PUTTING THE KAISER DOWN
THOUGH BOASTFUL AND BELLIGERENT, the Kaiser had never plotted to bring down the British Empire. The eldest grandson of Queen Victoria, proud of his British blood, he had rushed to her bedside as she sank toward death and “softly passed away in my arms.”30 He had marched in the queen’s funeral procession. The new king, Edward VII, was deeply moved. As he wrote his sister, Empress Frederick, the Kaiser’s mother who had been too ill to travel to the funeral, “William’s touching and simple demeanour, up to the last, will never be forgotten by me or anyone. It was indeed a sincere pleasure for me to confer upon him the rank of Field Marshal in my Army.”31 At the luncheon for Edward, the Kaiser rose to declare:
I believe that the two Teutonic nations will, bit by bit, learn to know each other better, and that they will stand together to help in keeping the peace of the world. We ought to form an Anglo-Germanic alliance, you to keep the seas, while we would be responsible for the land; with such an alliance not a mouse could stir in Europe without our permission.32
“[B]y dint of his mother’s teaching and admiration for her family, [the Kaiser] wanted only good relations with Britain,” writes Giles MacDonogh, biographer of Wilhelm II.33 It was a “British alliance for which [the Kaiser] strove all his professional life….”34
Why did the Kaiser fail? Certainly, his ministers who goaded him into collisions with England with the Kruger telegram and in the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911 bear much of the blame. But MacDonogh lays most of it on British statesmen and their haughty contempt of the Kaiser and Germany:
Faced by his Uncle Bertie [Edward VII], or high-handed ministers such as Lord Salisbury or Sir Edward Grey, he felt the British put him down; they treated him as a grandson or nephew and not as the German emperor. Germany was never admitted to full membership of that board of great powers. He and his country were patronised, and he took it very personally.35
When the Kaiser once inquired of Lord Salisbury where he might have a colony that would not be in the way of the British Empire, the great peer replied, “We don’t want you anywhere.”36
When Edward VII paid a visit to Kiel during the Russo-Japanese war, and the Kaiser suggested “that Russia’s cause was that of Europe, and that a Japanese victory over Russia would bring the world face to face with ‘the Yellow Peril,’” Edward had laughed in his face, “and for eighteen months thereafter the personal relations between uncle and nephew sank to the lowest point which they ever reached.”37
Yet on the death in 1910 of Edward VII, who detested the nephew he called “Willy,” the Kaiser again sought reconciliation with a grand gesture. He sailed to England and marched in Edward’s funeral—in the uniform of a British field marshal. As he strode behind Edward’s casket, the Kaiser’s feelings, Barbara Tuchman writes, were mixed. There was nostalgia for the great royal family to which he, too, belonged, but also
a fierce relish in the disappearance of his uncle from the European scene. He had come to bury Edward his bane; Edward the arch plotter, as William conceived it, of Germany’s encirclement. Edward, his mother’s brother whom he could neither bully nor impress, whose fat figure cast a shadow between Germany and the sun. “He is Satan. You cannot imagine what a Satan he is.”38
As his clumsy courtship failed, the Kaiser tried to force Britain to pay heed to him and to Germany with bellicose intrusions in African affairs. But where the British chose to appease the Americans, with the Kaiser they took a different course. And beyond the enmity between Wilhelm II and Edward VII, the Kaiser had, even while Queen Victoria was alive, committed one of the great blunders in German history. He decided to challenge Britannia’s rule of the waves with a High Seas Fleet. “The building of the German Fleet,” writes Massie, “ended the century of Splendid Isolation.”39
THE HIGH SEAS FLEET
SEVERAL FACTORS LED to the fateful decision. Soon after he ascended the throne, the Kaiser was mesmerized by an 1890 book by U.S. naval captain A. T. Mahan, “a tall beanpole of a man, with a great bald dome rising above calm hooded eyes.”40 Mahan was more scholar than sea dog. His thesis in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History was that it had been the Royal Navy, controlling the oceanic crossroads of the world, that had ensured the defeat of Napoleon and made Great Britain the world’s preeminent power. Navalists everywhere swore by Captain Mahan. It was at Mahan’s recommendation that Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt had put Admiral George Dewey in command of the Pacific Squadron of six battleships and three cruisers that steamed into Manila harbor in 1898 to sink the Spanish fleet before breakfast.
The Japanese had made The Influence of Sea Power a textbook in their naval and war colleges. But nowhere was Mahan more a “prophet with honor” than in Imperial Germany.41 “‘I am just now not reading but devouring Captain Mahan’s book and am trying to learn it by heart,’ the Kaiser wrote in 1894. ‘It is on board all my ships and constantly quoted by all my captains and officers.’”42 When France was forced to back down at Fashoda, the Kaiser commiserated, “The poor French. They have not read their Mahan!”43
It was in 1896 that the Kaiser came to appreciate what it meant to be without a navy. After he had sent his provocative telegram to the Boer leader Kruger, congratulating him on his capture of the Jameson raiders, which had enraged the British, the Kaiser discovered he was impotent to intervene to help the Boers. Any German convoy ordered to East Africa must traverse the North Sea, the East Atlantic, and the Cape of Good Hope, or the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. Its sinking would be child’s play for the Royal Navy. Rudely awakened to German vulnerability at sea, the Kaiser wrote bitterly to Chancellor Hohenlohe,
Once again it becomes obvious how foolish it was to begin our colonial policy a decade ago without having a fleet. Our trade is locked in a life-and-death struggle with the English, and our press boasts loudly of this every day, but the great merchant marine which plies the oceans of the world under our flag must renounce itself to complete impotence before their 130 cruisers, which we can proudly counter with four.44
Thus, on the strong recommendation of his new naval minister, the Anglophobic Prussian admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the Kaiser decided to build a world-class navy. Purpose: Defend the North Sea and Baltic coasts, break any blockade, protect the trade on which Germany depended for a fourth of her food. The Kaiser saw his navy both as an instrument of his world policy and a force to counter the Russian and French fleets. But Admiral Tirpitz left no doubt as to its principal purpose. “This intention was conveyed,” writes British historian Lawrence James, “in the belligerent preamble to the 1900 Navy Law which insisted that ‘Germany must have a Fleet of such strength that a war, even against the mightiest naval Power, would involve such risks as to threaten the supremacy of that Power.’”45
This was the “risk theory” of Tirpitz. While the German fleet might be defeated in war, it would be strong enough to inflict such damage on the Royal Navy, shield of the empire, that Britain would seek to avoid any war with Germany rather than imperil the empire. Thus, as the German fleet became stronger, Britain would appease Germany and not interfere as she grew as a world power. A great fleet would also enable the Kaiser to play the role of world statesman commensurate with his nation’s stature. Tirpitz believed the more powerful the fleet, the greater the certainty Britain would stay neutral in a Franco-German war. Of Britain’s haughty attitude toward him and his country, the Kaiser said, “Nothing will change until we are so strong on the seas that we become valuable allies.”46 Tirpitz and the Kaiser were mistaken.
Oddly, it was a British blunder that convinced many Germans that the Kaiser and Tirpitz were right: Germany needed a High Seas Fleet.
In December 1899, in the first weeks of the Boer War, the Cabinet authorized the Royal Navy to intercept and inspect foreign ships to prevent war matériel from reaching the Boers in the Transvaal and Free State. Three German passenger ships, the Bundesrath, the Herzog, and the General, were stopped and forced into port, where they
“suffered the humiliation of being searched.”47 As Thomas Pakenham, the historian of the Boer War, writes,
The search was negative in all three cases, and this only fed the flames of anglophobia in Germany. How dare the British Navy stop our mail steamers, cried the German Press. And how convenient it all was for the German government, whose great Navy Bill steamed majestically through the Reichstag…. Who could have guessed that these earth tremors of 1900 were to lead to the earthquake of 1914?48
Understandably, Britain only seemed to see the High Seas Fleet from her own point of view, never from the vantage point of Berlin. To the Germans, it was not Britain that threatened them, but giant Russia and revanchist France. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, both powers had spent far more on warships than Germany. By 1901, the combined naval armaments expenditures of Paris and St. Petersburg were three times that of Berlin.49 And if Britain could claim the right to a Royal Navy greater than the combined fleets of the next two naval powers—“The Two-Power Standard” written into British law by Lord Salisbury in 1889—was not Germany entitled to naval supremacy in her home waters, the Baltic Sea? As Tirpitz told the Reichstag, “We should be in a position to blockade the Russian fleet in the Baltic ports, and to prevent at the same time the entrance to that sea of a French fleet. We must also protect our ports in the North Sea from blockade.”50
Was this so unreasonable? By the twentieth century, Germany’s trade and merchant marine rivaled Britain’s, and Germany was under a far greater potential naval threat.
Still, writes Roy Denman, “The balance of power in Europe was under threat. The High Seas Fleet based on the Channel ports would have been for Britain an unacceptable danger.”51 But had not Britain survived secure for centuries with its greatest rival, France, having warships in the Channel ports? One British critic of his nation’s anti-German policy argues that the Kaiser’s Germany could make a far more compelling case for a world-class navy than the Britain of Victoria and Edward.
And why should Germany not have a fleet to protect her commerce? Surely, she had more reason to build one than Great Britain. The island power had no Russia at the mouth of the Humber, nor had she a France impinging on the beach of Cardigan Bay. All the avenues to the Atlantic were open for England. It was very different for German maritime service.
No one knew this better than the chiefs of the British admiralty.52
NOR WERE GERMAN fears of the Royal Navy misplaced. British war plans called for a blockade of Germany. Some at the Admiralty were avidly seeking an opportunity to stalk and sink the German fleet before it could grow to a size and strength to challenge the Royal Navy.
In 1905, a European crisis was precipitated by a provocative stunt by the Kaiser. Goaded by his foreign office, he interrupted a Mediterranean cruise to appear suddenly in Tangier, riding a white charger, to support the independence of Morocco, an open-door policy in that North African nation, and Germany’s right to equal treatment in commercial affairs. This was a direct challenge to French hegemony in Morocco, agreed to in the British-French entente. It was during this crisis that the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Fisher, wrote to Lord Lansdowne, the foreign secretary, urging him to exploit the situation to foment war with Germany:
This seems a golden opportunity for fighting the Germans in alliance with the French, so I earnestly hope you may be able to bring this about…. All I hope is that you will send a telegram to Paris that the English and French Fleets are one. We could have the German Fleet, the Kiel Canal, and Schleswig-Holstein within a fortnight.53
In his Memoirs, Fisher, a confidant of the king, confessed “that in 1908 he had a secret conversation with his Majesty [Edward VII]…‘in which I urged that we should Copenhagen the German fleet at Kiel a la Nelson, and I lamented that we possessed neither a Pitt nor a Bismarck to give the order.’”54 “Copenhagen” was a reference to Nelson’s charge into the Danish harbor in 1801, where, in a surprise attack, the intrepid British admiral sank every Danish ship in sight.
“My God, Fisher, you must be mad!” said the King.55
German admirals feared “Jackie” Fisher was neither mad nor joking. The idea of a British fleet steaming into Wilhelmshaven and Kiel and sending the High Seas Fleet to Davy Jones’s locker—in a surprise attack without a declaration of war, as Japan had done at Port Arthur—had been raised by other Admiralty officials and a Germanophobic British press.
Indeed, in November 1906, an “invasion scare…convulsed Germany” and “was followed, in January, 1907, by a fantastic rumour that Fisher was coming, which caused panic in Kiel for two days.”56 The Kaiser, “beside himself over the English threat,” ordered his naval expansion accelerated.57
What the Kaiser and Tirpitz failed to appreciate, however, was that the High Seas Fleet threatened the indispensable pillar of the British Empire. That empire’s dependence on seaborne commerce, a result of Britain’s half-century commitment to free trade, made the supremacy of the Royal Navy on the high seas a matter of national and imperial survival. For generations Britain had lived by an iron rule: The Royal Navy must be 10 percent stronger in capital ships than the combined fleets of the next two strongest sea powers.
Moreover, the Kaiser failed to see the strategic crisis he had created. To reach the Atlantic, German warships would have to traverse the North Sea and pass through the Channel within sight of Dover, or sail around the Scottish coast near the naval base of the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow.
It was an irrevocable fact of geography that the British Isles cut athwart all German overseas routes…. Mahan in 1902 described the situation very clearly. “The dilemma of Great Britain is that she cannot help commanding the approaches to Germany by the very means essential to her own existence as a state of the first order.” Obviously Britain was not going to surrender the keys to her islands and empire.58
The Kaiser’s decision to build a great navy represented a threat to Britain in her home waters. Should Germany achieve naval superiority in the North Sea, it was not only the empire that was imperiled but also England and Scotland. British statesmen found this intolerable.
“Germany’s naval policy was suicidal,” writes Holborn.59
By forcing Britain to take sides in the alignment of the European powers, German naval policy completed the division of Europe into two political camps armed to the teeth and ready to take up open hostilities; for any misunderstanding could seriously affect the precarious balance of power on which the European nations had staked their security.60
As Germany began building dreadnoughts every year, the young new First Lord of the Admiralty spoke in Scotland in 1912, in pointed words of warning to the Kaiser and Admiral Tirpitz. Said Winston Churchill:
There is…this difference between the British naval power and the naval power of the great and friendly empire—and I trust it may long remain the great and friendly empire—of Germany. The British Navy is to us a necessity and, from some points of view, the German Navy is to them more in the nature of a luxury. Our naval power involves British existence…. It is the British Navy which makes Great Britain a great power. But Germany was a great power, respected and honored, all over the world before she had a single ship.61
IN GERMANY, the deliberate mistranslation of Churchill’s word “luxury” as “‘Luxusflotte,’ suggesting that Tirpitz’s fleet was a sensual indulgence, stoked the fires of public outrage.”62
The German Naval Laws of 1898 and 1900 that laid the foundation of the High Seas Fleet had historic consequences. By constructing a great navy, four hundred nautical miles from the English coast, the Kaiser forced the Royal Navy to bring its most powerful warships home from distant waters to build up the Home and Channel Fleets. “[I]n 1896 there had been 74 ships stationed in home waters and 140 overseas,” writes James, “fourteen years later these totals were 480 and 83 respectively.”63 With the British Empire stripped of its shield, Britain was forced to resolve conflicts with imperial rivals Russia and France—the two powers that most threatene
d Germany.
Rather than enhance German security, the High Seas Fleet sank all hope of detente with Britain and pushed her into de facto alliances with France and Russia. The Kaiser’s decision to challenge the Royal Navy would prove a principal factor in Germany’s defeat and his own dethronement. For it was the arrival of a British Expeditionary Force in France in August 1914 that blunted the German drive into France, leading to four years of stalemate war that ended with Wilhelm’s abdication and flight to Holland.
“German foreign policy ought to have been mainly concerned with keeping England preoccupied by her overseas interests in Africa and the Near and Far East,” writes German historian Andreas Hillgruber.64 By building a great fleet to challenge the Royal Navy, Germany “tied England to Europe.”65
But the fault lies not with the Germans alone. The British were never willing to pay the Kaiser’s price for calling off Tirpitz’s challenge. During the 1912 Haldane mission to Germany, Britain could have gotten limits on the High Seas Fleet in return for a British pledge of neutrality in a Franco-German war. “The Germans were willing to make a naval deal in return for a neutrality statement,” writes British historian Niall Ferguson, “[I]t was on the neutrality issue that the talks really foundered. And arguably it was the British position which was the more intransigent.”66
BALANCE-OF-POWER POLITICS
BRITAIN’S REFUSAL TO GIVE a neutrality pledge in return for limits on the High Seas Fleet demonstrates that beneath the Anglo-German friction lay clashing concepts of security. To Britain, security rested on a balance of power—a divided Europe with British power backing the weaker coalition.
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 3