Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  In September Fisher was promoted to Admiral of the Fleet. His impact was soon felt on the 1905 naval estimates. Not only achieving far greater efficiency, he was also able to reduce the budget by £3.5 million to £36.8 million. The Admiralty Committee49 on Designs* would spearhead two of Fisher’s great innovations: the Dreadnought and the new battle-cruiser, Invincible.

  In retrospect, neither were well thought-out moves. The Dreadnought revolutionised battleship design and threw down the gauntlet to rekindle the Anglo-German naval arms race with a vengeance. For Jan Morris, this was ‘a moment when naval architecture seem[ed] suddenly to change gear’.50 It also put Britain and Germany on an equal footing, as it made Britain’s power – based as it had been on the sheer numbers of ships available – obsolete.

  The Naval Race: Comparative Fleet Growth in Tonnage

  For the Liberals, this was a red rag to a bull, Lloyd George describing the new ship as ‘a wanton and profligate ostentation.51 But the Dreadnought was Fisher’s baby and, because she was ‘precisely the same length as Westminster Abbey’, he thought that she would be divinely protected. Working in 11½-hour shifts, a workforce of three thousand men took exactly one year and one day to make her ready for trials.52 The second design resulted in a ship, the battle-cruiser, that could not fulfil its basic function as a fast battleship. The death of thousands of British sailors at Jutland resulted from the lack of armoured protection without the necessary radical gunnery or speed advantage.

  In December 1905 when Arthur Balfour resigned and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman formed a new government, a wind of liberal reforms brought in political constraints on those working on a more modern navy. With it came increasing pressure on military expenditure, with a growing confidence in Britain’s partnership with France and the reduced pressure in the Far East because of the alliance with Japan.

  The 1906 Novelle

  The conference that Wilhelm had promoted as the wedge between France and England during the Morocco crisis turned out to be a disaster for Germany. Of the thirteen nations that attended the Algeciras Conference, only Austria-Hungary supported Germany, while Spain, Italy, Russia, Great Britain and the United States firmly supported France’s claims and continued confrontation was only avoided by the Germans accepting a face-saving compromise and signing an agreement on 31 May, whereby French control of the local police ceased.

  For the British, Lord Grey was at one point quite ready to give the Germans what they really wanted out of any planned compromise: coaling stations that could support their flag carrying fleet around the world. Fisher would have been livid had the Germans walked away with these, as fuel was the critical factor in supporting a fleet in foreign waters. But, even if it had become clear that among the British there was not 100 per cent support for France’s position, the damage done by the Moroccan Crisis was tangible. It pulled Germany’s potential enemies closer together rather than forcing them apart.

  1906 was a turning point in Anglo-German relations, particularly naval relations. Against the background of Morocco, Britain was to throw down a gauntlet – in fact, two. Dreadnought was launched and the keel laid for the second of Fisher’s revolutionary ships, HMS Invincible. Wilhelm was worried that Germany was about to be outdone.

  In May 1906 a new draft of the Novelle was ready to be presented to the Reichstag. It even provided a small amount for U-boat development, although Tirpitz was not a supporter of submarines, derisively calling them pieces of ‘altes Eisen’ – old iron. Young officers at the head of the nascent submarine arm, men like Kapitän Lothar Persius, found themselves distinctly cold-shouldered during this period. So were proponents of cruiser warfare, which Tirpitz felt was a distraction from the main task of the navy: big-ship confrontation. ‘Young officers who associated too closely with cruiser or submarine tactics could be assured of shortcareers in the Imperial Navy’.53 For this reason Tirpitz even spoke out against Wilhelm’s taking up the Fisher ‘fast capital ship’ cause, thinking that it was too close to the cruiser position that was a challenge to what he really wanted to build: battleships.

  By the end of the year the draft of the Novelle was complete. Tirpitz found himself under increasing pressure from the Flottenverein to strengthen the Novelle; they wanted a reduction in a battleship’s life of twenty-five years, something that would not happen until the 1908 Navy Law. The eventual bill foresaw eighteen battleships, thirteen large cruisers and twenty small cruisers. After the Moroccan Crisis, Wilhelm was angry that Tirpitz had backed down from an even larger request to the Reichstag for funding.

  The different approaches of Tirpitz and his sovereign, the Kaiser, resurfaced. The always more cautious Tirpitz did not want to overdo the parliamentary request. He wanted to show the legislators that he was acting responsibly and spending their monies wisely. Wilhelm took the opposite view: ‘Flaußen! Man hat nicht genug seinerseits gefordert und fühlt nun, daß die darauf hinweisen, recht haben.’ (‘Humbug! We did not demand enough. Now we feel that the people who advised us asking more were correct.’)54 When Tirpitz heard about Wilhelm’s criticism he offered his resignation. It was rejected by the Kaiser and Tirpitz came crawling back. Threatening resignation was something that both Fisher and Tirpitz did regularly. Fisher would even threaten the mass resignation of the Admiralty board if his wishes were not respected.

  Despite the scare ignited by rumours going around about Fisher’s new battle-cruiser class (Invincible), Tirpitz decided against a race based mainly on calibre. Nevertheless, costs were rising sharply and Germany’s first Invincible-type battle-cruiser, SMS Von der Tann, was to cost 36.6 million marks. And now, with news that the French were moving major fleet elements down to the Mediterranean, the conclusion for the Germans was that the French and the British had come to a secret agreement to manage naval resources in tandem, adding even more pressure on Tirpitz’s planning.

  In June 1906, taking full advantage of the anti-British sentiment following the failure of the Algeciras Conference, he got the Reichstag to pass the third Naval Law. With it, six large cruisers were added to the fleet. The Kaiser’s attempt to find a way to prise open cracks within the Entente Cordiale came to an end.

  Work on widening the Kiel Canal was taken by the British as a sign of German intentions to provide a way to move heavier and broader-beamed battleships between Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. Fisher guessed the eventual date of the start of the war with extraordinary accuracy. He thought that it would be in 1914, because that was the estimated completion year of the canal, and it would occur after harvests had been brought in. Furthermore, it would occur on a bank holiday: 4 August 1914 was just that.

  Despite these forebodings the British government was committed to its programme of social welfare, particularly the introduction of pensions, and in July the new First Lord, Lord Tweedmouth, let the axe fall. Two of the four capital ships in the 1907/8 building programme were dropped. But the dreadnought project was concluded, in true Fisher style, in record time. In October 1906 Dreadnought set off on her sea trials. She was, however, a double-edged sword because overnight she rendered all other fleets obsolete, including a significant proportion of the Royal Navy’s strength. Patrick Kelly maintains that Dreadnought was Fisher’s anticipation of what the Japanese or United States navies would do, but it was with Germany, in the first decade of the twentieth century, that she directly spurred the naval arms race.

  In the short term, Fisher’s innovation paid dividends. By November 1909, Britain had seven commissioned dreadnoughts, Germany had two and Japan one. But Germany had eleven under construction against Britain’s projected ten. Other countries, too, were about to jump into the race: the United States, Russia, France and Italy.

  Tirpitz spent much of the summer months of 1906 pondering how best to respond to the dreadnought threat. It posed a series of quite different challenges to him. In Tirpitz’s mind Fisher had, in fact, made a mistake. By launching the dreadnought he had ‘wiped the slate clean’.55 ‘The huge British superiority in pre-dre
adnoughts would become increasingly irrelevant as both sides built more dreadnoughts.’56 The fact that the race was now more even, lending each side a more sporting chance, gave Tirpitz hope that he really could win after all.

  Cost was, of course, one challenge. It was not the canal-widening cost that bothered him. This would be taken by the Interior Ministry. But he would have to face the cost impact on the docks at Kiel. Tirpitz wanted to limit the displacement of the actual ships being built, as construction costs were dramatically increasing. His first agreement was to build a ship of around 15,000 tons. What he ended up with was nearly 19,000 tons, costing 37.3 million marks, two-thirds of what the annual construction spend was estimated to be in the first Navy Law.

  Tirpitz could also match British technology. He was quick to copy where he could and exploit weaknesses where he saw them. German design took a different approach to armament. Hans Bürkner, the chief designer of the Nassau class (Germany’s first post-dreadnought class, laid down between June and August 1907), purposely increased belt armour to match turret calibre. The Nassau class’s sixteen watertight compartmental divisions were also subsequently increased to nineteen on later classes, resulting in a wider beam and, therefore, more stability for a battleship in its primary role as a gunnery platform.

  In the end, the new Nassau class displaced 18,873 tons and mounted twelve 28cm (11in) guns, two more than Dreadnought herself had at launch. But Tirpitz’s rejection of the new turbine engines meant that the maximum speed was, critically, limited to 19 knots and therefore to a lesser role. At 37 million marks this was an expensive mistake.57

  The next major ship to be laid down, Germany’s first battle-cruiser Von der Tann at the Blohm and Voss yards in 1908, used a Parsons turbine power plant, the same design that had been first used on Dreadnought. With the new power plant Von der Tann was able to reach a speed of 27 knots, 6 knots faster than Dreadnought. She was a formidable ship.

  The last alliance cornerstone – the Anglo-Russian Entente – was put in place. Germany, encircled, was getting increasingly nervous that Fisher would, in fact, be responsible for the British Navy ‘doing a Nelson, ‘Copenhagening’ the German fleet while in harbour. In 1907 Kiel schoolchildren were kept at home for two days and the stock exchange was in crisis: fear was mixed with rumour that ‘Fisher [was] coming’. No other British naval man provoked collective anxiety in the Germans in quite the way that Fisher did.

  As the year headed for its close, Fisher made a speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet that he would come to regret. He assured his audience that Britons could sleep soundly in their beds. Just days later, on 18 November, the news from Germany was that the shipbuilding programme was accelerating. Its fleet would supposedly increase by 25 per cent over the next five years and would also include five new battle-cruisers.

  The 1908 Novelle

  Constant rumours of a pre-emptive British naval strike (that Fisher was again to threaten in 1908) increased the Reichstag’s receptivity to new propositions from Tirpitz. The fourth Novelle was passed on 28 March 1908. By reducing the active life of a battleship from twenty-five to twenty years, replacement production was sped up. Without knowing it, the Reichstag was painting itself into a corner and giving Tirpitz what he needed faster. Indeed, the suggestion to reduce the life of a battleship had been made by Reichstag deputies eight years earlier. They thought that this would merely limit the number of years that they would have to live with Tirpitz’s laws on the books. The opposite was the case: it built into law the replacement of the older ship with a new one on a more accelerated timetable.

  In the inner circle there was considerable debate over whether Germany should adopt a three or four Bautempo. The Etatsabteilung (the estimates department of the Reichsmarineamt known as the RMA) was strongly against the dangerous signals that a four Bautempo would send the British:

  If we go to the four tempo we would be tarred with the stigma of starting an arms race and even worse the Liberals in England would likely be replaced by the Conservatives. Thus, even if there is a majority within the bloc, we must have a four tempo, and therefore it would be better to stabilise [ie perpetuate] the three tempo and make us independent for all time from political accidents.58

  David Lloyd George was, for one, full of suspicion about the German naval construction rumours and treated the reports as pure propaganda, designed to whip up national fervour to heighten the pressure for increased naval estimates. German naval planning called for twelve dreadnought keels to be laid down in three years: four in 1908, four in 1909 and the last four in 1910. Churchill, trying to avoid being tied down to building more dreadnoughts, argued that the quality of British ships counted for more than merely increasing their numbers. As in Germany, national sentiment carried the day. The cry went up in the country for a bigger British dreadnought building programme to maintain the safety margin over Germany: ‘We want eight and we won’t wait’. The press whipped up the frenzy, the Observer announcing, ‘The Eight, the whole Eight, and nothing but the Eight’.59

  The Liberal government tried to resist. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s administration had come to power calling for ‘peace, retrenchment and reform’, and saw ‘militarism, extravagance and protectionism’ as ‘weeds which grow in the same field’. In his mind, the monies needed for social reform could not support an ongoing shipbuilding race with Germany.

  The British Admiralty proposed a programme for 1908 that had already been cut back: one battleship, a battle-cruiser, six light cruisers, sixteen destroyers and some submarines. When Campbell-Bannerman cut the programme by £1.3 million there was no way out but for the battleship to be scrapped. The consequences for the naval armament value chain, Fisher felt, would be catastrophic. Armour-plating expertise would be lost. At the very moment when the Germans were building up the munitions and armaments infrastructure, Britain was talking about dismantling hers.

  The tussle over the question of how many dreadnoughts continued, with various creative options being put on the table. One was to build four and allow for another four contingent battleships if reports from Germany warranted it. By July 1908 the contingent ships became part of the build plan. The British government could no longer oppose public pressure.

  Fisher’s fortunes were on the wane.

  The 1909 naval scare

  John Jellicoe, one of Jacky Fisher’s rising stars, heard that the Essen Krupp works were turning out artillery at a pace which would be consistent with a four Bautempo. The nickel market was heating up as Germany started to stockpile the essential ingredient for armour-grade steel. Claims that materials for the 1909 building programme had already been purchased in 1908 ahead of Reichstag sanction were made.

  Doing the calculations, the British Admiralty became nervous. It looked like the ratio between the British and German fleets could by 1912 be, optimistically, 18:13. But if the Germans had reduced construction time they could have as many as eighteen or even twenty-one ships. Britain would be at a severe disadvantage. The Admiralty wanted eight ships and not the six authorised for the 1909 estimates.

  The manoeuvring was intense. The Liberal administration did not want to be pushed into surrendering its pension programmes. Lloyd George was scornful of the reliability of the Admiralty reports and openly poured cold water on them. But the spirit in the nation was jingoistic; in the words of Churchill, ‘The Admiralty had demanded six; the economists wanted four and we finally compromised on eight’.60 More importantly, if in the end Tirpitz did not shorten the building cycles, the British had really been unnerved. Negotiations about an imperial contribution began (leading, ultimately, to the addition of the battle-cruisers HMAS Australia and HMS New Zealand).

  In 1909 Fisher accepted a barony from the King, becoming Baron Fisher of Kilverstone and adopting the motto ‘Fear God and dread nought’. Asquith’s words were kind and referred to ‘the great work – unique in our time – which [Fisher had] accomplished in developing and strengthening the navy, and in assuring the maritime supre
macy of Great Britain’.61

  The following year, on 26 January, Fisher left the Navy: his life should now have become roses, golf and correspondence. But even in retirement in Kilverstone Hall he continued to be able to influence and have an impact on people and events around him. One of the causes that he took up was that of pushing for social change in the Navy, trying to make it easier for those from the ranks to attain commissions. Churchill espoused the same cause.

  By 1912 the British were preparing for the inevitable. There was a need to concentrate forces where the fleets’ meeting was likely to take place, the North Sea. Echoing what Fisher had initiated years before, the Mediterranean now became a French theatre of operations. To confirm earlier moves, the entire French Atlantic fleet was indeed moved from Brest, south to Toulon.

  Fisher’s 1912 chairmanship of the Royal Commission to inquire into liquid fuel was significant. The commission’s findings, completed in six months, paved the way for the initial conversion of the Royal Navy from coal to oil. It held and still holds huge sway on British strategy and diplomacy, with the British moving to secure oil resources in the Middle East. Churchill’s 15in Queen Elizabeth-class battleships were the first to run exclusively on oil-fired boilers. The change would have profound consequences, as it shifted Britain’s global focus to future oil supplies and away from domestic coal.