Eurasia Press & News
If you ask someone to name the worst military or geostrategic blunders in history, the standard answers will tend to center on doomed invasions of the Russian interior, either in the form of Napoleon’s 1812 campaign or the Third Reich’s invasion of the USSR. Someone with a deeper well of knowledge might point to a more esoteric and specific blunder: perhaps Erwin Rommel’s failure to neutralize Malta, the Byzantine division of forces at Manzikert, or Britain’s Gallipoli campaign. Perhaps we could return to the age of heroes and cite the Trojans bringing that wretched wooden horse into their city without inspecting its interior.
What most of these mistakes (perhaps with the exception of the Trojan Horse) have in common is that, although they all misfired spectacularly, they at least possessed a certain strategic logic which made them defensible on theoretical grounds. Mistakes, the actions of the enemy, and bad luck can all compound to create a disaster, but usually there is no sense that decisions were made for no reason at all. Usually.
Between 1897 and 1914 Imperial Germany conducted its own geostrategic blunder of the highest order, when it unilaterally launched a naval arms race against the greatest sea power of the age in the Royal Navy. What is remarkable about the German naval buildup is that it was justified on tenuous strategic speculations about the British response; despite the fact that it was apparent in real time that these speculations were untrue, the buildup continued for its own sake, and Germany repeatedly eschewed opportunities to turn aside from a dead end path.
Prewar Germany stands out among the annals of the great powers for all the wrong reasons. It was, to be sure, an impressively powerful state with remarkable industrial and military power. Institutionally, however, it was a train wreck which allowed its strength to be commandeered in the name of an armaments policy that was conducted separately from its war planning and diplomacy. In the space of two decades, the Germans did succeed in building the second largest battlefleet in the world, but it did so with no sense of how such a fleet might figure into its broader geostrategy, or how to deploy it in wartime.
The result was an expensive military boondoggle which backfired on virtually all of its theoretical justifications, significantly worsened Germany’s strategic position, and demonstrated virtually no military utility when war came to Europe in 1914. This grand debacle was embarked upon as a willful and unilateral experiment driven by a few key personalities in Germany. Neither widespread organic domestic support, nor international pressure, nor critical strategic vulnerabilities compelled Germany to launch an arms race with Great Britain. She did so willingly, in an act of profligacy so profound that it astonished observers at home and abroad, with Winston Churchill naming it the German “Luxury Fleet.” Adrift from a coherent geostrategy and lacking institutional mechanisms for course correction, the Germans plunged ahead into a strategic trap of their own making.
Upstart: The Rise of the Germany Navy
One of the great peculiarities of the First World War, and in particular its nautical dimension, is that Germany and Great Britain, as late as the 1890’s, had no real sense that they were preparing to fight a war with each other. Well towards the end of the century, both German and British naval policy continued to view France (and to a lesser extent Russia) as the chief objects of anxiety. Yet in the span of barely a decade, their strategic animus became redirected and the two forces – the Royal Navy on the one hand, and the Kaiserliche Marine, or Imperial Navy on the other – were thinking almost exclusively of war against the other.
This mutual strategic pivot was predicated on changes in both Britain’s alliance policy and strategic outlook and on a wholesale revolution of the German Imperial Navy. In the early 1890’s, Germany’s navy was viewed fundamentally as a limited coastal defense force, designed and tasked with keeping the French and Russians away from Germany’s North Sea and Baltic coastlines, respectively. In 1900, the German fleet included just 36 effective fighting ships and ranked a distant fourth in Europe, behind not only the Royal Navy (by laughable margins) but also the French and Russians. By 1914, the Germans had the second largest navy in the world, with more dreadnought equivalent battleships than all the other non-British navies of Europe combined.
The rapid expansion of the German surface fleet, and its strategic shift against Britain, was a complex process, and certainly too complex to wave away by simply saying: “The Germans decided to build lots of battleships.” The process was intimately tied to the Imperial Navy’s unique position in the German state, and the personal predilections of two individuals: Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.
To begin, it is important to understand that the German Imperial Navy had a unique relationship to the rest of the state which made it strategically erratic. It was, to be sure, very unlike either the German Army or the Royal Navy. As an institution, it was practically unique. While perhaps less interesting than battleship design and deployment plans, a brief overview of the institutional peculiarities of the German Navy provides an important starting point for the broader topic of the prewar naval buildup.
The German Kaiser was both the head of state and the head of the armed forces, and he wielded power through his cabinets and the senior appointees within them. In practice, however, the Kaiser had limited authority over the land forces. The General Staff maintained absolute authority over war planning, and was free to appoint Chiefs of Staff to the field commanders (who were appointed by the Kaiser). The army thus had strong institutional control over both personnel and operations planning which were largely immune to the Kaiser’s direct interference.
The navy was much different, and far more subject to the Kaiser’s direct control. As a result, he tended to view it as something of a personal plaything. In wartime, the Kaiser had to personally approve naval operations, and he generally did so with great trepidation over losing “his ships.” Unlike the army, the navy had no institutional insulation from the Kaiser, and it lacked a strong central planning body akin to the army’s general staff.
Instead, the navy had a variety of different leadership bodies which frequently shuffled in relation to each other, under the overall command authority of the Kaiser. Initially, there was a conventional admiralty, generally called simply the OK (for Oberkommando, or Naval High Command), which was nominally responsible for planning and combat operations. The OK was parallel to a separate office known as the RMA (for Reichsmarineamt, or Imperial Naval Office), which was responsible for the navy’s building program. Finally, there was a a Naval Cabinet which was responsible for personnel and appointments, and was directly subordinate to the Kaiser. In a sense, we can think of the Germany Navy as having its three critical functions (operations planning and command, material and shipbuilding, and personnel) split into three separate bodies which did not have direct institutional connections, and instead were separately suborned to the Kaiser.
This suggests, from the beginning, a fragmented command structure with the Kaiser at its nexus, and in the absence of a unified naval command it was inevitable that the Kaiser – mercurial, easily influenced, and largely ignorant of naval operations – should have dominated the navy as a service. Furthermore, the lack of unified command and clear lines of communication largely froze the navy out of war planning and made it a strategically autonomous service, which did not coordinate with the General Staff of the army and generally lacked a sense of how it could fit into Germany’s larger war plans.
In short, the trajectory of Germany’s naval policy was always strongly influenced by several important institutional idiosyncrasies, which differentiated the service from both the German Army and from competing navies. These could be aptly summarized as follows:
The German Navy suffered from a dissipated command structure, with different bodies of authority including the OK and the RMA. This meant that war planning and fleet building were conducted by separate bodies which did not coordinate well with each other, with only the Kaiser in a position to adjudicate and give orders to all the different parties.
Ultimate authority over the navy was vested in the Kaiser, with no independent command (like the Army’s General Staff) able to plan operations independently of the monarch. The Imperial German Navy utterly lacked a single senior admiral, akin to the British First Sea Lord or the American Chief of Naval Operations, who could issue commands directly to operational commanders or engage with the Chief of the Army General staff on equal terms.
The head of the RMA (responsible for the design and construction of the fleet) was an Admiral, rather than a civilian. This stands in stark contrast to, for example, the American Secretary of the Navy or the British First Lord of the Admiralty, who were almost always civilians with little experience in naval operations. Rather than appointing a civilian with advising admirals, the German system vested this power directly in an Admiral. Finally, we can add that because the German navy began as a strongly subsidiary service (relative to the army, which was always the main pillar of German strength), the navy was forced to actively promote itself to ensure its own survival and growth as a service. This made the German Navy intensely political, locked as it was in a perennial fight to get the Reichstag to appropriate money for shipbuilding. We can say, with little exaggeration, that the primary activity of the German Navy was shipbuilding, rather than war planning or tactical innovation.
This was particularly the case because the dominant figure in the prewar Imperial Navy was Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. Undoubtedly a titanic figure, Tirpitz more than any other man was responsible for transforming the German Navy from a modest coastal defense force into a world class service capable of threatening (at least on paper) the Royal Navy. However, the methods that he used to do so had the ancillary effect of further warping the institutional peculiarities of the service, such that in wartime the High Seas Fleet proved to be much less than the sum of its parts.
Tirpitz was a Prussian, but in contrast to the usual Prussian pedigree he had joined the Navy as a young man, at a time when – by his own admission – it was not a particularly popular institution. He began his first serious leap towards high power in the 1880’s as the head of Germany’s torpedo program – notwithstanding his background in torpedo boats, however, he would become a staunch advocate of battleship construction and became the driving figure in the naval arms race which Germany would launch, almost unilaterally, against Great Britain.
Two broader aspects of Tirpitz’s career and character stand out which bear commentary before the particular process of the naval arms race can be evaluated. First and foremost, Tirpitz was a skilled political operator who demonstrated a perfect willingness to take a hatchet to institutional niceties in order to advance his program. This can be seen clearly in the way his views pivoted as he moved from post to post.
For example, from 1892 to 1895 Tirpitz was Chief of Staff for the OK (naval high command), and during that time he argued incessantly and aggressively that it was madness to allow the RMA (the Marine Office) to have control over fleet development. During this period, Tirpitz and the OK were chomping at the bit to build battleships, but the RMA and the Reichstag were still nervous about the price tag and continued to build armored cruisers instead. Frustrated by the failure of the State Naval Secretary, Friedrich von Hollmann, to heed his advice, Tirpitz argued that fleet construction ought to be the remit of the admirals who would command the fleet in wartime: in essence, this was a call to neuter the RMA and give its responsibilities to the OK.
In 1897, however, when Tirpitz took control of the RMA and succeeded Hollmann as State Naval Secretary, he launched a coup the other direction, that is against the OK. In a near total reverse of his old arguments, he now lobbied the Kaiser to transfer command authority from the OK to the RMA. The culmination of this effort, in 1899, was the dissolution of the OK altogether with many command authorities distributed between the RMA and a new admiralty staff organized under the Kaiser’s supreme authority.
All of this can seem like esoteric bureaucratic infighting (and in many ways it was) with far too many acronyms and obscure titles. The point, however is relatively straightforward: Tirpitz was aggressive about aggrandizing power in whatever office he happened to hold at the time. During his years as chief of staff in the OK (Naval High Command), he argued that shipbuilding responsibilities should be taken away from the State Naval Secretary. Once Tirpitz was himself the State Naval Secretary, he lobbied to strip command authority from, and the ultimately dissolve, the OK. At both stops, he was skilled at manipulating the Kaiser – with whom he had an exceptional relationship – to get what he wanted, even threatening to resign on multiple occasions. For Tirpitz, the point was that he had a clear and singular vision for how to develop the Navy’s power, and he resented the dissipated authority – therefore, he was ruthlessly and pragmatically willing to attack the institutional structure in order to accumulate the power he craved to push his vision forward.
And what was that vision? In its simplest form, it was a surface fleet structured around battleships that would be capable of, if not directly fighting and defeating the Royal Navy, at least posing a credible threat. The evolution of the German fleet from a budget force designed for coastal defense into a world class force with only one real rival (the Royal Navy) was not an inevitable process. It was a choice, spawned in Germany largely through the auspices of Tirpitz and his staff, who adroitly maneuvered the Reichstag into embarking on an unprecedented shipbuilding spree in a nexus of evolving strategic thought, personal ambition, economic concerns, and national anxiety.
The pre-Tirpitz conception of the German Navy was aptly summarized in an 1873 memorandum from the first chief of the Admiralty, Albrecht von Stosch:
The mission of the battlefleet is the defense of the coasts of the nation… Against larger seapowers the fleet has only the significance of a “sortie fleet.” Any other objective is ruled out by the limited naval strength that the law provides. The memorandum had a clean dual effect of not only stipulating the navy’s coastal defense mission but also noting that the limited German fleet would have no wartime role seeking battle on the high seas. The general sensibility is that the navy would have a purely defensive role preventing the enemy from landing troops on the German coastline and keeping the country’s ports and coastal installations open. This remained the general strategic animus of the navy until Tirpitz began to revise it in the 1890’s.
The embryo of Tirpitz’s evolving theory of naval power was his growing concern that, in some future war, the enemy might attempt to blockade German ports at long distance – that is to say, rather than conducting a close-in blockade of German harbors, the enemy fleet might loiter at strategic standoff and intercept German trade as it flowed through traffic chokepoints. It seems that at the beginning, the specific anxiety that preoccupied Tirpitz was the possibility that France might interdict German trade in the English Channel and the North Sea, at a distance beyond the fighting range of Germany’s coastal fleets.
If this were the case, then the entire German naval strategy might be obsolete. A blockade at range would compel the German fleet to come out from its own coastal areas to defeat the enemy on the open sea. This marked a conceptual shift from coastal defense to “sea control”, which necessitated in turn an entirely different sort of battlefleet prepared to fight a decisive battle far from German bases. In 1891, Tirpitz lamented that the naval officer corps did not grasp “the necessity to strike the enemy’s seapower in open battle.”
Tirpitz was thus already thinking along new lines early in the 1890’s, but the critical strategic pivot came specifically in 1894. In that year (while still Chief of Staff of the OK), Tirpitz drafted a series of memoranda for general distribution. Among these documents, the most important was memorandum (Dientschrift) number 9. Dientschrift IX would become perhaps the most important and influential doctrine in the history of the German Navy, announcing Tirpitz’s new strategic animus in unequivocal terms. The most important section of the memorandum was titled in a way that left no room for misunderstanding: “The Natural Purpose of a Fleet is the Strategic Offensive.” It read, in part:
In recent times, when the sea became the best highway for commerce between individual nations, ships and fleets themselves became instruments of war, and the sea itself became a theater of war. Thereby the acquisition of sea supremacy [Seeherrschaft] became the first mission of a fleet; for only when sea supremacy is achieved can the enemy be forced to conclude peace. It is at this point that Tirpitz’s growing preoccupation with the thinking of Alfred Thayer Mahan first becomes readily apparent. Mahan, of course, was the American theorist whose famous book The Influence of Sea Power upon History argued in unequivocal terms that control of the sea was the central pivot in world affairs and an absolute prerequisite for victory in modern war. Mahan’s books remain recommended reading today, and it is difficult to do them justice in a short space, but he implied two conclusions above all that were highly actionable for Tirpitz: first, that control of the sea was the greatest coefficient for victory on a strategic scale, as it would allow the dominant sea power to conduct global commerce unmolested while choking off the enemy’s trade, and second that supremacy at sea was attained primarily through decisive battle between rival main battle fleets.
Mahan’s book (published 1890) was a sensation, and while its influence has been occasionally overstated, it did capture the imagination of many world drivers, including US President Theodore Roosevelt, the Kaiser, and of course Tirpitz himself. It seems most likely that Tirpitz (who was fluent and comfortable in English) first read the book in the spring of 1894, before a German translation became available, and thereafter Mahanian language began to saturate his own writings, including the famous Dientschrift IX. It was notable, for example, that Tirpitz frequently referenced the decline of the Dutch Republic as a warning of what could happen to a power once defeated at sea: the preoccupation is telling, as the Anglo-Dutch Wars are a major topic in Mahan’s writing.
From 1894 onward, then Tirpitz was preoccupied with what he saw as a pressing need for Germany to acquire a battlefleet that could fight a decisive battle on the open ocean and wrest “sea supremacy” away from the enemy. This marked a radical shift from the conventional German sensibility, which was predicated on a defensive war fought in proximity to the German coast. Tirpitz argued:
Advocates of a defensive fleet proceed from the assumption that the enemy fleet will come to them and that the decision must take place where they wish it. But this is the case only very infrequently. Enemy ships need not stay close to our coasts… but they can stand out to sea far from one’s own works. Then our own fleet would have only the choice between inactivity, i.e., moral self annihilation, and fighting a battle on the open sea.At this time, German planning was still centered around scenarios involving a war against France and/or Russia. Dientschrift IX, therefore, called for a battlefleet designed to grant 1/3 superiority over either France’s Northern Fleet or the Russian Baltic Fleet, depending in which was expected to be bigger. The nucleus of this fleet was to be a striking force of 17 battleships (two squadrons of eight ships each, plus a fleet flagship) augmented by cruisers and torpedo boats.
Nothing about the German operational sensibility at this time was remotely realistic. A draft operations plan in 1895 envisioned a blockade of French channel ports designed to draw the French fleet out for battle. This was an elementary sort of formulation which ignored the fact that the French Northern Fleet would simply wait for reinforcements from the Mediterranean, and to make the plan work (even on paper) the OK assumed that repair and resupply could be done in English ports. This latter point is important, as it emphasizes that in 1895, rather than thinking of a war with the Royal Navy, the Germans were not only still preoccupied with France but even assuming that England would be a friendly neutral.
The movement in the German strategic concept occurred in two shift. The first shift, embodied in 1894’s Dientschrift IX, argued that the German fleet had to be prepared to proactively seek decisive battle and therefore needed a powerful nucleus of battleships, but it still envisioned France as the most likely enemy. The second shift, which began almost immediately after Tirpitz took office as the State Naval Secretary in 1897, moved the crosshairs onto the Royal Navy. In a top secret memorandum presented to the Kaiser on June 15, 1897, Tirpitz argued that the essential task of the German Fleet had to be seizing supremacy in the North Sea in wartime. This task implied that the measuring stick against which the German fleet had to size up was not the French Northern Fleet, but the most powerful force in the theater: the Royal Navy:
“For Germany the most dangerous naval enemy at present is England.”The point, for Tirpitz, was not some particular hatred of the English, but simply the fact that the Royal Navy was the most powerful in the world. Therefore, building a fleet designed specifically to defeat the French was a half measure, since victory would still leave the Germans with only the second most powerful fleet in the theater. “Sea Supremacy” implied just that: supremacy did not mean second place.
The issue, however, went even deeper than this. Tirpitz was determined to build a viable and powerful fleet comprised of battleships, but to do so he needed a strategic vision that could justify such a program. Neither Russia nor France was a good fit for the Mahanian understanding of war, with its emphasis on “Sea Supremacy.” In any war against the Franco-Russian alliance, whatever the particular configuration, it was inevitable that the German Army would be the arm on which the country lived or died. A Navy designed for decisive fleet battle and sea supremacy implied, almost by definition, that the Royal Navy was an adversary. Russia and France could never be defeated by sea, therefore Tirpitz needed an adversarial standard which would require, unequivocally, a fleet of battleships.
Tirpitz had, in effect, locked himself into a strategic feedback loop akin to the famous chicken-egg question. He believed that Germany’s global power could only be guaranteed through sea supremacy, which would be won through decisive battle by powerful battlefleet. Thus the battleship was, in his mind, the indispensable platform for power projection. Building battleships, in turn, required measuring the fleet against the Royal Navy; conversely, however, it was only by identifying the Royal Navy as a rival that costly battleship construction could be truly justified. The choice of the Royal Navy as the enemy justified the expense of the battleships, and it was the building of the battleships that made the Royal Navy an enemy.
Of course, the 1897 memorandum to the Kaiser was top secret for a reason. Tirpitz could not come out and simply say explicitly that he wanted to prepare for a decisive showdown with the Royal Navy – and given the state of the paltry German surface fleet at the time, such an announcement might have been mistaken for comedy. There was also the matter of the Reichstag, which Tirpitz – now ensconced as State Naval Secretary – would have to cajole for every mark and every ship. As he would put it in 1899:
For political reasons the government cannot be as specific as the Reichstag would like it to be; one cannot directly say that the naval expansion is aimed primarily against England.Nevertheless, it is clear from Tirpitz’s writings that by the end of the century, he (and the Kaiser) had the Royal Navy clearly in mind as a potential adversary, and the standard against which the German Fleet would have to measure itself. Given the fact that relations between Britain and Germany were generally good at this time, it is essentially indisputable that Tirpitz (and his brain worm, Alfred Thayer Mahan) began the Anglo-German naval race almost unilaterally, with the English serving as the necessary adversary to justify costly battleship construction.
One thing remained: Tirpitz would have to convince the Reichstag to pay for it all. Although Tirpitz did not conceive of himself as a particular political person, he proved quite adept at ramming his construction schedules through the legislature. His signature accomplishments were a pair of naval bills, known in the German parlance as the Naval Laws, which were passed by the Reichstag in 1898 and 1900 respectively, with a series of amendments coming at later dates.
The genius of the Naval Laws, and Tirpitz’s great political innovation, was that they laid out a long-term commitment to build a fixed number of ships over several years. This marked a radical departure from the established practice. Tirpitz’s predecessor as State Naval Secretary, Admiral Hollman, made it a practice to annually present the Reichstag with requests for a small number of ships. Hollman had considered it politically impractical to move at a larger scale: “The Reichstag”, he argued, “will never agree to be bound to a formal program for years in advance.”
As Tirpitz saw it, however, the protocol of annual shipbuilding appropriations prevented the navy from building out the fleet in a properly systematic way, and allowed the Reichstag to meddle needlessly in the particulars. He wrote:
“When I became State Secretary, the German Navy was a collection of experiments in shipbuilding surpassed in exoticism only by the Russian Navy of Nicholas II.” The British, he noted, had a similar practice, but:
“There, money is of no importance; if they built a class of ships wrongly, they just threw the whole lot into the corner and built another. We could not permit ourselves that… I needed a bill which would protect the continuity of construction of the fleet.” Convincing the Reichstag to approve a multi-year building program was no easy feat, which required Tirpitz to show both a deft political touch and justify the fleet on strategic grounds. Despite his previous disdain for the political process, the Admiral engaged in a flurry of activity plying German notables to support the Naval Law: he paid visits to the recently retired Bismarck, to the King of Saxony, the Prince Regent of Bavaria, and various and sundry Grand Dukes and municipal authorities, occasionally pledging to name ships after his hosts to cajole their support.
Strategically, Tirpitz validated his proposed battlefleet on the grounds of a supposed “Risk Theory.” Since he could not simply come out and openly say that he wished to be able to challenge the Royal Navy for control of the North Sea (in essence asking the government to sign on for an arms race with the strongest sea power in the world), he argued that a suitable battle fleet would act as a deterrent, forcing “even a sea power of the first rank to think twice before attacking our coasts.” He also stressed that, politically speaking, agreeing to a long term building plan would create predictability and free the Reichstag from worrying over endlessly expanding building plans being proposed year after year.
Tirpitz found an enthusiastic ally in his search for ever larger naval appropriations, in the form of German industrial interests – particularly the metallurgical behemoth, Krupp. The reason, once again, was a complex interplay of geopolitical concerns and economics – in this case, the emerging alliance between France and Russia and a subsequent explosion of French arms exports. What mattered for Germany in this instance, however, was not only the strategic implications of a French-Russian linkup (which intensified the German sense of encirclement and siege) but also export competition for Krupp.
Krupp’s enormous complex of machine shops and arms factories had a colossal output potential which was far beyond the demands of any one government – even Germany’s. Thus, Krupp relied extensively on foreign orders to keep its enterprises busy: in 1890-91, more than 85 percent of Krupp’s armaments sales were exports to foreign countries, and the Russians were one of their best customers. In 1885, however, the French government had lifted the ban on foreign weapons sales which had previously prevented French producers, like Schneider-Creusot, from competing with Krupp. Although Krupp was more price-competitive than the French, they were quickly squeezed out of the Russian market, thanks first to the consolidation of the Franco-Russian alliance, and secondly due to the eagerness of French banks to give the Russians loans to finance the purchase of French guns.
With the French government, banks, and manufacturers collaborating to outflank Krupp in foreign markets, the firm naturally needed to find alternative revenue streams, and it found a big one in the German naval construction program: if the German Army did not order enough artillery pieces to keep Krupp’s factories busy, they could make up the difference with naval guns.
Krupp would become an indispensable partner for Tirpitz in advancing ever larger naval construction bills (Naval Laws, in the German parlance) – not only through direct lobbying, but also by mobilizing broad public support. In 1898, the German “Navy League” was founded with Krupp money, for the purpose of organizing public support for the Navy. Within a year, it had over 250,000 fee paying members and some 770,000 affiliates. Mobilizing support from newspapers, industrialists, university professors, politicians, and patriotic citizens of every stripe, it provided a powerful apparatus of political pressure to drive Tirpitz’s construction schedule through the Reichstag.
Tirpitz’s full press on the Reichstag was too much to resist, despite continuing trepidation from many of the deputies – particularly those who anticipated, correctly, that the battle fleet program was putting them on a collision course with England. But Tirpitz had mobilized a great swathe of public opinion behind him, and on March 26, 1898, the First Navy Law passed with a vote of 212-139. The Kaiser was overjoyed and showered Tirpitz with praise:
There is the Admiral himself…. Cheerfully and alone, he took up the awesome task of orienting an entire people, fifty million truculent, short-sighted, and foul-tempered Germans, and of bringing them around to an opposite view. He accomplished this seemingly impossible feat in eight months. Truly a powerful man!The 1989 Naval Law provided appropriations for the construction of 19 battleships, organized into two squadrons of eight ships each, along with a fleet flagship and two reserve ships, along with a bevy of cruisers. Of equal importance, the law provided for automatic replacement of vessels on a regulated timetable – it thus provided a sort of self-regulating strength for the fleet. It was, of course, not nearly enough. The Second Naval Law, passed in June 1900, ballooned the construction schedule with an additional pair of battleship squadrons: once all ships were completed, the German battlefleet would have a total of 38 battleships along with 52 cruisers.
Tirpitz’s master plan seemed to be coming along nicely. Although it was doubtful that the Germans could ever match the total strength of the Royal Navy, Tirpitz counted on the fact that British strength would be dissipated around the world protecting her far flung empire. In January, 1905, for example the British had three fleets in proximity to the North Sea: a Channel fleet, based at Dover, an Atlantic fleet at Gibraltar, and the reserve Home Fleet. If these three fleets joined for action, they could muster some 31 battleships. Tirpitz’s Naval Laws, then, could be deemed to give the Germans a fighting chance in the North Sea.
Then, the master plan came untracked. On February 10, 1906, Jacky Fisher’s monstrous creation came off the slipway at Portsmouth. The Dreadnought was here.
The Dreadnought Race
In his memoirs, Tirpitz attempted lamely to argue that the British had made a fatal mistake in launching the Dreadnought. She was an immensely powerful weapons system, to be sure, but her commissioning more or less rendered all the pre-dreadnought battleships obsolete overnight. In Tirpitz’s argument, this created an opportunity to overtake the Royal Navy: because all the older ships were now obsolete, the only thing that mattered was the number of Dreadnought equivalent ships in the fleet: therefore, the Dreadnought reset the naval clock to zero. Instead of needing to match Britain’s enormous lead in pre-dreadnought ships, the Germans only needed to match them in dreadnoughts. In essence, Britain’s naval advantage was now 1:0, and their dozens of pre-dreadnoughts no longer mattered.
A tidy argument, but untrue. In real time, the launching of the Dreadnought sent Tirpitz into a minor panic, as his entire master plan for the battlefleet was now subject to revision. The decision to build German dreadnoughts was not as simple as it seemed: it entailed not only a significant increase in unit costs (each dreadnought equivalent would cost nearly 20 million marks more than a pre-dreadnought battleship) but also costly infrastructure improvements to accommodate the larger vessels, including widening the Kiel Canal and dredging harbor channels. Furthermore, if Germany immediately scrapped its extant ship designs and began building dreadnoughts, this would be a clear and unmistakable challenge to the Royal Navy. If Tirpitz took the plunge and began a Dreadnought construction program, he would be committing to a costly and resource-intensive naval construction race with Britain. If he did not, then the entire fleet program was dead in the water and Germany would be abandoning her vision of sea supremacy in the North Sea. Tirpitz decided he had to have dreadnoughts.
The first German dreadnought was laid down in July 1906. She was the Nassau, the lead ship of her class, followed shortly by the Westfalen, Posen, and Rheinland. Although some particulars of her design were different than Fisher’s Dreadnought, she fulfilled the basic design parameters of an all-big-gun capital ship, armed with twelve 11-inch main guns. In 1908, Tirpitz would authorize four additional dreadnoughts, along with armored battle cruisers. On the whole, the German pivot to dreadnoughts was largely seamless – but if Tirpitz hoped to catch the British asleep at the helm, he was in for a rude awakening.
On December 8, 1908, the British cabinet settled in for its regular Monday morning meeting. For most of the assembled ministers, the morning seemed unremarkable, but one among them – the newly appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna – had come to lob a bomb into the proceedings. Based on alarming intelligence that was now trickling in concerning the German shipbuilding program, McKenna planned to ask Parliament to pay for six new Dreadnoughts in 1909, followed by another six in 1910, and a third six in 1911. As if the enormity of this request was not enough, McKenna also brought forward the unsettling revelation that unless this accelerated program was approved, both he the Sea Lords (including First Sea Lord Jacky Fischer) intended to resign. McKenna’s disturbing information about the German Navy, his demand for accelerated battleship construction, and the ultimatum from the Sea Lords marked the beginning of an episode known forebodingly as “The Navy Scare.”
McKenna’s sudden and unexpected request to expand construction marked a stark shift from the prevailing sensibility, which had been for slim naval bills. The Liberals, who had swept the Conservatives out of power in 1905, generally resented the Dreadnoughts as staggeringly expensive and unnecessary, and had barely even formed their cabinet before they began slashing ships off the construction schedule: one battleship each was trimmed off the 1906 and 1907 programs (so that three instead of four ships were laid each year), and in 1908 the schedule was trimmed further to just two. As a result, by late 1908 the British had twelve Dreadnoughts either built, under construction, or approved, rather than the sixteen that had been anticipated by the old Conservative cabinet.
In this context, McKenna’s ask came as a genuine shock. Parliament had anticipated approving another two dreadnoughts in 1909, but here was the First Lord of the Admiralty not only requesting that this be tripled to six, but also that this accelerated pace be maintained for three years, and even threatening to resign his post if his demands were not met – taking the entire senior officer cadre of the Royal Navy with him. What could have provoked such a politically toxic maneuver?
The answer, obviously, lay in the acceleration of German shipbuilding. In 1907, precisely as the new Liberal government in London was trimming down the British battleship program, the German Naval Law (parlance for the annual shipbuilding appropriations) provided for four dreadnought equivalents, followed by an additional four in 1908. At the time McKenna was formulating his proposal for an expanded battleship schedule, the Admiralty had calculated that by 1912 (at which point all the approved ships would be completed), Britain’s lead in battleships would stand at just sixteen dreadnoughts against thirteen for the Germans. For McKenna, Fisher, and the other Sea Lords, this was clearly too slim a margin for comfort.
The publicly acknowledged German construction schedule, as approved by the Reichstag, was bad enough, and clearly indicated that the British lead in battleships would erode steadily unless corrective measures were taken. For the British Admiralty, however, the more ominous concern was the intelligence suggesting that German naval construction was been accelerated in secret.
The crucial question here was the peculiar timetable of dreadnought construction. The main constraint on battleship construction was not, in fact, the building of the hull, but rather the manufacture of the guns, turret systems, and armor, as these were both more expensive and laborious than the hull itself. What this meant, in practical terms, was that the construction of dreadnoughts could be accelerated if these intricate and expensive fittings were completed and staged ahead of time. The generally presumed timetable of three years for the completion of a German battleship could theoretically be compressed to just two, provided appropriate preemptive orders were placed for weaponry and armor.
What this meant, in practical terms, was that the Germans could theoretically have far more ships in the pipeline than advertised, if they were placing advance orders for guns, turrets, armor, and powerplants, or if the German Admiralty was placing preemptive orders before receiving authorization from the Reichstag. Rumors abounded – Krupp, it was said, was stockpiling vast warehouses of 12 inch gun barrels and buying up hoards of nickel – but ascertaining what was actually happening in the German dockyards and machining plants proved difficult. It did not help that London’s ear was bent by British industrialists (anxious to secure contracts of their own), like Herbert Hall Mulliner, managing director of Coventry Ordnance Works, who pestered McKenna with scare stories about a secret German acceleration.
One crucial nexus for information was the German ambassador to London, Paul Wolff-Metternich. Unfortunately, Metternich was frequently left in the dark by his superiors in Berlin, including Admiral Tirpitz, which put him in a compromised position and soured his relationship with Lord Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary.
The problem was fairly straightforward: the Germans were, in fact, ordering materials, laying keels, and stockpiling equipment in advance of the formal appropriations of the Reichstag. Their reason for doing so, however, was not to secretly build more ships than they were letting on, but for mundane reasons related to costs and contracts. Tirpitz, for example, had several battleship keels laid in advance (that is, before he was authorized by the Reichstag) because he wanted to get a lower price and prevent the yards from having to lay off workers (which might itself lead to a labor dispute and higher prices). In the aggregate, the Germans never did build more ships than the Reichstag’s naval laws allowed, but a cost conscious German Admiralty did stretch the timetables. Unfortunately, Metternich – posted in London and largely cut out of the loop on such matters – did not know any of this, and when pressed by Lord Grey he continually insisted that the German Navy did not place advance orders or lay keels before Reichstag approval.
Metternich was not exactly lying – he genuinely did not know that Tirpitz had been running ahead. But the British did know, and Grey confronted Metternich with the evidence. When Metternich urgently wired Berlin asking for clarification, Tirpitz belated explained the situation and allowed the ambassador to inform Grey that contracts were being placed preemptively only to secure better prices. Unfortunately, Metternich had by this time been humiliated and discredited, through no real fault of his own, by denying things that were actually true. Grey had concluded that Metternich – and Tirpitz by extension – were dissimulating. Berlin’s categorical refusal to allow naval attaches to visit dockyards to simply “count the ships” further poisoned the discussion. In the end, the British felt that they had no other option than to prudently assume that the Germans were secretly accelerating their building program, with Grey announcing that “We have got to have a margin against lying.”
