Britain’s foreign and defence policy, Crowe argued, was determined by geography, both its position on the periphery of Europe and its possession of a huge overseas empire. It was almost ‘a law of nature’ that the British would favour a balance of power to prevent a single country gaining control of the Continent.57 Nor could Britain concede control of the seas to another power without endangering its very existence. Germany’s policy of building up its navy might be part of an overall strategy to challenge Britain’s position in the world or it might be the result of ‘a vague, confused, and unpractical statesmanship, not fully realizing its own drift’.58 From Britain’s point of view it did not really matter. In either case, Britain must meet the German naval challenge, yet do so firmly and calmly. (Kennan was to give similar advice about the Soviet Union forty years later.) ‘Nothing’, Crowe wrote, ‘is more likely to produce in Germany the impression of the practical hopelessness of a never-ending succession of costly naval programmes than the conviction, based on ocular demonstration, that for every German ship England will inevitably lay down two, so maintaining the present, relative British preponderance.’59
Once the British had made their move to build the first dreadnought, Tirpitz and the Kaiser and their supporters were indeed faced with a clear choice: to give up the race and try to mend fences with Britain or respond by trying to keep up in the race and build their equivalent of the dreadnoughts. If they chose the latter Germany would face considerable increased costs: new materials and technologies, higher maintenance and repair, and bigger crews all added up to a sum double that of the existing battleships. In addition, docks would have to be rebuilt to handle the bigger ships and the Kiel Canal, which allowed them to be built in the secure shipyards on the Baltic coast and then be brought through in safety to German ports on the North Sea, would have to be widened and deepened.60 Moreover, money absorbed by the navy would not be available to the army, which was facing a growing threat from Russia. The decision as to which path to take could not be postponed for long lest Britain get too far ahead.
In the early part of 1905, months before the keel for Dreadnought was laid, the German naval attaché in London reported back to Berlin that the British were planning a new type of battleship, more powerful than any in existence.61 In March 1905 Selborne presented the estimates for the navy for the coming year to Parliament. They included one new battleship but he did not provide any details, and while he mentioned Fisher’s committee, he said that no public good would be served by making its report public. That summer Tirpitz retreated, as he liked to do, to his house in the Black Forest. There, amidst the pines and firs, he consulted with some of his most trusted advisers. By the autumn, he had made his decision; Germany would build battleships as well as battlecruisers to match the new British ones. As Holger Herwig, a leading historian of the German naval race, has observed: ‘It speaks volumes for the nature of the decision-making process in Wilhelmian Germany that the British challenge was accepted without input from the chancery, the foreign office, the treasury, or the two agencies directly responsible for naval strategic planning, the admiralty staff and the High Seas Fleet!’62 Tirpitz presented a new naval bill which provided for increased spending – some 35 per cent over the naval bill of 1900 – to cover the costs of dreadnoughts as well as six new cruisers. Germany would build two dreadnoughts and one heavy cruiser per year.
Not all Germans by any means shared the fears or accepted the need for a large and expensive navy. Even in the navy itself, there was grumbling that Tirpitz’s focus on more and more ships meant that there was not enough money for personnel or training.63 In the Reichstag, deputies from the centre and left but also from the right attacked the growing deficits, which were caused in part by the naval budget. The Chancellor, Bülow, was already struggling to plug the holes in the German budget and deal with a Reichstag which was reluctant to raise taxes, but fortuitously there was a major crisis and war scare over Morocco as the new navy bill, the Novelle, reached the Reichstag and it was passed by a large margin in May 1906.64 Bülow nevertheless became increasingly worried about the financial crisis looming for Germany and his own difficulties in dealing with the Reichstag. And there seemed to be no end in sight to the naval spending: ‘When will you be sufficiently advanced with your fleet’, he asked Tirpitz pointedly in 1907, ‘so that the … unbearable political situation will be relieved?’65 Tirpitz’s timetable for getting out of the danger zone (as Germany quietly tried to get to the point where it had a navy strong enough to pressure Britain) kept being extended further into the future.
As far as the Kaiser and Tirpitz were concerned the responsibility for taking the naval race to a new level rested with what Wilhelm called the ‘entirely crazy Dreadnought policy of Sir J. Fisher and His Majesty’. The Germans were prone to see Edward VII as bent on a policy of encircling Germany. The British had made a mistake in building dreadnoughts and heavy cruisers, in Tirpitz’s view, and they were angry about it: ‘This annoyance will increase as they see that we follow them immediately.’66 That did not stop the German leadership from being anxious about the immediate future. Tirpitz’s danger zone had just got longer and, so far, the British showed no signs of wanting to make an agreement with Germany. ‘No allies in sight,’ said Holstein sardonically to Bülow.67 Who could tell what the British might do? Did their history not show them to be hypocritical, devious and ruthless? Fears of a ‘Kopenhagen’, a sudden British attack just like the one in 1807 when the British navy had bombarded Copenhagen and seized the Danish fleet, were never far from the thoughts of the German leadership once the naval race had started. On Christmas Eve in 1904, when the war between Russia and Japan was causing international tensions, Bülow told Ambassador Lascelles that the German government had seriously feared that Britain, which was allied to Japan, might attack Germany, which had been offering considerable support to Russia. Fortunately the German ambassador in London who had been summoned back to Berlin had managed to persuade his superiors, including a very worried Kaiser, that the British had no intention of starting a war.68 Such fears spread out into German society and caused bursts of panic. At the start of 1907, parents in the Baltic port of Kiel kept their children home from school because they had heard that Fisher was about to invade. That spring, too, Lascelles wrote to Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary: ‘The day before yesterday, Berlin went stark raving mad. There was a fall of six points in German securities on the Bourse and a general impression that war was about to break out between England and Germany.’69 Taking out the German fleet in a sudden action did occur to some in Britain, notably Fisher, who suggested it on a couple of occasions. ‘My God, Fisher, you must be mad!’ the king said, and the idea went nowhere.70
In the military and civilian circles around the Kaiser, however, the possibility of war with Britain was increasingly discussed as a realistic prospect. And if war was coming then it was important to step up Germany’s preparations and deal as well with the ‘unpatriotic’ Germans such as the Social Democrats who resisted higher defence spending and who advocated a policy of friendship towards other European powers. The German Navy League became increasingly strident in its warnings of impending danger and its demands for more and more naval spending, even turning on its patron Tirpitz for not acting quickly enough. Indeed, so some leading figures on the right thought, it might be possible to kill two birds with one stone: the government should challenge the left and the liberal moderates by presenting a greatly increased budget for the navy, more than Tirpitz wanted, to the Reichstag. If the deputies rejected it, that would be an excellent opportunity for the Kaiser to dissolve the Reichstag and try for a more favourable nationalist majority or perhaps even carry out the coup he had talked about in the past and get rid of such inconveniences as a free press, universal male suffrage, elections, or the Reichstag itself. In late 1905, as Tirpitz was preparing his Novelle, he grew concerned that his beloved navy was going to be used as a ‘battering ram’ to force through political and constit
utional change in Germany. He had no objections to crushing the left but he worried about whether the attempt would succeed without serious internal upheavals and that it might make the British finally notice that Germany’s navy was expanding fast.71
By 1908, as the tensions in Europe rose again over the Bosnian crisis, Bülow was increasingly sceptical about the value of Tirpitz’s navy and Germany’s isolation in Europe. Could Germany, he demanded of Tirpitz, ‘calmly and with confidence envisage an English attack?’72 Tirpitz, who later said he felt deserted, replied that Britain was unlikely to attack at present and that therefore the best policy for Germany was to continue to build up the navy. ‘Every new ship added to our battle-fleet means an increase in risk for England if she attacks us.’ He dismissed the warnings from Count Paul Metternich, the German ambassador in London, that it was the German naval programme that was alienating Britain. The main reason for British hostility was economic rivalry with Germany, and that was not going to vanish.73 Backing down would cause serious political troubles at home. ‘If we undermine the Navy Law which is already in great danger due to the whole situation’, he wrote to one of his loyal aides in 1909, ‘we do not know where the journey is going to take us to.’74 Tirpitz’s final argument for keeping up the naval race was one that has been used repeatedly to justify continuing programmes or wars: Germany had already poured in so many resources that backing down would nullify the sacrifices that had been made. ‘If the British fleet can be made permanently so strong’, he wrote in 1910, ‘that it would incur no risk in attacking Germany, then German naval development will have been a mistake from the historical point of view.’75
In March 1908 Tirpitz got through the Reichstag a new supplementary naval bill, the Second Novelle, which shortened the lives of the existing ships in the German navy and therefore speeded up the rate of replacements (and small ships could be replaced by larger ones). Instead of three new battleships per year, the rate increased to four for the next four years, after which it would drop to three per year for, as Tirpitz hoped, eternity. The Reichstag would yet again approve a naval programme over which it would have no further control. By 1914 Germany would have had the equivalent of twenty-one dreadnoughts, which would have significantly narrowed the gap between Britain and Germany if Britain had chosen not to respond.76 Tirpitz assured the Kaiser that Germany would get away with the increase: ‘I have framed the Novelle as your Highness wished it, so that internationally and domestically it looks as small and harmless as possible.’77 Wilhelm sent a long personal letter intended to be reassuring to Lord Tweedmouth, now the First Lord of the Admiralty: ‘The German Naval Bill is not aimed at England and is not a “Challenge to British Supremacy of the Sea”, which will remain unchallenged to generations to come.’78 Edward VII was not pleased at what he saw as extraordinary interference by his nephew in writing to a British minister and many in Britain shared that view.79
Bülow, who had the unenviable role of trying to find money to carry out Tirpitz’s new building programme, was coming round to the opinion that Germany could not afford the strongest army and the second largest navy in Europe. ‘We cannot weaken the army’, he wrote in 1908, ‘for our destiny will be decided on land.’80 His government faced a serious financial crisis. Germany’s national debt had nearly doubled since 1900 and it was proving difficult to increase revenue. Some 90 per cent of all central government spending went on the army and navy and in the twelve years between 1896 and 1908, thanks in large part to naval spending, the total expenditure on the military had doubled and was going up for the foreseeable future. When Bülow tried to raise the issue of reining in naval spending, one of Wilhelm’s entourage begged him not to because it only made the Kaiser ‘very unhappy’.81 Bülow struggled on throughout 1908 trying to put together a plan for tax reforms which could get through the Reichstag but his proposals for expanding inheritance taxes infuriated the right and new consumption taxes had a similar impact on the left. He finally submitted his resignation to Wilhelm in July 1909, having failed to solve the problem. Tirpitz prevailed because in the end he had the Kaiser behind him.
In the meantime, the British had started to take notice of the increased tempo of German naval building. Initially, as he had hoped would be the case, they had not reacted to Tirpitz’s first Novelle of 1906. In December 1907 the Admiralty had in fact proposed slowing down the rate of building for battleships so that in 1908–9 it would construct only one dreadnought and one heavy cruiser. This was also in line with what the Liberal government, which had promised both to make savings and spend on social programmes, wanted. Over the summer of 1908, however, concern, both among the public and in government circles, began to mount. The German fleet cruised in the Atlantic. What did that mean? An anonymous article, ‘The German Peril’, published in the respected Quarterly Review in July, warned that if Germany and Britain got into a conflict, the Germans were likely to invade. ‘Her naval officers have sounded and sketched our harbours and studied every detail of our coasts.’ According to the author (who was J. L. Garvin, the editor of the Sunday paper the Observer) some 50,000 Germans, disguised as waiters, were already in place in Britain ready to spring into action when the signal was given. Shortly after the article appeared, the famous German aviator Count Zeppelin flew to Switzerland in his new dirigible. That sent Garvin, now writing under his own name in the Observer, into fresh predictions of the menaces gathering around Britain.82
In August that year, Edward VII paid a visit to his nephew Wilhelm in the pretty little town of Kronberg. Although the king had been armed with a paper by the British government outlining its concerns about German naval spending, he thought it wiser not to raise the issue with Wilhelm. It might, Edward thought, ‘possibly have spoilt the happy effect of the conversation which had taken place between them’. After lunch, the Kaiser, still in a cheerful mood, asked Sir Charles Hardinge, the permanent head of the Foreign Office, to smoke a cigar with him. The two men sat side by side on a billiard table. He thought, said Wilhelm, that relations between Britain and Germany were quite good. Hardinge, as he wrote in his memorandum of their discussion, had to disagree: ‘There could be no concealment of the fact that a genuine apprehension was felt in England as to the reasons and intention underlying the construction of a large German fleet.’ He warned that, if the German programme went ahead, the British government would be obliged to ask Parliament to approve an extensive shipbuilding programme and he had no doubt that Parliament would agree. That would be, in Hardinge’s opinion, a most unfortunate development: ‘There could be no doubt that this naval rivalry between the two countries would embitter their relations to each other, and might in a few years’ time lead to a very critical situation in the event of a serious, or even a trivial, dispute arising between the two countries.’
Wilhelm replied sharply, and inaccurately, that there was no reason for British apprehensions, that the German building programme was not a new one, and that the relative proportion of the German and British fleets remained the same. (According to the melodramatic account he sent Bülow, he told Hardinge, ‘That is sheer idiocy. Who has been pulling your leg?’) Furthermore, Wilhelm said, it had become a point of national honour for Germany that its naval building programme should be completed. ‘No discussion with a foreign Government could be tolerated; such a proposal would be contrary to the national dignity, and would give rise to internal troubles if the Government were to accept it. He would rather go to war than submit to such dictation.’ Hardinge stood his ground and said that he was merely suggesting that their two governments should have a friendly discussion and that there was no question of dictation.
He also challenged the Kaiser’s assertion that Britain would have three times as many battleships as Germany in 1909. ‘I said that I was at a loss to understand how His Majesty arrived at the figures of the relative strength of the two navies in battle-ships in 1909, and could only assume that the sixty-two first-class battle-ships of the British fleet comprised every obsolete vessel
that could be found floating in British harbours and that had not been sold as scrap iron.’ Wilhelm claimed in his version of the conversation that he put Hardinge in his place: ‘I too am admiral of the British Fleet and know it well – far better than you, since you are only a civilian and know nothing at all about it.’ At this point the Kaiser sent an aide for a summary of naval strength published annually by the German admiralty which would show that the German figures were right. Hardinge said dryly that the Kaiser gave him a copy ‘for my own edification and conviction’ and that he had told Wilhelm that he only wished he could accept the figures as correct.
Wilhelm’s version is characteristically quite different: Hardinge had a look of ‘speechless astonishment’ and Lascelles, who, Wilhelm claimed, completely accepted the German figures, ‘had difficulty in restraining his laughter’. The conversation ended, so the Kaiser told Bülow, with Hardinge plaintively asking, ‘Can’t you stop building? Or build less ships?’ to which Wilhelm responded, ‘Then we shall fight, for it is a question of national honour and dignity.’ He looked Hardinge squarely in the face and the latter had flushed, bowed deeply, and asked to be forgiven for his ‘ill-considered expressions’. The Kaiser was delighted with himself. ‘Didn’t I give it properly to Sir Charles?’ Bülow had trouble believing this account and his suspicions were confirmed by his colleagues who had been present at the conversation which, they said, was quite amicable. Hardinge had been frank but respectful and the Kaiser had remained in good temper.
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