Most historians believe that the German Navy was of little use in World War I and that the Germans had blundered in building it. In fact, the navy was more of an asset than generally realized.
Few navies have come quite so far quite so fast as did this one in the years just prior to the outbreak of the war. Guided by Rear Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Germany in 1897 embarked upon a massive naval building campaign.1 Thanks to von Tirpitz’s efforts, four battleships which had previously comprised the German Navy in home waters were replaced by the dreadnoughts and battle cruisers of what became known as the High Seas Fleet. Overseas, gunboats had formerly served to intimidate the natives in the uncivilized areas which might be penetrated by the German flag. These vessels were now succeeded by powerful, long-range cruisers calculated to command respect among not only black and yellow peoples but white men as well. At Tsingtao in Shantung Province, China, a German naval base— rivaling that of the British in Wei Hai Wei—was in the process of construction. Thus, the years between 1897 and 1914 were marked by a tremendous growth in German naval power. Great progress was made toward attaining the goal Admiral Tirpitz had set for Germany: the construction of “. . . a battle fleet so strong that, even for the strongest sea power, war against it would invite such dangers as to imperil its position in the world.”2 During these 17 years, the German Imperial Navy became the second most powerful in the world.
World War I placed heavy responsibilities on this new navy. Admiral Reinhard Scheer, commander of the High Seas Fleet for the better part of the war, summed up the mission of the German Navy in that conflict: ‘‘To support the army in its uphill task of fighting a superior enemy on two fronts, particularly by securing the army against any attack from the north.”3 The best method of accomplishing this naval mission has been a source of controversy ever since.
All German leaders agreed, however, that it was Great Britain which posed the greatest naval threat. The British Isles blocked German entrance into the Atlantic, and the capital ships of the Royal Navy outnumbered Germany’s by a margin of three to two.4 The Grand Fleet, composed of the best men and ships in the Royal Navy, was stationed on the North Sea, its specific mission the destruction of the High Seas Fleet.
Within the German high command5 two schools of thought evolved concerning means of dealing with the British Navy. Both schools could cite the writings of the renowned American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan in support of their views. Each maintained that only the adoption of its plan could save the German nation and fleet. Counting among its adherents no less a personage than Admiral Tirpitz himself, one group advocated an aggressive policy. Members of this group felt it essential that the High Seas Fleet6 engage in decisive battle with the Grand Fleet whenever conditions favored the Germans. They stressed the desirability of a fleet action at the earliest possible date—before the British blockade could begin to strangle the German economy, and before British shipyards could add more warships to the Grand Fleet. Even following the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, there were still many who clamored for decisive action, arguing that the whole purpose of a navy is to gain mastery of the seas.7 They could not see the sense of keeping the High Seas Fleet in port. “Even an unfavourable sea battle would not have made our prospects materially worse,” wrote Admiral Tirpitz after the war. “It could be safely assumed that the losses of the enemy would be as great as ours. Nothing, indeed, that could happen to our fleet could be worse than its retention in idleness.”8
There were, however, some people, including Kaiser Wilhelm II, who did not share Admiral Tirpitz’s confidence in the High Seas Fleet. They felt that there was certainly a worse place for the High Seas Fleet to spend the war than at anchor in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven.9 That would be at the bottom of the North Sea. Many members of the German high command thought the latter fate awaited their fleet should it dare engage the Grand Fleet under any but the most favorable conditions. Neither did they believe that any damage suffered by the High Seas Fleet would be correspondingly visited upon the British.
For a comparable amount of strategic damage to be inflicted on the British, the High Seas Fleet would have had to do a great deal more tactical damage to the Grand Fleet than the German fleet itself suffered. The Germans simply could not afford to trade ships with the British on a one-for-one basis. A slugging match conducted on such terms could not help but favor the British. The British, after all, had more ships to start with. They also, by virtue of being the world’s largest shipbuilder, were capable of constructing new ships and repairing damaged ones more quickly than the Germans. At the same time, it was unlikely that any contest with the British could be conducted on terms much better than one for one since the Grand Fleet was a rather competent naval organization. Ultimately, such a struggle would destroy the High Seas Fleet as a fighting force and leave the Allies in command of the seas. Only if blessed by the most fantastic luck,10 then, could the Germans hope to accomplish anything from battle to the death with the Grand Fleet. As a matter of fact, they never did wage such a battle. Probably the best hope was a temporary weakening of the British blockade—something that could be done better and more cheaply by submarines—and even then, such a weakening would last only so long as it took the British to replace and repair sunken or damaged ships. Such a reward seemed meager recompense for the possible loss of the world’s second largest navy.
There was doubt, too, as to the capability of the High Seas Fleet to achieve even this small measure of success. Certain German policymakers, citing such recent naval battles as Santiago and Tsushima, believed that in decisive naval combat the losing fleet was often annihilated while the victorious fleet remained more or less intact. They saw this as the natural consequence of one fleet gaining the edge on the other and thereby being able to exert relatively greater combat power against a steadily diminishing enemy fleet. The latter’s combat power would decline rapidly as fewer and fewer ships were left to fight a relatively uninjured opposing fleet. Observing that the Grand Fleet was almost always significantly stronger than the High Seas Fleet, critics of Tirpitz thought that a battle with any but a much reduced Grand Fleet was suicidal. They felt that it would invite the same kind of disaster that had befallen the Spanish in 1898 and the Russians in 1905.
What these Germans proposed to do was to whittle the Grand Fleet down to a more comfortable size by attrition before attempting a decisive engagement. Submarines and torpedo boats were to be relied upon to eliminate the numerical superiority the Royal Navy enjoyed over the German Navy. Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, commander of the High Seas Fleet at the beginning of World War I, reflected this kind of thought in his August 1914 orders to the High Seas Fleet:
All information we have received about the English naval forces . . . forces us to the conclusion that he himself intends to avoid the losses he fears he may suffer at our hands and to compel us to come with our battleships to his coast and there fall a victim to his mines and submarines. We are not going to oblige our enemy thus. . . Our immediate task is therefore to cause our enemy losses by all the methods of guerilla warfare. . . . This task will fall primarily to our light forces. . . . The duty of those of us in the battleships . . . is to keep this, our main weapon sharp and bright for the decisive battle we shall have to fight. [Italics in original]11
Realizing that it could take a long time for German submarines and torpedo boats to significantly damage the Grand Fleet, the German high command decided to employ the High Seas Fleet as a fleet in being in the interim, restricting its offensive operations to occasional demonstrations against the British coast and infrequent attempts to ambush portions of the Grand Fleet. Meanwhile, German cruisers caught overseas when war began would engage in commerce raiding, do such damage to Allied shipping as they could, and eventually return to Germany.
In the end, such a strategy worked out very well. Although the surface raiders achieved only very limited success, German submarines came dangerously close to winning the war for the Central Powers. In the final analysis, too, the decision to employ the High Seas Fleet as a fleet in being proved wise indeed. Admiral Tirpitz's ideas aside, it turned out that the High Seas Fleet could accomplish a great deal by staying in port and making an occasional foray into the North Sea. Paramount to an appreciation of the German Navy's role in World War I is the realization that the war at sea was just one facet of the whole conflict.
The fact is that the High Seas Fleet, at anchor in its home ports of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, profoundly influenced the Royal Navy. As the greatest threat to British command of the seas since the Battle of Trafalgar, the High Seas Fleet received appropriate attention. Throughout World War I, the bulk of British naval might was concentrated in the North Sea. Indeed, at no time could more than one of Britain's dreadnoughts be found anywhere else.12 It follows that warships blockading the High Seas Fleet could not be helping the Allied war effort elsewhere, for example by reducing Turkish fortresses on the Dardanelles or raiding the Austro-Hungarian coast. The High Seas Fleet, then, performed the classic function of a fleet in being by tying up the bulk of the Royal Navy in a very unproductive task.
The High Seas Fleet also was cause for the diversion to the Royal Navy of resources which might have gone to the British Army. Ever fearful of losing their mastery of the oceans, the British poured resources into their navy. Beginning with 26 dreadnought battleships, and losing two during the war, the Royal Navy finished World War I with 32 ships of this type.13 This required, of course, a corresponding rise in the number of smaller warships and personnel to man them. Carrying 146,000 officers and enlisted men on the rolls at the beginning of 1914, the Royal Navy counted 407,000 personnel of all ranks and ratings on Armistice Day.14 At the same time, the German Navy built very few ships larger than light cruisers, greatly increasing only her production of submarines. The prewar complement of 79,000 officers and men grew by only about 35,000.15 Germany, making a comparatively moderate investment, caused the British to make a much larger investment. Every ton of steel used to build British battleships could not be used to build British rifles, tanks, and machine guns. Every shipyard engaged in building dreadnoughts could not be used to replace merchantmen sunk by the U-boats. Every sailor who rode out the war at sea vainly awaiting some appearance by the High Seas Fleet was one less man available to fill shattered British divisions in France. Much of the ammunition which the artillerymen of the British Expeditionary Force desperately needed could be found in the magazines of the hundreds of ships of the Royal Navy, most of it destined never to be fired in anger or to take a German life.
The High Seas Fleet also contributed to the partial success of the U-boat blockade which nearly drove the British out of the war. It did this in three ways. First, the High Seas Fleet provided manpower for the U-boats. Battleship sailors, because of their experience, needed less training than newly recruited civilians. Consequently, by the end of the war a large percentage of the best officers and men of the High Seas Fleet had been transferred to the underwater service, a development which hastened the deterioration of the High Seas Fleet as a fighting force during the last months of the war. Second, many of the destroyers the British needed so badly for antisubmarine operations were retained in Scotland to support potential Grand Fleet operations against the submarine bases themselves. The superiority of the Grand Fleet would be reduced by engaging the Germans in their restricted home waters where German torpedoes and mines could be used to their best advantage and where British cripples would be vulnerable to almost certain capture or destruction.
Although often ignored, certainly one of the most important contributions made by the German Navy was ensuring that the Baltic Sea remained in German control for the duration of the war. German merchant shipping there continued largely unhindered, and Scandinavian forest products and iron ore were available for German use. Other resources needed in Germany could be procured by Scandinavian neutrals and thence channeled across the Baltic to Germany. German control of the Baltic was essential to the German effort in the war against Russia as well. Russian warships were prevented from raiding the German coast, and any ideas about landing Russian troops on the East Prussian coast, and thus outflanking the German armies in the East, remained only ideas because of German naval superiority. German surface ships were sometimes able to lend direct support to the army in its Russian campaigns. In the fall of 1917, warships under Vice Admiral Erhard Schmidt participated in a large-scale amphibious operation against Russian-held Baltic islands. In the spring of 1918, German warships supported German troops expelling Bolshevik troops from the newly created Republic of Finland. The Germans’ actions were particularly noteworthy in the capture of Helsinki. Finally, the High Seas Fleet eliminated, to a great extent, the need for a vast and complicated coastal defense system. It freed the army from the necessity of maintaining a string of coastal fortresses which would have required troops and guns badly needed at the fronts in Russia and France.
None of these tasks could have been performed so well—or in some cases performed at all—in the absence of a sizeable German naval force such as the High Seas Fleet. Shore batteries and minefields can offer the same protection as a fleet only in extremely rare situations. Static defenses, if installed properly and in sufficient quantity and depth along a long coastline, can also become very expensive while remaining completely useless for anything beyond coastal defense. A coastal defense system cannot project military power across the seas or carry the war to the enemy. Not even the most extensive coastal defense systems can threaten an enemy’s control of the seas.16Keeping Great Britain out of the Baltic without the High Seas Fleet would have been prohibitively expensive. Denmark would have had to be occupied, an undertaking which would have required always scarce German divisions. Ultimately, too, such an occupation might very well have worked to Germany’s disadvantage. Initial international furor over the German invasion of yet another neutral country aside, the German occupation of Denmark would also have enabled the British to clamp down on trade in and out of Danish ports, thereby plugging one of the bigger holes in the British blockade.
This article does not seek to defend the Kaiser’s decision to build a navy in the first place, but rather it suggests that the German surface fleet was more useful than most historians will admit. And there was a great need for improvement in the way the German Navy operated. For example, there was an urgent need for a naval equivalent of the German General Staff. There was also a need for better army-navy cooperation. Certainly, too, opportunities to inflict great punishment upon the British were missed. These, however, were not problems of basic strategy. They were administrative problems, communications problems, tactical problems. The point is that the German Navy, although conceived of largely as prestige for the Kaiser and built with no legitimate mission, did serve a useful purpose in World War I. All things considered, the strategy it adopted was the only strategy suited to the capabilities and limitations of the Kaiser's navy.
"Repugnant as this [role] might be to high-spirited German naval officers, it was unquestionably the worst policy for us," wrote a British naval officer, "for, whilst the High Sea Fleet remained 'in being' . . . we could not afford to undertake operations tending to weaken our Grand Fleet. . . ."17 That officer was Admiral Viscount Sir John Jellicoe of Scapa, for two and a half years the commander of the Grand Fleet, later First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty.
Cadet Romer is a senior concentrating in history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. He became interested in naval warfare while taking a course on seapower during the fall of his junior year. This article is adapted from a research paper written during the course, which is an elective in the Department of History. Cadet Romer has attended the U.S. Army's Northern Warfare Course at Fort Greely, Alaska, and is a graduate of the Airborne School, Fort Henning, Georgia. He is a native of St. Henry, Ohio, and intends to enter the armor branch upon graduation in June.
1 Geoffrey Bennett, Naval Battles of the First World War (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968), p. 18.
2 Ibid.
3 Quoted in Captain William D. Puleston, USN, High Command in the World War (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), p. 68.
4 Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: 1911-1914, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924), pp. 558-561. This ratio was deduced from figures found in these pages of Mr. Churchill's book. Generally, most sources will agree with this three-to-two ratio so far as dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers go. It is impossible to get firm figures on the number of smaller ships in either the British or German navies. Suffice it to say that the Royal Navy, throughout the war, had more of every kind of craft than the German Navy, excepting submarines. The Royal Navy increased its margin of superiority over the German Navy during the war, building more of every type of vessel than did the Germans, again with the exception of submarines. It is also important to note that the British deployed the great bulk of this naval power in the North Sea, relying on their allies to cover less vital areas.
5 German high command as used here refers to that somewhat nebulous body responsible for German policy during and in those years leading up to World War I. This body would include, as a minimum, the German cabinet, the chancellor, the Kaiser, and the German General Staff. The German General Staff—the nerve center of the German Army—was far and away the most important part of this body.
6 It is important to note here that after July 1915, the High Seas Fleet and the various submarine commands were, for all practical purposes, the German Navy. The one major German surface naval organization outside the North Sea, Vice Admiral Graf von Spee’s cruiser squadron, was destroyed off the Falkland Islands by a British squadron commanded by Vice Admiral Sir Dovetson Sturdee on 8 December 1914. Light cruiser SMS Konigsberg, sunk in the Rufigi River in German East Africa on 6 July 1915, was the last surface ship of the regular German Navy to operate outside of the North Sea area of operations. After the Konigsberg's demise, auxiliary cruisers became the only German surface ships to be found outside of the North Sea.
7 Jutland was a defeat for the aggressive school. The High Seas Fleet was most successful during the opening minutes of the action. As more and more British ships arrived on the scene, the tables started to turn on the Germans. Indeed, few will dispute that only nightfall saved the High Seas Fleet from suffering more damage than it did. German realization of this is evidenced by Scheer’s withdrawal from the engagement during the night of 31 May-1 June and further in the pages of the Berliner Tageblatt: "Germany narrowly escaped a crushing defeat.’’ Thus it was that the High Seas Fleet’s attempt to challenge the supremacy of the Grand Fleet had nearly ended in a German disaster. After being burned once, the German High Command was not so likely to risk its fleet again. Nevertheless, the High Seas Fleet remained just as credible as a fleet in being because it had proved that ship for ship it was at least the equal of the Grand Fleet. The British, of course, could not take chances with this kind of fleet, and caution demanded that British vigilance not be relaxed or British strength lowered lest some peculiar combination of events cause the Germans to believe that they could challenge the Grand Fleet with some hope of success. In short, the British were understandably paranoid about any fleet which could even conceivably challenge British naval power. The British wanted the deck stacked in their own favor.
8 Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, My Memoirs, Volume II (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1919), p. 30.
9 Kiel and Wilhelmshaven are situated, respectively, on the Baltic and North Seas. They are connected by the Kiel Canal, which was passable by the dreadnoughts of the High Seas Fleet. The existence of this canal greatly facilitated shifts of German warships from one sea to the other.
10 The reason the Germans needed such luck was not so much a result of being outnumbered by the British as it was to the fact that from almost the beginning of the war, the British had possession of the German naval codes. They were passed on to the British by the Russian Navy which had obtained the German codebook from a German warship sunk in the Baltic in August 1914.
11 Quoted by Admiral Reinhard Scheer in Germany's High Sea Fleet in the World War (New York: Cassell and Co., 1920), p. 39-40.
12 One dreadnought battleship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, took part in the Gallipoli operations in 1915.
13 Joseph Whitaker, editor, Whitaker’s Almanack (1915) (London: Whitaker Publishing Co., 1915), p. 248; 1920 edition, p. 240.
14 T. A. Ingram, editor, The New Hazell Annual and Almanack for the Year 1919 (London: Oxford University Press, 1919), p. 809; 1920 edition, p. 820.
15 Maurice Prendergast, editor, Jane’s Fighting Ships: 1918 (London: Sampson, Low, Marston and Co., 1918), p. 120.
16 The cross-Channel gun duels between German and British batteries during World War II cannot really be considered as examples of coastal defense systems projecting military power across the seas.
17 Admiral Viscount John Rushworth Jellicoe of Scapa, The Grand Fleet, 1914-1916: Its Creation, Development and Work (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1919), p. 39.