Fighting the Great War at Sea

Strategy, Tactic and Technology

Norman Friedman

• Publisher: Seaforth Publishing
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473849365
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

Winner of the John Lyman Book Award for Naval and Maritime Science and Technology. "A compelling and convincing historical analysis of World War I." —Navy News While the overriding image of the First World War is of the bloody stalemate on the western front, the overall shape of the war arose out of its maritime character. It was essentially a struggle about access to worldwide resources, most clearly seen in Germany's desperate attempts to counter the American industrial threat, which ultimately drew the United States into the war. This radical new book concentrates on the way in which each side tried to use or deny the sea to the other, and in so doing, describes rapid wartime changes not only in ship and weapons technology but also in the way naval warfare was envisaged and fought. Melding strategic, technical, and tactical aspects, Friedman approaches the First World War from a fresh perspective and demonstrates how its perceived lessons dominated the way navies prepared for the Second World War. "Friedman is a master of the evolution of naval strategy, tactics and technology... a rewarding read that will leave many wanting to return again and again just to see what they might have missed the first time." —Australian Naval Institute "Dr. Friedman's research credentials are impeccable, and the huge amount of factual detail he has unearthed will be sure to delight many... there is nothing comparable in either depth or scope out there, and for this reason, if no other, this book is likely to become a standard work on the naval aspects of the Great War." —Naval War College Review

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

CHAPTER 1

A Maritime War

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

Britain and Deterrence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. A Maritime War
• Chapter 2. Resources
• Chapter 3. Blockade, Trade Warfare and Economic Attack
• Chapter 4. Expectations versus Reality
• Chapter 5. The Fleets
• Chapter 6. The Chessboard – Naval Geography
• Chapter 7. Fleets in Battle
• Chapter 8. Capital Ships
• Chapter 9. Inshore Operations and an Inshore Fleet
• Chapter 10. The Battle of the Narrow Seas
• Chapter 11. Submarines
• Chapter 12. Protecting Trade: The U-Boat War
• Chapter 13. Anti-Submarine Warfare: Tactics and Technology
• Chapter 14. The Anti-Submarine Armada
• Chapter 15. Mine Warfare
• Chapter 16. Lessons for the Future
• Notes
• Sources