by Hew Strachan
The waters of the Far East, not those of the North Sea, were therefore the most obvious area of British maritime vulnerability. The Germans had acquired Tsingtao in 1898. Tirpitz, who himself had vacated the command of the Far Eastern squadron shortly before, saw the port as the first of a series which would girdle the globe, and so provide the means to integrate navalism with Weltpolitik. In the event, Germany’s colonies by 1914 fell into two groups, the islands of the Pacific—the Marianas, the Marshalls, the Carolines, New Guinea, and Samoa—and the territorially more sizeable acquisitions in sub-Saharan Africa—Togoland, the Cameroons, South-West Africa, and German East Africa. None of these possessed a major naval base. Tsingtao, therefore, stood alone in its capacity to service modern warships. But the Pacific archipelagos did at least provide a network of supporting points and hiding places for the conduct of cruiser warfare.
Germany’s operational possibilities were therefore at odds with strategic sense. The greatest concentration of British shipping was to be found in the eastern Atlantic, as it converged on its home ports. It was, however, precisely here that the Royal Navy’s defences were strongest and the German cruisers would have the shortest life-expectancy. Moreover, the Atlantic lacked both the German bases and the island networks possessed by the Pacific. A possible intermediate solution, attacks in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean on the traffic approaching the Suez Canal, offered only limited opportunities. East Africa, the obvious home for such operations, did not have the coal stocks for regular bunkers. The Germans consoled themselves with the thought that raids further east would at least indirectly challenge the traffic bound for Suez and the Mediterranean.16 But their cruisers would therefore have to operate on the periphery of Britain’s maritime trade, not at its heart.
Cruiser warfare, having been popularized by the jeune école in France, had become a less fashionable aspect of naval strategy by 1900. Mahan had concluded from his analysis of naval warfare in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries that cruiser operations were an option exercised only by the weaker power and that their effect, though not negligible, was secondary. The subsequent arrival of steam navigation seemed to have conferred more disadvantages than advantages on guerre de course. The main routes of world trade became set, not varied according to the direction of the wind, and could therefore be more easily defended. The sophistication of the twentieth-century warship, with its need for fuel and munitions, made cruisers more dependent on regular supply, and therefore on bases, than their sail-powered predecessors. A German armoured cruiser carried enough coal to last a week at moderate speeds and only five days of sailing at 20 knots.17 Furthermore, Britain’s defence of neutral rights, which seemed so absurd in the context of its plans for economic warfare, made abundant sense when related to the protection of its own trade. The 1907 Hague Conference had ruled that a belligerent could berth a maximum of three ships in a neutral port at any one time, that they could stay there for no more than twenty-four hours, and that they could take on sufficient supplies only to allow them to complete their homeward journey. Thus, to all intents and purposes neutral ports could not sustain cruiser warfare: Mahan’s weaker option was weakened yet further.
Early German naval thought had embraced the ideas of the jeune école, of fighting a guerre de course against major fleets, and the initial emphasis was therefore on the construction of cruisers and torpedo boats. In 1896 the Kaiser favoured cruisers to support Germany’s world role, and in 1903 and 1905 he advocated the adoption of battle cruisers built on lines similar to those suggested by Fisher. But after 1897 Wilhelm lost control of naval construction to Tirpitz. Battleships, not cruisers, dominated German naval orders. Tirpitz argued that cruisers would not be able to break out from the North Sea without the aid of battleships, and that once on the world’s oceans their operational capabilities would be restricted for lack of bases. Although both were valid points, his use of war-fighting propositions was self-serving. His emphasis on battleships reflected the fact that the purposes of his fleet were ultimately peaceful—to use naval power as a deterrent and as a means to a new diplomatic order. When his building policies hit the buffers of the 1912 naval law in 1913 and 1914, he was prepared to support the construction of cruisers. The Imperial Naval Office discussed with MAN (Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg) the use of diesel engines in surface ships, so as to reduce the problems of fuel supply by enhancing the ships’ range. Tirpitz himself was attracted to cruisers largely because their numbers were not so subject to Reichstag scrutiny.18
In the circumstances, Germany was more prepared for cruiser warfare than might have been expected. The last pure armoured cruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, launched in 1906, were the key units of the East Asiatic Squadron. But even Tirpitz was prepared to concede that their successors, the battle cruisers, though based at Wilhelmshaven, might have an independent role outside the North Sea. And by 1914 Germany had thirty-four light cruisers.19 Contingency plans were made to requisition as auxiliary cruisers modern merchant vessels, equipped with wireless, their decks strengthened to take guns, and with sufficient watertight compartments and speeds of at least 17 knots. Recognizing both the inadequacy of most of Germany’s colonial harbours and their obvious focus for enemy attack, the navy rejected any proposal to defend Germany’s peacetime bases, Tsingtao apart. Instead, their war instructions directed the cruisers to neutral harbours and isolated anchorages.20 To minimize the supply problem, a series of Etappen were established in Asia and along the east and west coasts of South America, each with a staff responsible for collecting fuel and food locally and for dispatching them on supply vessels to prearranged rendezvous with the cruisers. In 1900 the commander of the East Asiatic Squadron had 5.5 million marks in letters of credit and access to other funds held by German agents in order to acquire coal and supplies throughout the Pacific. Most striking of all was the development of a global wireless network. In Germany the Nauen station could transmit signals 5,000 nautical miles, as far as Peking and Bangkok in the east, to the Cape of Good Hope in the south, and to Chicago and Rio de Janeiro in the west. Intermediate stations in the German colonies, the most powerful of which were those at Windhoek (whose range was 2,000 nautical miles) in South-West Africa and at Yap (1,900 nautical miles) in the central Pacific, gave Germany effective communications across most of the Atlantic, all Africa and the Middle East, and the Far East and South Pacific. The obvious hole in the network lay along the entire American side of the Pacific and round Cape Horn.21
MAP 15. GERMAN CABLE AND WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS
Germany’s preparations for cruiser warfare rested in part on the recognition that in reality the choice between cruisers and battleships, between oceanic warfare and fleet action in the North Sea, was a false one. The two were not exclusive, but complementary. The Germans appreciated that the cruisers would account for only a small proportion of British tonnage. But by driving up freight rates and insurance premiums they might stop up shipping, block the trade in raw materials, and cause widespread unemployment. In 1912 Vice-Admiral Curt Freiherr von Maltzahn even argued that the panic which would ensue in the City of London, as well as the effects of starvation in the north of England, would bring the war to an even more rapid conclusion than operations on land. What was essentially an instrument for a long war would achieve its effects in short order. This was, of course, a self-serving argument: the quicker the war, the less grievous would be the cruisers’ lack of bases.22
Secondly, the activities of the cruisers would serve to draw the Royal Navy away from the home waters, whither it had concentrated, and back to the more distant areas of the world. If the East Asiatic Squadron could divert British battle cruisers from the North Sea to the Pacific, then it would have rendered appreciable assistance to the High Seas Fleet. Equally, if the British refused to be drawn for fear of the more immediate danger posed by the High Seas Fleet, then the East Asiatic Squadron would be free to damage British trade. Either way, the addition of cruiser war to Germany’s nava
l options was disproportionately valuable to the inferior power: it brought comparative strength against Britain’s most vulnerable point, its import routes. In the narrow confines of the North Sea one warship balanced another; in the wide spaces of the Pacific one warship would draw out many more. Thus, the true prop to Germany’s conduct of the cruiser war was the High Seas Fleet itself. The greatest strategic criticism of Pohl’s advocacy of defensiveness and inactivity in 1914 was that it left Germany’s major maritime striking arm unsupported.23
Although such thinking had its advocates in 1914, it was not elevated to the status of policy. The potential of cruisers in the event of war had to compete with the fact that the navy overseas had a highly active role in peace. Much of what was effected in the way of wireless stations and cruiser construction was determined more by Germany’s need for a naval presence to buttress its colonial and global policies. In the first half of 1914 two battleships and a light cruiser sailed the Atlantic from West Africa to South and Central America. The deployment of ships to meet the navy’s peacetime functions was necessarily different from its active preparation for war.
The dichotomy also had its institutional manifestations. Formally speaking, the German Colonial Office was charged with colonial defence. It saw Germany’s possessions as administrative burdens and as vehicles for economic expansion, not as the pivots of maritime warfare. Its more forward-thinking officials focused their attentions on their African colonies, which by 1914 were moving—in the case of East Africa in particular—along more civilized and enlightened paths than the early history of German colonialism had rendered imaginable. The vulnerabilities of all Germany’s sub-Saharan African colonies in the event of European war were evident, and the common verdict—one in which the army’s general staff was happy to collude in order to avoid imperial demands on its manpower—was that their fate would be decided by the outcome of events in Europe. This somewhat fatalistic position was buttressed by an optimistic reading of the Berlin act of 1885 (to which Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany were signatories), stating that if all the powers were agreed the Congo basin was to be considered neutral territory. The garrison of each of the African colonies therefore numbered in the region of 2,000 men. But, while the Colonial Office orientated itself on Africa and hoped for at most a limited impact from war in Europe, the navy focused on the Pacific.24 Tsingtao was the fiefdom of Tirpitz’s Imperial Naval Office, not of the Colonial Office. The expanse of the Pacific and the availability of isolated atolls as bases bestowed opportunities for harrying trade in the south Pacific. With a well-organized intelligence network centred on Sydney, the offensive instincts of German cruiser captains were buoyed by the slow progress of the Pacific fleet idea and of the Royal Australian Navy.25 The only threat to an otherwise favourable regional balance of naval forces was the possibility of Japan adding its fleet to that of Britain. So German plans for cruiser warfare in the south Pacific rested ultimately on a division of the globe as arbitrary as that embraced by the Colonial Office. Neutrality in the China Sea was necessary in order to avoid triggering the Anglo-Japanese alliance. In practice, hopes for sustaining neutrality in one quarter of the globe were undermined by the determination to attack in another.
The outbreak of war, therefore, found neither Germany’s colonies nor its cruisers with an integrated operational plan. Germany’s main assets, in addition to the East Asiatic Squadron, were two light cruisers in the West Indies, Dresden and Karlsruhe, and one, Königsberg, off East Africa. Little use was made of the July crisis to pre-position ships. Full naval mobilization was ordered too late, on 1 August, to enable the converted merchant ships to get out of the North Sea. Of the four auxiliary cruisers requisitioned on the war’s outbreak, one developed problems with its boilers, and one was already overseas and could not be armed. Thus, only two became operational. Kronprinz Wilhelm was equipped at sea by the Karlsruhe, and Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse broke out into the Atlantic on 4 August but was sunk just over three weeks later. The only subsequent addition to this number was Berlin, responsible for the sinking of Audacious. The instructions to the cruiser captains, in origin those issued by Wilhelm I in 1885, were specific as to types of target but short on overall strategy. Their burden was ‘to carry on cruiser warfare against enemy merchant vessels and against contraband carried in neutral vessels, raid the enemy’s coasts, bombard military establishments, and destroy cable and wireless stations’.26 However, what they lacked in the way of plan, they made up for in common sense. Recognizing its inability to exercise effective control, the Admiralty Staff made a virtue of the independence and initiative of its subordinate commanders.
Britain was no better prepared. At the time of the Anglo-French staff talks of 1906, the army had given some thought to the capture of German colonies, but had seen them as potential bargaining-counters in the peace negotiations, not as important in the conduct of the war itself.27 Britain’s major desire, as the positioning of the bulk of its fleet testified, was to restrict the global consequences of events in Europe. For Britain, as for Germany, colonies produced an inhibiting effect, and imperialism, at least in the specific sense of lust for annexation, was neither a trigger for war nor a response to its outbreak.
However, colonies were indivisible from seapower, and it was both the exercise and the defence of this that made a rigid demarcation between Europe and empire impossible. Hankey had rated the defence of maritime trade as a priority second only to the defence of Britain itself; moreover, his advocacy of amphibious operations could be taken to include landings outside Europe.28 But his agency, the Committee of Imperial Defence, had made little headway in planning this sort of undertaking. Its subcommittee on combined operations of 1905 had gone into abeyance. Talks about its reactivation in the summer of 1914 were concerned rather more with amphibious operations on the continent than outside Europe, and so were seen as marginal, a diversion from the army’s commitment to France. Not until 5 August was a subcommittee convened to consider overseas operations. The navy’s was the leading voice: its demand, urgent and strident, was for the defence of British maritime communications by depriving Germany of its bunkers, wireless stations, and cable communications, the essential props of cruiser warfare. But the army’s fear of diversion from the continent was also heard. Two cardinal principles were established as pre-eminent. First, the object was not the conquest of territory. Second, any land operations had to be undertaken by local forces only. From the outset, therefore, Britain’s conduct of the war overseas was determined by tenets that were supportive of the effort in the main theatre and not diversionary.29
JAPAN ENTERS THE WAR
On 1 August, in conformity with its pre-war expectations, the British Foreign Office told the Japanese government that it was unlikely to invoke Japanese aid. Under the terms of the alliance, Japan was obliged to help Britain defend its Asiatic possessions against an unprovoked attack by another power. Grey thought only an assault on Hong Kong or Weihaiwei, both of them improbable eventualities, would produce a British summons. On 4 August Japan affirmed its neutrality.30
Germany was no danger to Japan. But in 1895 Japan had acquired Taiwan and had secured treaty rights in China. In 1905 the defeat of Russia rendered Korea first a Japanese dependency, and then—in 1910—a colony. In the decade before the First World War Japan behaved in China as did the great powers of Europe, promoting informal empire through exports and advocating the sort of modernization from which their own development had so recently benefited. War in Europe therefore presented a double challenge to the Far East. First, Japan itself had twice recently used war to advance its own interests in the region with considerable success. Second, the nations’ spheres of influence in China, guarded by their own troops, provided the opportunity for European rivalries to spread.
China itself badly needed stability. It had undergone revolution in 1911, and the Manchu dynasty had abdicated in 1912. In 1913 the president of the new republic, Yuan Shihkai, had accepted a loan, funded by a consortiu
m of five powers, to enable him to reorganize the country and consolidate his rule. The revolutionary republican party (the Kuomintang), whose strength lay in the south, was disgusted on two counts. It saw the loan as an affront to China’s nationhood and as a form of western imperialism, and it feared that Yuan would use the money to advance his own despotic aspirations. In February and March 1913 Sun Yat-sen, the Kuomintang leader, had visited Japan and had been encouraged in his visions of a pan-Asian community by the outgoing prime minister, General Katsura Taro, as well as by Japanese nationalists and businessmen. But the rebellion which Sun staged in July ended in defeat. Japan, as one of the subscribers to the reorganization loan, had effectively backed both sides. Yuan’s financial muscle ensured the loyalty of the armed forces and the support of the commercial classes. Sun went into exile in Japan, and the Kuomintang lost cohesion and direction. With Japan’s policy over China divided, Yuan’s hopes for order were raised. To the British he appeared to be the representative of constitutionalism and efficient government. His response to war in Europe was to maintain the status quo throughout east Asia, and to neutralize the foreign concessions in China.31