of the torpedo boats as being best to operate on a divisional basis, unattached to individual large ships.

  In those years the design of torpedo boats – and not only Germany’s – started to evolve and a lot of effort went into looking at variants. Torpedo-boat tonnage ranged between 98 and 113 tons; speed was fixed at around 20 knots. Tubes were mounted at deck level and above water. Schichau also built a larger, 300-ton vessel that could accommodate the extra staff needed to lead a flotilla, in line with Tirpitz’s idea of independent torpedo flotillas.

  At the end of 1886 Fisher moved into the post of Director of Naval Ordnance (DNO), a position in which, like John Jellicoe years later, he was responsible for the Navy’s guns and ordnance (even though gun manufacture was still under the control of the War Office and not yet independently controlled by the Royal Navy). The position put him in close contact with industry and the large armaments companies, so it was not unnatural that he formed a friendship with Josiah Vavasseur of the Armstrong company. Later his only son Cecil was adopted by Vavasseur, and his stately home, Kilverstone Hall, passed into the Fisher family as the seat and title. Fisher’s proximity to the Queen, meanwhile, ended in his being appointed the sovereign’s AdC in 1887 and a rear admiral that August.

  The year 1888 started well for Tirpitz. His chief, Caprivi, asked for views on tactics from his senior officers. As usual, Tirpitz’s twenty-page response was well-documented, well-argued and well-presented; Tirpitz impressed Caprivi. In November he reached the rank of Kapitän zur See, but he was worried about the effects of Wilhelm’s bureaucracy changes on the unified command, and therefore on the future of the torpedo boat.

  British naval policy at this point was b
ased on the assumption that the British would face either the French or the Russians as adversaries, or a combination. This led to the adoption of the two-power standard, a battle-fleet weight that would equal that of the next two strongest naval powers together. What had been informal was now written into policy in the Naval Defence Act of 1889.

  While Tirpitz was eventually unsuccessful in preventing a split – as was the case for the rest of the navy – between the command and administrative functions of the torpedo units, the torpedo ‘school’ would still come to be strongly represented later in the war years. Three High Seas Fleet commanders – Ingenohl, Scheer and Hipper – and five chiefs of the Admiralty staff – von Büchsel, Fischer, von Heeringen, von Pohl and Bachmann – were from the ranks of the famed ‘sea-cossacks’, the nickname by which German torpedo men came to be known. In April, Tirpitz took command of an armoured frigate, Preußen. The 7,700-ton vessel had been built sixteen years earlier, but was refitted in 1885 with torpedo tubes and became part of the 2nd Division of the so-called manoeuvre fleet (a self-contained unit that can operate freely without having an impact on other units) under the command of Rear Admiral Friedrich Hollmann, later to be one of his great critics.

  Once more at sea on board Preußen, Tirpitz accompanied the Kaiser to Greece and Turkey, and on his return took command of an armoured corvette, the 7,800-ton Württemberg in 1890. While the junior officers took to him because he always included them in tactical discussion, he was not considered a good sea captain and was referred to as ‘ein schlechter Fahrer, a bad helmsman.