by Hew Strachan
In August 1914 Britain could deploy twenty Dreadnoughts (with twelve more building) to the Germans’ thirteen (with seven building), and nine battle cruisers (with one building) to the Germans’ five (with three building). In addition, the Royal Navy enjoyed a two fold advantage in pre-Dreadnoughts and a threefold lead in cruisers; although many of these vessels were obsolescent in the context of the North Sea and of the Mediterranean, they were the workhorses that enabled Britain to maintain a presence in more distant waters and to sustain the blockade. This quantitative superiority stood the Royal Navy in good stead throughout the war. But Fisher’s aim had been to outbuild the Germans qualitatively, to save costs by reducing the number of units. Ironically, the margin of technical superiority was much more open to doubt.
When Fisher arrived at the Admiralty as First Sea Lord in 1904 he did so on the back of a reputation enhanced by the command of the Mediterranean Fleet between 1899 and 1902. Then his putative opponents were France and Russia. In terms of battleships, the French, with their enthusiasm for the torpedo and the changeability of their governments, could not compete. But, stung by the Fashoda incident in 1898, they set about the creation of a commerce-raiding fleet of armoured cruisers: by 1904 thirty-five had been ordered. The Admiralty responded in kind, itself ordering twelve large armoured cruisers for trade defence between 1902 and 1906. In doing so it generated the crisis in the navy’s finances which Fisher was summoned to address. The estimates for 1904–5 were fixed at £36.8 million, in contrast with estimates of £19.6 million in 1895-6. The First Lord, Selborne, conscious of German building, had set a margin over and above the two-power standard: he reckoned on having six battleships more than the joint totals of France and Russia, and twice as many armoured cruisers. The size of the merchant navy—9 million tons to the 1.5 million tons of the next two naval powers combined—made the two-power standard a totally inadequate yardstick for the protection of commerce against a guerre de course.21
The formative experience of the French threat and the ongoing nature of the Russian (even after 1907) meant that British naval construction remained geared to achieving a global capability, for all the pressures generated by Germany in the North Sea. The adoption of steam made vessels dependent on the supply of coal and so reduced their endurance; oil-fired turbines exacerbated the problem. But Britain’s worldwide network of sovereign bases rendered it less vulnerable on this score than any other power. After 1905 the Admiralty enlarged its docks in Auckland, Bombay, Fremantle, Hong Kong, Simonstown, Singapore, and Sydney.22 Moreover, steel alloys allowed armoured vessels to have high freeboards without creating instability through excessive topweight. Warships, which had hitherto had to fight their battles in calm coastal waters because their gunports, close to the water-line, had to be closed in choppy conditions, could now engage on the high seas.23 The effect was to negate the danger posed to the warship by torpedoes. Lacking in sea-keeping qualities, torpedo boats were largely restricted to the coast, and the extra sea space allowed the battleship to use her guns while staying out of torpedo range. Maritime strategy and warship design, therefore, supported the creation of a fleet of global and oceanic capabilities.
In Britain the major objection to this line of argument in 1904 was the fear of invasion from the continent. But it was precisely in the North Sea and the Channel that the torpedo retained its efficacy. Fisher therefore planned to liberate his major units for worldwide deployment by building up a coastal-protection force of submarines and smaller vessels. This flotilla defence would constitute a second-line navy whose task would be to target the troop transports of an invading force. Spending on flotilla craft doubled under Fisher’s direction, and against the background of a falling construction budget moved from 10 per cent to 20 per cent of the whole between 1904 and 1909.24
In the long run, the most striking element in this strategy is its reliance on the submarine. The first practicable ocean-going submarine (as opposed to French battery-powered submarines with only limited cruising ranges) was developed from the design of J. P. Holland and had entered service with the United States Navy as recently as 1900. Submarines played only a minor role in the Russo-Japanese War. Holland’s submarine was powered by internal combustion engines on the surface and by electrical motors when submerged. Making good speed on the surface and having a reasonable radius of action were considered essential in order to enable the submarine to act in conjunction with conventional warships. But the reliance on petrol restricted the range of the submarine and created dangers in an airtight vessel. Most significant, therefore, in naval attitudes to the submarine before 1914 is not the neglect of new technology, nor a purblind adherence to the capital ship in preference to its challenger, but rather an enthusiasm for the potentialities of something hitherto untried.
Scepticism with regard to the battleship was also evident in Fisher’s original conception of the Royal Navy’s striking force. Its key component was to be the armoured cruiser. Capital-ship construction required the reconciliation of three not necessarily convergent objectives—firepower, armour, and speed. For Fisher, the last of these three was pre-eminent. ‘Sea fighting’, he later instructed Churchill, ‘is pure common sense. The first of all necessities is SPEED, so as to be able to fight When you like Where you like and How you like.’25 The speed of the armoured cruiser was both strategic and tactical. It enabled a navy with global reponsibilities to achieve a rapid local concentration. Once in contact with the enemy, it ensured the ability to catch him; Fisher was assuming that the navy’s most likely operational task was the overhauling of fleeing French cruisers.
Implicit in Fisher’s twin conception of 1904—flotilla defence by submarines and a striking force of fast armoured cruisers—was an abandonment of the conventions of the two-power standard. Naval supremacy was no longer to be measured in numbers of battleships. But two factors militated against such radicalism. The first was political: prestige overseas and expectations at home were attuned to battleship supremacy. The second was technical: smokeless powder gave naval ordnance higher muzzle velocities, and therefore greater ranges and greater striking power. Guns were the capital ship’s answer to the torpedo. They constituted a case for the retention of the battleship. Fisher himself preferred to give the guns to the armoured cruiser. ‘The armoured cruiser of the first class’, he wrote in 1902, ‘is a swift Battleship in disguise.’26 What he had in mind came to be dubbed the battle cruiser, a ship which, in addition to the traditional role of the cruiser, would also have the ability to operate in the battle-line, scouting for the main force and then forming its fast wing. Fisher’s ideas were referred to a committee on designs in 1905; its answer, although, innovative, did not go quite so far. It proposed a new sort of battleship, the Dreadnought.
In the interim the Russo-Japanese War had confirmed the direction of British naval thought in tactical terms while undermining its strategic context. The removal of the Russian navy as an immediate threat meant that the security of the Pacific trade routes no longer depended on the presence of major units. At the same time the profile of the German threat became more pronounced. Both armament and armour were likely to be more important in the North Sea. Furthermore, the injection of the battle cruiser into the Anglo-German naval arms race could have deleterious consequences for the Royal Navy. As long as the Germans concentrated their efforts on battleships they confined their capabilities to the North Sea. If they responded to British battle cruisers by creating a comparable force of their own, they could penetrate into the northern Atlantic and wreak havoc along merchant-shipping lanes. By emphasizing Dreadnoughts rather than battle cruisers, the Admiralty ensured greater stability in Britain’s projection of maritime power, while suggesting greater comparability between the two navies in practice than existed in theory. Both of Fisher’s successors, Wilson and Bridgeman, endorsed this policy. The price was the construction of eighteen capital ships in the three years after 1909 compared with eight in the three previous years.27
The fact t
hat Dreadnought was the first of the new constructions to be completed, that it was built so quickly, and that its main armament was ten 12-inch guns, therefore obscured the point that Invincible—the battle cruiser rather than the battleship—was for Fisher the truly innovatory design. Invincible also had 12-inch guns (eight of them), but could achieve a speed of 25 knots (as opposed to the Dreadnought’s 21). H.M.S. Lion, the next class of battle cruiser, built in 1909, had 13.5-inch guns and a speed of 27 knots. And in 1912 Fisher was urging on Churchill battle cruisers with 15-inch and even 16-inch guns, and speeds of up to 30 knots. In the event Churchill stuck to battleships, at least in name, for the 1912–13 programme. The oil-burning Queen Elizabeth was nonetheless capable of 25 knots, while possessing a main armament of 15-inch guns. The focus on the North Sea and on the arms race with Germany had resulted in a preponderance of battleships over battle cruisers, but in Fisher’s eyes the two were similar, and in practice each had some of the qualities of the other.
Fisher’s ultimate objective, therefore, was to fuse in one vessel the firepower of the battleship with the manoeuvrability of the cruiser. The single type would meet three key objectives. First, it would fulfil Fisher’s fervour for rationalization as an end in itself. Secondly, and relatedly, it would obviate duplication and so cut costs. And thirdly, its capacity for rapid redeployment would give it strategic significance as well as tactical: it would maintain Britain’s global reach even while the navy concentrated in home waters. Fisher achieved celerity by sacrificing armour. In 1904 a 12-inch high-explosive armour-piercing shell could penetrate the main armour of any vessel, battleship or cruiser, at ranges up to 10,000 yards. His designs, therefore, concentrated armour around the ship’s vital parts, rather than around the vessel overall. Some additional protection was provided by increasing the watertight subdivisions of the hull. But the vessel’s main security was its speed and its ability to engage the enemy at long ranges. Its task was to hit before it itself was hit. Firing at high elevations, as long-range combat required, would result in shells striking ships either at oblique angles or vertically rather than horizontally. In theory, therefore, the battle cruisers needed armoured decks as well as armoured hulls. But shooting at extreme ranges seemed unlikely to be so accurate or so effective. In the battles of 1904–5 the fuses of the Japanese armour-piercing shells had proved too sensitive, and they had therefore detonated too soon for maximum effectiveness. British trials in 1909 corroborated these doubts: 12-inch armour-piercing shells fired at ranges beyond 9,000 yards, and so striking plate at oblique angles, broke up rather than penetrated. Jellicoe, as director of naval ordnance, proposed that a new fuse be developed, but the decision of Sir Arthur Wilson as First Sea Lord in 1911 was that high-explosive shell should be used at long ranges (and therefore be aimed against unarmoured parts of the ship only), and armour-piercing shell at close ranges. High-explosive shell might detonate above the deck rather than into it, and in any case by the time it struck its velocity would be largely spent, and its effect minimized by the angle of impact.
These calculations lost their force if the enemy possessed comparable vessels, and if armour-piercing shells gained in effectiveness. By 1914 the British battle cruiser, with armour plate 3 to 6 inches thinner than on a battleship, was vulnerable to a 12-inch gun at 16,000 yards.28 Furthermore, the lack of armour on the gun turrets increased the dangers of flash down the ammunition hoists to the magazines.
Long-range gunnery was the attribute which squared the circle of Fisher’s designs: it was the complement to speed, and guns and speed in conjunction were the theoretical antidote to lack of armour. Of the quality of British naval armament, and its superiority to that of the Germans, there is no doubt. In the 1880s the emphasis had been on quick-firing guns and close ranges. Ranges had then been increased by the danger of torpedoes, and by the concomitant development of destroyers (and in due course battle cruisers) to provide a forward defensive screen. At long ranges the variation in types—and multiplication in numbers—of guns had made accurate fire control difficult.
Fisher’s answer, embodied in the Dreadnought, was a concentration on big guns, on the neglect of secondary armament, and on slower rates of fire. His ships would use their speed to bring a fleeing enemy to action. They would then keep the ranges long, so that their salvoes would be easier to spot and correct. The calibre of the big guns meant that fewer could achieve a heavier broadside than a larger number of smaller-calibre guns. The ten guns of the Dreadnought were placed so that eight could fire on each broadside, or six ahead or astern. The broadside of the super-Dreadnought, Queen Elizabeth, with eight 15-inch guns, amounted to 15,600 pounds; that of the German battleship Kronprinz Wilhelm, also laid down in 1912 but with ten 12-inch guns, was 8,600 pounds.29 In July 1914 Germany had only four vessels building with 15-inch guns compared with Britain’s ten, and the dominant calibre in service in Germany was 12-inch to Britain’s 13.5–inch.
The maximum ranges of the guns of the Dreadnought generation were enormous: 20,000 yards was normal (the Russians had opened accurate fire at 18,000 yards in the Russo-Japanese War), and Queen Elizabeths 15-inch guns could range 35,000 yards. However, Britain’s long-range gunnery performance remained theoretical. A stationary ship firing at a stationary target could achieve one hit per gun per minute. Pre-war tactical orthodoxy assumed that a naval battle would in most cases imitate the conditions of stationary combat, and the ships would engage in one long line on parallel courses. In reality, a firing ship and its target would normally manoeuvre at varying ranges at different speeds and on convergent or divergent courses. The calculation of the rate of change had to predict the relative positions of the two ships and to make allowance for the flight times of the shells themselves. Gunnery’s problems were compounded by the fact that a ship was not a stable gun platform. Pitching and rolling, particularly in a heavy sea, meant that the guns were only fleetingly covering their targets. Poor weather conditions, spray, smoke, and even darkness itself could hamper observation and had to be taken into account in controlling fire.
Fisher, although he—like many others in the Royal Navy—grossly underestimated the scale of the difficulty, did not totally neglect it. When he became First Sea Lord he appointed an inspector of target practice, Percy Scott. In 1907 Scott managed to have stationary targets replaced by towed ones, and increased to 7,000 or 8,000 yards the ranges at which firing was undertaken. But by 1914 practice was still performed at half the guns’ maximum range, conducted in good, clear weather, and divorced from tactical manoeuvre. Scott’s principal achievement was the system of director firing, the placing of a centralized sight for all a ship’s guns on the foremast: the sight would then be as clear of spray and smoke as possible, and the guns would fire simultaneously, allowing the fall of shot to be more easily observed and corrected. However, the advocates of individual gun-laying were sufficiently vociferous to ensure that Scott’s proposal had to wait until 1912 for formal adoption.
Fisher also showed some interest in the work of Arthur Hungerford Pollen, a civilian, trained in the law but interested in naval matters, who produced a mechanical solution to the problems of long-range fire control. Pollen’s system plotted the course and bearing of the enemy ship, related them to those of the firing ship, corrected for movements by both ships and for the flight times of the projectiles, and performed all this at speed. Pollen’s system would have enabled the navy to break the tactical tyranny of formations in line-ahead, that is of ships following each other in single file, so that a fleet could concentrate their fire in broadsides to port or starboard. Greater flexibility, which had been promised by the advent of rams and torpedoes, seemed to have been put in abeyance by the revival of gunnery. But Pollen’s system was never universally adopted. Instead, Captain F. C. Dreyer, with the backing of Sir Arthur Wilson, pirated Pollen’s Argo clock (effectively the computer of the system) to mechanize the plotting of bearings but retained the manual plotting of ranges, so producing a fire-control system which was ch
eaper than Pollen’s, and which performed well enough on the straight courses and limited ranges of pre-war battle practice. Despite all Pollen’s promotion of his inventions, the Admiralty bought only five clocks, for installation on the King George V class battleships.
The frustration of Scott, and in particular the virtual rejection of Pollen, meant that despite the primacy for Fisher of effective long-range gunnery no reconciliation of its problems had been achieved. Engine speed, as Pollen emphasized in 1911, was not the same as tactical speed: high engine speed was only valuable if the knowledge could be acquired to enable its use in combat. But Pollen was an outsider, not a naval man, and he was taking on the elite of the Royal Navy, its gunnery experts. Pollen had produced a mechanical solution to problems whose resolution had hitherto relied on the training and skill of naval gun crews: he was arguing that professional, human qualities, which had marked off British naval superiority in the age of sail, should be abandoned in favour of the machine. Dreyer, as a naval officer, had powerful backers—first Reginald Bacon, director of naval ordnance from 1907 to 1909, and then Arthur Wilson. Pollen, on the other hand, had lost the support of Fisher because the latter reckoned him a Beresfordian. His chances looked up again when he enlisted the enthusiastic aid of Captain Frederick Ogilvy, commanding HMS Natal and responsible for the 1909 trials of Pollen’s system. But Ogilvy succumbed to typhoid, ironically the product of some oysters presented to him by Pollen. Battenberg was also sympathetically inclined to Pollen, but was probably reluctant to reactivate an issue whose nature was calculated to invite Churchill’s interference in technical matters. The objective assessment of the Pollen system was thus prey to individual favour, to accident, to prejudice.
All this is not to say that the qualitative balance was actually weighted against the British in 1914. The Germans too practised firing at no more than 10,000 yards, albeit at speed and in poor visibility. They did not have director firing or, for all its deficiencies, the equivalent of the Dreyer range table: in the matter of fire control their only advantage lay in their stereoscopic sights. The first German Dreadnoughts, the Nassau class completed in 1909–10, had reciprocating engines rather than turbines and thus—unlike their British equivalents—lacked the space to mount twin-turrets. But the fact that they were therefore relatively under-gunned in more ways than one was not to prove decisive. Being built in more modern dockyards, the German ships were up to ten feet broader in the beam than British Dreadnoughts. Their limited operating radius, since they were intended for the North Sea only, allowed a larger number of watertight compartments. And, as a general principle, the Germans used armour of a thickness equivalent to their guns’ calibre: thus, the Nassaus had plate 300 mm thick compared to 279 mm on the Dreadnoughts, and it extended (unlike the British armour belt) from bow to stern.