The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (22 page)

Nelson’s successor was born in 1841 in Ceylon, where his father was first an army captain and then an unsuccessful tea planter. According to Fisher, his parents, whom he scarcely knew, were both very handsome: ‘Why I am ugly is one of those puzzles of physiology which are beyond finding out.’
³¹
And it is true that there was something strange, inscrutable, even savage about his face. ‘The full eye’, said Gardiner, ‘with its
curiously small pupil, the wide, full-lipped mouth, dropping mercilessly at the corners, the jaw jutting out a good-humoured challenge to the world, all proclaim a man who neither asks nor gives quarter.’ There were rumours for years that Fisher was part-Malay, which might, thought a German naval attaché, explain why he was so cunning and unscrupulous.
³²

God and country were Fisher’s key articles of faith. He believed that it was right and fitting that Britain should rule the world. God had protected his country as he had the fabled Lost Tribes of Israel who would one day return in triumph. ‘Do you know’, he once said, ‘that there are five keys to the world? The Straits of Dover, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Suez Canal, the Straits of Malacca, the Cape of Good Hope.
And every one of those keys we hold
. Aren’t we the lost tribes?’
³³
The Bible, the Old Testament in particular with its many battles, was his favourite reading and he went whenever he could to hear sermons. A visitor once called at his town house on a Sunday morning to be told, ‘The Captain has gone to Berkeley Chapel.’ ‘Will he be in this afternoon?’ the caller asked. ‘No, he said he was going to hear Canon Liddon at St. Paul’s.’ ‘Well, this evening?’ ‘In the evening he is going to Spurgeon’s Tabernacle.’
³⁴
Fisher also loved dancing and his wife and family, but the navy was his passion.

On its behalf, he waged war on inefficiency, laziness, and obstructiveness. He was known to sack incompetent subordinates on the spot. ‘None of us on his staff could be certain we would still have the job the next day,’ said one.
³⁵
When he became First Sea Lord, he was given a huge file on a dispute with the War Office over who should pay for some Highlanders’ spats which had got ruined by saltwater when the navy landed them on a beach. He threw the whole lot of paper on the fire in his office.
³⁶
He decided that he wanted a wireless telegraph on top of the Admiralty in Whitehall; the Post Office raised difficulties so one day six sailors simply appeared and swarmed up into a cupola and installed the necessary equipment.
³⁷

Fisher was, inevitably, a divisive figure within the navy and among its supporters. He was accused of playing favourites and of going too fast and too far in his reforms. Yet change was certainly needed. If Churchill did not actually mock the traditions of the Royal Navy as ‘rum, sodomy, and the lash’, the jibe was not far off. The navy had become
complacent and hidebound over the long decades of peace. It clung to old ways, because that is how things were done in Nelson’s day. Discipline was harsh; the cat-o’-nine tails, as it was known, could lay a man’s back bare in a few strokes. On his first day in the navy in 1854 the thirteen-year-old Fisher fainted when he saw eight men flogged.
³⁸
(The practice was finally abolished in 1879.) Ordinary sailors continued to sleep in hammocks and eat their staples of hardtack biscuits (often complete with weevils) and unidentifiable meat (and with their fingers). Training badly needed to be overhauled and updated; it did not make much sense after all to spend so much time on sailing when the ships were virtually all steam powered. Education, even for officers, was regarded as a necessary evil and merely to impart basic knowledge. Young officers were not properly educated or indeed encouraged to take an interest in such mundane matters as firing practice much less tactics and strategy. ‘Polo and pony-racing and amusements’, remembered an admiral of his early days in the service, ‘were more important than gun drill …’ Many senior officers actively disliked firing the guns because the smoke made the paintwork on the ships dirty.
³⁹
The navy had no war college to teach the arts of war, much less international relations or politics. Its senior commanders generally did not bother their heads with war plans although they were good at marshalling their ships for naval reviews or for carrying out elaborate manoeuvres (although in one of the great Victorian scandals Admiral Sir George Tryon sent his flagship the
Victoria
straight into the side of the
Camperdown
, sinking it along with 358 men).

Fisher’s reforms to the navy started before he became First Sea Lord. As commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean and then Second Sea Lord, he had done much to improve naval education including laying the foundations for a proper war college; he had insisted on sustained gunnery practice; and he had promoted and encouraged a band of bright young officers. ‘The increasing average age of our Admirals is appalling!’ he had told his superiors. ‘In a few years you’ll see them all going about with gouty shoes and hot-water bottles!’
⁴⁰
After 1904, when he held the highest command post in the navy, he set in motion even more sweeping changes. ‘We must have no tinkering!’ he wrote to a fellow reformer. ‘No pandering to sentiment! No regard for susceptibilities! No pity for anyone!’
⁴¹
In spite of protests from their officers, he
ruthlessly scrapped over 150 obsolete ships. He trimmed and reorganised shipyards to make them more efficient (and cheaper). He ensured that the neglected Naval Reserve Fleet have nucleus crews on board so that they could rapidly take their place on the seas in a crisis. His boldest piece of reorganisation was to bring much of the navy home from far-off posts and concentrate its ships, especially the most up-to-date, close to the British Isles. He amalgamated scattered squadrons so that there was one great Eastern Fleet based on Singapore, another at the Cape of Good Hope, one in the Mediterranean and two more, the Atlantic and the Channel, near at hand. Fisher’s redistribution of the navy meant that three-quarters of its force could be used if necessary against Germany. And following Nelson’s principle that ‘the battleground should be the drill ground’, the Atlantic and the Channel fleets made a practice of carrying out extensive manoeuvres in the North Sea.

As soon as he took over as First Sea Lord, Fisher set up a group to work on what was going to be his greatest innovation of all, a new super battleship. (It also drew up designs for a new heavy battlecruiser, the
Invincible
.) The idea of having a battleship which combined speed, heavy armour, and heavy, long-range guns was already in the air, partly because technology was now advanced enough to make it possible. New turbine engines, for example, could move heavier weights through the waters at high speeds. (In 1904 Cunard decided to put turbines into its new
Lusitania
and
Mauretania
, the largest passenger ships of their day.) In 1903 an Italian ship designer published an article outlining a possible design, which he described as ‘an ideal battleship for the Royal Navy’, and the Japanese, German, American and Russian navies were also known to be considering the possibilities for a new super battleship.
⁴²
The stunning Japanese victory over the Russian navy in the Tsushima Strait in May 1905 seemed to prove that the future of naval warfare lay with fast battleships, the new high-explosive shells and the big guns to deliver them. (The Japanese fleet used 12-inch (30.5cm) guns; the measurement refers to the muzzle diameter, which meant that they were firing very big shells indeed.)
⁴³
While Fisher has sometimes been criticised for taking the naval arms race to a new level by building ships which made every other type obsolete, it is difficult to see how the jump ahead could have been avoided.

The Fisher committee did its work with great dispatch and on 2
October 1905 the keel was laid for what was going to be HMS
Dreadnought
. It was formally launched by the king in February 1906 in the presence of huge and enthusiastic crowds. By the end of the year the ship was ready for service.
Dreadnought
, the first of a whole new class of battleships, was the Muhammad Ali of the seas – big, fast and deadly. The largest battleships to date had been some 14,000 tons;
Dreadnought
was 18,000. Where top steaming speed had been eighteen knots,
Dreadnought
could do twenty-one and more with its turbine engine (made by Charles Parsons, who had so scandalised the navy by showing off his
Turbinia
at the Diamond Jubilee naval review). Fisher considered speed even more important a protection than armour but
Dreadnought
had plenty of that as well, some 5,000 tons above and below its waterline. And like Muhammad Ali it could sting like a bee. It carried ten 12-inch guns as well as batteries of smaller guns and, since the guns were mounted on turrets,
Dreadnought
and her successors could virtually fire on the whole area around them. As
Jane’s Fighting Ships
said in 1905: ‘It is hardly too much to say that, given her speed, gun power, range and the smashing effect of the concentrated force of heavy projectiles, the
Dreadnought
should easily be equal in battle-worthiness to any two, probably to three, of most of the ships now afloat.’
⁴⁴

Although the immediate impetus behind the move to dreadnoughts and heavy cruisers seems to have been fear of the combined power of the French and Russian navies, the British naval planners increasingly saw the German navy as their main enemy of the future.
⁴⁵
Relations were starting to improve with France and Russia but they continued to worsen with Germany. British planners assumed that, whatever the official German line, the German fleet was designed for action in the North Sea; it had a restricted cruising radius, for example, and cramped crew quarters which made long voyages difficult. It did not help either that the Kaiser carelessly signed a letter to his second cousin the tsar as the Admiral of the Atlantic.
⁴⁶
Fisher certainly felt no doubts: as he said in 1906 as the naval race with Germany was heating up, ‘Our only probable enemy is Germany. Germany keeps her
whole
Fleet always concentrated within a few hours of England. We must therefore keep a Fleet twice as powerful concentrated within a few hours of Germany.’
⁴⁷
From 1907 the Admiralty’s war plans focussed almost entirely on the possibility of a naval war with Germany in the seas around Britain. The
Committee of Imperial Defence, set up to co-ordinate British strategy and advise the Prime Minister, concurred: as it said in 1910, ‘In order to avoid exposing our fleets to the risk of suffering defeat in detail, naval action in remote waters might therefore have to be postponed until by the clearing of the situation on home waters adequate naval force could be brought to bear.’
⁴⁸

To ease the financial burden of the navy the British government looked to the empire. New ships were launched with ‘colonial wine’ and frequently given names such as the
Hindustan
or the
Good Hope
.
⁴⁹
The self-governing ‘White’ dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and later South Africa, proved curiously unmoved.
⁵⁰
In 1902 they collectively contributed some £150,000 and, even after considerable pressure from the British government, that only climbed to £328,000 in the following years.
⁵¹
Canada, the senior dominion, did not want to contribute anything at all, arguing that it had no immediate enemies. ‘They are an unpatriotic, grasping people’, said Fisher, ‘who only stick by us for the good they can get out of us.’
⁵²
It was to take the intensifying of the naval race with Germany to change minds in the empire. In 1909, both New Zealand and Australia started their own dreadnoughts and in 1910 Canada moved cautiously towards establishing its own navy and bought two cruisers from the British.

In Britain itself, another key part of government, the Foreign Office, was also coming to share the navy’s view that Germany was a menace. Where the older generation which had grown up in the days of splendid isolation still hoped to keep Britain on civil if not friendly terms with all the other powers, the younger one was increasingly anti-German. Sanderson, the Permanent Undersecretary between 1894 and 1906, wrote in 1902 to Sir Frank Lascelles, the British ambassador in Berlin, that there was a worrying tendency among his colleagues to think badly of the Germans: ‘There is a settled dislike of them – and an impression that they are ready and anxious to play us a shabby trick. It is an inconvenient state of things for there are a good many questions in which it is important for both countries that we should work cordially together.’
⁵³
Rising stars such as Francis Bertie, to be ambassador in Paris from 1905 to 1918, Charles Hardinge, Permanent Undersecretary from 1906 to 1910, or Arthur Nicolson, ambassador in Russia during the same period and then Permanent Undersecretary (and also
father of Harold Nicolson), were all deeply suspicious of Germany.
⁵⁴
Those who did not share the prevailing anti-German view in the decade before 1914 tended to be marginalised or retired. In 1908, in what was a key change, Sir Frank Lascelles, who had been British ambassador in Berlin since 1895 and who strongly supported friendship with Germany, was replaced by Sir Edward Goschen who was convinced that Germany was hostile to Britain.