Fighting the Great War at Sea: Strategy, Tactics and Technology

Introduction

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT how the naval part of the First World War was fought – about what the navies (and their governments) expected, about what limited them and about the many surprises they encountered. It is not a full operational history, but instead it explores various themes in the naval history of the war, many of them technological and tactical. Without such exploration, much of what happened during the war does not make sense. For example, the quick destruction of three British battlecruisers at Jutland might seem to prove that the battlecruiser concept was fatally flawed or that German shells were disastrously superior to British – except that it could be traced to extraordinarily dangerous British practices adopted after the same German guns and shells proved ineffective at the earlier battle of Dogger Bank. Moreover, contemporary British documents show that the Royal Navy came to exactly that conclusion at the time. The conclusion is not that, had the battlecruisers been handled better, the Royal Navy would have won, but more that the battle should have been even more of a draw than it was. German documentation gives some indication of the impact of the battle on their fleet, which was not quite what is usually assumed. A better understanding of war planning and tactical development on both sides illuminates the actions that the two navies took, both at the beginning of the war and later on.

Above all the naval part of the First World War involved new technology. The most recent experience of modern naval war, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, was only a decade old, yet in the intervening period navies had been revolutionised. Although fire control was primitive at best, both Russian and Japanese heavy guns hit at unprecedented ranges and some of those hits seemed decisive. This experience was used to justify the new ‘dreadnoughts’ in the Royal Navy and the US Navy. Alongside the guns was extensive use of sea mines, one of which sank a Russian battleship in 1904 and killed the best Russian naval commander, Admiral Makarov. Wartime use of sea mines so impressed both the British and the Americans that they converted existing cruisers into specialised minelayers.

Alongside mines were torpedoes, mainly surface-launched. Although torpedoes did not live up to their advertising during the war, they were generally classed alongside mines as devastating weapons, capable of sinking a capital ship with a single hit. By 1904 torpedo range and accuracy were beginning a dramatic rise which helped create the dreadnought revolution (greater gun ranges to keep battleships out of mutual torpedo range). By 1904 torpedo threats in narrow seas such as the English Channel and parts of the Mediterranean had already much affected British naval thinking.

The advent of dreadnought battleships (the first of which was completed only eight years before the outbreak of the war) dramatically changed the way in which fleet power was calculated. In 1904 even minor powers had large battle fleets, built up over a long era of more or less stable technology. On that basis it was unlikely that a single battle could change the balance of naval power as understood by the major powers. In 1914 the fleets of the minor powers were entirely obsolete; even major powers like France and Russia were only beginning to commission dreadnoughts. The number of such ships was so limited that it was possible to imagine a single decisive battle in which a dreadnought fleet might be wiped out. It would take so much effort to replace such a fleet that for the loser the naval war might effectively be over. This possibility of decision at sea contrasted with the changing reality of war ashore, in which national resources in terms of men and materiel were so vast that no single battle or campaign was likely to be decisive. Given the possibility that a big battle would destroy the core of a fleet, governments and naval commanders were understandably cautious. It was not only Admiral Jellicoe who could ‘lose the war in an afternoon’. The result was that the massively expensive battle fleets generally were not risked, so that there was only a single battle between the British and German fleets – battlecruisers and lesser types fought on a far more frequent basis, because their loss would not have been catastrophic.

On the other hand, in their large pre-dreadnought fleet the British (and, to a lesser extent, the French) had a considerable number of more or less expendable capital ships. Losses of such ships would be regrettable, but they would not tip the balance of seapower calculated in terms of dreadnoughts and their successors. The mass of pre-dreadnoughts made it possible for the British to distribute seapower along their coast (to counter a possible invasion threat) at a limited direct cost to the Grand Fleet. They also made Gallipoli a reasonable gamble. Modern destroyers were a different proposition: never available in sufficient numbers and needed even when dreadnoughts were not present.

Dreadnoughts changed the calculus of sea power, making the vast majority of battleships suddenly obsolete – and available for secondary operations. HMS St Vincent, a first-generation dreadnought, is shown in May 1910.

Alongside the new battleships were modern long-range submarines, which had not existed at all during the Russo-Japanese struggle. Although both sides in that earlier war had submarines, they were effectively limited to harbour defence. By 1914 it was widely accepted that sea-going submarines could change the balance of seapower, but it was not widely expected that they would be effective commerce raiders. That was not a matter of naiveté; it was inherent in the accepted rules of trade warfare. The First World War demonstrated what could happen if the rules were jettisoned.

A perhaps subtler new technology was radio, generally in the form of wireless telegraphy (W/T: Morse code) rather than voice radio (radio telephony, or R/T). W/T made for effective scouting before the crucial battle of Tsushima in 1905, but its potential for global command and control had not yet been realised. In 1914 the Royal Navy had a truly global communications system and both the British and the Germans conducted operations intended specifically to cripple their opponents’ command and control systems. During and probably also before the war, the British used signals intelligence to create, in effect, an ocean surveillance system with enormous operational implications.

Aircraft were another new technology. In 1904 the only effective aircraft were big airships, but no navy yet operated them. In 1914 the German navy had Zeppelins and the British thought they had effective sea-based torpedo bombers. Although the promise of naval aircraft was not quite realised during the war, the Zeppelins’ scouting capability certainly affected operations in the North Sea.

The new technologies brought forth new tactics and new concepts of fleet operation. After the war many British naval officers claimed that their navy had been obsessed with materiel rather than with tactics, but enough pre-war documents have survived to show that this was not the case. It was essentially an excuse for tactical failure, particularly at Jutland. It does not appear that the Imperial German Navy spent nearly as much effort developing its own tactics.

The sheer speed with which some technologies were developed and fielded is astonishing. The most striking examples are aircraft and anti-submarine sensors and weapons, with submarines not too far behind. The United States entered the war in April 1917 – and by the end of the year its listening devices, not even conceived before that, were in widespread service.

Pre-war naval intelligence badly lagged behind the new technologies. The British seem to have succeeded in keeping the nature of HMS Dreadnought secret until she was deliberately unveiled and also the nature of the first battlecruisers. More importantly, they concealed the development of their war plans, as they moved towards a distant blockade of Germany. The Germans managed to prevent the British from discovering much about ships under construction. There is some evidence that British tactical intelligence was so poor that the Royal Navy came to depend on French sources – which seem to have been flawed – for their accounts of German exercises, the main evidence of their tactical thinking. Intelligence failure led to gross British overestimates of German capabilities and to serious mis-estimation of German wartime naval intentions, the British clearly massively mirror-imaging.

All of the major combatants invested heavily in their navies, but the British and the Germans stood apart from the others in the size of their fleets and in the extent of their efforts. This book therefore concentrates on their North Sea experience, which seems to have attracted most of the post-war naval attention around the world. For example, the historical papers written at the French naval war college between the two world wars are overwhelmingly concerned with the war in the North Sea between the two largest navies, rather than with French naval operations or with those of the Italians (their most likely future enemy) or the Austrians.

The pre-dreadnought HMS Magnificent is shown disarmed as a troop transport for the Dardanelles (in 1915), with a 9.2in gun monitor alongside. She and three sisters (Illustrious, Mars and Victorious) lost their 12in guns to Lord Clive class monitors. (Dr David Stevens, SPC-A)

Only a few years separated Princess Royal from the armoured cruiser Duke of Edinburgh, which in theory had had much the same function. Shown in 1912, Duke of Edinburgh had about half the displacement of the new battlecruiser Princess Royal and far less powerful armament (9.2in rather than 13.5in guns).

This book is based largely on British official records.¹ Unfortunately the British pre-1914 record is spotty at best, many important documents having been discarded. Although post-1914 records were systematically preserved, there are still problems. The Admiralty underwent a major reorganisation in 1917. It is not at all clear that this reorganisation had fundamental effects on the working of the Admiralty, but it dramatically changed the way in which records were assembled and retained. For example, detailed Admiralty Board Minutes and Memoranda began to be kept.² Pre-1917 Board Minutes amount to no more than recording that the Board met on a given day; they give no hint of what was discussed. The volumes of wartime records dated from the autumn of 1917 onwards are far more revealing than earlier ones – which does not necessarily mean that what happened was very different. Many pre-1917 British handbooks have survived because they were provided to the US Navy soon after the United States entered the war in April 1917.

British official documents were originally classified under a fifty-year rule, so that many bear markings like ‘closed until 1967’.³ As a consequence, any account written before about 1970 is likely not to incorporate much or any material taken from the records of the Royal Navy. Many officers did speak out and in many cases their papers became available to particular authors well before 1970. In effect they were a commentary on documents which did not become available until later, if ever.⁴

Many of the published and private accounts amount to self-justification and are difficult to evaluate without access to contemporary documents. I have, however, made extensive use of two published sources. One is Lord Hankey’s two-volume work The Supreme Command, which draws heavily on his diaries. Hankey was Secretary to the pre-war Committee on Imperial Defence and to the wartime War Council and War Cabinet. The point of his book, which was written in the late 1930s but not published until 1961, was the need the war revealed for a command structure over the two fighting services, capable of evaluating their conflicting views. Hankey’s book is particularly revealing of the issues surrounding Gallipoli. As an observer rather than a prime mover, Hankey is likely to be less biased than other writers. The other published source is the extraordinary collection of letters from Prime Minister Asquith to his mistress Venetia Stanley. Asquith wrote about policy and about Cabinet and War Council sessions, revealing a considerable amount of highly classified information. He seems not to have been concerned with security, merely noting that some items in the letters should be considered most private (his italics). In the absence of a Cabinet secretary, these letters are probably the best contemporary source for decisions taken and for their logic. Unfortunately for historians, in the spring of 1915 Venetia Stanley decided to marry and Asquith ceased to write to her. Both Hankey’s account and the Asquith letters indicate that the story of Gallipoli was far more complicated than the widely accepted one that it was simply Winston Churchill’s folly.

The account of German operations is based largely on the German official history, Der Krieg zur See 1914-1918. It was based on German internal records, but it was very much a political document intended to justify the heavy – and ultimately ineffective – German investment in naval forces before the war and also to deal with the bitterness associated with the High Seas Fleet mutiny of 1918.⁵ Much wartime German practice is reflected in tactical documents captured and translated by the Royal Navy during and immediately after the war.

The US Navy was a very interested observer of the war before April 1917 and then a major participant, particularly in the antisubmarine war. Its massive surviving records include observations of the Royal Navy (and, to a lesser extent, the Imperial German Navy) and also accounts of its own rapid wartime development, particularly in anti-submarine devices and weapons.

An important point for those not versed in British politics of the period is that the label ‘Liberal’ applies to a party, not to liberal ideology. The Liberals won the 1906 election (against the Conservatives [Tories]) and remained in power until a National (all-party) government took over late in 1916. Until after the war the Labour Party had little influence. As Labour power grew after 1918, the Liberals collapsed to become the small third British party, later merged with a splinter group from Labour to be renamed the Liberal Democrats. The current (2014) British Government is a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition opposed by Labour.

By 1918, some saw submarines as the future of sea power. Every navy asked what lessons the German submarine campaign had taught. Surrendered U-boats are shown at Parkestone Quay, Harwich.

CHAPTER 1

A Maritime War

THE F IRST W ORLD W AR was above all a maritime war, not in the sense that most of the action was at sea, but rather in the sense that maritime realities shaped it. That was inevitable: one of the main protagonists, the United Kingdom, was the core of a maritime empire. Britain was the first truly globalised country, relying on imports for essential resources which could be produced less expensively abroad. Those imports included much of the British food supply. Before the war, Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher pointed out that, for the British, the consequence of a naval defeat would be starvation.

Britain and Deterrence

Before the First World War Britain was above all the foremost trading nation in the world. Not only did she import and export vast amounts, but she also had by far the largest merchant fleet in the world and the largest shipbuilding industry to support it. These merchant ships handled much of the world’s maritime trade, not only the trade between the world and the British Empire. This reality was associated with support of free trade (i.e., minimal tariffs), which in turn helped fuel the explosive growth the world enjoyed during much of the nineteenth century. The vast development of British maritime trade during that century was bound up with the development of a financial empire centred on the City of London. In 1914 the City was the hub of world trade, the dominant factor in world finance. It made most world trade possible, because goods bought in one place could be paid for in another with bills discounted or cashed in London. To make that possible, the banks involved borrowed money from the major British merchant banks, which in turn invested heavily abroad. London was the place to go to raise money – for a railway or for a new battleship. By the decade before the war Britain was running a net imbalance of visible trade, but that was balanced by ‘invisible’ exports produced by the City’s financial services and by income derived from foreign investments.

During the pre-war era, most governments who needed large loans floated them in London. For example, the South American dreadnoughts were paid for in this way. The major British shipbuilders were associated with particular London banks. Because they were also associated with the world’s largest naval programme, the same builders were more efficient than their foreign competitors.¹ In 1914 the great bulk of the naval export market was centred on Britain. That export market financed expansion of a naval shipbuilding industry beyond what the Royal Navy needed, giving Britain a valuable surplus wartime capacity. On the outbreak of war the Germans rightly assumed that the balance of naval power could only worsen, simply because the British could and would grossly outbuild them. This was quite apart from the capacity to build the mass of minor warships needed to fight the war, thanks to the dominance of British builders of commercial ships.

Before 1914, battleships were the visible side of seapower. Grand Fleet flagship HMS Iron Duke is shown as completed. She was one of four sisters, the last British battleships completed before war broke out.

That the City was a central part of the British economy as a whole had enormous implications for the British government as it contemplated a political crisis in Europe in the years leading up to 1914. These implications are not obvious from contemporary documents, because there was no particular spokesman for the City in government, no one whose views were recorded or challenged or acceded to. Yet the importance of the City must have been so obvious that it was almost never written about, just as almost no one making military policy in the Cold War United States wrote about the economic impact of decisions. It is for the historian, writing in a very different world, to understand what the interaction had to mean.

Before 1914 the balance between the British Government and capital (represented by both the City and industry) was very different from that we now take for granted. Government was smaller and weaker and in Britain and the United States its power to take property (including taxing power) was much more circumscribed.² The idea that the proper role of government was to guarantee national prosperity and that prosperity was best guaranteed by limiting government intervention, took hold in the mid-nineteenth century. Its greatest symbol was probably the elimination of tariffs on cereals. The British situation was radically different from that on the Continent, but it is not clear that British Governments appreciated what that meant. They were certainly aware that economic pressure on them could have massive political consequences.

In the years leading up to 1914, the City surely found the prospect of war unacceptable, even unthinkable. Everyone in the City was well aware that countries were increasingly linked by trade, to the point where it seemed that almost none of them could do without it. Financial panics, such as one which shook the United States in 1907, were clearly bad enough. Everyone probably suspected that a war would cause a much worse crash. Moreover, governments generally felt somewhat insecure. A crash would starve, hence enrage, workers, who were regarded everywhere as a potential revolutionary army. In effect the default view of anyone in the Government outside the fighting services was presumably that war was most unlikely.³ Books on the impossibility (or more accurately, the impracticality) of war in an interlinked world sold well.⁴ The City’s views were surely well represented in the Cabinet, particularly in the Treasury and in the Foreign Office. That is presumably why the growing British commitment to France was never presented to the Cabinet, many of whose members would have found it unacceptable.

The ruling Liberal Party itself considered war unlikely and it resisted military (which largely meant naval) expenditures, much preferring social investment. Maurice Hankey, the long-time secretary of the Committee on Imperial Defence (CID), wrote long after the war that Prime Minister Asquith and his Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey

rightly treated war as something to be avoided by every possible means. They were not so foolish as to close their eyes to the menacing attitude of Germany, but they always believed that with patience, honesty and frankness the international difficulties with Germany might be surmounted as they had been with France and Russia . . . [hopefully] the rise of Germany as a commercial power would gradually lead to an increase in the sobering influence of men of affairs and that in time, with the growth of democratic institutions, the German people would see that their real interests and their prosperity depended on the maintenance of peace . . . [until then] nothing must be done which would tend to precipitate the catastrophe it was so intensely desired to avoid.⁵

Effective seapower required massed capital ships. As numbers increased, fleet tactics became more difficult to implement. The Grand Fleet is shown at sea. Note the funnel smoke these coal-burning ships generated. It made the fleet more visible from beyond the horizon, but it also obscured a fleet commander’s view of his own ships. Note also the cruising formation in columns, which was not the line-ahead formation adopted for battle. Determining proper deployment into battle formation might decide a battle. At Jutland, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe successfully deployed the Grand Fleet battle line across the ‘T’ of the German High Seas Fleet, thanks in part to much better situational awareness achieved by maintaining a tactical plot. (Dr David Stevens, SPC-A)

As Hankey recalled it, in Asquith’s view, the navy was not provocative, but the conscription urged by some in the army certainly was.

To the Liberals, the immediate threat was not war but a social explosion. They therefore wanted to shift from military to social spending. The most obvious potential cause of a social explosion would be hunger: in 1911 the Liberal Government mobilised 30,000 troops to protect food supplies against industrial action.⁶ Asquith, who became Prime Minister in 1908, initially hoped to stop building heavy warships altogether. A large radical element of the Liberal backbench strongly supported arms control. They looked forward to the 1907 Hague Peace Conference, called in 1906.

Asquith was caught in a dilemma familiar to many American strategists of the Cold War. There was a deterrent (even a form of mutually assured destruction, since a war would badly damage both Britain and Germany). How far should he go to develop the means of war-fighting, for use if the deterrent broke down? To what extent would assembling those means reduce deterrence? The words were not used at the time, but the problem was certainly understood. Preparation for economic warfare, including but not limited to blockade, offered the possibility of devastating effect if activated, without creating peacetime provocation which might, in Asquith’s view, trigger a war. It was probably the only such alternative available to him.

The sea unites. In 1914 Britain was the most globalised country on Earth, the one most dependent on foreign resources. As the German Navy rose to present a mortal challenge, the Royal Navy also had to maintain power overseas. HMAS Australia represents one attempt to do so, by convincing Dominions on the Pacific to finance ‘fleet units’ which could run down commerce raiders or, alternatively, form a Pacific Fleet. They had to reckon with a powerful German squadron based at Tsingtao in China (Graf Spee’s force) and also with a potential Japanese threat. Despite the alliance with Britain, Japan took some weeks to declare war on Germany and at least some Germans were surprised that Japan went to war against them. In 1917 the German Zimmermann Telegram posited a German-Japanese alliance (with Mexico) against the United States (the Japanese used the German offer to extract concessions from the Allies). After the war the British remembered Japanese wartime action against the Empire, such as support for nationalists (subversives) in India. HMAS Australia is shown before Jutland, with turret-top rangefinders and also with torpedo net booms.

The Liberals won the 1906 and 1910 elections, the latter fought on the basis of Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’, which entailed increased taxes. In 1914 the Liberals expected to face another election in 1915 and again there was considerable pressure to reduce naval spending. The Liberals pointed to the growth of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) to dominance of the Reichstag in Germany as evidence that the Germans would be unable to make war, unaware that the growth of an anti-military party might be propelling the conservative rulers of Germany into war for fear that their window of opportunity was closing. An important consequence of Liberal Party orientation was that few in the party spent much time thinking through the implications of a war. Once war began, the Cabinet had little basis for decision, yet key decisions were normally made on a Cabinet-wide basis. Prime Minister Asquith found himself convening a War Committee dominated by his military ministers.

During the period between 1905 and 1914 the Conservative Party, which tended to emphasise defence, was continuously in opposition. It says a great deal about the strength of British public feeling about the Royal Navy that the Liberals’ attempts to cut the naval budget generally failed, even though the navy itself might complain about what amounted to belt-tightening. The Germans did not understand as much. During the build-up of the German fleet, its architect Admiral Tirpitz once mused that he feared that if he went too fast the British would return the Conservatives to power and that they would spend enough to overwhelm him. In fact the Liberals themselves proved quite willing to outspend and outbuild him.

A century later, we see the pre-1914 world as peaceful, even idyllic, because we know what came next. At the time, governments throughout Europe were haunted by various kinds of subversion. Many feared growing Socialist movements, which were clearly hostile to the status quo. There was a terrorist fringe, most prominent in Russia. Anarchists were active in every European country. Like modern terrorists, they created vast anxiety, even though there were relatively few attacks. The British Government faced increasing pressure for Irish Home Rule – and the real possibility that the army, which had a substantial Irish element, would refuse to support it if Ireland exploded into civil war. That was aside from other movements considered subversive, such as the growing Suffragette movement. In 1914 a British government which considered it most unlikely that Europe would explode into war faced the immediate threat of a civil war in Ireland. It is not surprising which engaged its attention.

Looking back, we can see what the British Government of 1911 (and 1914) did not. No country on the Continent had a government influenced by economics the way the British were; there was no equivalent of the City to enforce such influence. There were certainly many bankers and industrialists who saw the world the way the City saw it, but they did not run their governments. Those who did saw national life in much older ways. National power and prestige were connected directly with territory. Perhaps worst of all, neither Asquith nor anyone else in the British Government seems ever to have appreciated the extent to which the German army (or rather its General Staff), rather than German business, ruled Germany – people jokingly said that Germany was an army with a country attached, but they did not take it seriously. Connected with the dominance of the army and the Prussian minor aristocracy was the peculiar sensitivity of German rulers to the security of eastern Prussia – a major opportunity foregone once war broke out. That is, Asquith and everyone else in power mirror-imaged, a sin for which no one has found an effective antidote.

Consideration of war against Germany began at about the same time the expensive and unsatisfactory Boer War ended (at the outset, Germany was hardly the only potential enemy Britain faced, the Franco-Russian alliance being more threatening). The end of the war left serious financial problems, so it prompted a defence review, ordered in December 1902. The defence budget (largely the naval budget) was already expanding more rapidly than the governments of the day thought affordable, due in large part to the need for large numbers of armoured cruisers, each as large (and as expensive) as a battleship, both for trade protection and for fleet operations. Going into the review, the navy wanted to keep its budget intact. The army needed a new role, because the Boer War had soured interest in any new colonial conflict. The army argued that it was an essential defence against invasion. The only other justification for a substantial army was the need for an expeditionary force in the new context of the German threat.

Since home defence was also a naval role, anyone trying to cut defence could seek cuts there. The Cabinet formed a Defence Committee (ultimately reconstituted as the Committee on Imperial Defence). The navy argued successfully that it could preclude an enemy landing (or reinforcing or supplying whatever enemy troops managed to get ashore). The navy argued successfully that its new submarines were a better coast defence than the army’s minefields, which might endanger ships approaching British ports. One of the navy’s leading advocates was Admiral Sir John (‘Jacky’) Fisher, who had recently returned from command of the Mediterranean Fleet. While there he had faced the first French submarines capable of moving beyond the French coast, in addition to the large French force of surface torpedo craft. He began to develop the idea that the North Sea could be made impassable by submarines and other torpedo craft (‘flotilla defence’) and that capital ships could operate only outside its confined waters.

Having been badly defeated in the review, the army sought an alternative role in the context of the new anxiety about Germany. Nascent British war plans against Germany emphasised traditional themes: blockade, both to strangle the Germans and to protect British trade. The army was already aware that it could not justify itself on the basis of seizure of the enemy colonies themselves, which were considered to be of limited value. What would the army’s role be in a European war against Germany? If the British were working in coalition with the French, what could they do from the sea which would have an immediate effect on the war ashore; meaning, which would impress the French?

When the British thought they would have to fight the Russians in 1885, their plans included naval penetration of the Baltic and landing troops there. With the rise of torpedo craft and mines, landings became increasingly dangerous. However, about 1905 the German fleet was still weak enough that British losses in such operations would not have tipped the balance of naval power, so the Royal Navy could propose dangerous landings on, for example, the German Baltic coast both for their strategic impact and as a way of using dominant British seapower to demonstrate support for France.

Initially the army was interested, but its leaders soon realised just how risky such operations could be; a force landed in the Baltic might find itself marooned there. By about 1906 the British army general staff had fixed on direct support of the French army as its single best option. In France the army would have the benefit of good sea communications back to Britain. The Royal Navy soon concluded that no landing on the German coast would be decisive. Blockade was another thing. The more closely the Royal Navy examined the German economy, the more dependent it seemed on foreign trade. Blockade (later, a wider form of anti-trade warfare) might well be a decisive weapon, so much so that the army need not be deployed in any numbers.⁷

The army was naturally not amused. It fought hard against a strategy which did not require any large expeditionary effort.⁸ It found an ally in the Foreign Office, which disliked the entire idea of blockade. The Foreign Office was interested in deterrence. It was also affected by the widespread view within the Liberal Party that private property, any more than private citizens, should not be subject to attack in wartime. The Foreign Office seems also to have considered the entente with France so important an achievement that it was worth reinforcing with military promises. British reliance on blockade might limit any ties to France. As it sought to promote a Continental commitment in a future war, the army general staff did its best to disprove the navy’s contention that blockade or some stronger form of economic warfare could achieve a rapid decision. Army leaders argued to the British Government that theirs was the only supportive operation the French would take seriously. Arguments between army and navy leaders played out before Prime Minister Asquith during acute European crises, particularly in 1908 and in 1911.

Both argued that the Germans could evade any attack on their trade by using neutral ports, particularly Rotterdam and Antwerp, in wartime.⁹ Admiralty analysts showed that both ports had limited capacity. In 1908 German Chief of the General Staff von Moltke wrote that it was essential to maintain a neutral Holland as the conduit for essential goods, the ‘windpipe through which we can breathe’. However, in 1914 the Germans contemplated crossing through the Dutch Limburg Appendix if they failed to smash the Belgian frontier fortifications. The Admiralty did not take account of Scandinavian ports, which could feed goods to Germany through the more or less German-controlled Skaggerak, as they actually did during the war.

It did not help that the Admiralty did not have a formal and widely articulated war plan. The First Sea Lord Admiral Fisher was fond of saying that he had the war plan in his head and that it was too secret to disclose. He created a war planning cell, but its product was not widely disseminated and naval exercises and practices did not necessarily reflect Fisher’s ideas.¹⁰ Fisher actively opposed the creation of a formal war staff with a corporate memory of previous war planning (in fact the Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty did perform planning staff functions). War plans, to the extent that they were formalised, were embodied in brief war instructions provided to the commanders of the deployed fleets, to be opened only upon the outbreak of war. Because Fisher did not disclose his own favoured war plan, any later First Sea Lord could develop his own plan without much or any reference to past efforts. It is therefore impossible to say, for example, that the Royal Navy abandoned close blockade in 1907 or in 1912 any more than that it expected to carry out a close blockade at those or earlier times.

Unlike a Continental power, which had to concentrate on the armies on its borders, the British could envisage a wide range of possibilities: the sea could connect them and the Empire with a wide range of countries. To an army, that kind of range of possibilities was inconceivable. Armies require detailed planning because even the smallest operation demands enormous logistical preparation. The war plans prepared by various armies before 1914 were largely about logistics: about how to move masses of troops and how to keep supplying them as they moved forward. Contact with the enemy was a relatively minor – tactical – part of overall planning. When Director of Military Operations General Henry Wilson explained his war plan to the CID in 1911, his map showed how the army would deploy and what French roads it would block against the oncoming Germans. Famously, he demonstrated how detailed his staff work had been by including in his schedule a ten-minute stop for coffee.

Logistics obviously also affects naval operations, but in a much less pervasive way. Ships carry their own fuel and other supplies; troops carry very little of theirs. The logistical consequences of deploying a fleet one way or another are relatively minor, but those of deploying a mass army are enormous. Even changing the port supplying that army has vast implications, which became evident when the war of movement in 1914 threatened the Channel ports on which the British army depended. To change ports meant changing the entire structure which moved goods from port to troops (much the same might be said of any considerable relocation of troops). Armies emphasise staff work because the main role of the staff is to translate broad concepts of operation into details, many of them logistical. Logistics is why the outbreak of the First World War was so closely bound up with railway timetables: trains moved both masses of troops and their supplies and in 1914 there was no alternative on land.¹¹

Naval technology was changing much more rapidly than that ashore, with important possible implications. In 1907 Fisher strongly advocated flotilla defence of Britain: he thought that surface torpedo craft and submarines could make the North Sea impassable for battle fleets. In that case close blockade was impossible. Fisher was unable to convince everyone, which is one reason why the Royal Navy kept building battleships.

As the Royal Navy strained to overmatch the Germans in the North Sea, it also had to reckon with growing Italian and Austro-Hungarian fleets in the Mediterranean. Before the war Italy was part of the Triple Alliance. An agreement with France helped, but it did not completely solve the problem. Once Italy entered the war on the Allied side, her battle fleet more than counterbalanced the Austrian fleet. The newly-completed Austro-Hungarian Viribus Unitis is shown.

In the 1911 crisis, a particularly bellicose and inept presentation by First Sea Lord (from 1910, after Fisher) Admiral A K Wilson before the CID prompted Prime Minister Asquith to rein him in. Like Fisher, Wilson rejected the creation of an Admiralty War Staff. Asquith was impressed by his Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane, who was important in his Liberal Party. Haldane could point to the army’s recovery from its Boer War failures. The symbol of revival was the army’s new general staff, which promised a modern scientific approach to soldiering. No one in the army would concoct a war plan too secret for the general staff, as Wilson had concocted his own plan, which involved a form of close blockade, without informing anyone in the fleet (several senior admirals refused to implement his war orders). Wilson’s predecessor Admiral Fisher had made much the same claims about his own war plan, that it was too secret to discuss within the fleet. He had been compelled to provide the CID with a dossier of alternative war plans, without disclosing which one he planned to execute, as proof that he had been sponsoring formal war planning. This time the claim of secrecy was sufficient to make Wilson anathema. It does seem that Wilson had made no attempt to consult previous war plans or planners, but Fisher wrote a strong letter defending him.

The 1911 meeting is usually taken as the formal origin of the British army commitment to France, but Prime Minister Asquith felt compelled by his Cabinet to agree a few months later to bar any further staff talks, which certainly suggests the opposite. This makes sense if the 1911 meeting is taken simply as an attempt by the army general staff to secure backing for its plan, rather than as Asquith’s comparison of army and navy war plans.

Haldane seems to have hoped that by pointing to the Admiralty’s lack of an effective staff he would promote himself into the First Lord’s seat, on the grounds that what he had done for the army he could do for the navy. Asquith could not lightly dismiss his First Lord, but he could switch him with Home Secretary Winston Churchill. Asquith seems to have considered Churchill a better spokesman than Haldane for the large budgets the navy required. Haldane’s importance to the Liberals carried him only so far.

Churchill promptly fired Wilson, which may have been his main function from Asquith’s point of view. Given that Wilson had apparently shown no ability to develop viable war plans, Churchill’s task was clearly to create a naval war staff. The lack of a staff was something of an illusion. The Royal Navy already had a small staff in the form of its Naval Intelligence Department (NID), supplemented by fleet staffs. Churchill’s War Staff turned out largely to be a renamed and slightly reorganised NID.

How all of this is to be interpreted depends on how seriously Asquith took the threat of war compared to other threats. The possibility of some explosion in Ireland, as almost happened in 1914, was much more immediate than a European war. In this context the visible strength of the Royal Navy was a valuable deterrent backing up the logical argument against war. As the largest single item in the budget, the Royal Navy also limited social expenditures. Selling that budget was important, but so was controlling its growth. The Liberals knew that there was enough public awareness of the importance of the fleet that if they slacked off the rival Conservatives might push them out of office at the next election.

In 1914 the Germans had a force in the Mediterranean, the battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau. They sought refuge in Turkey when war broke out. Although nominally transferred to the Ottoman Navy, the ships remained under German control. They brought Turkey into the war by shelling Sevastopol without Turkish consent. Goeben survived as the Turkish Yavuz, the last remaining operational dreadnought. She was photographed on 10 May 1947 during a US fleet visit.

The rise of armoured cruisers badly strained British naval finances, because these ships had to be dealt with both within a battle fleet and as commerce raiders: in 1904 the British wanted a 2:1 ratio of armoured cruisers over those of the combined fleets of the next two European powers. At the same time the British felt they had to match the battleship strengths of the next two powers (with a 10 per cent margin). The French Amiral Aube is shown. She was completed in 1904, just as British naval attention began to shift from the Franco-Russian alliance to a new German threat. This cruiser was named after the prime exponent of the jeune école, a form of naval warfare based on commerce raiding by such ships. This doctrine assumed that French torpedo boats would prevent the British from bottling up the cruisers in their ports (they would also raid commerce in the Channel).

During the 1911 crisis, then, Asquith probably assumed that war would not break out (the outcome of the crisis presumably confirmed for him that he was right). For political reasons he could not afford to infuriate Haldane. He saw no point in angering the army, key to stability in Ireland. Asquith had been trained as a lawyer; his wartime behaviour displayed the lawyer’s preference for conciliation over hard choices. Given a belief in economic mutual deterrence, he probably thought much as many in the US government did in the 1970s. Even if a crisis led to war, surely it could be contained and wound down. No irreversible steps should be taken at the outset. Haldane’s French commitment fell into that category. Wilson’s planned instant attack on German torpedo craft did not. Governments bent on deterrence do not like fire-eaters. In the 1960s intense interest in how to limit the risk of war was reflected in discussions of escalation, crisis bargaining and, later, limited nuclear options. Before 1914 no one wrote about the ‘escalation ladders’ which fascinated nuclear strategists half a century later, but the idea that initial steps in war should be limited, controllable and reversible was surely present in many minds.

As Home Secretary Churchill had been at the centre of anti-subversive efforts, in effect the guarantor of the part of national security Asquith considered most urgent. His transfer to the Admiralty was seen at the time as something of a step down. It was a real step down if Asquith regarded war as most unlikely but subversion as a current threat. Churchill was full of strategic ideas – some of them expressed during the 1911 crisis – but they did not really matter as long as war was never going to break out.¹² Asquith may also have felt safer with Churchill out of the Home Office, where he had presided over some rather violent incidents.¹³

British official behaviour in the years leading up the war is redolent of the way governments in the West behaved under the mutual deterrence understood to be in force half a century later during the Cold War. In this context numbers are more important than effectiveness. Appearances matter: whether or not the weapons are ever to be used, the other side cannot be allowed to imagine that he can gain superiority. In the British case, it appears that the point of building the Queen Elizabeth class battleships was to demonstrate to the Germans that their innovation of building fast battleships rather than British-style battlecruisers could be overmatched. In that light it does not seem strange that First Lord Winston Churchill chose to offer the Germans a ‘building holiday’, a suspension of the battleship-building race, in 1912, once the Queen Elizabeth class was in train. Such attempts at arms control were a familiar fixture of the deterrent world of the 1970s: if war was unthinkable there was no point in building weapons to the point of bankruptcy.

Acts, such as signing treaties or allocating forces, are symbolic, intended not for tactical purposes but rather to achieve diplomatic ends. The possible consequences of agreements tend not to be thought through – if war is literally unthinkable, then why think in terms of what might happen if it broke out? Those who find this somewhat absurd may ponder the US government’s enthusiastic post-Cold War policy of guaranteeing the security of former Soviet republics in order to convince them to turn their nuclear weapons over to Russia, the idea being that mutual deterrence limited to two (actually three) superpowers was much safer than a fragmented nuclear world. No one in the US government seems to have asked whether the blank cheques being passed around would ever have to be honoured.

Although the effect of deterrence thinking seems obvious in British national policies of 1910–14, it would be misleading to imagine that the Royal Navy (or for that matter the army) had abandoned efforts to be ready to fight. Churchill might govern available resources and make choices favouring numbers over readiness, but the Royal Navy did not necessarily accept the deterrent idea. While deterrence might be preferred, it had to be ready to fight. That included developing war plans. Anyone who remembers the Cold War and deterrent thinking will recognise exactly this kind of schizophrenia.

When war broke out despite expectation, Asquith and others in the British Government seem to have expected a stalemate in the West. Russia was the only virtually limitless source of military manpower. It seemed that if the French managed to stop the initial German offensive, the Russian ‘steamroller’ might well destroy Germany, or at the least force it to sue for peace. Asquith initially resisted the despatch of the expeditionary force to France, on the grounds that it would be useless. Perhaps surprisingly, its commander Field Marshal Sir John French agreed. The force was sent only after those resisting its despatch failed to produce any alternative plan by means of which the British could display support for France. Even then the Cabinet assumed that the key British contribution to the war would be seapower and associated economic attack against Germany.

Germany and Tirpitz

In 1914 Germany was the greatest power in Continental Europe. The Kaiser considered himself monarch by divine right and he considered the Prussian Army the most important element of his state. Germany was often described as ‘an army with a country attached’. In 1848, when a temporary German legislature offered the Kaiser’s grandfather the crown of a unified Germany, he rejected it because he refused to accept the authority of a ‘rabble’.¹⁴ Unification came out of a successful war with France in 1870 – which the Kaiser’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck instigated but enticed the French Emperor Napoleon III to declare. The new German Empire (Reich) that emerged from the war was ruled by the Kaiser and his largely Prussian army.

The new government was by no means a parliamentary democracy. The upper house of parliament (Bundesrat) consisted of the kings of the states comprising the German Empire; in theory it was the German imperial government. Prussia had an effective veto because it had sufficient votes and the Prussian King was Kaiser. The Kaiser chose (and dismissed) not only the Chancellor but also the State Secretaries of the various departments, although in theory they were appointed by the Chancellor.

The elected component was the Reichstag, elected by universal male suffrage through a secret ballot. The Kaiser had the power to dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections (there was no equivalent to the British practice of dissolving the House of Commons and calling new elections in the event of a vote of no confidence). The Reichstag could not initiate legislation (which was proposed by the Kaiser’s Chancellor), but laws – including the annual budget – could not be enacted without its vote. Once approved and signed, the Reichstag could not rescind laws, a point of great importance as Admiral Tirpitz grew his fleet through successive Navy Laws.

It took a battleship-size armoured cruiser to match an enemy armoured cruiser; hence the fiscal crisis Admiral Sir John Fisher was brought in to solve. When Minotaur was completed, she was of roughly battleship size. Her very tall topmasts gave her long wireless receiving range, so that she could be integrated into a global command-and-control system. It sought to track commerce raiders by analysing their attacks. This intelligence-based system was very different from the more or less random hunting which critics attributed to the Admiralty. In August 1914, Minotaur was flagship on the China Station, supported by the considerably smaller armoured cruiser Hampshire, the light cruiser Yarmouth and the pre-dreadnought Triumph. As the 1914 crisis escalated, the British China Fleet was ordered to concentrate with other Far Eastern ships at Hong Kong. Since the Germans had already left their base at Tsingtao (for a peacetime cruise) when war broke out in August, it was impossible to bottle them up there. The fleet concentration further south was intended to protect vital trade against whatever attacks the German Asiatic Squadron might mount. This photograph was obtained by the US Office of Naval Intelligence on 5 August 1908.

Like other Western European countries, Germany was affected by the wave of industrialisation of the nineteenth century, which swept people out of the countryside and into the cities – and from supporting conservative parties whose votes were dominated by landowners to the socialist parties. It was generally assumed that major landowners could compel their labourers to vote as they wished, but such control vanished as people moved into the cities. The shift from countryside to cities affected all the industrialising countries, probably the United Kingdom more than the others. However, the Kaiser and his supporters found it particularly threatening because the Reichstag was in effect the only brake on them. The sense of threat was so bad that in the 1890s there was some sentiment among the Kaiser’s supporters to curb industrialisation to limit the growth of the working (city) class. Bismarck had tried to buy off the emerging working class by providing social benefits, but once he was gone the Kaiser and his advisors were more and more afraid of a rising proletariat. Electoral boundaries in Germany were never altered to reflect the shift of population, so it took time for the socialists to convert their large majorities (in elections from 1890 on) into power in the Reichstag, but by 1912 they finally had enough votes to form a centre-left coalition.

There was a long history of conflict between Kaiser and Reichstag, the Kaiser and his advisers often considering a military coup to restore an absolute monarchy. There was even a German term for such a coup: ‘Staatstreich’. Even before German unification, the Kaiser (of Prussia) had problems with his parliament: in 1860 it rejected funding for the army. Bismarck, who was then Chancellor, dissolved the Diet (the Prussian equivalent to the Reichstag) but did not call new elections. He ruled without it, meanwhile seeking to increase conservative votes. He instigated a war against Austria in 1866, apparently largely in order to excite patriotic emotions which would sweep the conservatives into office.¹⁵

The Kaiser saw the army as his main bulwark against a rising population moving to the left. That made the army at least as important for preserving the Kaiser and the state as for foreign operations.¹⁶ Conversely, it made for an army general staff which did not clearly distinguish between its foreign and domestic roles. For example, war could be attractive as a way of turning German politics sharply to the right, towards whatever policy the Kaiser and the establishment favoured. That had certainly happened in 1870. With the centre-left victory in 1912, the latent problems of the German state came very much into focus.

Late in 1913 a junior German army officer in Alsace beat a civilian who had insulted him.¹⁷ A civilian court convicted the officer, but it was overruled by a military court. Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, representing the Kaiser, supported the officer and, by extension, the army. The Reichstag majority passed a vote of no confidence in him, many deputies talking about how the incident symbolised the unacceptable power of the army. Bethmann-Hollweg refused to resign; he was responsible only to the Kaiser. The Reichstag deputies were unwilling to push further, for example to reject that year’s budget, possibly for fear of a Staatsreich.

However, it was clear that the Reichstag was becoming more assertive and the Kaiser and the General Staff (and others in the German Establishment) considered that unacceptable. They became somewhat panicky. There is considerable evidence that early in the twentieth century the General Staff (and the associated establishment) came to see a successful war as a way out of deepening internal political problems.¹⁸ Such a war had to be presented to the Reichstag as defensive and success had to bring dividends which would make it appear well worthwhile. The object was not the gains in territorial or other terms, but a more docile Reichstag. If this explanation is correct, the First World War was ignited by domestic German politics. It was an extroverted German civil war – just as the 1870 war against France had actually been about creating national unity. The seizure of Alsace and Lorraine (and a huge war indemnity from France) were incidentals which demonstrated that the war had been worthwhile.

The prime mover in 1914 was not the German military as such, but the army General Staff, which had led the Prussian army to victory in 1870. The expensive German navy was not involved. For example, no naval operation figured in the war plan activated in August 1914. The army’s view was that victory over the French army would force France to surrender whatever was wanted later on. Army planners do not seem to have taken the possibility of a protracted war with naval implications at all seriously.

The German General Staff was positioned very differently from its counterparts in most countries. In peacetime they were all planning staffs – not, at least in theory, political planners. Such staffs and their naval counterparts are trained to examine conditions objectively and to produce plans for all possible circumstances. For example, between the two World Wars both British and US naval planners developed plans to fight each other, even though that was very nearly politically impossible. The difference between most countries and Germany was that in those countries it was clearly understood that the civilian authority would decide whether war plans were relevant; the civilians decided who was and who was not an enemy. What made the primacy of the General Staff so important and had such devastating effects, was that the General Staff evaluation of which neighbouring countries might, if they wished, cause damage translated, in minds like the Kaiser’s, into the belief that exactly those countries would attack Germany. Very sadly, it is possible that no one in the German General Staff or in the Kaiser’s government realised that their way of thinking was not the standard everywhere.

Given Germany’s lack of natural borders, General Staff thinking translated into ideas of pre-emptive attack, even though the countries involved, France and Russia, had no real intention of attacking Germany. Russian modernisation after the Russo-Japanese War became a threat which had to be countered before it gave the Russians a chance of attacking Germany – even though there was no evidence that the Russians had any such intent in the years leading up to 1914.

In theory, the Kaiser, not the General Staff, ran Germany. He often acted as a moderating force (though sometimes the opposite, as when he vowed ‘revenge’ against anyone who displeased him). The Kaiser was famously mercurial and he must have been a considerable trial to all of those who ran the German government on a day-to-day basis. British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey once described him as a powerful battleship, all screws turning, entirely without a rudder, which one day would collide with something with terrible consequences. In 1908 the Kaiser gave an embarrassingly frank interview to the British Daily Telegraph, after which his power was considerably reduced.

The Kaiser spent much of the 1914 crisis on his yacht, visiting Norway with the German fleet. The German official naval history took his absence from Berlin as proof that Germany was innocent of the charge that it had deliberately triggered the war. Later a German historian found evidence that the General Staff had deliberately kept the Kaiser ‘with his pacifist ideas’ out of Berlin during the critical period.¹⁹ If this analysis is correct, had the crisis of 1914 (and possible crises in the next few years) been averted, the Reichstag might have gained so much power that there would have been no German internal political problem to turn into a world war.

The most bizarre feature of the German pre-1914 political landscape was that the German navy accounted for so much of the military budget but that at the same time it had no role whatever in deciding German policy, particularly in the choice for or