Defeating the German Challenge: The Royal Navy 1912–1914

In many respects the year 1912 ushered in a new and more frenetic period for the Royal Navy. Although nobody knew that a global war was less then two years away, they were aware that another force of nature had been let loose on the Admiralty in the form of a new and extremely dynamic First Lord, Winston Churchill. Appointed in October 1911, he very quickly left his mark. Among his earliest reforms was the establishment of an Admiralty War Staff, a new central strategy agency intended to erase the deficiencies in the planning system allegedly revealed at the Committee of Imperial Defence meeting of 23 August 1911.1 To effect this change, Churchill first needed to dismiss Sir Arthur Wilson, the First Sea Lord, who was emphatically opposed to the establishment of a naval staff, a body which he regarded as perfectly suited to land warfare, but utterly out of tune with maritime needs and practices. Although difficult in some respects, this proved a blessing in disguise, as Wilson’s enforced retirement afforded Churchill the opportunity of sweeping away a large swathe of the existing senior naval leadership, a process which enabled him to bring in some much needed fresh blood at the top. Significantly, this included a new Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, Sir George Callaghan, whose impact on pre-war planning would unexpectedly prove considerable. The establishment of a naval staff was not a solitary achievement. As First Lord, Churchill would be instrumental in, among other things, setting up the Royal Naval Air Service, improving the pay and conditions of the lower deck, overseeing the transition from coal to oil fuel, and bringing in the new 15-inch gun and the ships that would mount it, most notably the five famous battleships of the Queen Elizabeth class. Yet, while innovation often appeared the order of the day during this period, the Churchill Admiralty was also confronted with many of the same recurring issues as its predecessors. By no means the least of these was the question of war-planning. The unprecedented good fortune experienced by the Royal Navy at the start

of the First World War in capturing not just one, but three different German code books – a lucky strike that enabled the Admiralty to obtain, for almost the whole duration of the conflict, advance warning of German decisions to send their fleet to sea – has tended to obscure the fact that prior to the fighting the British naval leadership faced a real dilemma in deciding on its dispositions. In the absence of an ability to read German radio signals – something that could hardly be banked upon – the only certain way of knowing if the German navy was coming out of harbour was to keep a watch on the German coast. This, of course, explains the various war plans we have seen that made an observational blockade by destroyers the key feature. However, it was increasingly recognised that maintaining such a watch would not be straightforward. Destroyers – the main workhorses for such an operation – had limited sea endurance and needed to refuel and replenish at regular intervals. Added to that, there were only so many of them in the Royal Navy and this made their constant rotation for observational purposes intrinsically problematic. It became even more problematic as alternative calls on their services began to increase. In particular, throughout this period the leadership of the battle fleet was becoming increasingly eager to have a large number of destroyers assigned to it in order to afford the navy’s capital ships protection from German torpedo craft; acceding to this request meant taking destroyers away from other duties, such as observational blockade. One solution to this numbers problem, of course, existed in building more destroyers and keeping ever more in full commission; but the money was not available for this [151]. Having somewhere close to the German coast to use as a base was the obvious solution to the relief and replenishment problem. However, the progressive fortification of the German littoral and of Germany’s offshore islands was slowly but surely eliminating the possibility of seizing one of these as an advance base. In short, the sinews of observational blockade were becoming ever harder to maintain. Could the Royal Navy dispense entirely with a close watch of the German coast? Some felt it could not. The dispositions suggested by Mark Kerr in a memorandum from December 1912, for example, suggest that he for one still envisaged destroyers guarding Germany’s ‘debouche from the Baltic’ [143]. Why? The obvious danger was that, without such a watch, the German fleet, or at least a portion of it, might slip out of harbour unbeknown and suddenly appear off the British Isles as part of a raid or invasion. Logical though this reasoning was, for others it was obvious that, however desirable an observational blockade might be, as it was becoming impossible to maintain one, an alternative needed to be found – a point stressed by the Head of the Operations Division of the War Staff, the ubiquitous Captain Ballard [138]. But what might that

alternative be? This question became one of the first major war-planning issues of the Churchill era. A compromise proposal, tested in the 1912 manoeuvres, was to institute what some historians, echoing Churchill, have termed an ‘intermediate blockade’. This involved removing from the German coast the patrolling cruisers and destroyers, whose job it was to locate the enemy, and placing them instead in the mid-North Sea area, where they would be beyond the immediate and easy reach of German forces. The hope was that any German ships that left port and approached this ‘cruiser cordon’, as Churchill called it, would be detected and the warning given would be sufficient to allow for their interception. How effective was this? As Churchill’s summary of the manoeuvres clearly shows, he regarded it as a failure [139a]. According to his analysis, the cordon was easily breached – in fact its constituents made easy pickings for German forces – and the second line of defence, the flotilla craft available to the Admiral of Patrols on the British coast, turned out to be unable to detect let alone prevent an enemy landing. Accordingly, in the view of the First Lord, ‘intermediate blockade’ as a technique for gaining certain intelligence of German movements and thereby vectoring a response needed to be jettisoned forthwith. However, it must be stressed that there was no unanimity on this point. Jackson, the chief of staff, contested the idea that the manoeuvres clearly demonstrated that a ‘line of patrol’, as he preferred to call it, was a failure [139b]. Ballard, likewise, saw nothing in the outcome of the manoeuvres to necessitate a change of approach; watching the Germans from a safe intermediate position was still his preference, although he did suggest that a major mining policy might be a useful adjunct to it that would make it more effective [138]. Nevertheless, with Churchill unhappy with the results of the manoeuvres, other options were clearly going to be considered. One proposal was to pull the fleet back so that it guarded the entrances to the North Sea but did not occupy the mid or southern North Sea itself, a deployment that is sometimes known as ‘distant blockade’. Ballard had shown considerable scepticism about such an approach in his September 1912 assessment [138]. However, that Sir George Callaghan was a strong proponent of this is evident from an important memorandum he penned in August 1913 on North Sea strategy [148]. Such an approach, he argued therein, kept the British battle fleet away from the danger both of surprise attack and of being reduced in strength by mine or torpedo warfare. No less in its favour, it allowed his ships to offer battle to the German fleet, should the occasion arise, in the most favourable possible circumstances – close to his bases and far from theirs. But this came at a cost. With a distant blockade in place it was most unlikely that definitive early information about German movements would be forthcoming, with the

result that in most cases the only possible British reaction to a German raid or invasion would be a counterstroke once the Germans were in situ and their operations had begun. This counterstroke would, it was calmly anticipated, lead to the defeat of the German squadron or fleet accompanying the landing force, thereby cutting off any soldiers that had come ashore and severing their supply lines, but it would not actually prevent the landing itself from taking place. It was important therefore, in Callaghan’s mind, to acknowledge that accepting the distant blockade strategy meant that appropriate military forces were needed to contain a landing. This would once have been a heretical position for a British admiral to take, let alone the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet. Dealing with invasion was not the only factor that distant blockade brought to the fore. Another key question concerned where British ships would be based. Clearly, if the British fleet was to stand out of range of German destroyers, then alternative ports to the existing ones would be needed. The importance of defended northern harbours was a matter on Callaghan’s mind in August 1913. He was not alone. The role of Rosyth had already been stressed in Churchill’s memorandum to Asquith of the previous year; while the Admiralty War Staff also cast a longing eye over Cromarty, with the suggestion that it, too, needed further development [147]. The inexorable move northward can clearly be seen here, with the interconnection between bases and strategy very much the driver. Although the shift from observational blockade to distant blockade took place during Churchill’s tenure, it did not follow from this that he was entirely pleased with the new approach. The former strategy of placing destroyers off the German coast was, on the face of it at least, much more dynamic and proactive and Churchill, the former cavalry officer with a restless disposition, was not instantly attracted to a course of action that placed a premium on waiting for your opponent to make a move. Thus, despite overseeing this shift, Churchill also sought alternatives. His attempt to revive the idea of seizing a North Sea Island is well documented. Another less well-known idea that he advanced was to begin a future Anglo-German war with a major destroyer deployment in the Heligoland Bight [146a]. This would not be a revival of close blockade, but a one-off deployment in force. The proposal, which was entirely out of line with the prevailing strategic thinking in the Admiralty, was roundly condemned by all who read it. No response was more withering than that of Herbert Richmond, the future naval writer and strategic thinker, then serving as Assistant Director of Naval Operations, whose blunt and unrestrained appraisal of its shortcomings is reproduced here [146b]. Churchill’s proposal was a nonsense, but it did reflect a concern that was alive not just in the impatient First Lord, but also more widely in the

Royal Navy, namely how to devise a strategy that would encourage the Germans, the weaker force, to give battle. Assessments of the German navy by competent and informed observers such as Hugh Watson, the British naval attaché in Berlin, stressed that the High Seas Fleet was becoming more confident as it grew in size and experience and that a more dashing and daring class of senior officer was emerging that sought to operate more as a North Sea than a Baltic force [140]. However, that did not mean that the German navy would voluntarily commit suicide for Britain’s amusement by knowingly giving battle on unfavourable terms. In a memorandum, the original of which is now sadly lost, the former Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, Sir William Henry May, argued that the best means of forcing the German fleet out of port was to capture Germany’s shipping and so disrupt her trade [142]. This would be so vexatious to the German public that the High Seas Fleet would be compelled by popular clamour to seek to put an end to this through battle. May’s suggestion throws an interesting light on the role of economic warfare in British naval thinking. Was it conceived as a war-winning strategy in its own right or did some ulterior motive, such as luring the German fleet out of port, underlie its role? That German vulnerability to economic pressure had long been a factor in Admiralty thinking has been demonstrated by documents in Chapter 6 [106a-c]. However, the exact part that this vulnerability was to play is a matter of historical dispute. Was it expected that cutting Germany off from global trade would be decisive in the long run, but slow to take effect? Suggestive of this analysis is Ottley’s comment to Baddeley that the ‘process of economic exhaustion due to the annihilation of [Germany’s] sea-trade will perhaps be slow, but the mills of the superior Sea-Power “grind exceed[ing] small”’[77]. Most historians have understood economic warfare in these terms. Recently, however, a more extravagant analysis has been advanced which postulates that the Admiralty’s goal was to use economic pressure to win a decisive victory quickly.1 This would be achieved not by the traditional methods of seizing German ships and cargos, but by collapsing the global trading system – insurance, cable communications, banking and finance, and so on – and provoking the meltdown of the German economy in the process. Whether the 29 or so people who staffed the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty War Staff were capable of such an elaborate task is debatable.2 So, too, is the question of whether this was ever intended. Much of the

evidence advanced for this proposition lies in a specific interpretation of the deliberations of the enquiry by a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence into ‘Trading with the Enemy’, an investigation sometimes known as the Desart Committee after its chairman, the earl of Desart. Previous examinations into the work of this committee have tended to interpret it quite differently. One prominent historian saw it as evidence that, in the event of a major European war, the British government’s economic strategy was to continue with a ‘business as usual’ approach.1 In the light of this divergence of views, this chapter will include minutes from the fourth [131], fifth [132] and sixth [133] meetings of the Desart Committee, meetings at which many key issues were debated. One of the major sources of controversy within the committee was whether or not it was advisable for Britain to apply economic pressure on Germany to the full extent that was possible. Representatives from the Treasury in particular were cognisant of the fact that Britain and Germany were active trading partners and that, consequently, any attempt to damage the German economy might have deleterious effects on the British one as well. Indeed, they argued that in some respects Britain might suffer more than Germany from the effort to apply economic pressure. From the Treasury’s point of view this made economic warfare a questionable enterprise that should be applied with the greatest care. Needless to say, others – the Admiralty and Lord Esher in particular – thought differently. They argued that it was the main weapon against Germany and should be used despite any inconvenience it might cause either to Britain or to neutral nations. As such, this debate strikingly prefigured disputes that would erupt once war actually broke out. Readers will, of course, draw their own conclusions about what these minutes show: clearly it was an important investigation; that it set the scene for a revolutionary economic warfare strategy is not impossible, but is far less certain. Economic warfare was not, of course, a strategy open only to the British. As we have already seen in previous chapters, it had long been a major concern in the Naval Intelligence Department that Germany would attack Britain’s floating trade. In this context civilian merchant vessels that converted into men-of-war on the high seas were the major source of anxiety. On the eve of war this fear was undiminished. In a revealing memorandum from May 1914, Richard Webb, the officer designated to head the War Staff’s proposed Trade Division once Treasury sanction for its establishment had been secured, estimated that in the first weeks of an Anglo-German war Britain could expect to experience crippling losses in its merchant navy even if only a handful of German cruisers and armed

merchant vessels were operating [152]. This vulnerability was hardly encouraging. Another familiar issue that remained on the Admiralty’s agenda was the strategic importance of Scandinavia and the Baltic. Fears over the future of Denmark were longstanding, but these were now powerfully supplemented by concern over Norway [134]. The long Norwegian coastline, if available to the Germany navy, would give enormous additional flexibility and help counter the constraints imposed by geography on German maritime power, a fact that would be amply proven during the Second World War. This was, however, already obvious. That Germany might attempt to seize such a vantage point was evidently a source of anxiety, as Churchill’s comments to Asquith on this matter illustrate [139a]. Alternatively, German ships might attempt the more subtle approach of seeking shelter in Norwegian territorial waters, where they were notionally protected for a limited time by Norwegian nonbelligerency, and then from there attack British interests at their selected moment. Considering this problem, the Admiralty recommended that, should such an eventuality occur once war had broken out – note the key proviso – it would be impossible to respect Norwegian neutrality in this respect [145]. On the more positive side, Russian naval rearmament, particularly the rebuilding of the Baltic Fleet, was threatening to create a situation in which the German navy would be unable to focus purely on the North Sea for fear of the Russian forces in their rear; assuming, of course, that the Russian battleships were completed and that the Russians who crewed and commanded them proved to be more adept as fighting sailors than the ones who fought in the Russo-Japanese War. On this point, as the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, admitted, it was hard to be confident [137]. A further complicating factor in the strategic situation was that the North Sea, although increasingly the main focus of the Admiralty’s attention, was not the only overseas preoccupation of the British government. Britain was also a Mediterranean power. While this was a matter of long standing, the need to pull forces back to home waters to face the growing German navy combined with new developments in the Mediterranean balance of power massively complicated matters at just the moment when Churchill took office at the Admiralty. Particularly salient in the latter respect was the dreadnought building programme of Germany’s main ally, Austria-Hungary. The looming completion of this battleship construction spree threatened to place the Admiralty in a major quandary. British prestige in the region partly rested on the presence of significant naval assets there acting as a visible token of British power. This was straightforward to accomplish when the fleets it would face were

either those of friendly powers, like France, or were relatively weak. In such circumstances a few older warships could maintain Britain’s standing at low cost. However, a squadron of brand new Austrian dreadnoughts was another matter entirely. There would be no point in keeping a British fleet in the Mediterranean if it was patently inferior to the Austrian one, but matching such a force would be very expensive. As far as Churchill was concerned, neither the ships nor the sailors would be available for this if his goal of an overwhelming superiority to Germany in home waters was to be achieved. His preferred solution was to pull back Britain’s armoured warships from the Mediterranean and replace them with destroyers and submarines, a deployment that would be cheaper both in terms of capital outlay and in manpower. The cabinet, however, demurred and, as Christopher Bell has recently argued, saddled the Admiralty with a one-power Mediterranean standard alongside the existing naval standard operating in respect of Germany.1 Bell’s argument has been challenged,2 but official documents seem relatively clear as to the naval standards that were fixed by the British government in this period [144]. Bell’s further thesis that the Admiralty only reluctantly accepted this and sought continually to revert to its preferred option of focusing on Germany in the North Sea without Mediterranean distractions also seems borne out by the documentation [150]. In addition to broad strategic concerns, the Churchill board found itself facing a number of tactical issues. Among them was the perennial question of how to deal with torpedo craft in a fleet action. One option was to design British battleships with defence against torpedo craft firmly on the agenda. In May 1912 a conference was held to determine the secondary armament of the latest capital ships [135]. Under Fisher’s tenure as First Lord the emphasis had always been on devoting the maximum resource to primary armament with the result that nothing bigger than a 4 inch gun had ever been mounted in the secondary batteries. This practice was now overturned. Future capital ships (until Fisher’s return in late 1914 brought about a temporary reversion) would carry 6 inch guns to deal with the expected German torpedo boat threat. An alternative solution – although the two were not mutually exclusive – was to incorporate in the battle fleet ships especially designed to deal with German torpedo boats. Such a category of ship already existed in the form of the torpedo-boat destroyer, more commonly known simply as the destroyer. Up till now, as we have seen, many destroyers were

earmarked for service in the observational blockade of the German coast. However, with the adoption of distant blockade, this was less of an issue. What became an issue in its place was the question of which mission destroyers should consider as their primary one. Were they in the fleet largely to launch torpedoes at German warships or was their main concern dispatching German torpedo boats with gunfire and so preventing these vessels from attacking the Royal Navy’s line of battle with their torpedoes? This became a matter of extensive debate [141a]. The end result, however, was that dealing with German torpedo craft was confirmed as the priority [141b]. Despite the complex and evolving strategic and tactical considerations that faced the Royal Navy in this period, it is notable that by 1914 many in the Admiralty felt confident that not only were they on top of matters, but that they were clearly winning the naval race. In part this reflected the perception – accurate as it transpired – that the German challenge had peaked and that Germany was finding it difficult even to fulfil its existing naval programme. Intelligence on this matter was a great comfort to Churchill and allowed him to contemplate the retardation of British countermeasures in a manner that would alleviate considerably the financial costs of competition [149]. More significant still was the sense that the Royal Navy was greatly superior to its German counterpart. The construction programmes of the Churchill era promised to equip the British fleet with a new generation of super-dreadnoughts that outclassed their German counterparts and to do so in very large numbers. As far as Churchill was concerned this superiority was overwhelming [153a]. Not everyone agreed. The attempt by the Second Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, to pour cold water on Churchill’s optimism has been observed before, but it is notable that Churchill disagreed strongly with Jellicoe’s analysis [153b]. And arguably Churchill was right to do so. Whatever the experience of the war would show about the relative quality of British over German warships – and the jury is still out on this one – the fact was that Britain had won the naval arms race and had done so conclusively. Unbeknown in London, no one was clearer on this point than the German naval leadership.