After firing, the ship steamed close to the targets so that the royal couple could see the results for themselves. The King was so pleased that he climbed inside both turrets to congratulate the gunners. Fisher, Scott, Jellicoe, and Bacon, all of whom were aboard, all with much at stake in the Dreadnought, were exultant. The Queen was excited and asked that the targets be hoisted aboard and displayed like trophies on the fantail so that she could take snapshots. (Later, when the Dreadnought returned to Portsmouth, steaming past other battleships with her targets displayed, there were grumbles that Bacon was “a cheap swaggerer.”)26
From the beginning, the Germans had been curious about the development of the Dreadnought. Their curiosity was heightened by the unusual secrecy surrounding all details connected with the ship. The Times noted “the air of mystery27 in which she had been officially enveloped and which is still to be maintained.” The key details did leak out. The 1905 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships reported that the new ship would be laid down before the end of that year, that she would be an all-big-gun ship with 12-inch guns, and that she would be powered by turbines which would give her a speed of 21 knots. Jane’s was impressed: “It is hardly too much28 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 battleworthiness to any two, probably to three, of most of the ships now afloat.”
This, of course, included German ships, and Admiral Tirpitz and the German Admiralty paid careful attention. In December 1904, even as Fisher was announcing the formation of the Committee on Design, Admiral Carl Coeper, the German Naval Attaché in London, was reporting to Berlin that Vickers Limited, a British shipbuilding firm, was drawing plans for a new battleship armed with ten or twelve 12-inch guns. The Kaiser noted Coeper’s news approvingly, scribbling on the dispatch: “In my opinion,29 this is the armament of the future.”
Despite the Kaiser’s opinion, his navy was bound on a different course. As the Dreadnought was emerging from the drawing board, Tirpitz was launching the Deutschland, the first of five new German battleships which, with their 13,400 tons, four 11-inch and fourteen 6.7-inch guns, and 18-knot speed, were inferior even to the British pre-dreadnoughts Lord Nelson and Agamemnon. To follow the Deutschland class, Tirpitz was thinking of two larger ships of sixteen thousand tons with eight 11-inch guns and twelve 7.6-inch guns, but beyond this limit in size and tonnage he could not go. The obstacle was the depth of the Kiel Canal, the path by which the fleet shuttled between the North Sea and the Baltic. It was a cruel choice: either the ships remained the same size or the canal would have to be enlarged. And redigging the canal would require years of effort and millions of marks. As a result, when confirmation of the size, speed, and armament of the Dreadnought reached Berlin, something close to panic ensued. Admiral Müller, subsequently Chief of the Naval Cabinet, wrote to Tirpitz on the subject on February 8, 1905. Müller was a waffler and, typically, he explored both sides of the argument and then hopped back up on the fence: “If there were no natural obstacles,30 we should be bound to choose the very large ship of the line as the type for the future.... But we are faced with a natural obstacle: the Kiel Canal. One might indeed say that the concentration of power in a 17,000 ton or 18,000 ton ship is so very important that we must do without the canal rather than the big ships. But I do not value the big ships as highly as this.”
Tirpitz knew better, and his decision, not made easily, was to build bigger ships and to enlarge the canal to accommodate them.fn3
When speculation about the new British ship first appeared in the winter of 1904–1905, Tirpitz was engaged in building the Deutschland class. The Deutschland herself had been laid down in 1903 and was launched in November 1904, before Fisher’s Committee on Design held its first meeting. Two more ships, Hannover and Pommern, had been laid down in 1904 and were launched in September and December 1905 respectively, as Dreadnought’s own keel was being laid and construction begun. The fourth and fifth ships of this now hopelessly obsolete class, Schlesien and Schleswig-Holstein, were laid down in 1905 and launched in May and December 1906. Although by the latter date H.M.S. Dreadnought had been commissioned, Tirpitz doggedly went ahead and finished all five ships. The Deutschlands were thus brought into service over a two-year period, 1906 to 1908, when the Dreadnought was already proving herself at sea and nine additional dreadnought ships were under construction for the British Navy.
An even better measure of the disarray in Berlin can be seen in the timing of Tirpitz’s own dreadnought program. In July 1906, when the British Dreadnought was already in the water fitting out for sea trials, Tirpitz laid the keel of Germany’s first all-big-gun battleship, S.M.S. Nassau, of 18,900 tons and twelve 11-inch guns. Then, suddenly, Tirpitz reversed himself. On orders from Berlin, all work on the new ship at Wilhelmshaven was halted; the workmen were commanded to lay down their tools and walk away. This hiatus, while German designers struggled to obtain and analyze details of the Dreadnought, lasted an entire year. Not until July 1907 was work resumed on the Nassau. At that point, Tirpitz plunged forward. In the same month, besides resuming work on the Nassau, he laid the keels of two more dreadnoughts, Westfalen and Posen, and a month later, in August, the keel of a fourth sister, S.M.S. Rheinland, was laid down in Stettin. Nevertheless, in terms of time lost, the damage was done. For twelve long months, the Imperial German Navy had not driven a single rivet into this new class of supership.
Despite her triumphs, the Dreadnought and Fisher were assailed from many sides. The brilliant achievement was declared to be, not a stroke of genius, but a horrendous blunder. By enormous effort and at vast expense over many years, Britain had built an overwhelming supremacy in pre-dreadnought battleships. Now, charged Fisher’s critics, at the whim of a foolish First Sea Lord, she had thrown it all away. By introducing a new class of ship so powerful that all previous battleships were instantly obsolete, she had doomed the long lines of King Edwards, Canopuses, and Majestics—forty battleships in all. Germany was to be given a chance to begin a new race with Britain for naval supremacy on equal terms.
Protests poured into the Admiralty, rang in the House of Commons, inundated the press. “The whole British Fleet32 was... morally scrapped and labeled obsolete at the moment when it was at the zenith of its efficiency and equal not to two but practically to all the other navies of the world combined,” roared Admiral of the Fleet Sir Frederick Richards, a former First Sea Lord. David Lloyd George, a member of the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, denounced the Dreadnought as “a piece of wanton33 and profligate ostentation” and thunderously demanded to know why Fisher had not left well enough alone. “We said, ‘Let there be34 dreadnoughts,’” declared the fiery Welshman. “What for? We did not require them. Nobody was building them and if anyone had started building them, we, with our greater shipbuilding resources, could have built them faster than any country in the world.”
There were conceptual arguments from naval personages such as Sir William White, who had designed most of Britain’s pre-dreadnought battleships, and Lord Charles Beresford, a popular admiral and Member of Parliament. White complained that building dreadnoughts was “putting all one’s naval eggs35 into one or two vast, costly, majestic but vulnerable baskets.” Better to have a greater number of smaller ships, he argued, because the loss of one in battle meant a smaller fractional reduction in fighting strength. There were practical complaints from serving officers about design mistakes. Lieutenant K.G.B. Dewar, a gunnery officer, could not imagine the thinking of the designer who had placed the forward tripod mast, which carried the fire-control station, behind and not in front of the forward funnel. This unfortunate juxtaposition ensured that when Lieutenant Dewar was sitting aloft on the mast trying to use his binoculars or telescope to spot the fall of shells, he would receive the full blast of black smoke pouring out of the forward funnel directly into his eyes and lungs.
As well as he could, Fisher ignored the politicians, but at White
, Beresford, and his naval antagonists he roared defiance. “I wish to God36 I could bite them,” he wrote of his enemies on May 12, 1905. “I will if I get a chance.” He rebutted the “too many eggs in too few baskets” argument, saying that bigger, stronger ships were not only more dangerous to the enemy but more survivable. Larger ships could carry greater guns and more armor; large hulls could be designed to better resist torpedo attack and enclose more powerful engines, thus giving higher potential speed. Besides, Fisher declared, all these advantages were being obtained without actually increasing either the size or the cost of the Dreadnought markedly over the Lord Nelsons. For an increase of only 1,500 tons and 10 percent more money, he was equipping the navy with a ship two or three times as powerful.
Against one of Beresford’s arguments—that Dreadnoughts should not be built because they would not fit into Britain’s existing drydocks—Fisher turned withering scorn: “It should clearly37 be borne in mind that the docks and harbors exist for our ships, not the ships for the docks. If the necessity for larger ships be shown, the other expenditure which they entail must be faced, for otherwise, if we continue to build ships only because they will go into the existing docks, we shall not require any docks at all—in the day of action our ships will all go to the bottom.”
One objection, Dewar’s complaint about smoke in the eyes of the fire controllers, was acted upon and in the seven new battleships which followed Dreadnought, the forward mast was placed in front of the funnel. Then, inexplicably, in Colossus, Hercules, Orion, Thunderer, Monarch, Conqueror, and the battle cruiser Lion, the original error was repeated. Dreadnought, obviously, was not always steaming directly into the wind and smoke was not always pouring directly into the face of her fire-control spotters. In 1907 target practice, the ship scored twenty-five hits in forty rounds fired at eight thousand yards, which ranked her third in the fleet. But in weight of shell thrown at the target—a crucial factor in battle—the Dreadnought stood unchallengeably supreme. In eight minutes, she hurled 21,250 pounds of shells from her guns, 75 percent more than any other British battleship.
These statistics still failed to convince Sir William White. In 1908, he wrote an article, “The Cult of the Monster Warship,” which reiterated his opposition. But he was fighting a losing battle; more dreadnoughts, British and foreign, were sliding down the ways. Noting his views, the Observer commented dryly: “When Sir William White suggests38 that both the United States and Germany are foolish and deluded powers, slavishly copying the errors of a blind [Admiralty] Board in Whitehall, he surely takes up the position of the dissenting juryman who had never met eleven such obstinate fellows in his life.”
In the end, Fisher and the Admiralty built the Dreadnought not only because they believed they were right, but because they believed it was their duty. As Bacon put it: “Knowing as we did39 that the Dreadnought was the best type to build, should we knowingly have built the second-best type ship? What would have been the verdict of the country if Germany had... built a Dreadnought while we were building Lord Nelsons, and then had forced a war on us and beaten our fleet? What would have been the verdict of the country if a subsequent inquiry had elicited the fact that those responsible at the Admiralty for the safety of the nation had deliberately recommended the building of second class ships?” Bacon’s own suggestion was that the guilty parties be hanged from lampposts in Trafalgar Square.fn4
Although Fisher’s design committee sat for only seven weeks, it produced plans not only for the Dreadnought, but for a second new type of revolutionary and controversial warship. This was the very large, very fast, heavily gunned, but lightly armored ship originally called a large armored cruiser and eventually known as the battle cruiser. Between 1906 and 1914, ten battle cruisers were constructed in Great Britain; across the North Sea, six were built for the High Seas Fleet. From the beginning, the battle cruisers captured the public imagination. They weighed as much as battleships (Dreadnought at 17,900 tons and Invincible at 17,250 tons were the two largest warships Britain had ever built up to that time), carried 12-inch battleship guns, and were extraordinarily fast. When they put to sea, with black smoke pouring from their funnels and waves curling back from their bows, with their turrets and long gun barrels training around towards a target, they were intimidating symbols of naval power. People began to think of them in simile. Their speed and huge guns called forth the image of great jungle cats, swift and deadly, with large shining claws. Others likened them to cavalry, a highly mobile force, hanging on the flanks of battle, ready to charge in for the kill. The most famous of the battle-cruiser admirals, the brave, impetuous Beatty, handled his ships like cavalry. In the navy and in society, he and his officers radiated the glamour of hussars, appearing more dashing than the captains of the plodding dreadnought battleships, the infantry of the sea, the backbone of the fleet. But despite their speed, their power, and their glamour, their beauty was flawed, and doom rolled over them at Jutland. On a single afternoon, four of these sixteen giants, three British and one German, went to the bottom of the sea.
Originally, these big, fast, powerful ships were intended as super-cruisers with the duties that cruisers had always had: scouting for the battle fleet, commerce raiding or hunting down enemy commerce raiders, patrol, and blockade. In sailing-ship days, the antecedent of the cruiser was the frigate. Nelson’s majestic three-deck ships-of-the-line, carrying eighty to one hundred guns, were too big, too slow, and too valuable to be risked for this kind of work, and frigates—smaller, faster, more versatile—were assigned these duties.
The frigate’s first and crucial mission was to be the eyes of her admiral, observing and reporting the size and movements of the enemy fleet. Speed was essential and, by carrying three masts and spreading almost as much canvas as a ship-of-the-line, a frigate was able to thrust her lighter hull through the water much faster than a larger, heavier ship. This enabled her to approach a hostile squadron while staying just out of range, to establish its numbers, course, and speed, and to return to her own admiral to tell him what she had learned. Once battle impended, the frigate withdrew. With her lighter timbers she was too thin-skinned to lie in the line of battle and her smaller guns could not contribute much to a heavy cannonade.
Ships evolved from wood to steel and propulsion changed from wind to steam, but admirals still needed the same information. The job of scouting was assigned to fast, lightly armored cruisers. By the 1890s, British cruisers had been given a second assignment, the protection of merchant shipping. France—still the potential enemy—had provoked Admiralty concern by suddenly launching a series of big cruisers capable of 21 knots. These ships were the brainchilds of a school of French admirals who, despairing that France would ever be able to match Britain battleship for battleship, concluded that the best way to bring down the maritime colossus was to unleash a pack of swift, deadly cruisers and torpedo boats that could attack and cripple Britain’s vulnerable overseas merchant trade.
British admirals grasped the threat. Their reaction was to produce the anticruiser cruiser, a ship even faster, stronger, and more heavily gunned, to hunt down and sink anything the French sent out. These ships, designed to fight, not simply to shadow and report, were given more armor and called armored cruisers. Class after class was designed, launched, and sent to sea: six ships of the Cressy class, 12,000 tons, laid down in 1898 and 1899; four ships of the Drake class, 14,100 tons, laid down in 1899; nine ships of the County class, 9,800 tons, laid down in 1900 and 1901; six ships of the Devonshire class, 10,850 tons, laid down in 1902; two ships of the Duke of Edinburgh class, 13,500 tons, laid down in 1903; four ships of the Warrior class, 13,550 tons, laid down in 1904; and finally three ships of the Minotaur class, 14,600 tons, whose design had been completed and funded by Parliament before Fisher took office and which were laid down in January and February 1905, even as his own design committee was sitting. In all, there were thirty-five of these British armored cruisers, some of them as big as or bigger than the Royal Sovereign and Maje
stic-class battleships. Yet no matter how big they got or how impressive they looked, they were never expected to fight battleships. Indeed, their own survival, like that of the frigates that preceded them, lay in keeping out of range of battleship guns.
This was Fisher’s understanding and purpose too, at least in the beginning. His first battle cruisers were intended to be the ultimate in armored cruisers, so fast and heavily gunned that they could overtake and destroy any other cruiser in the world. As early as March 1902, when he was Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Fisher wrote to Lord Selborne that he was working with Gard, the Chief Constructor of the Malta dockyard, on a design for an armored cruiser which would make all existing armored cruisers obsolete. Fisher called the hypothetical ship H.M.S. Perfection, and at the top of the list of her design characteristics he put “Full Power Speed of 25 knots.” In his letter, he wrote gleefully: “there would be no escape43 from her 25 knots.” Once Perfection put to sea, all other armored cruisers might as well head for the scrap heap: “A single fast armoured cruiser44 would lap them up like an armadillo let loose in an ant hill.... The decisive factor upon which the fate of the ants will thenceforth hang will not be the efficacy of their bite, but the speed of their legs.” In fact, Fisher advised Lord Selborne, he had already tested his theory in exercises at sea during his tour as Commander, North American Station, in the fast battleship Renown: “I on one occasion45 ‘mopped up’ all the cruisers one after another with my flagship the battleship Renown. The heavy swell and big seas had no corresponding effect on the big Renown as it had on the smaller... cruisers.”