Fisher was revolutionizing the navy. All of his ideas, many of them hatched in the Mediterranean, elaborated and polished at Portsmouth, suddenly became the marching orders of the Fleet. Fisher’s first reform, having to do with personnel and the selection and training of young officers, already had been announced in December 1902 when he was Second Sea Lord and put into effect under the Admiral’s own eyes during his year at Portsmouth. The next three were announced simultaneously in an Admiralty Memorandum issued on December 6, 1904, when Fisher had been First Sea Lord for only six weeks. They were sweeping and interlocking; one could not be done without the others; there was not enough money and there were not enough men. Fisher hammered on this theme of interdependency: this is “the house that Jack built,”10 he declared, and “so we must have no tinkering! No pandering to sentiment! No regard for susceptibilities! No pity for anyone! We must be ruthless, relentless, and remorseless! And we must therefore have The Scheme! The Whole Scheme! And nothing but The Scheme!!!” The fifth of Fisher’s great reforms, the one which had the most dramatic effect on the naval balance of power and the prewar diplomatic history of Europe—the one by which the era came to be known—was the decision to build a fast, all-big-gun battleship, H.M.S. Dreadnought.
All of Fisher’s reforms were controversial. The one which attracted the least opposition, because the argument in its favor was so unchallengeably logical, was the redistribution of the Fleet. For decades, British fleets and squadrons had been scattered around the globe. In 1904, there still were nine, including squadrons in China, the South Atlantic, and North America and the West Indies. Some of these outlying fleets were formidable: the China Squadron possessed five battleships. But all were much weaker than the fleets of the local powers which occupied those regions. The British China Squadron, although far superior to the naval forces of any other European power in the western Pacific, was woefully inferior to the navy of Japan—but in 1902, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance had been signed primarily so that Japan would look after British naval interests in the Far East. The North American Squadron, unassisted, could not have begun to deal with the growing strength of Theodore Roosevelt’s United States Navy—but war between the two Anglo-Saxon powers seemed remote, if not unthinkable. The South Atlantic Squadron was weaker than either the navy of Brazil or the navy of Argentina—but neither Brazil nor Argentina seemed likely to attack Great Britain; both, in fact, were soon to place orders for battleships in British shipyards.
Closer to home, British fleets seemed oddly distributed. The Mediterranean Fleet, with the twelve most powerful battleships, was the navy’s premier striking force, available for war against France. But the Foreign Office had been negotiating for a year, and was soon to conclude, a colonial entente with France, greatly diminishing the prospects of such a conflict. Meanwhile, alarm was spreading about the rise of the German Navy. To meet the growing threat of the High Seas Fleet, the Royal Navy deployed the Channel Fleet, whose responsibilities and cruising grounds included everything north of Gibraltar. This fleet had eight somewhat older battleships. To cover the Home Islands when the Channel Fleet was at Gibraltar, three days away, the navy had the Home Fleet, made up of eight even older battleships.
Fisher, who since the autumn of 1902 had looked upon Germany as Great Britain’s most probable naval opponent, moved quickly to redistribute the Fleet so that the latest and most powerful ships would be concentrated against the most dangerous potential enemy. Four new battleships were withdrawn from the Mediterranean Fleet and attached to the Home Fleet, which was renamed the Channel Fleet and told to remain close to the Channel. When, in 1905, the five battleships were withdrawn from China, they too were attached to the Channel Fleet, whose strength then rose to seventeen battleships. The former Channel Fleet, now redesignated the Atlantic Fleet, was based at Gibraltar and assigned eight battleships, which could steam either north towards home waters or eastward into the Mediterranean, depending on where they were needed. The Mediterranean Fleet, its strength now reduced by one third, was instructed to think in terms of fighting a war alongside France, not against her. The China, North American, and South Atlantic squadrons were disbanded and their useful ships, mostly cruisers, reassigned. Naturally, the admirals commanding these flotillas were not pleased. The Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet protested violently against the reduction of his force. The Admiral of the China Squadron argued against sending home his five battleships; ordered to comply, he begged to be allowed to keep at least one battleship as his flagship for reasons of prestige. The Admiralty insisted that all five come home and instructed him to come home with them.
The criticism applied to Fisher’s redistribution of the Fleet was mild compared to the censure he took for his next reform: the scrapping of scores of useless and obsolete ships. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Pax Britannica had been policed around the world by British warships. Scattered around the globe were dozens of small, elderly gunboats and tired Second- and Third-Class cruisers, usually at anchor in a sleepy harbor, occasionally putting out to sea to parade the White Ensign along the coast and remind the natives that behind this little ship lay the mighty battleships and armored cruisers of the greatest navy on earth. To Fisher, this policy of soaking up crews and money in ships which, he said contemptuously, were “too weak to fight11 and too slow to run away” was absurd. The smallest gunboat cost the Admiralty £12,000 a year to maintain. Each had a captain, officers, and seamen, whose skills were going to waste and whose training was lagging every month they were kept away from the fighting fleet.
Not all the ships disdained by Fisher were small or on foreign stations. There were battleships, too slow and lightly armored to be allowed to wander within the range of enemy guns, each costing £100,000 a year to keep in service. The five battleships of the Admiral class, “magnificent on paper,12 splendid when weight of broadside is taken as a criterion, but in reality... absolutely useless for fighting,” were prime examples. All had to go. “The first duty of the Navy13 is to be instantly ready to strike the enemy and this can only be accomplished by concentrating our strength into ships of undoubted fighting value, ruthlessly discarding those that have become obsolete,” declared the new First Sea Lord.
The blow fell ruthlessly. One hundred and fifty-four ships were struck off the active list “with one courageous stroke14 of the pen,” as an admiring Prime Minister Balfour described it. Ninety of these ships, classified by Fisher as “sheep,” were condemned as totally useless and put up for sale as scrap. Thirty-seven were classified as “llamas” and transferred to future peripheral wartime duties such as laying mines. Twenty-seven, including four old battleships, became “goats,” allowed to retain their guns but to be the object of no further expense for repair or maintenance. Both the “llamas” and the “goats” were to be laid up without crews in British home ports. A few gunboats—Woodcocks, Woodlarks, Sandpipers and Snipes—were retained for service on Chinese rivers and along the west coast of Africa.
The scrapping policy brought reproof. The Foreign Office disliked having the the navy unavailable to its diplomats. Fisher’s reply: “It appears necessary to repeat,15 as the Foreign Office pays no attention to this point, that visits of powerful ships and squadrons have largely taken the place of desultory cruising by small, isolated vessels and that, so far from injuring, this has greatly enhanced the prestige of British naval power.” More serious was the criticism of many admirals, some on active duty, others—described by a pro-Fisher journalist as the “Bath Chair Flotilla”—retired16 admirals who complained that the navy was being deprived of ships which would be essential in wartime. No matter how weak or slow, they argued, old Second- and Third-Class cruisers could be used to escort British merchant ships and to mop up enemy merchantmen. Fisher’s rebuttal was that the most likely commerce raiders of a future war were armored cruisers which could annihilate British Second- and Third-Class cruisers with minimum effort. The admirals could not know it, but Fisher had a remedy for German armo
red cruisers firmly fixed in his mind: it was to be the battle cruiser, larger, faster, and more powerful than any armored cruiser in the world. These revolutionary ships, which were to become the Royal Navy’s Invincible-class battle cruisers, were part of Fisher’s interlocking plan—“The Scheme! The Whole Scheme! And nothing but the Scheme!”
The next part of Fisher’s Scheme evolved coherently from the scrapping policy. Bringing home 154 ships provided the navy with a large surplus of officers and seamen. Fisher used them to establish a fleet of reserve ships ready for war, each carrying a nucleus crew. Under the previous system, ships which were not fully manned and in commission were assigned to the Reserve Fleet, where they were laid up in harbors without crews, with only maintenance parties poking about. Upon mobilization, entirely new crews from the Naval Reserve were to be brought on board. These officers and men, wholly unfamiliar with the ships, would have to learn the idiosyncrasies of the guns, the peculiarities of the engines—even each others’ names—as they were putting out to sea to face the enemy. On the rare occasion when Reserve ships were sent to sea to drill, the results were appalling: frequent engine breakdowns, and gunnery results the Admiralty preferred not to release.
Fisher’s purpose was to bring the Reserve Fleet to war readiness. He did so by manning the most useful ships in that fleet with nucleus crews: that is, two fifths of the vessel’s normal wartime complement of officers and men. These men, including the specialists in fire control, gunnery, and engineering necessary to fight the ship effectively, lived aboard the ships and became thoroughly acquainted with their turrets and boiler rooms. When the alarm was sounded for either war or drill, the remainder of the crew was drawn from the large numbers of Regular Navy personnel in naval schools or shore barracks nearby. This fleshing out was necessary to fight the ship, but the hundreds of men engaged in passing coal to the furnaces or projectiles and powder to the guns did not need the training or familiarity with the ship required of the nucleus-crew specialists. Four times a year, exercises were held in which nucleus-crew ships took aboard hundreds of men within a few hours and put to sea for two weeks of maneuver with the active squadrons of the fleet. Even in harbor, care was taken to preserve the psychological impression among nucleus crews that they were part of a war fleet, instantly ready to sail. They were not tied up to quays and jetties with gangplanks permanently down, as Reserve Fleet ships had been in the past. Instead, nucleus-crew ships were moored far out, to break the link with land and let the men feel the tug of the sea. One officer, visiting a group of nucleus-crew ships lying between Sheerness and Chatham, looked out and could see nothing but water and mud flats. He asked an old petty officer whether he did not mind being moored so far from shore. “No, bless you, sir,”17 replied the old sea dog. “What the eye can’t see, the ’eart don’t long for.” Fisher was delighted by the results of his nucleus-crew system and described it as “the keystone of our preparedness for war.” The whole fleet, he said, was now “instantly ready... Suddenness18 is now the characteristic feature of sea fighting!... Readiness for sudden action has to be the keynote of all we do!” Balfour was enormously impressed by the Admiral’s new creation, which, he declared, “has augmented the fighting power19 of the British Fleet not once or twice, but threefold.”
Within five months of becoming First Sea Lord, Fisher acted to correct the deplorable state of fleet gunnery. The navy had been stung when, in testimony before a Royal Commission investigating the errors of the Boer War, a British general had described the marksmanship of the naval gunners sent to help in the defense of Ladysmith as something “which would have disgraced20 a girls’ school.” Fisher was furious, the more so because he knew it was true. From Portsmouth, he had recalled Percy Scott, who had served under him in the Mediterranean and who had demonstrated rapid, accurate fire, and had given him command of the gunnery school H.M.S. Excellent. In March 1905, as First Sea Lord, Fisher created the new post of Inspector of Target Practice, appointed Scott, and told him to do for the fleet what he had done for the ships under his own command. That same autumn, Scott introduced competitive firing into the fleet. By 1908, ships were hitting the target more often at six thousand and seven thousand yards than they previously had at two thousand yards. Conventional officers disliked Scott, who was small, cocky, and obsessed with gunnery. Fisher backed him nonetheless. “I don’t care if he drinks21, gambles, and womanizes,” the First Lord said. “He hits the target.”
Fisher’s reforms brought not only more efficiency to the Fleet, but greater economy in naval expenditure. When Fisher took over the Admiralty, the Navy Estimates were continually rising. From £27.5 million in 1900, they had increased to £36.8 million in 1904, the year before Fisher arrived. Even those who favored a powerful navy were uneasy with this relentless growth. “Unless retrenchment22 comes from within, there will come upon us an irresistible wave of reaction which will do infinite mischief,” The Times’ naval correspondent, Thursfield, wrote to Fisher, adding, “It haunts me like a nightmare.” Fisher entirely agreed. He rejected the principle that “fighting efficiency23 is inalienably associated with big Estimates! The exact opposite is the real truth! Lavish naval expenditure, like human high living, leads to the development of parasitical bacilli which prey on and diminish the vitality.... Parasites in the shape of non-fighting ships, non-combatant personnel, and unproductive shore expenditure must be extirpated like cancer—cut clean out.” Fisher went after the bacilli, great and small. Scrapping obsolete ships saved £845,000 a year in repair costs alone and permitted the discharge of six thousand redundant dockyard workers. He discovered that the navy kept ten thousand extra chairs in stock. “There is only so much24 money available for the Navy,” he roared. “If you put it into chairs that can’t fight, you take it away from ships and men who can.” He was told that an “amazing array of tumblers25” was kept on hand. “The surgeon had his own particular pattern of tumbler, and the purser his, and they had to be stored in enormous quantities so that neither the pursar nor the surgeon should run the horrid risk of being short of his own particular tumbler.” To their dismay, the First Sea Lord insisted that both professionals drink from similar goblets. Fisher’s eagle eye brought dramatic results: in the 1905 Naval Estimates, £3.5 million was lopped off the previous year’s expenses; in 1906, the Estimates dropped another £1.5 million; in 1907, still another £450,000. By 1907, the navy was costing the government and the taxpayer £31.4 million a year, which was £5.4 million less than it had cost when Fisher took office. The budget was reduced, not only as the fighting power of the British Fleet was augmented “not once or twice, but threefold”; it was done while Fisher was building a new ship and a new class of ship that would revolutionize naval warfare. This ship, which gave its name to all subsequent battleships from every nation, was H.M.S. Dreadnought.
Chapter 26
The Building of the Dreadnought
A battleship is a floating platform for naval guns designed to destroy enemy ships. Assuming equal marksmanship on both sides, the ship with the larger number of guns, firing heavier shells at longer range, will prevail. Speed is also a factor, giving a captain the power to choose the moment of action—whether to pursue or withdraw. In battle in mid-ocean, where an enemy ship cannot flee to a friendly harbor and where there is no hiding place other than in rain clouds, fog, or darkness, destruction of the slower, weaker vessel is almost inevitable. Range is important because a ship which can fire and score hits out of range of the guns of her enemy is fighting a helpless foe. Range, size of the guns, and destructive power go hand in hand; the larger the shell, the greater the range, and the heavier its penetrating and blast effect.
When she was designed and built, the Dreadnought was the supreme embodiment of these concepts. Her main armament consisted of ten 12-inch guns, each capable of hurling an 850-pound projectile. If all eight guns of the Dreadnought’s broadside fired simultaneously, 6,800 pounds of steel and high explosive would plummet down on an enemy. Until she appeared, standard
battleship armament in all major navies had consisted of four 12-inch guns, supported by a mixed battery of guns of smaller calibers. The summit of this earlier design had been reached in Dreadnought’s immediate predecessors, Lord Nelson and Agamemnon, designed to carry four 12-inch and ten 9.2-inch guns. At three thousand or four thousand yards, ranges which the smaller guns could manage, these ships were formidable. But Fisher, since his days with the Mediterranean Fleet, had dreamed of six thousand, eight thousand, even ten thousand yards. At these distances, all previous British battleships and all foreign battleships could fire only four guns.
The genesis of the Dreadnought traditionally is traced to an Italian, Vittorio Cuniberti, the chief constructor of the Italian Navy. Cuniberti had already designed four light battleships, the Vittorio Emanuele class, each carrying two 12-inch and twelve 8-inch guns, for his own navy. When his design for a larger, more heavily armed ship for the Italian Fleet was rejected, he received permission to write an article for Jane’s Fighting Ships, calling for a 17,000-ton ship carrying twelve 12-inch guns. The article appeared in the 1903 annual edition of the publication and although it galvanized naval thinking on the matter of the all-big-gun ship, it may not have had quite the pioneer effect claimed for it at the time. Several powers, including the United States and Japan, were moving in the direction of larger, faster, heavier-gunned ships. In the spring of 1904, the U.S. Navy presented to Congress an appropriation request for two 16,000-ton ships each carrying eight 12-inch guns. The Americans moved slowly; the South Carolina and Michigan were not authorized until the spring of 1905 and not laid down until the autumn of 1906. Japan laid down two large 20,000-ton, 20-knot “semi-dreadnoughts” (they carried four 12-inch and twelve 10-inch guns) in the spring of 1905.