Jutland: World War I's Greatest Naval Battle

Preface to the First Edition

Despite whatever distinctions may be implied by the terms military history and naval history as they are used in Anglo-American historiography, the Military History Research Office (Militär-Geschichtliches-Forschungsamt, or MGFA) also addresses matters of naval history. The series, of which this present book is a part, is one instance. Among the new volumes that were published during the past five years in the Conference Articles on Military History series, three deal with naval history. These involve the broad thematic range of the collected volume Deutsche Marinen im Wandel (The Evolving German Navies), the study of Tirpitz’s naval strategy by Rolf Hobson, and the influential and insightful testimonials of Albert Hopman, a naval officer of the Wilhelmine era, for which Michael Epkenhans supervised the editing. The present collection of articles rounds out the field of vision in one particular respect in that it focuses on the actual war, specifically on its battles, and in this case on the Battle of Jutland, which has for a long time taken a prominent place in the history of the German navies.

Of course it is not just about the strategic context or the operational events that built on it. That part of the story is of essential importance and must not be left out of a volume such as this. But if we limited ourselves to just the examination of the operational events, as important as these may be, the MGFA would not be living up to its role in the field of modern historical sciences. The aim of the MGFA is an approach that does justice to the broader historical phenomenon that draws on a pluralism of methods in historical studies and uses as many approaches to the subject as possible.

The research papers in this volume, articles from a conference that was held in the year 2006 in Rinebek Castle, not only take into account historical policy and diplomacy, historical strategy and operations, but they also attempt to approach the subject from underneath—that is, to take into account the politics of memory of the event and thereby diminish the effect of the intermediary agency of communication.

That a multifaceted approach to the Battle of Jutland has been achieved in this volume is due first of all to a group of authors whom we were able to acquire through the cooperation of three institutions. I want to first thank first of all the authors, three of whom—Michael Epkenhans, Frank Nägler, and Jörg Hillmann—were also editors. I would also like to thank the two partner institutions of the MGFA, namely the Otto-von-Bismarck Stiftung (Otto von Bismarck Foundation) in Friedrichsruh and the University of Oxford. The costs involved in this cooperation were also most generously shared by the Freundeskreis Marineschule Mürwik (Circle of Friends of the Naval School in Mürwik). Further, the fact that the results could be presented in a volume with maps, illustrations, and tables is the achievement of the MGFA.

Last but not least, I thank the commander of the navy, Vice Adm. Hans-Joachim Stricker, for his interest in the conference and the publication of this volume, and for the preface he wrote.

Despite the earlier mention of a kind of rounding out of the field of vision, this was not intended imply that the MGFA would no longer take an interest in naval history subjects. The MGFA will, despite a decrease of personnel resources assigned to us, continue to devote ourselves to this aspect of German military history and in doing so will try to use all opportunities for cooperation that have been made possible by this volume of conference papers.

Dr. Hans Ehlert

Colonel and Bureau Chief of the MGFA

(2004–2010)

Introduction

Michael Epkenhans, Jörg Hillmann, and Frank Nägler

The naval battle that took place on 31 May and 1 June 1916 at Jutland, and which is described in this volume, was a unique event that occurred almost precisely at the midpoint of World War I. In this respect, it was an exceptional event, and, to put it bluntly, the protagonists on both sides would have preferred it had been a normal one.

The long duration of the war before and after the battle indicates that it was a superfluous battle, one that only served to confirm the status quo. And yet it claimed an alarming number of casualties by today’s standards—nearly ten thousand dead and wounded on each side. In comparison with the battle on the Somme, which began a few weeks later and which cost the lives of far more combatants—three hundred thousand to be exact—these losses were minor. But the Battle of Jutland contained other superlatives. Unlike the mass killing on the western front, this battle was a showdown between the most highly developed battle technologies, with what were essentially state-of-the art weapons that had been the achievements of domestic industrial ability and had been developed and produced over many years and at great expense. In all of this, the battle offers rich material in terms of its prologue, its uniqueness as an event, and its epilogue, which are taken up in these chapters from both the German and English perspectives.

The multifaceted prologue to the Battle of Jutland reaches far back into the prewar era. In his opening chapter, Nicholas A. M. Rodger traces it as far back as half a century prior to the war, devoting particular attention to its political and military aspects. He does not neglect to bring up the main cause of the German-British estrangement prior to 1914. This had not been due to economic competition or, to specific, politically debatable issues in world politics; rather, it was due to the irrationality of the Germany fleet expansion and the incomprehensible reasoning behind it, which, during the arms race that preceded the war, had been kept in check thanks to the agile diplomacy and a capable political system of the British.

Compared to the German side, the British were in a far better position to make the necessary finances available for the mobilization of armament production. Within the limited realm of naval strategy planning—that is, within the Imperial Navy’s operational and strategic ideas prior to World War I—it is obvious that that, although their irrationality revolved around a reasonable core idea, this idea was no longer in keeping with the times.

Under the conditions of the nineteenth century, their ideas may still have found justification. However, by expecting that the British must indeed come and that they would be forced to do so for military reasons, the Imperial Navy had underestimated the options available to their soon-to-be enemy on the eve of World War I, if only in terms of its rapid upgrading of technology and greater flexibility in strategic thinking.

After the outbreak of the war, it soon became clear that everything was, or at least many things were, now different from the way that those in charge had previously thought. Ultimately for the German side this had catastrophic results—for the British as well, although admittedly not with the same outcome. In his chapter James Goldrick analyzes the learning process that the Royal Navy underwent in changing from a peacetime to a wartime navy, which was nevertheless no automatic guarantee of victory.

Instead of their usual short practice maneuvers, during which economic and safety concerns took priority over any attempt to simulate reality, both personnel and matériel now had to undergo punishing long-term deployments, which demanded getting up and out in the worst of weather.

The learning process did not involve just the way the navy conducted its operations or the way it deployed standing units and its crews at sea. The strategic background of the Battle of Jutland, as it evolved for the British side, can also be viewed as an outcome of a learning process. Andrew Lambert points out that here some of this painful learning experience had to do with a lack of communication and an insufficient understanding between the two most important people in British naval leadership, Adm. Sir John Fisher and Winston S. Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty.

Ultimately, there had to be a shift away from the original concept of a limited war primarily fought with naval means, which by 1916 had given way to the concept of total war. This shift was reflected in the strategy that transformed the blockade concept into an instrument of total economic war, which reversed the British prewar stance step by step.

Fisher, who had meanwhile been carefully hatching his own strategic scheme, now added a convoluted plan in which the Royal Navy would pose a believable threat to the High Seas Fleet’s positions in the Baltic by means of surface-going ships and thus force a battle on British terms. The resulting jolt to the German dominance of the Baltic Sea was supposed to have rounded out the blockade, interrupted the Scandinavian ore shipments, and stopped the war in favor of entente before it developed into total war. Still, these plans were thwarted in the end by the constant pressure from the first lord, whose own numerous initiatives corresponded with Fisher’s intentions only to a limited degree. Because Churchill was not reluctant to go over Adm. Sir John Fisher’s head and relocate to the Dardanelles the units necessary for challenging the Kaiser’s Navy, the discord between the two men led to the retirement of one of them and the political demise of the other.

Their less able successors, however, continued to misuse the naval resources that Fisher had procured in his effort to put pressure on the German positions in the Baltic Sea, and these resources were frittered away on other naval battle fronts of the war. These ships were not available when Adm. John Rushworth Jellicoe, under the expanding expectations at the beginning of the third year of war, saw the time had come for the necessary advance with the Grand Fleet into the region of the Danish straits, which then formed the prelude to the Battle of Jutland.

In any case, the Royal Navy basically had a strategic concept at its disposal, which, given sufficient time for it to take effect, would bring them closer to victory. On the German side, the situation was quite different. Michael Epkenhans’s chapter, The Kaiser’s Navy, 1914–1915 describes the Germans’ effort to come to terms with the unexpected turn of events in the war, which had been marked by self-defeating measures and the lost arms race. At the same time, Operations Order No. 1 reflects helplessness more than it does any promising strategic concept. Insecurity and self-restraint had increased even more as a result of the defeat at Helgoland right after the outbreak of war. In 1914 there had only been scattered sorties against the British east coast. Each time the High Seas Fleet hoped that it would only meet smaller parts of the Grand Fleet, which it hoped to defeat in order to whittle down its overwhelming strength. Following the debacle at the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915, the High Seas Fleet stopped making any sorties at all until early 1916. The kaiser and chancellor did not wish to risk the fleet. Their own caution was reflected in the opinion of the leading naval officers such as Hugo von Pohl, Reinhard Scheer, or even Alfred von Tirpitz.

But the older officers did tend to take the more cautious approach, in contrast to the younger flag and staff officers, whose discontent was soon to become clear. Essentially German naval leadership suffered from the requirement to succeed without taking any risks, as impossible a task as the squaring of a circle. This was made more acute by the ineffectiveness of the top levels of organization, as well as a kind of thinking that focused on the battle but not beyond. All of this hindered, if not completely blocked, the search for alternatives, a situation that had an increasingly negative effect on the German leadership in the naval war.

The circumstances in the first half of 1916 that prompted Scheer to abandon his restraint and take greater risks are described in the chapter by Werner Rahn. One reason was that during the (temporary) cessation of the trade war, U-boats had become available for use in forays by the High Seas Fleet. Further, there was growing concern that, without a visible commitment to more vigorous action during the war, no one could justify the degree of fleet expansion during peacetime that had taken place before the war. Thus, even in 1916, the navy’s openly displayed self-centeredness played a considerable role in operational planning. With this, the present focus on the Battle of Jutland’s prehistory comes to a close.

In German historical writing, when it comes to the battle itself, there has been no scientific treatment that meets with modern standards. For this reason, we devote relatively more space to this aspect here and include sources from widely different perspectives that offer insight into the reality of the naval battle and its events.

Even amid the mixture of relief and triumph that came from having confronted the Grand Fleet and from having taken only a small number of casualties, Scheer’s report to the emperor left no doubt that the superiority and position of the enemy would prevent a decisive victory for the High Seas Fleet. The Battle of Jutland left Germany no basis for internal quarrelling about lost opportunities.

But on the British side things turned out differently. In the actions of the two leading British naval commanders, Admiral Jellicoe and Adm. David Beatty, the seeds were sown for later conflict. As John Brooks observes in his chapter, Beatty’s leadership decisions—or perhaps better said, his leadership mistakes, as they are reflected in the subsequent documentation—offer a new analysis of the course of the battle based on technical expertise, which, because the battle was not a second Trafalgar, the British sometimes considered disappointing, despite the positive assessment that followed. This also throws light on the later manipulations by Beatty and at the same time opens the discussion as to the epilogue of the battle.

Part of this later history, as seen in Eric Grove’s chapter, is also part of the long-lived and sometimes bitter dispute about whose leadership conduct was mostly responsible for the lack of clear success in terms of destroying enemy ships. After Beatty’s party initially gained the upper hand in this area during the 1920s and after Jellicoe’s departure from the post of first sea lord, Jellicoe’s followers won increasing influence under the sway of his loyal successor.

In the 1930s the dispute was curbed by the very closed nature of the Royal Navy. Despite the disclosure of personal weaknesses, the dispute had a positive side for the navy in the respect that because instead of disguising it, the service dealt with it in a way that would pay off during World War II. In contrast, the later histories of the battle from the German side are less riddled with controversy. But this does not mean the Germans somehow passed along an image of unity. The German memory of the naval battle at Jutland is divided at this juncture between the intragroup memory and the memory of the society as a whole.

The relationship between the two reveals something more about the self-image that had already become obvious in the leadership of the naval war through the Kaiser’s Navy. In terms of the intragroup, the remembrance of the Battle of Jutland represents an effort to create a kind of unity between the Kaiser’s Navy and its successors. The figure of Erich Raeder shifted increasingly into a central position in his association with the Kriegsmarine. The aftereffects of these overall successful efforts toward a single identity and the closed nature of the navy can be traced through the era of the Federal Republic well into the 1970s.

But the official positions and surviving naval networks essential to such an effort did not manage to lock the event in the long-term memory bank of society in general. It is true that during the war, in the direct aftermath of the battle, the media was dominated to a large extent by an uncritical glorification in very wide variety of publications, from newspaper reports to paintings to theater productions.

But the scuttling of their own ships by those interned at Scapa Flow, undertaken in the spirit of the battle of 1916, revealed a wide gap between the intragroup’s interpretation, which centered on honor, and the judgment made by society as a whole, which was based on a primarily pragmatic point of view.

Further, during the Weimar Republic, the work that was done by the navy and naval auxiliary circles in the interest of commemoration—from official naval battle histories to monuments and memorials—was not as enthusiastically received by society in general as it was by the intragroup, in which unity could be ensured at the cost of marginalizing critical voices.

In another way—but again, symptomatic of self-centeredness—the commemoration of the Battle of Jutland in the Third Reich was supposed to become a focal point for an enduring anti-British resentment within the Kriegsmarine but one in which Hitler, with his plans for a huge empire in eastern Europe, had no interest. The navy continued to fixate on the fallacious view of the battle, one that upheld the idea that it had been defrauded of victory in the war, declining to view the trauma of 1918 as a fresh beginning (never again) and instead turning to 1916 for a different sort of fresh start (as in, battle must at last be fought to its end).

After 1945 such perspectives only had a chance within the navy; since the 1970s they had to yield to increasingly critical views—self-centeredness being one of the issues. Only in the memory of small circles within the navy and related circles did the battle have any place at all. In contrast, in the memory of the society as a whole, it has no permanent mooring.

In the period between the wars, the new, prominent medium of film played a significant role in commemorating the battle, even though there are no authentic film testimonials, at least on the German side. As the chapter by Jan Kindler shows, the Battle of Jutland as a film topic ran a parallel course with the overall German commemoration of the battle. Almost throughout the Weimar era, the most frequent explanation that was offered was one that vindicated the Kaiser’s Navy and was excessively nationalistic. This held true for the early films, whose lack of authenticity could hardly remain hidden even from the less informed public. The same could be said about the much more expensive production of 1921, the cinematic treatment of the commemoration ceremony itself.

This imbalance was evened out by means of a film that, because of commercial interests and the need to appeal to as broad a public as possible, including an international one, allowed less space for the nationalistic perspective. An animated cartoon film was the only one that took up a critical, pacifist interpretation. After 1933, the cinematic reminders of the battle served as a mental preparation for the next war. Thus, the imperial era and the Kaiser’s Navy formed a backdrop for the buildup of the Kriegsmarine. In 1937 this development found its first peak in the film Klar Schiff zum Gefecht (Make Ship Ready for Battle), which was produced with the most modern technology and at great expense, and in which the powerful units of the Kriegsmarine and its steely men, together with Adolf Hitler, supplanted the imperial era to a great extent. Shortly thereafter, the ousting process was complete: after 1939 there were not to be any more films about the Battle of Jutland.

The Battle of Jutland was very much an unnecessary and irrational act embedded in a mélange of practical and rational planning, of myths and power fantasies, of sober consequences, and of dream images fed by intoxication. And it exacted immeasurable misery from those who were involved. Michael Salewski’s chapter brings together final reflections in essay form.

1

Anglo-German Naval Rivalry, 1860–1914

Nicholas A. M. Rodger

We live history forward but we study it backward so that inescapable hindsight distorts the historian’s vision of the past and cuts him off from contemporaries who longed to know what he cannot avoid knowing: what was going to happen. No passage of modern history was so terrible and so consequential as World War I, and it is hardly surprising if historians have tended to view the events of the thirty years or so preceding it mainly through a single lens, the causes of World War I. Applied to Anglo-German relations, and especially naval relations, this produced the classic narrative of Arthur Marder, a story of steadily rising hostility driven by new naval technologies—above all the dreadnought—and new naval personalities—above all Sir John Fisher and Alfred von Tirpitz.¹ Only in recent years has a new generation of scholars reinterpreted both the technology and the men, and in the process cast Anglo-German relations in a new light.

During the wars of German unification, those relations were almost entirely friendly. Britain had no essential interests at stake on the Continent so long as the balance of power was not fatally disturbed, and there was insufficient public or parliamentary support for intervention even in a relatively popular cause such as Denmark’s in 1864. Otto von Bismarck was careful to avoid infringing on Belgian neutrality or otherwise arousing British hostility. Only occasional voices suggested that the rise of the new great power might at some remote future date cause Britain problems. I have no faith in the friendship of Prussia, wrote Lord Cowley, the British ambassador in Paris in the 1860s, and if ever she becomes a naval power she will give us trouble.² So long as Bismarck remained chancellor, however, there was no trouble. Though in political and ideological terms, Gladstonian Britain and Wilhelmine Germany were almost polar opposites, and the domestic policies of each were capable of irritating the other, their foreign policies remained closely aligned. British governments were preoccupied with colonial and naval questions, above all in the East, which concerned France and Russia. Germany figured mainly as a potential counterweight, at least to France. Two royal families closely linked by marriage helped to bind the countries together. Bismarck was aware that Germany could not expect to eliminate another of the great powers without arousing against herself just such a coalition as had overwhelmed Napoleon.³ For the same reason he refrained from engaging in overseas adventures, which risked alienating Britain for no essential benefit. Your map of Africa is very nice, he said of German colonial promoters, but there is Russia, and there is France, and we are in the middle, and that is my map of Africa. Adm. Leo von Caprivi, the head of the Admiralty, took the same line: The less Africa, the better.⁴ There was no economic logic in Anglo-German rivalry, since much of German foreign trade was with Britain and would have been ruined by provoking British protection. The modest growth of the German navy in the 1870s aroused no alarm across the North Sea. In 1874 the Times described the launch of a new German ironclad as a healthy and promising sign for the new German nationality. . . . England will be the last country to view such a spectacle with anything like jealousy.⁵

In both countries colonial and naval questions assumed greater public interest and political importance in the 1880s. For domestic economic and political reasons, Bismarck was now prepared to offer limited support to German colonialists. He was also aware of the potential of colonial issues (and Ireland) to embarrass and undermine William Gladstone and by extension the Liberal circle around the crown prince whose accession to the throne could not be long delayed (Wilhelm I being eighty-three in 1880). British governments, preoccupied with domestic problems, favored Germany’s new colonial interests insofar as they noticed them, though British colonials in Australia and New Zealand were less understanding. Bismarck’s government aroused annoyance by exploiting Britain’s difficulties in 1885, with the Russian army in the Hindu Kush and the Mahdi’s army in Khartoum, but it was an irritant rather than a threat.⁶ What really worried British governments was Ireland and Russia. In November 1886 the incoming prime minister, Lord Salisbury, told Queen Victoria, The prospect is very gloomy abroad, but England cannot brighten it. Torn in two by a controversy which almost threatens her existence, she cannot in the present state of public opinion interfere with any decisive action abroad. The highest interests would be risked here at home, while nothing effective could be done by us to keep the peace on the Continent.⁷

Meanwhile British domestic politics was becoming preoccupied with a new concern over naval vulnerability. For most of the century (the Crimean War excepted), British naval supremacy had been assured at a remarkably cheap price, but the public was increasingly ready to be alarmed by the naval plans of France and Russia. The 1885 Truth about the Navy scare was largely an artificial panic skillfully exploited by naval promoters, but four years later the Naval Defence Act was an official policy adopted by the new Conservative government. Salisbury’s private convictions remained more or less Gladstonian, but a combination of an aroused public opinion and a more threatening foreign situation persuaded him to invest in the first major peacetime naval expansion program. The program was explained and justified by the invention of the Two-Power Standard. This brilliant public-relations exercise provided a simple formula, accessible to politicians and journalists, which supported government policy with the appearance of impartial strategic logic, without in reality constraining it at all. For the first time it referred explicitly to battleships—the new functional category that the Royal Navy had only just adopted—but what was a first-class and what a second-class battleship, which were serviceable and which obsolescent, remained matters only the experts could define, so that the balance of naval power could be manipulated to suit the government’s convenience. (It could also, potentially, be manipulated by the admirals to discomfort the government.) Moreover, it was not made clear whether the standard was numerical equality with the next two naval powers or a strength equal to the task of fighting them—which was generally understood to require a margin of superiority. The Two-Power Standard had a further advantage in 1889. It gave the spurious appearance of impartiality, when in reality the only naval opponents any British government took seriously were France and Russia, which were the first and third naval powers after Britain. The second was Italy, an unlikely enemy, and the difference in size between the Italian and Russian fleets gave Britain a further margin.⁸ In the short run the Two-Power Standard was an ingenious political coup. It channeled and legitimated public concern over naval strength in ways that Gladstone could not answer or divert. It helped to end his career and split his party. In the longer term, however, it had consequences that were uncomfortable for all parties. It invited the public to participate in discussions that had hitherto been reserved for the experts, behind closed doors. It was one response to the new mass franchise, turning major policy questions into major public debates. It was not a coincidence that three important naval pressure groups, the London Chamber of Commerce, the Navy League, and the Navy Records Society, were all founded in the early 1890s. The Two-Power Standard had another effect too: it cast the debate solely in terms of battleships, though the experts were at least as interested in cruisers and in the extent to which the functions of cruisers and battleships might overlap.⁹

The Naval Defence Act gave Britain naval superiority in the terms of the Two-Power Standard, but it did not give lasting security. It initiated a period of rapid expansion in foreign navies, above all the French and Russian navies, which were Britain’s obvious potential enemies. The growth of the Russian Black Sea Fleet raised the specter of a Russian fleet capturing Constantinople, breaking into the Mediterranean, and cutting British communications to the East just as the Russian army marched on India. The 1892 Franco-Russian military convention, though in reality a limited defensive agreement with no naval component until 1900, was understood abroad as a full alliance. The visit of a Russian squadron to Toulon in 1893 aroused grave alarm in London and led the naval members of the Admiralty Board to demand an immediate reinforcement of seven battleships for the Mediterranean.¹⁰

To complicate strategy, the Two-Power Standard had fixed the public’s attention on battleships just as the advance of naval technology seemed to be undermining its position. First, in the late 1880s, French naval policy was briefly transformed by the ideas of the Jeune École, a group closely associated with the Radical Party, which argued that the new Whitehead torpedo, delivered by the new torpedo boats, was the modern, proletarian naval weapon that would drive the clumsy aristocratic ironclad from the seas or at least from the English Channel. Adm. Théophile Aube, spokesman of the Jeune École, was minister of marine in the short-lived Radical government of 1886–1887, but neither the government nor its favorite weapons performed effectively, and by the time of the Naval Defence Act the battleship seemed to be safely restored to its throne. The French and Russian building programs of the early 1890s were centered on conventional battleships.¹¹ Behind the scenes, however, the Royal Navy and others continued to develop the torpedo and consider how best it might be used, and other naval technology advanced at the same time. The introduction in 1894 of Krupp face-hardened armor made it possible for the first time to protect the exposed hull of a large ship against the medium-caliber high-explosive shells that then formed the main armament of cruisers and the secondary armament of battleships. Two years later the French navy laid down a new large cruiser, the Jeanne d’Arc, which inaugurated the type known as armored cruisers, protected with Krupp armor. She promised to be both faster and more powerful than any British cruiser afloat. Only the main armament of British battleships could damage her, and they could not possibly catch her. The new type presented a grave and obvious threat to British trade. In response the Royal Navy began to build armored cruisers of its own. These ships were nearly as expensive as battleships, their hulls were longer (which meant that docks all over the world had to be rebuilt to accommodate them), and their crews were larger; man-eating vessels they were called by Adm. Sir Frederick Richards, senior naval lord in the late 1890s. In a period when the pace of battleship building had not slackened, the British had in effect taken on an additional naval race, which imposed an acute strain on money and even worse on manpower. Both financial and technical considerations prompted some admirals to wonder if the new armored cruisers might not take on at least some of the work of the battleship.¹²

In the short term, the British naval effort worked. At a time when the Russians were busy in China, Salisbury was able to take a hard line with France over the Fashoda Crisis and force her withdrawal from the Upper Nile. The following year the Scott-Muravyev Agreement, delimiting British and Russian spheres of influence in China, lessened one area of tension.¹³ Seen from London, however, the overall situation continued to darken. Between 1889 and 1904, the cost of a battleship doubled, and that of a first-class cruiser increased fivefold. The increased pace of technical change reduced their service life to fifteen years or less, and the faster depreciation of its much larger fleet hit Britain especially hard. British naval expenditure more than doubled, but Britain’s strength relative to its likely enemies remained about the same. The rise of new navies outside Europe added unpleasant complications. By 1898 the Japanese were already reckoned to hold the local balance of power in the Far East. In the same year the unexpected victory of the United States over Spain marked the arrival of another new navy, remote from the centers of British naval power and invulnerable to its pressure, and the Russian government borrowed £27,560,000 to build a new Pacific Fleet.¹⁴ Then the outbreak of the South African War, and the humiliating disasters of Black Week in December 1899, temporarily reduced Britain (in A. J. Balfour’s view) to the status of a third-class power and in three years added 25 percent to the national debt.¹⁵

Throughout the 1890s, as Britain’s strategic, naval, and financial situation seemed to weaken rapidly, Germany remained on the margins of British concerns. Colonial disputes in Samoa, New Guinea, and the Congo excited public opinion but were trivial in themselves. The Kaiser’s characteristically ill-judged intervention in the Jameson Raid of 1896, the Kruger Telegram, provoked more serious trouble. In 1899 there were rumors of a Franco-Russian-German alliance to exploit British embarrassment in South Africa.¹⁶ Seen from London, however, Germany appeared to be an irresponsible mischief-maker rather than a major threat. Only by allying with Russia could Germany do Britain real damage, and it was hard to believe that it would choose to adopt a policy so obviously against its own long-term interests. As Balfour wrote to Lord Selborne, the new first lord of the Admiralty in April 1902, I find it extremely difficult to believe that we have, as you seem to suppose, much to fear from Germany—in the immediate future at all events. It seems to me so clear that, broadly speaking, her interests and ours are identical. But I have sorrowfully to admit that the world, unfortunately, is not always governed by enlightened self-interest.¹⁷

Selborne was in fact of the same opinion: Germany will never help us for love of us but she will refrain from assisting to injure us from the instinct of self preservation.¹⁸ As early as 1895 an anonymous writer in the Saturday Review ended an article with the phrase Germaniam esse delendam—Germany must perish—but this was an extremely marginal point of view at that date.¹⁹ The real significance of German policy to British statesmen at the end of the century was not that it represented a threat in itself, but that it blocked what might otherwise have been an obvious escape route from at least some of Britain’s difficulties: an Anglo-German alliance. In November 1900 Selborne considered this the only alternative to an ever-increasing Navy and ever-increasing Navy estimates.²⁰ Unfortunately exploration showed that there was no prospect of real German support. Britain had to look elsewhere for some escape route from isolation.²¹

The erratic and indiscreet Wilhelm II continued to give the impression (truthful, as we now know) that Germany harbored secret ambitions of naval power, if not naval supremacy and that exactly at a time when, in view of our naval inferiority, we must operate so carefully, like the caterpillar before it has grown into a butterfly, as Bernhard von Bülow wrote in July 1899.²² Bülow and Tirpitz, the agents of the kaiser’s new naval ambitions, were alarmed that their long-term plans would be detected while they were still in the vulnerable early stages. Moreover, in Germany, as in Britain, public opinion, having been invited into the formerly private world of naval policy, showed an alarming tendency to get out of control. In spite of the careful coaching of the Marinenachrichtenbureau, the shrill hostility of German press comments on British conduct of the South African War went a long way to persuade reluctant British policymakers that they might have to add Germany to their already excessively long list of potential enemies. Selborne seems to have come to that conclusion by the autumn of 1902.²³ It must be stressed, however, that Germany was well down every list of enemies, and only a few experts were concerned by the long-term implications of the Navy Laws. What worried Selborne was precisely that the German navy might work in the manner that (as we now know) Tirpitz was proposing: as a diplomatic lever calculated to exploit Britain’s difficulties elsewhere. I am inclined to think we shall be liable to be blackmailed by our ‘friends’ if we give ourselves no margin, he wrote, numbering Germany, Japan, and the United States as friends of this equivocal sort. The margin he wanted (and got) was over the Two-Power Standard, and the two likely enemy powers were still France and Russia. We must have a force which is reasonably calculated to beat France and Russia and we must have something in hand against Germany, he wrote in January 1903. The Germany that concerned the Admiralty was still the potential opportunist ally of Russian aggression. As late as October 1904, the outgoing first naval lord, Lord Walter Kerr, remarked that one cannot shut one’s eyes to the possibility of a Russo-German combination some day.²⁴ Only a few days later it very nearly happened, when Russian warships (with German encouragement) opened fire on British fishing boats that they mistook for torpedo craft. But the admirals (with the obvious exception of Prince Louis of Battenberg) were not familiar with Germany or accustomed to looking that way for danger. It was only among Foreign Office officials and a few politicians, who knew Germany very well, that the 1900 Navy Law aroused real concern.²⁵

The end of the South African War left Britain in a mood of introspective gloom. Worse than the very high financial and diplomatic price of victory over the Boer Republics, the war seemed to have revealed profound national weakness at home and gathered an invincible coalition of enemies abroad. The impossibility of paying for unceasing naval expansion, and in particular of building and manning the new armored cruisers on top of everything else, was only one item on a long list of intolerable burdens. All this was exactly as Tirpitz had predicted—but he had also predicted that Britain could find no way out of its difficulties. He was confident that money and manpower could not be found to meet an additional naval challenge, and he was certain that Britain could not escape the inevitable war with Russia, and probably France, which would give Germany her opportunity.²⁶

Tirpitz was quite wrong. British diplomacy reacted to dangerous isolation with considerable agility. In 1901 the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty in effect conceded the Caribbean as an American sphere of influence, and in 1903 the settlement of the Alaskan boundary dispute defused another possible cause of Anglo-American friction.²⁷ The Japanese, who had had their own experience of isolation and humiliation in the aftermath of the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, were willing to come to an alliance that promised to neutralize much of the risk of the new Russian Pacific Fleet.²⁸ The attraction of the Japanese alliance for Britain was obvious, but the danger was that it might draw Britain into war with France and Russia. The French diplomatic overtures of 1903 were warmly received in London because both powers had to fear the same thing: being drawn into a destructive war by Russian aggression. The Entente Cordiale split the opposing alliance and drew the French toward Britain.²⁹

The diplomatic revolution of 1902–1904 greatly improved Britain’s situation, but it did not eliminate the threat from Russia. We all on the C.I.D. [Committee of Imperial Defence], Selborne wrote in April 1904, must be impressed with the great weakness which accrues to the British Empire from the fact that, whereas Russia can strike at us when she pleases through Afghanistan, we apparently can hit back at her nowhere.³⁰ The Admiralty was acutely aware that diplomatic arrangements could fall apart. The Entente Cordiale, in particular, was exactly that: a friendly understanding, which bound nobody to anything. The rate of French and Russian naval building, and consequently the financial pressure on Britain, had not slackened. Selborne knew that he had to find a way of reducing the navy estimates without sacrificing British naval supremacy. This was Sir John Fisher’s opportunity. He was already too old for the job, he was far from being universally popular or trusted among the senior officers of the navy (in the judgment of his predecessor Kerr, he certainly does not possess the confidence of the Service and his appointment as Senior Naval Lord would be very universally condemned), but he did have a formula to give Selborne what he needed.³¹

Fisher’s plan was based on technical rather than strategic considerations. Developments in torpedo technology were pushing their maximum range beyond that of battleship gunnery, and seaworthy destroyers were now available to carry them anywhere in home waters. The dream of the Jeune École now seemed to be within practical reach, and Fisher meant to turn it against its original authors. The French and Russian battle fleets were divided between widely scattered bases, the Russian ones far away from essential British interests, and their ships were not of impressive quality. The threat they presented to Britain and her overseas bases could be checked by destroyers and (Fisher’s particular favorite) submarines. The real danger was the armored cruisers, and to meet them Fisher proposed a new fleet of very large armored cruisers with an large-caliber armament (capable of outranging torpedoes), and turbine engines to give very high sustained sea speed for long ocean chases. To find the manpower needed for these extremely large ships, he proposed to scrap most of the navy’s existing fleet of cruisers. While they were building, he planned to redistribute the existing battleship force so that the newest ships were concentrated in the new base at Gibraltar, far from enemy torpedo craft and ideally situated to move against threats anywhere in the world. From the moment he returned to the Admiralty as senior naval lord in October 1904, Fisher was working in great secrecy on this scheme. Two days after his arrival, the Dogger Bank incident very nearly brought on the Russian war that had so long been forecast. As Zinovy P. Rozdestvenski’s fleet steamed slowly eastward, Fisher’s Design Committee was at work, and before the Battle of Tsushima had been fought and won (by a fleet largely made up of armored cruisers, against battleships), their plans were ready.³²

The astonishing Japanese victory transformed Britain’s strategic situation overnight. The Russian fleet was completely eliminated (except the Black Sea squadron, which had mutinied), and there was no risk now that France would abandon her new friendship. Instead of struggling to maintain the Two-Power Standard, Britain found herself with a comfortable margin over a Three-Power Standard. All this happened just as Fisher’s radical scheme was being set in motion. He himself remained passionately convinced that it was the right and necessary course, but other admirals and politicians thought again about the new situation. The politicians and the public had been educated, ever since the Naval Defence Act, to measure naval strength by battleships and were not easily persuaded to abandon their basic concept of seapower. The armored cruisers that had caused so much worry were now either sunk or friendly. The German navy, elevated by force of circumstances to the status of Britain’s principal remaining enemy, had hardly any cruisers or overseas bases and presented only a battleship threat across the North Sea. In these circumstances Fisher’s radical program was modified, and one of his new battlecruisers (to give them the name by which they came to be known) was completed instead as a battleship of analogous type. Forced to compromise, Fisher characteristically extracted the maximum public relations value from the new battleship, making it the trials ship and public face of the scheme, behind which its real nature could be concealed as long as possible.³³

Fisher seems to have been almost the last man in the Admiralty to notice the German threat. He did not intend to build the Dreadnought to upset Tirpitz’s naval plans—he did not intend to build the Dreadnought at all—and he seems to have been unaware until later that the Dreadnought revolution was going to present German naval planners with acute difficulties. He did not know of the draught limitations in the Jade River and the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal. He did not know that the new 28 cm gun and new underwater protection system were just going on trials. German industry’s difficulties in producing turbines and the acute financial and political crisis into which the German naval program was plunged were all unforeseen consequences of a scheme that had never been directed at Germany at all. Least of all could Fisher have predicted the trouble that would be caused between Tirpitz and Wilhelm II when the real nature of the new battlecruisers leaked out at the end of August 1906. There is the fast ship of the line that I have been striving for in vain for our navy since 1902, the Kaiser minuted furiously, adding in English, "If I had been heard we would have been the first to have this type."³⁴

By 1906 it should have been obvious that many of Tirpitz’s assumptions were wrong. Britain was not condemned to isolation and an inevitable war with Russia. On the contrary, British diplomacy had reacted with agility, and it was now Germany that looked isolated; the new fleet had made her less rather than more attractive for new allies [bündnisfähig]. There was no longer any foreseeable prospect of Britain being forced into war with either Russia or France. The Royal Navy had not run out of men or money, and it had found means to rewrite the strategic and technical rules of naval warfare in ways that bore heavily on Germany’s financial, political, and industrial weaknesses. Though we now know that this was largely an unplanned result of policies not aimed at Germany at all, this would not have helped Tirpitz even if he had known. There were sufficient indications for any observer with open eyes that British admirals were moving away from close blockade and that the new German battleships were not certain, or even likely, to be offered the sort of naval campaign for which they had been designed. So far from being motivated by deep-rooted economic envy [Handelsneid], the British electorate had decisively rejected Joseph Chamberlain’s (rather limited) program of tariff reform in response to German protectionism. All this would have provided rational grounds for a complete reassessment of German naval policy, but neither Tirpitz nor the kaiser were prepared to confront reality, and the German constitution allowed no one else to do so.³⁵

Meanwhile the accession of the Liberal government in 1906 promised to confirm some of Tirpitz’s assumptions about British inability, or at least unwillingness, to bear the rising cost of naval supremacy. The new government contained a large Radical element, hostile to naval spending, and was committed to expensive new social programs. Britain’s margin of naval strength was now so great that it was impossible for the Admiralty to resist a reduction in the rate of new construction. Fisher remained in office, tacitly supported by the Conservative Opposition led by the naval expert A. J. Balfour, but his endeavor to keep building his new battlecruiser force (and support British shipbuilding) was now very difficult. In the new strategic situation, both admirals and politicians refused to abandon battleships, and Fisher was forced to compromise. The Two-Power Standard now referred to Germany and the United States—not a very credible threat, especially as German construction had been completely disrupted by the Dreadnought. The Radicals loudly demanded reductions in bloated armaments, and the new prime minister, H. H. Asquith, though in principle a Liberal Imperialist committed to naval supremacy, was in practice a skillful trimmer committed to whatever was necessary to keep together his uneasy coalition.³⁶ In private Fisher admitted that the Radicals were right: "Our present margin of superiority over Germany (our only possible foe for years) is so great as to render it absurd in the extreme to talk of anything endangering our naval supremacy, even if we stopped all shipbuilding altogether!!!"³⁷

In these circumstances, a continued reduction in the rate of British building must have been very likely if not absolutely certain. With moderation and patience, Tirpitz’s long-term goal would have been brought steadily nearer. The only thing that could have upset his plans was a powerful alarm of naval danger in British politics, one so powerful as to disarm Radical objections to bloated armaments. This alarm Tirpitz obligingly provided with the Amendment of 1908. It was published on 17 November 1907, the same day that Wilhelm II left Windsor after another visit to his British cousins and one week after Fisher, in a speech at the Mansion House, had assured the City financiers that British naval supremacy was safe and they could sleep quiet in their beds. The recent improvement in Anglo-German relations was effaced with casual arrogance. By laying down four dreadnoughts for 1908–1909, and (as it seemed) another four for the following year with no Reichstag vote to pay for them, Germany seemed to vault over both industrial and constitutional barriers to a sudden increase in building. Now the Opposition could credibly present Asquith’s cabinet as simpletons deceived by fair words—and the superpatriots of the Imperial Maritime League could accuse Fisher of treason. The British public was as wedded as ever to naval supremacy, expressed in numbers of battleships, and no government, however large its majority, could afford to ignore public alarm. Even the Radicals were reluctantly forced to accept that the German challenge was real and unavoidable.³⁸

Thus Tirpitz achieved the worst of all possible worlds: convincing the British that the German naval challenge was real and deadly and that German industry and finance were capable of carrying it rapidly into effect. The first part was true, and the realization brought about a permanent alteration in Liberal politics, converting the Radical leaders Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George into firm supporters of naval spending. As Asquith told the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, nobody here understands why Germany would need or how she can use 21 Dreadnoughts, unless for aggressive purposes, and primarily against ourselves.³⁹ What was not true at all was the sudden increase in German industrial strength. Though Britain laid down no fewer than ten dreadnoughts for 1909–1910, Tirpitz was unable to increase the tempo or even, in the event, to sustain it. He had aroused a response that Germany was unable to match. Yet even then there was nothing inevitable about war. The Liberal government remained committed to expensive social programs and keenly interested in reducing naval expenditure. As first lord of the Admiralty from 1911, Churchill repeatedly explored the possibilities of reducing Anglo-German naval competition by a building holiday, by confidence-building exchanges of information, or by a mutually acceptable ratio of strength. He was sincerely convinced that there was no inevitable quarrel with Germany. It is all nonsense . . . there is no collision of primary interests—big, important interests—between Great Britain and Germany in any quarter of the globe. . . . Look at it from any point of view you like, and I say you will come to the conclusion in regard to relations between England and Germany, there is no real cause of difference between them, and . . . these two great people have nothing to fight about, have no prize to fight for, and have no place to fight in.⁴⁰

Expression of British sea power: Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Review at Spithead, 26 June 1897. Painting by Charles Dixon (1872–1934). National Maritime Museum, London, BHC0654

All these overtures were rejected or greeted only with the unacceptable condition that Britain should agree to stand aside in a future European war and give Germany a free hand—implicitly a free hand to break her treaty obligations, such as to the neutrality of Belgium.⁴¹ Wilhelm II treated all attempts to negotiate as a personal insult: I wish the whole endless, dangerous chapter of arms limitations had not been rolled out again. One way or another, it finally comes down to England’s claim to my right to judge the necessary sea power for Germany, and in the end to an attempt to breach the Navy Law [Flottengesetz].⁴²

The 1912 Amendment was Tirpitz’s answer to Churchill’s hopes of economy. It stunned him into a commitment to four battleships a year, but he was still in touch with Fisher and still thinking of ways to save money in spite of the German menace. By 1914 he had the agreement of the admirals to replace at least one battleship a year with