‘Feat God and Dread Nought’

Years before an incompetent chauffer drove Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria down the wrong Sarajevo street and into range of a waiting assassin’s revolver and thus ignited World War 1, Europe was seen by the prescient to be poised on the brink of conflagration. Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen’s eponymous “plan” had committed German land strategy to its Channel-brushing right wheel; France’s counterpart, Plan 17, envisioned a thrust to the south, the other half of a vast revolving door into its beloved lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. When war began and both offensives found their momentum spent short of their goals, Europe was cleaved by a vast and ready-dug grave into which marched stolidly the flower of its youth for the next four years. None could have foreseen that slaughter in the restive prewar years. None could have known how new technologies and hidebound strategies would combine to derange war’s equilibrium on the land.¹

The same could not be said, however, of the approaching war at sea. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm had drawn one lesson when he put down his copy of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power Upon History: “Germany’s future is on the water.” In the busy years preceding the war’s outbreak, he executed a major naval expansion. The German Naval Law of 1912 raised Germany’s planned addition to its fleet of 17 battleships, 4 cruisers, and 12 small cruisers to 25, 12, and 18, respectively. Some 50 new submarines were to join them. More significant from a strategic perspective was the planned deepening of the Kiel Canal between the Baltic and the North Sea. This would allow the nearly instantaneous emergence of the German fleet into the waters of the North Sea without the delay that hitherto had provided other nations with strategic warning. Emerging swiftly into that seascape was a technologically modern navy manned by an almost 20% increase in its officers and men. Germany, in addition to its army coiled like a spring on land, would have a navy virtually on a permanent war footing. As the Kaiser himself said, “Only when we can hold our mailed fist against his face will the British lion draw back.” Germany meant to challenge Britain’s dominance of the high seas.²

When Winston Spencer Churchill, a Liberal cabinet member in the Asquith premiership, became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, he essayed a precarious strategic position.’ Sea power was unquestionably Britain’s lifeline. Two-thirds of its food was imported, and the merchant shipping that delivered it accounted for half the world’s seaborne trade. Safeguarding that supply was one of the Royal Navy’s vital tasks: Transporting troops among the outposts of the Empire, delivering the British Expeditionary Force to the continent, and keeping the island nation safe from invasion were others. The ships of the Royal Navy, Churchill wrote later, were “all we had. On them, as we conceived, floated the might, majesty, dominion, and power of the British Empire . . . open the sea-cocks and let them sink . . . and the British Empire would dissolve like a dream.”⁴

Churchill resolved to address the growing maritime threat not merely through weight of numbers but also through significant improvements in training, equipment, and command. First, however, came strategy, the scaffolding on which all other elements would depend for their vigor. Churchill famously had opinions on every topic, and he was never more forceful, his vision never clearer, than when addressing issues of grand strategy. Responding to British Conservatives who wanted naval units dispersed widely, he heaped scorn on the “frittering away of money, empty parades of foolish little ships ‘displaying the flag’ in unfrequented seas,” which he said were the “certain features of an extravagant policy leading to defeat.” While posing as strategy, such dispersal in fact disguised its absence. Not dispersion but the concentration of naval resources on the enemy fleets was Churchill’s aim. In this he echoed Napoleon Bonaparte’s “supreme strategic principle” of the concentration of force; when one eager subordinate showed him a plan for lining the French frontiers with soldiers end- to-end, Napoleon replied, “What are you trying to do? Stop smuggling?”⁵

Churchill had to walk a fine political line in his new post. He was seen as a turncoat and an opportunist by many Conservatives ever since he crossed the floor of the House of Commons to join the Liberals in 1905 over the Free Trade issue. He was also in a party comprised of some pacifist members who distrusted notions of military rearmament, and who did not think Churchill a true Liberal. Churchill worked assiduously to stay on good terms with his former Tory colleagues, keeping up a lively correspondence with them, and his plans for naval rearmament were very much to their liking. Upon the Reichstag’s approval of the German Naval Law, Churchill negotiated supplementary funding for the Royal Navy, promising an extraordinary increase “in the striking forces of ships of all classes.”⁶

Never patient with reticence in his subordinates, Churchill liked to surround himself with men as gregarious as himself. Alas for his convivial inclinations, he had inherited a First Sea Lord of somber mien. Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson was more than three decades older than the 37-year-old First Lord, but neither that nor his close- tongued nature would be his undoing. Instead, what made Churchill show him the door was Wilson’s resistance to the formation of a naval war staff. Wilson thought it would undermine his authority; Churchill, for his part, intended to change a system whereby “all plans were locked up in the mind of one taciturn admiral.”

Such a war staff had already been imposed on the army, and Churchill’s goal was to make the admirals cooperate with that other service rather than operate in isolation and hauteur. Wilson had also opposed the cooperation with the army on the plans to deliver seven divisions of the British Expeditionary Force to the continent. He was against the transition from a policy of blockading enemy ports to one of intercepting ships on the high seas. Clearly, he had to go. Wilson was due to retire in early 1912, and another politician might well have taken the line of least resistance, politically and militarily, and waited out those few remaining months. But Churchill got him out in November 1911. The Admiralty’s new First Lord was a transformer in a hurry.⁷

Other appointments followed quickly—a new First Sea Lord, who did not last long, owing to ill health, and Prince Louis of Battenberg (the family name had not yet bowed to Germanophobia and been Anglicized to Mountbatten) as Second Sea Lord. A notable appointment was the installation of Deputy Commander of the Home Fleet Admiral John Jellicoe, who was thus well placed years later to command the fleet at the Battle of Jutland, when Churchill described him as “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.” And when that replacement First Lord retired after his brief and unremarkable tenure, and his successor, Battenberg, proved too Teutonic, Churchill turned aside much political counsel and brought out of dry dock one of the most famous and controversial seamen in the Royal Navy.⁸

Sea Change

He was bombastic, more than merely outspoken, more tempestuous than simply opinionated. He brooked little opposition to his policies among subordinates, flatly declaring them traitors, and in a characteristic rhetorical flourish averred that “their wives should be widows, their children fatherless, and their homes a dunghill.” He was arguably somewhat demented. Admiral Sir John Arbuthnot “Jacky” Fisher had joined the Royal Navy in the age of sail. He was attracted to novel ideas and at age 33 became commander of a newly established torpedo school. His extraordinary frankness was leavened with intelligence and charisma. Improbably, he was a dancer of great renown, a talent that helped smooth his way into Victorian royal society. It at least afforded him the ear of the Prince of Wales, whom he lectured about the need for naval modernization: less bureaucracy, fewer pointless drills, the adoption of new concepts and weapons. He recognized the minatory potential of submarines, those “invisible demons of the deep.”

Fisher was determined to shake the Royal Navy free of its cobwebbed traditions. Once, faced with a torrent of Fisher’s ebullience, the Prince of Wales pleaded, “Would you kindly leave off shaking your fist in my face?” He wrote as he spoke and asked his correspondents to burn his letters. In 1902, then in his 60s, he felt that his day was over, that his “radical” ideas had earned him too many enemies. The existence of politicians, he said, had “deepened his faith in Providence. How else could one explain Britain’s continued existence as a nation?” In truth, he was not the sort of military officer designed to render sleep-filled nights to the political class. Fisher must have been as astonished as anyone to find himself appointed a delegate to an early peace conference in The Hague, and he nailed his colors to the mast with his usual abandon. “The humanizing of war?” he exclaimed at one point to a colleague,

. . . You might as well talk about humanizing Hell! The essence of war is violence! Moderation in war is imbecility! ... I am not for war, I am for peace. That is why I am for a supreme Navy. The supremacy of the British Navy is the best security for the peace of the world. ... If you rub it in both at home and abroad that you are ready for instant war . . . and intend to be first in and hit your enemy in the belly and kick him when he is down and boil your prisoners in oil (if you take any) . . . and torture his women and children, then people will keep clear of you.”⁹

Civil War Major General William Tecumseh Sherman without the nuance, Fisher had firm ideas of deterrence. The Admiral Hyman Rickover of his day on technical issues, he could be as inspired on issues of strategic modernization as he was uncompromising in his opinions. Like Rickover, that future father of the U.S. nuclear Navy, Fisher conceived a shipbuilding departure. He had taken as his personal motto, “Fear God and Dread Nought” and bestowed the name on a new type of battleship festooned with big guns. HMS Dreadnought, commissioned by King Edward VII in 1906, was arguably the first lethal Leviathan of the sea, the fullest realization of Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan’s emphasis on the importance of capital ships. Powered by turbines, the ships had no cluttered array of small-caliber weapons and concentrated all firepower around 13.5-inch guns. Their appearance on the seas rendered every other warship obsolete. The very name became a metonymy as these ships started an arms race at sea: Soon all major seafaring nations had dreadnoughts arising from their shipyards.¹⁰

Fisher deactivated 90 obsolete ships, transferred many to the reserve fleet, introduced submarines, and overhauled naval education. He built 161 warships, including 22 battleships, and believed Germany to be Britain’s principal enemy. When his tenure ended in 1910 he had remade the Navy along his lines, and he had acquired a powerful friend in Churchill, whom he had first met in 1907 and whom he had impressed by being the maverick military man brimming with novel ideas and heedless of conventional thinking. Perhaps he was an intellectual influence on Churchill; perhaps it was a case of two men of similar temperaments gravitating toward each other; perhaps Churchill merely recognized his own reflection. In any case, when Churchill needed a new First Sea Lord, he knew where to turn.

Fisher might well have been Churchill’s first choice in 1912, hut the former First Sea Lord had acquired some powerful enemies in the Navy. Chief among these was the politically connected Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, whose fondness for riding to hounds was such that he had a hunting scene tattooed across his buttocks. He detested Fisher and was opposed to all his ideas. Beresford enjoyed considerable support, and Fisher must have known his days were numbered. But an overreaching Beresford went first in what amounted to a coup within the Royal Navy. In 1909, he was forced to retire following one act of insubordination too many. Fisher soon retired as well, after an inquiry into his behavior, albeit one that ultimately exonerated him. He was raised to the peerage as Lord Fisher of Kilverstone. Beresford became a Conservative Member of Parliament and continued his assault on Fisher’s ideas from there."

Fisher had directed many suggestions at Churchill in the correspondence they maintained since their first meeting. It would be too much to say he was Churchill’s eminence grise, but Churchill adopted many of the old admiral’s proposals: the creation of a naval staff; arming Britain’s battleships with 15-inch guns; and most important, the switch from coal to oil for battleships. Oil added speed and eased the logistical burden on British sailors, who during refueling had to become coal miners in the bowels of colliers. Fisher had devoted his usual fervor to this effort, especially when he learned the German Navy was working toward a similar goal. “They have killed 15 men in experiments with oil engines and we have not killed one!” he wrote. “And a damned fool of an English politician told me the other day that he thinks that creditable to us.”¹²

Churchill had seen in his correspondence more than once the other side of the Fisher personality, when Churchill went against his advice. “A Royal pimp” was how he described Churchill when the latter appointed officers well connected with the King. “I must consider you have betrayed the Navy,” he told the First Lord on another occasion. Churchill was enough of an egoist himself to withstand the gales of the mercurial old admiral. He recognized the genius beneath the vitriol. In 1914, Churchill, in need of a new First Sea Lord for the third time, came calling on Fisher, then 73. The old admiral displayed not a little reluctance but finally accepted the offer.¹³

Aviation Pioneer

Churchill was re-creating the British Navy to fight a modern and mechanized war at sea. The conversion to oil was to be accomplished in the naval programs for 1912-1914. It was a large gamble, not least because of the roiled political constituencies—Welsh coal had powered the fleet— but also because Britain would need to find sources of oil to fuel that fleet.

Churchill discovered that no plan existed for transporting the British Expeditionary Force to the continent, so he drew one up. The fleet had no sequestered anchorage, so he found it one at Scapa Flow. He improved life below decks, increasing pay and improving accommodations, and was popular with forecastle opinion. The First Lord also would try to work out some of the technical problems afflicting torpedo use. As he soon outlined the use on land of something called a “tank,” he found a new cause: naval aviation. In 1912 he created the Royal Naval Air Service to provide aerial protection and reconnaissance and to augment British aviation in general. He coined the term “seaplane” and introduced “flight” as a collective noun for a group of sorties. And he insisted that references to naval air service be “the most honourable, as it is the most dangerous a young Englishman can adopt.” The Army had wanted its aviation branch restricted to reconnaissance and avoiding air battle. That suited Churchill not at all: he wanted the Navy version to use aircraft far more aggressively, and bombing and machine-gunnery became part of training.¹⁴

Against the desperate importuning of family and friends, Churchill determined to become a pilot himself. He had until then been flying with instructors in their rickety craft, and they were appalled to learn he wanted ultimately to solo. No instructor wanted the responsibility of putting the British First Lord of the Admiralty, scion of one of the most famous political names in England, up in one of his crates on his own. After countless pleas from his wife, Churchill ultimately relented and abandoned his fledgling career as an aviator.

War and Aftermath

None of the preparations Churchill and others made prevented the Great War, but they at least ensured Britain did not lose it at sea. There were naval escapades in far-flung locations, and one great engagement, the Battle of Jutland, the only naval battle of that war. It was fought to a draw but rendered the German fleet strategically irrelevant for the remainder of the war. Meanwhile, the hecatombs on the fields of France multiplied. Churchill, sitting among Liberal politicians he later described as being completely unfamiliar with war, occupied a strong position. He was one of the few with a large amount of military experience, and he had free rein to sculpt his plans into reality. At one point he created an embryonic naval infantry, the Royal Naval Division, and brought it to Antwerp with him in the early days of the war, trying personally to buck up the Belgians. He even offered to resign his post as First Lord to help organize the defense.

But the stalemate on land dominated all thinking. The Churchill-Fisher connection became troubled, and it flared out in the early days of the Gallipoli campaign, a failed attempt to force the Dardanelles with ships. As First Lord, Churchill was accountable, and a newly formed coalition government found no place for him. Fisher already had departed over disagreements on Dardanelles strategy. The graves of individual careers, however lustrous, are as nothing compared to the graves of the millions of soldiers who died during that war. But the epitaph to Churchill’s early term as First Lord must fairly include the revolution he wrought on a reluctant and reactionary naval establishment. Lord Horatio Kitchener, a British Army icon whose formidable form had graced many a recruiting poster, consoled a departing Churchill with the words, “Well, there is one thing at any rate they cannot take from you. The fleet was ready.”