Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

  The Dreadnought's return to England was marred by new troubles. Bacon came down with malarial fever of 103 degrees, a recurrence of an illness contracted as a young officer in a naval landing-party expedition against African headhunters in 1897. One of the ship's boiler tubes burst, injuring three men. And the ship almost ran out of coal. Steaming nonstop for ten days across the Atlantic, the Dreadnought arrived at Spithead down to her last eighteen tons, enough for about four hours of steaming.

  I Upon her return to England, the Dreadnought became the flagship of the Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet. In the spring of 1907, she made a series of visits to ports around the British Isles, and in June she traveled across the North Sea to Bergen, Norway. From July 30 to August 7 she was at Spithead for the annual naval review and there, on August 5, 1907, King Edward paid her another visit, this time bringing the Queen and the Prince of Wales. With Fisher standing at his elbow on the bridge, the King watched the hoisting of both the Royal Standard and his personal flag as an Admiral of the Fleet. At ten a.m. the ship weighed anchor and steamed down the lines; of anchored battleships and cruisers whose cheering crews lined the rails. Reaching the sea, the Dreadnought increased speed to twenty knots. A party of journalists invited on board were surprised by the absence of vibration. The naval correspondent of The Times went below to the starboard engine room and subsequently told his readers: "It was far cooler than any other engine room I have visited; there were no moving parts visible except the governors of the two turbines and there was very little noise. As to the engineers in charge, they seemed to have very little or nothing to do except to stand by for orders from the bridge."

  The main purpose of the excursion was to demonstrate to the royal party the firing of the battleship's 12-inch guns. Once south of the Isle of Wight, the Dreadnought's two after turrets trained around to slightly ahead of amidships and then, with the monarchs watching from the bridge, opened fire. The Queen, peering aft at the muzzles of the guns, was startled by the flame and blast as the projectiles belched forth. In less than three minutes, twelve rounds had been fired, six by each turret, and the exercise was over. The targets, two floating canvas structures fourteen feet by fourteen feet, were only a mile and a half away, the range being drastically cut so that the King and Queen could observe the shells either striking the targets or falling into the sea. In spite of the close range, the marksmanship was impressive: of twelve rounds fired, eleven hit the target and nine were bull's-eyes. This shooting was even more impressive to The Times' correspondent when he discovered that the firing had been done, not by specially picked gunnery marksmen, but by the regular gun crews which manned the two turrets.

  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.")

  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 mystery 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 much to say that, given her speed, gun power, range and the smashing effect of the concentrated forge 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 ion Design, Admiral Carl Coeper, the German Naval Attache 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, 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 Muller, subsequently Chief of the Naval Cabinet, wrote to Tirpitz on the subject on February 8, 1905. Muller 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, 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.*

  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 Imperi
al German Navy had not driven a single rivet into this new class of supership.

  * Later it was said that forcing the Germans to spend time and money widening and deepening the Kiel Canal was part of the brilliance of Fisher's scheme. Fisher himself subsequently saw the advantages and exulted that Germany had been "paralyzed by the Dreadnought which had halted all German construction for a year and converted the Kiel Canal into a useless ditch," but this was after the fact. There is no evidence that Fisher or his design committee were thinking about the problems Tirpitz would face with the Kiel Canal; if they were thinking of Germany when they designed the Dreadnought, it was of sinking German battleships on the high seas.

  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 Majesties- 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 Fleet 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 wanton and profligate ostentation" and thunderously demanded to know why Fisher had not left well enough alone. "We said, 'Let there be 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 eggs 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 God 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 clearly 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 suggests 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."

  I 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 did 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.*

  * In February 1910 the Dreadnought, lying with the Home Fleet in Weymouth Bay, received word that the Emperor of Abyssinia with a small suite was on his way to visit the ship: The telegram was signed "Hardinge" (Sir Charles Hardinge was Permanent Under Secretary of the Foreign Office). The Emperor's party-four Abyssinians. a young man from the Foreign Office, and a European translator-were met by a red carpet and a saluting naval officer at Weymouth Station. Escorted to Dreadnought, they found the battleship dressed with flags, lines of marines drawn up on deck, a band playing, and the admiral and his staff in gold-laced uniforms waiting to greet them. The visitors inspected the ship and saw the sick bay, the wireless room, the officers' wardroom, and one of the gun turrets, which was rotated and its guns elevated and depressed. The admiral wanted his explanations translated, but the translator had difficulty. Told the difference between the marines in red uniforms and the marines in blue, he said, "I am afraid it will be rather hard!' to put that into Abyssinian, sir. However, I'll try." He turned to the Emperor: "Entaqui, mahai, kustufani." The Emperor nodded. "Tahli bussor ahbat tahl aesque miss,:" the translator continued. "Erraema…" The Emperor repeated a few of the words, nodding that he understood. The British officers were excellent hosts; one young lieutenant was particularly delighted at the astonishment of the native visitors when he switched on an electric light. At the end of the tour, the admiral invited his guests to remain for a meal, but the translator replied that "the religious beliefs of Abyssinia ma
de it impossible for the Royal family to touch food unless it was prepared in special ways." With salutes, bows, and smiles all around, the Imperial party left the ship and returned to London.

  A few weeks later, the Daily Mirror got wind of the story and the truth emerged. The "Emperor" was a young man named Anthony Buxton, disguised with greasepaint, a false beard, a turban, and robes. His suite, similarly costumed, was made up of friends, including tie painter Duncan Grant. The language employed, after the first three words of impromptu Swahili, were the translator's adaptation, suitably mispronounced, of the

  Fourth Book of the Aeneid, which he had memorized in school. The navy reddened with embarrassment; questions were asked in Parliament; the hospitable admiral was followed through the streets by boys shouting "Bunga-Bunga!" When the hoaxers called on the First Lord and offered to apologize, Mr. McKenna frowned and bundled them out of his office. It was particularly mortifying that one of the costumed Abyssinians had been a woman. This was Virginia Stephen, who was to become Virginia Woolf.