Royal Naval Officers from War to War, 1918-1939

Mike Farquharson-Roberts, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137481962
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In the context of their war experience in the First World War, the changes and developments of the Executive branch of the Royal Navy between the world wars are examined and how these made them fit for the test of the Second World War are critically assessed.

1

The Officers of the Royal Navy Before 1918

An understanding of the officers of the executive branch of the Royal Navy between the two world wars is impossible without first understanding their service, the Royal Navy, and them in the sense of who they were as a part of that service. Unfortunately, the literature is quite sparse, and unsupported assumptions abound, in large part because officers of the Royal Navy prior to and during the First World War (and indeed subsequently) have attracted so little attention.

If there is to be an understanding of the officer corps, it is necessary to look at the service. While there has been some recent interest, there is not the breadth or depth such as that that covers the British army over the same period, and misperceptions, and outright misunderstandings abound. Thus, this chapter first looks at the Royal Navy up until the end of the First World War, and then at its officers. It will show that far from being the one-dimensional uneducated ‘mindless automata who only came alive at the will of a superior’¹ they were actually very highly educated and able officers whose abilities were multidimensional.

Because it is not perceived as having had much effect on the outcome of the First World War, the part the Royal Navy played in that conflict has attracted relatively limited attention. As will be discussed, this was fuelled by the navy’s own misperception of its performance, and the opinions of internal and external critics. The whole process was exacerbated by an internal conflict which to some extent split the officer corps, what might be termed the Battle of Jutland post-mortem which continued well into the 1920s, characterised then and since as being between the protagonists of Jellicoe and Beatty.

Before the First World War the Royal Navy was seen by the people of the nation, their government and by itself as being the country’s primary defence. Headed by the Admiralty, it was the biggest department of state in terms of expenditure. It is appropriate to examine what it did with this massive expenditure. The revolution in naval affairs that took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century is well known. In barely fifty years, the Royal Navy led the world’s navies as they moved from wooden sailing vessels armed with muzzle-loading cannon, fighting at ranges measured in tens of yards and only able to communicate within visual range, to armoured steel, turbine-propelled warships armed with guns that could fire over miles and that could communicate across the world. The outward and visible signs of these changes were obvious; their expression was HMS Dreadnought. However, the whole navy was a seething mass of innovation and change. What follows is not intended to present a coherent picture of the changes, but merely to show their breadth and depth.

Epstein, in her recent book, which is likely to have a significant influence on future thinking, remarked that ‘… too much was changing too quickly for industrial navies before World War 1 to achieve the neat, linear relationship…’ between technological developments and strategic and tactical thought.²

Most of the navies of the world were going through a similar series of changes, but the Royal Navy led in almost every area, both of technology and, more importantly, in what would now be called ‘Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence’ (C3I). When the changes are looked at in any detail, what is striking is that they were not invariably imposed from the top down. The navy was far from being a rigid organisation, rather, it was very well aware that it had to prepare to fight an unknown war. It is to the credit of the Admiralty that the many technological advances in naval warfare in the decades preceding the First World War were introduced in a timely and co-ordinated fashion. Much has been made of the navy’s failings and mistakes, but, considering the sheer breadth of the changes, what should excite comment is not how many failings there were, but how few. British warships and their equipment were the best in the world, British strategic and tactical thinking was flexible and responsive; it only started to show failings when there was amateurish interference from 1912 onwards.

Many of the changes and adaptations were not imposed ‘top down’. It is instructive to look at where within the service some instances of major innovation and change originated. A Lieutenant Sydney Hardcastle suggested an improvement to the propulsion system of British torpedoes, what was to become known as the ‘wet heater’, which radically improved the range and/or speed of the torpedo.³ Hardcastle devised this outside his hours of duty. On submitting his idea he was transferred to the navy’s torpedo school, HMS Vernon, given an assistant so that he could develop the device, and advised to take out a secret patent.

Central to naval technology before the First World War was fire control – ensuring that guns were pointed not at the target, but where the target would be when the shells arrived. Any system had to make allowances variables such as wind as well as the speed and course of the target. Fire control became critical to the navy as the range of its guns lengthened and the speed of ships it was aiming at increased. The rights and wrongs of the conflict that occurred about which fire control system to use, that devised by Captain Frederic Dreyer versus that of a civilian, Arthur Pollen, is not directly of concern, except insofar as it illustrates two facets of the navy. First, specialist officers were active participants and innovators. For instance, in 1902 Lieutenant John Dumaresq devised a mechanical analogue computer to assist in fire control. In various iterations, the Dumaresq remained in service throughout the Second World War; indeed, Captain Dreyer incorporated it into his fire control computer. Second, the Admiralty was ready to involve private industry, at every level. Epstein has recently argued (in the context of torpedo development) that this cooperation and interaction by the navy was the birth of the ‘military-industrial complex’.⁴

This was very different to the army, which held commercial concerns very much at arm’s length. It preferred to have its weapons made ‘in house’, hence the ‘Royal Gun Factory’ and the ‘Royal Aircraft Factory’. The latter, run by the civil service, was bureaucratic and became a byword for inefficiency and for stifling innovation. The former originally produced torpedoes as well as guns, but the navy bypassed it and instead bought torpedoes from the commercial company, Whiteheads. Similarly, during the First World War, when the Royal Aircraft Factory used commercial aircraft builders purely as sub-contractors, the Admiralty went directly to private manufacturers. On the outbreak of war Captain Murray Sueter, head of the aviation branch of the Admiralty, went to Frederick Handley-Page, owner of the eponymous aircraft firm, and asked him to produce ‘a bloody paralyser’. With this minimal specification Handley-Page produced the 0/100 bomber which the Royal Naval Air Service was to use as a strategic bomber.

The best example of naval–civilian technological co-operation was undoubtedly that between Guglielmo Marconi and Henry Jackson, who was to be First Sea Lord during the First World War and later admiral of the fleet.⁵ As early as 1896 he successfully sent a Morse signal by wireless from one end of a ship to another, and in 1901 was the first person to transmit wireless messages between ships. His naval career came before his wireless experimentation, and he yielded primacy, and the chance of patents, to Marconi.⁶ Nonetheless, in 1901 he was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, a distinction very few scientists achieve and a recognition of the esteem in which he was held by the scientific community.

The service allowed, even encouraged, original thinking. As an example it is instructive to look at the role of HMS Vernon, the torpedo and electrical school, which also had responsibility for wireless. Like the other schools, as well as being responsible for training both officers and ratings, it was a school in the sense of being a community of those of like mind and interest. It was responsible for overseeing acquisition of equipment, from issuing a specification to testing and approving new equipment as well as undertaking development work itself, as with Hardcastle’s wet heater torpedo. HMS Vernon’s newsletters, which appear to have been issued twice a year, record and report wireless experimentation by officers at Vernon itself, but also that undertaken by officers serving at sea. Most interestingly, it involved itself in, indeed appears to have led, development of tactical doctrine based on wireless. The newsletter of 1906 described how destroyers, which usually had only one wireless set, could only change wavelength (then referred to as ‘tunes’) with significant effort. This meant that communications between ships of a destroyer flotilla and the remainder of the battlefleet had to be carefully managed. The article described how communications could be managed in a variety of tactical situations. This is an illustration of the schools functioning as professional ‘think tanks’.

Thus it can be seen that the Royal Navy before the war not only had intelligent, professionally well-educated officers, but encouraged them to think, and put their thoughts into practice. It was a vibrant organisation, well aware of technological change and developments, and ready to make use of them whether developed within the service or in industry.

How, then, to address the matter of initiative, of which Churchill in particular was so critical? It is difficult to see how officers who on the one hand were encouraged to think were at the same time to be denied initiative. ‘[T]hings happen too quickly at sea to allow time for long and detailed instructions. Orders must be short and snappy, and they must be instantly and exactly obeyed’.⁷ Discipline at sea rests on that very basis and often there can be no room for individuality or initiative. By way of illustration, the twin 15-inch BL Mark 1 magazine/shell room/barbette/turret in service (latterly as the Mark 1* and Mark 1 N) in both World Wars was manned by 64 men. Each man had particular duties and actions to be carried out in a particular and specific sequence, 37 in the process of loading and firing, seven further after firing. If these were not carried out in the correct sequence, each gun could not and did not fire continuously. This required discipline, obedience and teamwork of the highest order.⁸ Attempts to cut corners to speed up the rate of fire probably contributed to the loss of three battlecruisers at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 – in many circumstances there was no place for initiative.⁹ As a result, the navy was extremely hierarchical, and its discipline was rigid, because it had to be. Officers were expected to obey orders.

Here the Royal Navy undoubtedly had a problem. As Andrew Lambert has pointed out

the navy needed a large supply of capable officers for junior command, watch-keeping, managing the men and imposing order. It required relatively few captains to exercise the independent command of ships.¹⁰

Throughout its history the navy has needed a mass of officers who were intelligent and able enough to carry out demanding, but routine duties. Latterly these had become increasingly complex due to rapid technological developments. This required higher levels of intelligence education and training, but officers often had to obey orders and for the most part exercise judgement only within quite narrow bounds.¹¹ However, from this mass of officers whose initiative and originality had, during their developmental years, been restrained even constrained, the navy had to produce a relatively small number of leaders with initiative, the future admirals.

Barnett’s attack on the lack of initiative culminated in his description referred to above of the resulting officer as ‘an automaton who only came to life at the impulse of a superior.’¹² How justified is this description? Were naval officers before the First World simple automata? In fact the navy did give leadership and initiative experience to its trainee junior officers. The view that before the First World War the navy in general and the Mediterranean fleet in particular were hidebound and hierarchical with no allowance for individuality and in particular initiative is not supported by contemporary witnesses. The future Lord Hankey, well recognised as an astute observer,¹³ who served in the Mediterranean fleet after being commissioned as a Royal Marine officer, wrote that:

[m]y impressions during my first few months afloat, before Fisher hoisted his flag as Commander-in-Chief,¹⁴ were somewhat mixed. So far as the personnel was [sic] concerned, in the handling of the individual ship they were almost wholly favourable. There was an infectious zeal, and a strong sense of personal responsibility engendered in all ranks by the nature of life. Even the midshipmen often found themselves in positions requiring prompt decision in taking their boats and launches ashore in rough weather, particularly at night. This tended to a self-reliance and resourcefulness … superior to that developed by any civilian education or by the military system in which I had been trained.¹⁵

This held true for most officers in 1914. Those who commanded smaller warships such as destroyers, and particularly submarines, were actually given far more responsibility than the majority of junior officers, but they were a minority, and not seen as likely to advance – to be ‘seen’, service in a major unit was necessary. ‘Independent command’ or in naval parlance, ‘command of a private ship’ had become increasingly rare as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth. Even large warships commanded by senior captains were organised into squadrons, often of as few as four or five ships, under the command of a more senior officer, either a commodore or more usually a rear admiral. This process was accelerated as Fisher brought back scattered units from overseas to home waters. Often, even a rear admiral had little independence of action: Evan-Thomas at Jutland was subordinate to Beatty, and the famous ‘paintwork being more important than gunnery’ encounter between Beresford and Scott shows how little freedom of action even a rear admiral actually had.¹⁶ The navy did not see command, or rather the experience of exercising it, as important; based on examination of personal records, this book will show that having held command was not a pre-requisite for higher rank until at least into the Second World War. One example will be cited of an officer who retired as a vice admiral who did not exercise command at sea until a flag officer; his only ship command was six months as captain of a ship that did not go to sea during that period.¹⁷ However, during the Second World War it was not uncommon for an entire convoy escort group of five or six ships in the Battle of the Atlantic to be commanded by a lieutenant commander who in reality was but a senior lieutenant. Such officers were still a minority, but now central to the navy’s fighting capability.

The crucial point that Barnett and other critics have missed is that a naval officer was far from being one-dimensional. He was trained to be self-reliant and to have initiative, and above all to recognise when to use it and when not; he was multidimensional. However, the navy did not train its officers to be automata, even when it might be thought an advantage to do so. Almost by accident, or at the whim of Winston Churchill depending on one’s viewpoint, the Royal Navy ended up with the responsibility for manning and training an infantry division fighting on the Western Front in France, the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division. Initially a port defence force, a temporary excess of manpower led to a mixed naval (mainly Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve) and Royal Marine Division being formed in August 1914. It was deployed at Churchill’s behest, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 The Officers of the Royal Navy Before 1918
• 2 The Naval Officer and Interwar Society
• 3 Becoming a Naval Officer: Entry, Education and Training
• 4 Personnel Management
• 5 The Officers of the Royal Navy in the 1920s
• 6 Malign Neglect? The Collapse of Executive Officers’ Morale
• 7 The Officers’ Nadir and the Inflection
• 8 The Ascension: Improving Morale
• 9 The Ascension: Admiral Chatfield and the Coming War
• 10 The Naval Officer in World War Two: The Apogee
• 11 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index