by Hew Strachan
The capital ship of 1914 had become, by virtue of its construction, its armour, its watertight compartments, and its speed, stronger in relation to defence than to offence. However great their own offensive capacities, the British were going to find it hard to sink the robustly built and more stable German ships. The Royal Navy’s difficulties in this respect were increased through self-inflicted and largely avoidable deficiencies. In July 1914 fifteen out of twenty-eight British capital ships did not have the optimum fire-control gear, and in only eight had Scott’s director firing been installed. The theoretical capabilities of firepower could not be realized in practice. The possibility of a decisive fleet action was more remote than the massive 15-inch guns of the super-Dreadnoughts suggested.30
What had sunk ships in the Russo-Japanese War was fire and water: as crews shipped water to fight fires they added to that already entering through holes in the hull and so rendered vessels unstable. Neither problem was inherently incapable of management, but the efforts of the crews of stricken ships were impeded by a hail of close-range high-explosive shell discharged from lighter, quick-firing secondary armament. Wilson’s belief that 8,000 yards was an extreme range for battleships did more, therefore, than mirror his own pre-Dreadnought fleet-handling experience in 1904; it also reflected the most recent (albeit also pre-Dreadnought) lessons of war.
Intellectually, this was the Royal Navy’s greatest problem. The service radically revised its capabilities in the decade before 1914, but in doing so it had rendered its continued maritime pre-eminence dependent on equipment untested in combat. The fear that theory had outstripped performance was reinforced by its increasing focus on the North Sea. Sturdee, calculating that on twenty-five out of thirty days visibility there was restricted to a maximum of 10,000 yards, concluded that battle was likely to open at 6,000 yards. At such a range the deficiencies of armour-piercing shell were not relevant, and, because in close action torpedo-boats would once again constitute a threat, the values of quick-firing guns were enhanced. Furthermore, line-ahead would remain essential, and the Pollen system would be redundant.31
Fisher’s critics were therefore worried that technological innovation had become, in the words of a future First Sea Lord, Ernle Chatfield, ‘a master rather than a servant’.32 In their youths first the ram and then the torpedo had meant that speed of decision and rapid executive action would be essential command qualities in a fleet action if it had occurred. The advent of long-range gunnery decelerated the pace of combat at sea, while reimposing order through its insistence on line-ahead to enable concentrated and accurate fire. Fisher himself neglected naval tactics, and so was slow to see that the consequences of his own radicalism at this level were, paradoxically, in some respects conservative.
New equipment did not have to create a tactical straitjacket: materialism could be a servant. Pollen’s fire-control system would have permitted battle squadrons to assimilate frequent changes in ranges and bearings. Wireless, which the Royal Navy tested in 1899, could in theory confer flexibility through real-time intelligence and reporting. Scouting cruisers were now able to relay information over distances of 70 miles, from points far over the horizon. Leading units could take the initiative in closing with the enemy, confident that their actions would not go unsupported. But practice did not match these expectations. Ships had been designed without wireless offices close to their bridges, and so the information wireless conveyed was not readily incorporated with command. The messages themselves had to be encoded before transmission and then deciphered on receipt. Thus, as ranges closed, wireless became less and less efficient at providing real-time intelligence. By contrast, wireless enabled excessive control at long ranges. Manoeuvres in 1906 condemned the wireless as inefficient, not so much on technical grounds as because it invited the transmission of far too many useless messages.33 In March 1910 Sir Arthur Wilson directed the manoeuvres of the 2nd battle squadron off Portugal from the Admiralty.34 Thus the wireless’s initial impact was not to promote tactical flexibility through the delegation of command but to further tactical restraint through its centralization.
The navy, after all, was a hierarchical profession, in which seniority prevailed over selective promotion. The advent of steam, with its ability to equalize the speeds of ships, provided the opportunity for further regulation. ‘The chief aim of the naval tactician’, according to Philip Colomb in 1874, was ‘to work a fleet at speed, in the closest order.’35 The arrival of the wireless did not change the fact that tactical control was exercised primarily through flag signals. In the 1880s a fleet required a minimum of 14,000 different signals, and despite efforts to reduce this number little had changed by 1914. Signalling promoted the cult of fleet control, although steam ensured that there were fewer masts on which to fly the flags and more smoke with which to obsure them.
By 1891 Sir George Tryon, appointed commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet in that year, feared that fleet manoeuvres orchestrated by flags had become an end in themselves, usurping effectiveness in battle. Recognizing that in close action an excessive dependence on flag signals could rob commanders of initiative and the fleet of tactical flexibility, he experimented with the delegation of command through signal-free manoeuvring. But his efforts to reinject the reality of war into the navy’s peacetime training were confounded in 1893 when his flagship, HMS Victoria, was rammed by HMS Camperdown. Although not the consequence of signal-free manoeuvring, the disaster discredited Tryon’s principles, as well as drowning their author. Signalling became a naval specialism, as self-important and self-promoting as gunnery. The dangers did not go unrecognized, but responses tended to be defeatist. In 1908 E. J. W. Slade, the director of naval intelligence, wrote: ‘The tendency for signalling methods to be based on peace conditions and to become increasingly complicated has been apparent for some time: it is an almost inevitable corollary of such conditions.’36
The navy liked to think that its view of battle was Nelsonic. Its belief was justified in so far as fleet action remained the operational focus for every right-thinking officer. Nor was the stress put on decisive battle as ill-conceived as subsequent experience might suggest. The evidence of Tsushima just as much as Trafalgar supported such a stance. What was not Nelsonic was the centralization of command which steam propulsion and flag signalling fostered. The fleet would approach the enemy in column, deploy into line, and would engage in a gunnery duel on a parallel course to the enemy’s. The ultimate objective was to outdistance the enemy line and so be able to cut across his van, to cross the ‘T’ in the naval parlance of the day, bringing the fire of the line’s broadside against the reduced weight of the enemy’s fire ahead. But the speed of the line would, for the sake of the formation, be restricted to that of the slowest ship. Ships would fight, not as independent units but as part of a larger formation.37
A decisive victory over the German fleet would fulfil the objectives of British strategy: it would secure Britain’s maritime approaches and resolve most of the other responsibilities of admiralty. But the pursuit of such an action was in no sense obligatory. The navy’s overriding task was defensive: to maintain Britain’s supremacy at sea and to rebuff the challenges of others. In their so-called ‘green pamphlet’, Slade, in his previous incarnation as director of the navy’s war college, and the civilian maritime strategist Julian Corbett told the war course at Portsmouth in November 1906 that defensive action could well prove both stronger and sufficient. According to Corbett, dominance of the sea rested on the control of its lines of communication. The impulse to battle, he argued in Some principles of maritime strategy in 1911, should not, ‘for all its moral exhilaration’, become ‘a substitute for judgement’. As the power in possession, Britain should only seek battle when it commanded overwhelming force and when the circumstances were exactly right.38
And there was a further factor militating against fleet action: the Germans might not come out to fight. In the immediate aftermath of Tsushima, with the Russian threat eliminated,
Britain’s margin of maritime superiority was so massive as to make fleet action both unnecessary and improbable. The German navy in the North Sea was growing but still manageable, and the Admiralty’s pursuit of plans for blockade and for amphibious operations between 1906 and 1908 reflected the fact that it was very unlikely to seek a decisive engagement of its own volition. Indeed, Asquith was so confident in Britain’s mastery of the seas that in March 1908 he embraced a two-power standard, plus 10 per cent.39 This confidence was of course shaken by the 1909 scare, but its legacy persisted in two forms. First, the aim of Britain’s pre–1914 naval programme was to intimidate the Germans. Throughout the period 1905 to 1918 the British never lost a clear quantitative lead in capital ships; deterrence was therefore as likely to operate during the war, to keep the German fleet in harbour, as it had done in peacetime. Secondly, if the German fleet was so neutralized, the navy would be free to pursue options other than fleet action.
At one level, therefore, the intellectual origins of close blockade lay in the idea that the German fleet would not sally forth; moreover, close blockade would serve both of Britain’s pre-eminent defensive objectives, resistance to invasion and protection of its trade routes. But at another level close blockade fed the offensive instincts of the Royal Navy. By stopping up Germany’s main waterways, it would force the German fleet into action, despite its inferiority, in a bid to reopen navigation.
The dangers of close blockade were, however, evident as early as 1904; the advent of the submarine, the mine, and the torpedo, in addition to the threat of coastal batteries, suggested that the maintenance of an immediate watch on the estuaries of the Jade and the Elbe would result in the steady erosion of British capital ships, with no comparable loss to Germany. Fisher’s war orders of 1908, therefore, compromised by ordering the blockading fleet to pull back at night to a point at least 170 miles from the nearest enemy destroyer base. Confusion ensued. The commander responsible for the operational execution of the First Sea Lord’s war orders was Beresford: thus, the conversion of concept into detailed plan fell foul of the two admirals’ personal animosities. Nor did their joint retirements clarify the situation. Wilson had been responsible for some of the more hare-brained thinking of 1905–6, including a scheme (endorsed by Fisher) to destroy the forts at Cuxhaven, sink the German fleet at anchor, and master the Kiel canal in order to threaten Hamburg.40 As First Sea Lord, therefore, Wilson reverted to close blockade, arguing on the basis of his experience in 1904 that submarines could not manoeuvre in shallow waters and would not attack destroyers. (In fact, in the manoeuvres to which he was referring the submarines had been evading escorts in a bid to get at battleships.) Wilson concluded that destroyers could enforce a blockade close to the coast, and that the Grand Fleet should be at hand in the event of the High Seas Fleet coming out to break it up. Wilson’s plan rested on an overestimation of the destroyer and an underestimation of the submarine. It would be criticized on both counts.
Destroyers were built to ‘destroy’ torpedo boats; they had been designed both for attack with torpedoes and as a defence against them. The combination of reciprocating engines and a limited displacement restricted their endurance at sea. Thus—in a further reflection of its global remit as a maritime power— Britain had fewer destroyers than did Germany: forty-two to eighty-eight in 1914. Moreover, as the possessor of a network of sovereign bases, the Royal Navy had only one collier: the Grand Fleet alone reckoned it needed in excess of 200 on mobilization. The blockading destroyers would have to return to coal every three to four days. As the nearest British port was 280 miles from the German coast, the blockading force would require three reliefs—one on station, one in port, and one en route—or twice as many destroyers as Britain possessed. Wilson’s response to these difficulties was to suggest the seizure of Heligoland, so as to create a forward base. Both Bridgeman, the Second Sea Lord, and Sir George Callaghan, who became commander-in-chief, Home Fleet, in November 1911, were appalled. The confusion was compounded by the Declaration of London, which in bolstering the maritime rights of neutrals, threatened the use of blockade as a weapon of war. The navy’s confusion at the Committee of Imperial Defence on 23 August 1911 was an accurate and direct reflection of the confusion in its war planning.41
At first Callaghan’s own solution was an observational blockade. During the course of 1912 the naval war staff examined the idea of deploying cruisers and destroyers in a line 300 miles long, from the Norwegian shore to the east coast of England. Again the navy had too few ships to match its operational objectives. Battenberg dubbed such thinking ‘plain suicide’; Callaghan himself rejected the idea, and by November was advocating the adoption of a distant blockade.42 Its logic was geographical, exploiting Britain’s land mass athwart Germany’s exits to the oceans, and dividing its warships into two components, one from Orkney to Norway, across the northern exits from the North Sea, and the other in the Channel, at its southern exit.43 The fact that the North Sea was thus rendered a no-man’s land was not seen necessarily as a disadvantage. Flotilla defence could guard the eastern coast of Great Britain against German raids, while the temptation of German capital ships to sally forth would be thereby increased, and the opportunity for fleet action created.
By 1913–14, therefore, distant blockade had begun, at least formally speaking, to give the Royal Navy a coherent operational plan, which integrated the possibility of fleet action with Britain’s wider strategic objectives. But the issue was far from settled. Wilson’s low opinion of the submarine was not shared by Fisher, who had promoted it for the purposes of coastal defence. By 1909 the combination of Fisher’s enthusiasm and Vickers’ nose for easy profits (submarine construction did not require expensive plant)44 meant that Britain led the world in the development of ocean-going submarines. But Wilson’s appointment as First Sea Lord and the cabinet’s acceptance of the need to surpass German Dreadnought construction rates left the submarine programme in disarray. Not until Churchill took up the reins at the Admiralty did Fisher’s voice again find a hearing.
Churchill was receptive to the submarine for reasons that were strategic, political, and operational. By February 1912 Fisher’s solution to the naval arms race in the Mediterranean was flotilla defence. The objections to such a strategy were political: not only the public but also the Committee of Imperial Defence measured naval strength in terms of Dreadnoughts. Churchill, therefore, wavered. However, submarines were cheaper than battleships, and by the end of 1913 he was able to promise the prime minister that he could substitute the latter with the former and so meet the Treasury’s determination to cut the naval estimates from 1915–16. But Churchill’s conversion to the submarine was not simply the product of political expedience or the needs of the Mediterranean; it was also a manifestation of his pugnacity. The submarine might enable a reversion to close blockade in the North Sea.
By 1908 the Royal Navy possessed in the Di a submarine capable of sustaining itself in the North Sea for up to a week, and with the range to operate off the German coast. The D-class’s successor was the E-type, a long-range patrol submarine. So impressive, however, was the Di’s performance that it also fostered experiments with other types, and particularly with a much larger vessel, capable of 24 knots on the surface and therefore of operating with the Grand Fleet. By 1915 this line of development would result in the K-class. But in the short term the consequence of experimentation and proliferation was loss of momentum. In 1913 Britain lacked the plant to develop and produce three different types of submarine at the same time. To allow room for the fleet submarine, E-type production was retarded in favour of the F-class, which had been designed for coastal protection and which the fleet submarine advocates argued was as fit for close-blockade work as the E-class. By late 1913 it was clear that the F-class lacked the endurance to operate off the German shore.45
Fisher wrote to Churchill in November casting doubts on the fleet submarine, and pushing the E-class. Typically, his advocacy almost did as much to damage his ca
se as advance it. Churchill, Battenberg, and the commodore of the submarine service, Roger Keyes, were scandalized by Fisher’s suggestion that submarines might sink unarmed merchant vessels. Furthermore, his belief that the submarine challenged the hegemony of the battleship was at least superficially a case for proceeding with fleet submarines rather than patrol craft. Certainly, one consequence of the secret conference held at the Admiralty on 9 December 1913 to discuss Fisher’s views was an acceptance that if the K-class was to enter service it should do so at the expense of battleships and not of patrol submarines.
Britain’s increasing insouciance concerning its inability to sustain the two-power standard, therefore, derived from an impending change in naval strategy. However, the abandonment of the battleship as the yardstick of naval power could not be public. Domestically, Dreadnoughts had too high a profile to be rapidly abandoned; internationally, Britain’s rivals had to be encouraged to persist with expensive technologies whose impending obsolescence the Admiralty now began to recognize.46