To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Pohl’s own response to the pressure for an offensive option was the U-boat. It is hard to resist the argument that this was a decision grounded, not on strategy but on bureaucratic necessity. Pohl needed to mark out a policy that was different from that of Tirpitz.118 He agreed with the rejection of major operations in the North Sea; although he considered the Baltic options, their limited versions seemed redundant and their expansive versions far fetched. But in February 1915 the U-boats too had little to recommend them. In 1914 they had lost a quarter of their strength, sinking only ten of sixty-one vessels accounted for by German action.119 Most German naval thought still saw the submarine in ancillary terms, not as a major new way of exercising sea-power.

  Thus, just as Germany’s naval administration remained divided by faction and function, so did its strategy get pulled in divergent directions. The net consequence was the neglect and incipient decline of Germany’s High Seas Fleet. By the end of 1914 two marine divisions were fighting in Flanders, their numbers being made up with reservists, and in February 1915 the 6th battle squadron was taken out of commission and the 5th reduced. After the demise of the Blücher only the most modern capital ships were kept operational. On 23 March 1915 Pohl wrote to the Kaiser,

  I do not know the positions of the enemy naval forces. My scouting forces are too weak for me to be able to know when meeting weak enemy forces if the main body is in the vicinity. I can therefore find myself—in spite of myself—engaged in a naval battle that I must avoid. In the current military situation, I think therefore that the offensive opportunity must be very brief, and limited to showing that we dominate the Heligoland Bight.120

  The Kaiser agreed. By the spring of 1915 the Royal Navy had to all intents and purposes won the battle which it had set out to win; the German surface fleet was crushed, even if its units were intact. Tirpitz’s pre-war policies were in ruins. But, as Wegener had observed, neither the fleet nor battle was an end in itself; there were other ways of exercising sea-power.

  6

  WAR IN THE PACIFIC,

  1914–1917

  OCEANIC SECURITY AND THE CRUISER

  THREAT

  On 21 July 1914 Sir F. C. D. Sturdee wrote a minute for the two First Lords of the Admiralty: ‘it is very evident’, he remarked, ‘that our next maritime war will be world-wide, more so even than former wars.’1 The concentration of the British fleet in home waters and the high profile accorded the Anglo-German naval arms race had not gainsaid the continuity of the navy’s task in British grand strategy. The British empire was bonded by maritime communications; the homeland was dependent on a vastly increased oceanic trade; the Royal Navy’s global responsibilities, even if some what humdrum, remained indivisible from its mission in the North Sea.

  Therefore, the fleet which Fisher built was not designed, as much of the German was, exclusively for North Sea operations. The features of his battle cruisers which excited criticism in that context became assets when placed alongside the demands of global service. The relative lack of armour and of subdivision in watertight compartments, so problematic in fleet action in narrow seas, allowed speeds and cruising ranges which were fundamental on the oceans. Fisher’s designs, and indeed his very preference for the battle cruiser over the battleship, betrayed his broad interpretation of the nature of British sea-power. His willingness to embrace the notion of blockade, his deep-seated revulsion at the army’s continentalism, suggested an Atlantic and imperial orientation that he shared with Hankey and Esher.

  Navalism, which when expressed by any other power sent British strategists into flurries of self-induced panic, provoked little response when taken up by the United States. Co-operation not confrontation was the keynote, even if not formalized, of pre-war Anglo-American relations. Britain’s economic dependence on the world’s producers of primary materials left it no choice.

  Before the war 58 per cent of the calories consumed in Britain arrived by sea—grain from the prairies of North America, meat from Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina; cheap food kept British wages down and therefore made the prices of its finished goods competitive; in return the dominions of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand took 60 per cent of their imports from Britain. Moreover, exports by themselves were insufficient to cover Britain’s trade deficit. London paid for its imports by its overseas investment, by the world dominance of its shipping, banking, and insurance. Britain’s livelihood was therefore global, oceanic, and imperial.2 Thus, the concentration of the fleet on home waters was not, in its ultimate purposes, designed to bring about a fleet action; it was—as the policy of distant blockade abundantly testified—to prevent German cruisers breaking out into the oceans and trade-routes of the world.

  But, as with so many other aspects of Britain’s pre-war naval policy, its global perspective remained ill-developed. There was little effort either publicly or in the Committee of Imperial Defence to reconcile the immediate focus on Germany with the underlying continuities of British sea-power. Fisher’s critics pointed out that the scrapping of obsolescent vessels on economic grounds removed from service those very ships most suitable for trade protection. The First Sea Lord replied that the threat to merchant shipping would come from enemy cruisers operating in squadrons, not in isolation. The Royal Navy could therefore best serve the interests of commerce by seeking out and attacking those enemy cruiser squadrons.3 But his argument was self-serving. It put a premium on all his own personal predilections—on modernization, on concentration, on the offensive, and on the battle cruiser. Its failure to convince was hardly surprising when the Admiralty simultaneously reduced the Mediterranean and China squadrons, and terminated that in the South Atlantic.

  In reality, economic necessity combined with the German challenge to give the Admiralty little room for manoeuvre. The British navy could not independently sustain a global presence. The solution to its far-flung problems was, of course, the establishment of local proxies and regional balances—informally the United States in the Pacific and western Atlantic, formally France in the Mediterranean and Japan in the Far East.

  After 1907 Russia, if it posed any threat to Britain, did so in Persia, not in China or India. The strategic buttress of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, fear of Russia as an east Asian power, was therefore removed. The renewal of the alliance in 1911 consequently came to rest on somewhat different foundations. Japan, which had derived both status and great-power backing from the alliance, saw it as a means for Anglo-Japanese co-operation in the exploitation of China. In this it was not as totally deceived as Britain’s defence of the status quo in the Far East and of the open door in China might seem to suggest. Grey recognized the legitimacy of Japanese expansionism, albeit within limits. The alliance was therefore the means by which Britain could—and before 1914 did—moderate Japanese foreign policy. But such a justification for the alliance was insufficient from the British perspective, particularly when Japanese economic ambitions in the areas of British influence, on the Yangtze and in South China, were creating unease in British commercial circles. For Britain, the fundamental purpose of the alliance was naval. By the end of the nineteenth century the Pacific had become a hub of naval competition, attracting significant French, Russian, and Japanese fleets. In 1901 the Admiralty had maintained thirty-eight battleships and cruisers in Far Eastern waters, but by 1910 that number was halved.4 The French fleet had been withdrawn, the Russian eliminated, and the Japanese neutralized. By calling in the Japanese navy as reinforcement, Britain could rest easy with regard to its defensive obligations, both coastal and commercial, in the Pacific.

  However, this solution to its naval requirements, while attractive to London and consonant with its reconciliation of global and European concerns, was less satisfactory to those Anglophone countries whose shores were washed by Pacific waters. A corollary of Britain’s close trading links with the Americas and the Dominions was the continuing identification of the emigrant communities and settler societies of those lands with the mother country. They
were white and determined to remain so. The emigration of Japanese to British Columbia and to California agitated both Canadian and United States opinion; racism found its most virulent expression in Australia, and its most forceful exponent in that country’s future Labour leader Billy Hughes. The policy of exclusion, although populist and protective in markets where labour was scarce and jobs plenty, was not, therefore, economically motivated in the first instance.5 It was rather a statement of emergent national identity. Australia’s popular fiction portrayed the Japanese as its invaders, not its defenders. Moreover, many Australians could not see any long-term advantage to Tokyo in the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Britain needed Japan to protect its possessions in the Far East; Japan, on the other hand, had no comparable need of Britain in Europe, and could not rely on Britain to face its most likely Asian or Pacific opponents, Russia and the United States.

  But the Japanese threat did not pre-empt the German threat: the latter also had resonances in the Antipodes. If Germany defeated Britain in Europe the Dominions might find themselves reallocated as colonies of Germany. Less extreme but more immediately, Germany’s acquisition of Pacific islands pointed menacingly at the coastal trade of Australia and New Zealand; the German consular service in Australia worked hard to ensure that the sizeable German immigrant population retained its cultural identity.6

  Ultimately the Dominions’ long-term security lay in the co-ordinated efforts of the empire as a whole: the defensive capability of the sum was greater than that of the parts. In 1909 Sir Joseph Ward—prime minister of the most British, if also the most far-flung, Dominion New Zealand—told the Imperial Conference: ‘Our country is very anxious and willing to assist the Old Land in the event of trouble arising to do so voluntarily by men or money, and . . . always would be ready to do its share in fighting for the defence of the Motherland in any portion of the world.’7 Ward recognized that an investment in defence equipment sufficient to sustain viable independent forces would cripple the New Zealand economy: thus, his loyalty to London was not at the expense of the needs of New Zealand but was their corollary. Nascent nationalisms were compatible with a continuing imperial identity.

  Grey exploited these convergences. When meeting the dominion prime ministers in 1911 he took care to put the case for the alliance’s renewal in its global and naval context. He preferred to see Japanese ambitions and Japanese emigration as directed towards China rather than into the Pacific. In revealing his sensitivity to opinion in the Antipodes and North America, and by consulting the Dominions (if not deferring to them), he did much to appease them.

  Australia’s response to its fears of invasion, whether Japanese or German, was to create its own fleet. In 1906 it planned a force of eight coastal destroyers and four torpedo boats; by 1908 it had developed this into a putative navy of twenty-four destroyers. The Admiralty could see no value in such proposals. For the orthodox, A. T. Mahan’s advocacy of battle fleets and the advent of the Dreadnought made gunboat defence an even more inadequate expedient against a first-class power. For the unorthodox, like Fisher, submarines were a more promising means of coastal defence—a point which both Australians and New Zealanders appeared to take on board at the Imperial Conference in 1907, but did nothing to implement.8 Fisher did not push it: he saw the Australians’ fears of invasion as preposterous. Since Tsushima, the only significant navy in the Pacific, apart from that of the United States, belonged to Britain’s ally Japan. Even if the alliance lapsed, Japan could hardly mount a realistic challenge to antipodean security, since it lacked the bases to render it logistic support, and the advent of wireless telegraphy was likely to give timely intelligence of its advance. Such views did not mean that Fisher was averse to a revived Pacific fleet. Its task, however, should not be defence against invasion but the protection of oceanic trade. For such a mission cruisers, not destroyers, were required.

  Fisher’s cause was boosted by New Zealand’s vision of imperial defence. Ward was worried by the possibility of an Australian navy; its effect could be a further reduction in the Royal Navy’s presence in the south Pacific, with New Zealand’s defence dependent on Australia as it could not afford its own. On 22 March 1909 he responded to the German naval scare in London by announcing that New Zealand would fund at least one Dreadnought, and possibly a second, as its contribution to the imperial fleet. Such controversy in Wellington as his initiative caused was generated more by his failure to secure prior parliamentary approval than by a desire to follow the Australian route. Across the Tasman Sea both New South Wales and Victoria responded to New Zealand’s gesture, and put pressure on the Commonwealth of Australia also to offer a Dreadnought.9 It duly did so.

  At the Imperial Conference held in July 1909 Fisher responded enthusiastically to both these initiatives, while trying to channel them in different directions. His aim was inter-operability, and his preferred tool was his beloved battle cruiser. McKenna duly told the Dominions that a navy needed to be at least 2,000 men strong and to be formed of one battle cruiser, three light cruisers, six destroyers, and three submarines in order to present a viable fleet unit both in terms of career structure and of operational utility. Individually such units would not create the logistic, manning, or fiscal demands of a fully fledged oceanic battle fleet. But by operating in conjunction with each other they would be the building blocks for an imperial Pacific fleet. Fisher imagined that Canada and Australia would each provide one fleet unit, and Britain two (to be based at Hong Kong and Singapore). New Zealand would help subsidize the Hong Kong unit, and South Africa and India might contribute in due course.10 The political merit of the fleet unit idea was its ability to appease Australian nationalism; to that extent Ward was disappointed by the dilution of his conception of an overarching imperial navy. Its operational utility was both logistic and tactical. The line of battle, vulnerable in any case to long-range torpedoes, was hard to support across the expanse of the Pacific; its replacement by the battle unit, in which each capital ship would fight in conjunction with smaller, supporting vessels, but independently of other Dreadnoughts, eased the constraints of fuel supply.11

  The policy unravelled almost as soon as it was created. Fisher’s retirement removed its prime advocate in Whitehall. Canada saw the scheme, not as a concession to dominion nationalism but as a reassertion of imperialism.12 But its principal challenger was Churchill. The conclusions of the Imperial Naval Conference overlapped with the 1909 naval estimates crisis. Its focus was Germany, and Churchill agreed that true economy rested in concentration against the main enemy in the potentially decisive theatre. As First Lord he was delighted to accept the naval units of the Dominions, but on condition that they were incorporated into the Royal Navy, and he was bent on bringing that navy home at an even more resolute pace than Fisher had been.

  In 1911 Sir Robert Borden’s Conservative party won the Canadian election. It had campaigned on a policy of imperial unity. Borden therefore rejected the proposals of Sir Wilfred Laurier’s Liberal party for a Canadian navy of four cruisers and six destroyers for coastal protection. In 1912 Churchill persuaded Borden that Canada should allocate $35 million for the construction of three Dreadnoughts, not for the Pacific or even for the Atlantic but for the Mediterranean. Borden’s bill was thrown out by the Liberal-dominated Canadian Senate. In 1914 the Royal Canadian Navy possessed two ageing cruisers, one for either coast. In two years its strength had fallen from 800 men to 350, sufficient to provide half a crew for one vessel.13

  Churchill’s policy ought to have proved as disastrous with the Australians and New Zealanders. He insulted them in 1913 by suggesting that they would be sufficiently protected by a quick-reaction force based as far away as Gibraltar. The First Lord argued that there were only two battleships in the Pacific, one Chilean and one American: the Japanese did not count as they were allies. But in this case events rebounded to Churchill’s advantage. The New Zealand naval defence bill of November 1913 commenced the training of a New Zealand navy, while still promising that its men w
ould be transferred to the Admiralty in time of war. Australia’s response was to look to embark on a twenty-two-year programme of naval construction, and its annual naval spending approached £2 million. By the outbreak of war the Australian navy comprised one battle cruiser, four light cruisers, and three destroyers.14

  The Australian brand of navalism was a fruit of Pacific rivalries and of fears of Japan. The deployment of the Australian navy was from the outset the affair of the Commonwealth of Australia. But in the minds of the Admiralty, Australia and New Zealand, the eponymous battle cruisers provided by each of those Dominions, improved the naval balance against Germany. The Admiralty had been able to play off the Japanese against the Dominions and so secure the contributions of both. The building blocks of a Pacific fleet existed, even if its design was not in place.

  Therefore, in the Pacific as much as, if not more than, in the North Sea, ships were symbols of power rather than executors of strategy. Churchill’s case rested on the Anglo-Japanese alliance as the ‘bond that is the true and effective protection for the safety of Australia and New Zealand’.15 But the service of which he was the political head resolutely refused to develop this conceptual framework, this grand strategy, into operational reality. The Japanese suggested that the two navies conduct joint exercises and establish a common signal book. The Admiralty refused. The concept of security to which the Japanese alliance subscribed was a generalized one; the specific threat of Germany was not addressed. Indeed, the Admiralty assumed that Japan would not become involved in the event of war with Germany in Europe. This was reasonable in so far as the Anglo-Japanese alliance was designed as a settlement and stabilizer of Far Eastern issues. It was militarily naive in view of the fact that Germany’s major overseas naval base was at Tsingtao in the Shantung peninsula. The forces stationed there, the East Asiatic Squadron, constituted the principal grouping of German cruisers overseas. Indeed, the German vessels, two armoured cruisers and three light cruisers, were numerically comparable with those of the British Chinese station (two armoured cruisers, two light cruisers, and eight destroyers), and—being all of the latest construction—were qualitatively superior. Sir Thomas Jerram, who took up the command of the China station in 1913, was very worried. The Admiralty’s sop to his concerns, HMS Triumph, was a pre-Dreadnought battleship capable of only 20 knots, and was in dry dock in Hong Kong when war broke out. Jerram recognized that real security lay with the addition of the Japanese navy, and cultivated Anglo-Japanese relations accordingly. But Japan itself was no better disposed than the Admiralty to resolve his difficulties: the army was worried by Russia’s resurgence and feared a renewed threat to its position in Manchuria; the navy saw its putative enemy as the United States.