Human conscience, gentlemen, could not tolerate the idea that a belligerent should be permitted to sow mines profusely in seas frequented by the world’s merchant marines: but international law does not at present prohibit such acts, and it is to be feared that, long after the conclusion of peace, neutral vessels navigating the seas far from the scene of war will be exposed to terrible catastrophes. 1
This statement, made on 27 June 1907 by Captain Charles Ottley to delegates at the Second Hague Peace Conference, was part of Britain’s concerted effort to get the use of mines banned under international law. Ottley was a torpedo officer, who, twenty-three years previous, had invented the apparatus that allowed mines to be laid on a large scale in the open sea. Whilst serving as Director of Naval Intelligence , he developed war plans which relied upon the use of mines on a scale never previously envisaged. Yet, when in June 1907, he stood before the august gathering of diplomats and naval officers he, as far as we can tell sincerely, pressed for the weapon to be banned. In making this statement Ottley came to embody the highly contested position which the mine occupied in the outlook of the Royal Navy, and Britain more generally, in the decade before the First World War.
By the standards of the early twentieth century, the mine was not a complex piece of technology, nor was the basic concept a novel one. Yet this simple device posed a greater ideological challenge to the Royal Navy than any other item of technology. The reason for this was simple. The innate purpose of the weapon was mutual sea denial, the prevention of anyone from using a specific area of sea for any purpose. This stood in total contradiction to the idealised view of Britain’s role as a maritime power, and the Royal Navy’s self-appointed mission as guardian of the seas. Use of the seas for both commercial and military purposes was perceived to be a basic right, guaranteed under some sense of Pax Britannica. The mine represented the antithesis of this in material form. Not merely challenging Britain’s right to exercise command of the sea, but denying it to all.
The problem for the Royal Navy came from the fact that the mine proved to be an extremely effective weapon in naval combat. Events in the Russo-Japanese War in particular removed any lingering doubts about the impact mines could have on war at sea. This juxtaposition of the weapon’s obvious effectiveness with its objectionable intrinsic quality created a contested space in which the debates in the Royal Navy, the British government and the country at large took place. It is this space that is the focus of this study. In particular, it will examine the reactions of the British government to the mine in the separate spheres of strategy and international law, highlighting the problems and inconsistencies thrown up by the conflict between the technology and the specific national and organisational cultures which were dominant in this period.
The field of early twentieth-century naval history is an extremely active one, and within it considerable attention has been devoted to questions of technology. Despite this, the mine has barely featured in the historiography. In many respects this is surprising. The mine was one of the most important naval technologies of the First World War. It was used extensively by all sides, achieving dramatic results including the sinking of the super-dreadnought Audacious , and the death of Lord Kitchener . This was, however, only the tip of the iceberg. The real impact of mining came not in the sudden successes, but in the way it came to shape the very maritime environment in which the war at sea was fought. From the large mine barrages targeted at German U-boats to the swept channels routing merchant shipping around the British coasts, the mine slowly but dramatically altered the human geography of the sea, and so fundamentally changed the experiences of those using it. This had a profound influence on both the naval and maritime histories of the war but lacked the drama of the engagements between capital ships, or the novelty of the U-boat war. As such it has been virtually ignored within the historiography of the conflict. This book will address part of this lacuna in our understanding of the First World War, but it is not an operational or purely technical history. Instead it is focused on the asymmetric challenge posed by mines and the impact that had in terms of strategy and law. The most obvious result of this is that the book largely ignores the issue of mine clearance. The reason for this is simple: mine clearance, whilst technically very challenging, fitted easily into the accepted views of the role of the Royal Navy, and that of Britain more generally in the maritime sphere. Sweeping the seas clear of any threats or obstructions to British or neutral shipping was a role which the Royal Navy had played for many years and was an accepted part of its self-defined mission. Mine clearance could be directly assimilated into this outlook and as will be seen there were public calls for the Royal Navy to engage in mine-clearance operations during the Russo-Japanese War, in order to ensure the safety of neutral vessels. Although the Admiralty resisted these specific calls there was little argument that mine clearance would, and crucially, should be an important part of the Royal Navy’s role in future. Thus the issue failed to open up the same type of contested space created by the debates over the use of mines as an offensive technology.
By exploring the issues surrounding offensive mining this study provides insight into a range of wider questions regarding British strategy, maritime culture and perceptions of international law. The debates which surrounded the use of mines throughout the period had their roots in a simple question: what type of war was it that Britain could or should fight? The cleavage between the idealised perceptions of the maritime world and naval combat, and the realities embodied by the mine, starkly revealed the debate which took place in the Royal Navy, and in Britain more widely, over attitudes towards warfare at this time. The questions over the use of mines were ones of balancing the rights of belligerents to conduct their wars as against those of neutrals to continue their activities in peace; gauging the importance of military necessity as against that of international law; and ultimately asking what limitations morality and civilisation placed on warfare. These themes fit directly into a much broader debate which had been conducted across Europe throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth. This debate saw regular attempts by both international lawyers and governments to limit warfare and codify the laws of war. 2 This project reached its apogee in the two peace conferences held at The Hague in 1899 and 1907 and arguably came to something of a conclusion in the middle of the First World War, as nineteenth-century attitudes towards warfare were submerged beneath a rising tide of belligerence. The questions raised by mines only formed one aspect of this debate, but the nature of the technology provoked extremely strong reactions, and consequently provides a rich seam of information on the broader issue. The debate over the nature of warfare is one of real historiographical importance, marking a watershed between nineteenth- and twentieth-century attitudes, and providing a crucial context for understanding British strategic policy.
The scope and range of this debate mean that it cannot be easily explored within the bounds of the usual historical sub-disciplines. Questions of international law, and the attitudes of politicians and diplomats, shaped the debate in equal measure with the more direct issues of naval strategy facing professional sailors. All of the protagonists operated within a distinct cultural context which was very different from the cultural landscape of twenty-first-century Britain. Furthermore, distinct organisational cultures, particularly that of the Royal Navy, shaped the attitudes of those taking decisions in this debate. Thus this study avowedly seeks to go beyond the usual disciplinary boundaries and explore the issue from a range of perspectives. It draws upon the literatures on naval policy, naval and maritime culture, and international law and demonstrates how interconnected these usually distinct topics actually were. This methodology is facilitated by the in-depth archival approach taken. The necessity of exploring the full range of reactions to technology has meant that the book draws upon a wealth of sources that have rarely been used in combination, or even at all, in order to present the most comprehensive picture possible.
Exploring the inconsistencies in British attitudes towards mining, and the wider debate on the nature of war, provides meaningful contributions to a number of significant and distinct historiographical debates. Historians of technology have long acknowledged the crucial role that culture plays in shaping technological change. 3 Many now argue that one can go further, and say that within large technically focused organisations, such as navies, there is a feedback loop through which the technology begins to impact on the organisational culture. 4 Naval historians have been slow to incorporate this thinking into their work, but there is a growing trend in this direction. 5 The new scholarship has helped shed light on the process of technological change within the Royal Navy, emphasising the role that culture played in shaping decision-making with regard to both strategy and technology. 6 Examining the issues surrounding mine warfare not only expands this work, but also provides a particularly powerful example. This is because the antithetical nature of the technology to traditional Royal Navy thinking forced the service to work through the assumptions and attitudes that lay behind its opposition. This, in turn, has made visible what is usually hidden to the historian, the attitudes and practices that were so universally accepted that they rarely needed to be set to paper.
The growing emphasis on the importance of culture within the work of historians looking at naval technology has been mirrored in that of historians of international law. In particular there has been a real focus on the attitudes of the German military towards international law, and a debate over the extent to which military culture shaped its response. 7 Recently Isabel Hull has made a strong case for German exceptionalism with regard to that country’s military culture and attitudes towards international law. 8 There has been little work done specifically on British perceptions of international law, and where the issue has come to the fore, regarding maritime rights, there is no consensus among historians. The issue of mine warfare is a particularly useful one in shedding light on the British attitudes towards international law and assessing its relationship with military culture. The legal debate surrounding mine warfare was an issue of considerable importance to Britain both prior to and during the First World War. Despite the failure of British attempts to ban the use of mines at the 1907 Hague Conference, there remained widespread public and governmental concern about the subject up until the outbreak of war. From August 1914 through until the late spring of the following year, German use of mines was to provide the basis for British legal diplomacy. At the same time widespread use of mines was regularly discussed by the Royal Navy in prewar planning and was adopted by the Cabinet in October 1914. Thus the issue of mines provides an excellent insight into how the British government viewed international law in this period, highlighting where it perceived it to be useful, and under what circumstances it was willing to ignore it on the grounds of military necessity.
The examination of the role of the mine in British prewar strategy also provides insight into naval policy, particularly with regard to the blockade. Within contemporary debates the discussion of mining was invariably bound up in the contested issue of blockade. Indeed it is fair to say that the Royal Navy’s engagement with the mine as a technology derived almost entirely from its potential for use in a blockade scenario, and the mine and the blockade were inextricably linked in the minds of contemporary naval officers. Debates over blockade were at the heart of discussion of British strategy throughout the prewar and wartime period. It was an essential feature of how Britain would prosecute any major war. It provided home defence and protected Britain’s far-flung lines of communication. It acted as the country’s primary offensive weapon in the form of economic warfare and facilitated potential combined operations. Its centrality to British strategy was undisputed, but technological and legal restrictions meant that its application was deeply problematic. This subject is one which has concerned military, diplomatic and legal historians for almost a century, and yet the mine barely features in any discussion of the subject. 9 By viewing the blockade question from the perspective of this crucial technology it is possible to gain new insight into the way these problems were conceptualised and how the Royal Navy and British government attempted to resolve them.
The outbreak of war saw these issues addressed with renewed urgency, and once again the mine came to be a crucial issue. One result of the conflict was the merging of the previously largely separate spheres of international law and naval strategy, and the inconsistencies between them that had marked prewar attitudes towards the technology were eventually unpicked. Throughout the first year of war the mine remained at the heart of British strategic thinking, and a focus on the technology makes clear how much continuity there was with prewar planning. By looking at a weapon with a uniq...