Cover
Welcome Page
Map
Dedication
Trafalgar
Introduction: Sea Power
Part 1: The German Challenge
Chapter 1: Victoria and Bertie
Chapter 2: Vicky and Willy
Chapter 3: “Blood and Iron”
Chapter 4: Bismarck’s Grand Design
Chapter 5: The New Course: Kaiser William II, Caprivi, and Hohenlohe
Chapter 6: “The Monster of the Labyrinth”
Chapter 7: Bülow and Weltmacht
Chapter 8: “Ships of My Own”
Chapter 9: Tirpitz and the German Navy Laws
Part 2: The End of Splendid Isolation
Chapter 10: Lord Salisbury
Chapter 11: The Jameson Raid and the Kruger Telegram
Chapter 12: “Joe”
Chapter 13: Fashoda
Chapter 14: Samoa and William’s Visit to Windsor
Chapter 15: The Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion
Chapter 16: The “Khaki Election” and the Death of Queen Victoria
Chapter 17: The End of Anglo-German Alliance Negotiations
Chapter 18: Arthur Balfour
Chapter 19: Joseph Chamberlain and Imperial Preference
Chapter 20: Lord Lansdowne and the Anglo-French Entente
Chapter 21: The Morocco Crisis of 1905
Part 3: The Navy
Chapter 22: From Sail to Steam
Chapter 23: Jacky Fisher
Chapter 24: Ut Veniant Omnes
Chapter 25: First Sea Lord
Chapter 26: The Building of the Dreadnought
Chapter 27: Lord Charles Beresford
Chapter 28: Fisher Versus Beresford
Part 4: Britain and Germany: Politics and Growing Tension, 1906–1910
Chapter 29: Campbell-Bannerman: The Liberals Return to Power
Chapter 30: The Asquiths, Henry and Margot
Chapter 31: Sir Edward Grey and Liberal Foreign Policy
Chapter 32: The Anglo-Russian Entente and the Bosnian Crisis
Chapter 33: The Navy Scare of 1909
Chapter 34: Invading England
Chapter 35: The Budget and the House of Lords
Chapter 36: The Eulenburg Scandal
Chapter 37: The Daily Telegraph Interview
Chapter 38: Naval Talks and Bethmann-Hollweg
Part 5: The Road to Armageddon
Chapter 39: Agadir
Chapter 40: “I Do Believe That I Am a Glowworm”
Chapter 41: Churchill at the Admiralty
Chapter 42: The Haldane Mission
Chapter 43: Naval Estimates and a “Naval Holiday”
Chapter 44: “The Anchors Held.... We Seemed to Be Safe”
Chapter 45: The Coming of Armageddon: Berlin
Chapter 46: The Coming of Armageddon: London
Appendix: The Dreadnought Race 1905-1914
Picture Section
Notes
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
About this Book
Reviews
Also by Robert K. Massie
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
ROBERT K. MASSIE was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1929. He studied American History at Yale University and Modern European History at Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes scholar. He lives in Irvington, New York.
From colonial disputes, secret treaties with former foes, high-wire diplomacy, and tit-for-tat building of the terrifyingly powerful dreadnought battleships. Dreadnought is a dramatic re-creation of the diplomatic and military brinkmanship that preceded, and made inevitable, the outbreak of the first world war.
Massie brings to vivid life such historical figures as the single-minded Admiral von Tirpitz, the young, ambitious, Winston Churchill, the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow, and many others. The relationship between Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm is particularly intriguing. Wilhelm’s admiration, and even envy, for everything British, was to play an important part in the events to come. Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tragedy in his powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, Dreadnought is history at its most riveting.
FOR KIM MASSIE, JACK MAY, CHARLES DAVIS,
AND EDMUND KEELEY
AMICIS A IUVENIBUS
AND FOR DEBORAH
The supremacy of the British Navy was stamped indelibly on the history of the nineteenth century during a single terrible afternoon in October 1805. Between noon and four-thirty P.M. on October 21, in a light wind and rolling Atlantic swell off the coast of Spain, twenty-seven line-of-battle sailing ships commanded by Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson annihilated a combined French and Spanish fleet of thirty-three ships-of-the-line under French Admiral Pierre Villeneuve. The battle took place in a small patch of ocean not more than two miles on each side, a few miles offshore between the port of Cádiz and the western end of the Strait of Gibraltar. The nearest map reference, a remote coastal bay, was to give the battle its name. The bay was called Trafalgar.
Nelson’s victory that autumnal afternoon established a supremacy at sea which lasted a century and gave most of the world’s great nations a period of relative calm known as the Pax Britannica. Both the naval supremacy and the peace endured while warships changed beyond recognition: wooden hulls were transformed to iron and steel; masts disappeared as sail gave way to steam; bottle-shaped, muzzle-loading guns were replaced by powerful, turret-mounted naval rifles of far greater range and accuracy. Something else remained constant as well: through all those years British seamen exuded a confidence higher than arrogance, an assurance that was bred and passed along by the seventeen thousand men who served at Trafalgar in Nelson’s oak-hulled leviathans.
Trafalgar was fought because a mighty Continental state ruled by a conquerer, Napoleon Bonaparte, threatened the security and interests of England. The British Fleet attacked its enemy that day, bearing down on Villeneuve’s worried captains with serene and implacable purpose, but the strategic role of the Royal Navy, then as always, was defensive. Historically, the mission of the British Fleet has been to protect the Home Islands from invasion and to guard the trade routes and colonies of the Empire. During the summer of 1805, the Emperor Napoleon assembled on the cliffs of Boulogne an army of 130,000 veterans to invade and subdue his English foe. The Emperor needed only a brief period of freedom of movement on the English Channel, time enough to transport his battalions across the twenty miles of water so that they could seize London and dictate peace. During their passage, the hundreds of flat-bottomed barges and small vessels collected along the coast to transport the army needed protection from the guns of the British Fleet. This protection could be provided only if Napoleon’s own French Fleet, combined with the ships of France’s reluctant ally, Spain, could at least briefly take control of the Channel. To block the Emperor’s design and prevent the invasion of their homeland was the task of Britain’s seamen.
They did so by performing one of the most remarkable feats of sustained seamanship in the annals of maritime history. Overwhelming as the victory at Trafalgar was, the battle was only the thunderous climax to an unparalleled nautical achievement. For two years before Trafalgar, the British Fleet remained continuously at sea off the coasts of Europe. Napoleon’s fleet, broken into squadrons, was scattered in harbors from Brest on the Atlantic to Toulon in the Mediterranean. Britain’s safety lay in preventing these squadrons from combining in sufficient numbers to force their way into the Channel and clear the way for passage of the Emperor’s army into England. And so, for two years, the British Fleet watched and waited outside the ports of Europe; watching to see whether the enemy ships were raising sail and coming out, waiting to destroy them when they did. The blockade was maintained by fifty to sixty British ships-of-the-line, each vessel holding six hundred to nine hundred bored, lonely, hungry, weather-beaten men, lying at night in hammocks slung over their silent, waiting guns. For two years, the ships had been at sea, in the stifling heat and glassy calms of summer, in the gale winds, mountainous seas, and bitter cold of winter. They saw land rarely, touched it almost never. On the blockade, Nelson had spent two years without setting foot off the decks of his flagship, H.M.S. Victory. For twenty-two months, Admiral Lord Cuthbert Collingwood, Nelson’s second in command, had not heard the splash of his flagship’s anchor. It was the blockade fleet and its success in stalemating the Emperor at Boulogne that Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan described when he wrote: “those far distant, storm-beaten ships,1 upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.”
Now, an angry, impatient Emperor had ordered his fleet to come out and sail for the Channel. The bulk of the fleet was at Cádiz, watched by an English fleet commanded by the idol of the British Navy and the hero of all England. Horatio Nelson was small, slight, and battered; one arm and one eye had already been given in the service of his country. He had other human frailties: he had abandoned his own wife to live openly with a lusty young woman, herself married to an elderly man who had given Nelson his unstinting friendship. Nelson disobeyed Admiralty orders when they did not suit him and he became seasick in bad weather. But his kindness and compassion already were legend, and his skill in battle has never been equalled. Every man in the British Fleet loved him and would follow wherever he led. Nelson’s death at the moment of victory blurred triumph and tragedy. When the news reached England, the nation swayed dizzily between celebration and mourning.
Nelson’s instructions, as the two fleets sailed slowly towards each other on a gentle morning breeze, were—as always—to attack. Recognizing that in the confusion of battle specific plans would go awry, he concluded his memorandum to his captains: “No captain can do very wrong2 who places his ship alongside that of an enemy.” Implicit in this command was the assumption that any British ship could defeat any opposing enemy ship. Nelson’s supreme confidence in British seamanship, British gunnery, and British courage was another legacy of Trafalgar.
Nelson divided his fleet into two divisions with himself in H.M.S. Victory and Collingwood in H.M.S. Royal Sovereign. At the head of his division, Nelson steered his flagship straight at the center of the French line. At noon, the guns began to speak. Four hours of massive carnage were to follow. The lightness of the wind left the smoke of the cannonades hanging in thick curtains over the sea. Through these shrouds, ships would suddenly loom upon each other at close range, firing broadsides and then colliding, hugging each other in a hellish embrace. Cumbersome and slow, they drifted entangled while the men on one ship tried to kill the men on the other. At point-blank range of five yards, fifty guns would thunder and fifty heavy cannonballs would smash into the timbers of the adjacent ship. Huge masts crashed to the deck, bringing down sails, spars, and lines across both ships and over the sides to trail in the water. On the main decks and in what remained of the rigging, marines fired muskets and cannon loaded with grape, sweeping the enemy’s deck, covering it with rows of bodies, filling the scuppers with blood. Sometimes, when all the masts were down and the main deck empty, the men on the gun decks below continued oblivious, loading their cannon, running them out, depressing the muzzles to shoot through the hull or raising them to shoot through the upper decks of the opponent alongside. No matter how badly damaged their ships, Nelson’s captains were relentless. Some British ships with masts down and rigging shot away still managed to rig temporary sails, gaining maneuverability to seek new enemies.
When the firing ceased about four-thirty P.M., eighteen enemy ships had struck their colors and a nineteenth had burned to the waterline and then exploded. Villeneuve himself was a prisoner, and later a suicide.
Trafalgar did not defeat Napoleon; ten more years were to pass before the Battle of Waterloo. But Trafalgar removed Napoleon’s threat to seize the English Channel. Never again during those ten years did France or any other nation challenge Great Britain’s dominion of the seas. And so it remained for one hundred years.
Thursday there had been great heat. Friday was worse. The breeze died, the air became moist and heavy. Flags hung limp and haze spread over the immense fleet anchored in the Solent. Only when the sun peeked through was it possible to see from shore the pale outline of what appeared to be an enormous city. One hundred and sixty-five warships of the British Navy lay in this protected body of water, three miles across from the sandy shores of the Hampshire plain to the wooded hills of the Isle of Wight. Five lines of black-hulled ships, thirty miles of warships, they carried forty thousand men and three thousand naval guns. It was the most powerful fleet assembled in the history of the world.
It was June 1897. Queen Victoria, seventy-eight, had reigned over Great Britain and its empire for sixty years and a Diamond Jubilee had been proclaimed. Saturday, June 26, was the review of the Royal Navy, the bulwark of Britain’s security and the shield of her imperial power. Accordingly, the Admiralty had summoned the warships from Britain’s home commands without withdrawing a single ship from the battle fleet in the Mediterranean or any of the squadrons on foreign stations. Twenty-two foreign navies had been invited and fourteen had accepted and sent ships.
The town of Portsmouth on the Solent, England’s principal naval base since Tudor times, was crowded with sailors. Hundreds of British seamen came ashore every day from the fleet, along with foreign sailors from the foreign warships. The Daily Mail observed “black-browed little Spaniards,1 tall, dull-eyed Russians, and heavy-limbed Germans” browsing in the fruit stalls and tobacco shops. To amuse the sailors, the navy and the town organized garden parties, tours of the dockyard, sporting events, and a garden party for foreign seamen given by the Mayor. Naval planning, overwhelmed by numbers, went awry. “The victualing yard2 say they cannot possibly kill fast enough to supply the ships with fresh meat,” an admiral ashore signalled the admirals afloat. “Suggest ships issue salt meat.”
English men and women swarmed into Portsmouth. By Thursday night, all garrets were rented and people were sleeping on billiard tables and rows of chairs. It was difficult to sit and eat; every chair in every restaurant was coveted by a dozen hungry visitors. “Chief among the foreigners3 are Americans,” noted the Daily Chronicle. “If they are not known by their accents, they are sure to disclose their nationality at mealtimes by rising without the slightest shame and prettily drinking the toast of ‘The Queen!’... English folk would be shy of doing this except at a public dinner, but not so our cousins from over ‘the Pond.’”
Every day, thousands of people paid a shilling to go out and see the fleet. Every available boat on the south coast of England—ocean liners, pleasure steamers, tugboats, steam launches and pinnaces, private yachts, watermen’s boats, even clumsy Thames River barges—came up to Portsmouth piers to pick up spectators. Decorated with colored bunting and jammed with passengers, they steamed past the harbor mouth and the heavy stone forts guarding the anchorage and began the passage down the lines of warships. As the steamers passed, their wakes rocking the small navy boats set out from the warship hulls on booms, sailors and spectators waved and cheered each other. There were accidents: a black sailing schooner collided with a white steam yacht and lost her bowsprit; a launch ran into a small torpedo boat and the launch sank, but all her passengers were safely fished out of the water.
What the visitors saw, in the lines of black hulls, white superstructure, and yellow funnels, was British sea power. Farthest out from Portsmouth lay the Channel Squadron: eleven First-Class battleships, five First-Class cruisers, and thirteen Second-Class cruisers, with the flag of the Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, flying from H.M.S. Renown. This array of eleven battleships of the Royal Sovereign and Majestic classes, all under six years old, was unmatched for gunpower, armor, and speed. The next line contained thirty older battleships and cruisers, the next thirty-eight small cruisers and torpedo boats, and the line nearest to Portsmouth forty-nine vessels, of which thirty were new torpedo-boat destroyers.
The second line contained historic, but still serviceable, ships. Here lay Alexandra, Admiral Sir Geoffrey Hornby’s Mediterranean Fleet flagship when he ran up to Constantinople in 1877 and trained his guns on the Russian Army outside the city. Next to her was Inflexible, which two decades before had been the world’s mightiest battleship. Her first captain, the famous Jacky Fisher, had used her cannon to bombard Alexandria, opening the door to Britain’s long involvement in Egypt. Inflexible had recently been designated a Second-Class battleship, but “even now,” noted an observer, “the muzzles4 of those four grim eighty ton guns peering from her turrets could deal terrific blows.” Ahead lay Sans Pareil, boasting a single turret mounting two mammoth 110-ton guns, the largest of the navy’s weapons. Her presence could not help reminding spectators of the Victorian Navy’s greatest peacetime disaster: three years before her sister ship, Victoria, flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet, had been rammed and sunk by Camperdown during maneuvers.
Beyond the farthest line of British battleships lay the foreign warships. Visitors could stare at the big gray Italian battleship Lepanto, the Japanese cruiser Fuji, built on the Thames, Norway’s black cruiser Fritjhof, and the modern French cruiser Pothuau, whose bow sloped forward and down at a peculiar angle into the sea. Interest centered on the Russian and American vessels, both new. The Rossiya was the largest warship ever built in Russia. Weighing 12,200 tons, she had three propellers and an advanced engineering plant which could burn either coal or oil and drive the ship at nineteen knots. The U.S.S. Brooklyn, an armored cruiser of 9,200 tons, was the pride of the United States Navy. She was the most visually spectacular of the foreign ships; her sides, turrets, superstructure, and funnels were painted a gleaming white. British observers with an eye to aesthetics declared the height of the tall, thin funnels “by no means conducive5 to sightliness of appearance. The effect is to dwarf the hull of the ship.” For the Americans, it was enough that the arrangement kept smoke off the decks and out of the eyes of officers and seamen. The Brooklyn had other qualities of interest to experts. Her decks, treated to be nonflammable, were spongy and soft. “Will they stand the wear and tear?”6 the British wondered (British decks were hard and combustible). The American ship used electricity to hoist shells from magazines to guns and to rotate turrets. “We are at least seven or eight years behind,” lamented the Chronicle. “Her equipment is so admirable that I blush with shame that only one of our British men of war is fitted with electrical shell hoists.” The deportment of the Americans attracted favorable comment: “The United States officers7 were exceptionally polite, never failing to raise their white-covered caps in greeting over the water.”
Disappointment focussed on the next ship in line, a gray vessel with two red stripes around her funnel, S.M.S. (Seine Majestät Schiff) König Wilhelm (King William) of the Imperial German Navy. “Germany has sent us8 neither her newest nor her best,” complained the Daily Mail. Indeed, the vessel, built as a battleship twenty-nine years before at Blackwell’s Yard in England, had achieved fame primarily for ramming and sinking her sister Grosser Kurfürst (Great Elector). Recently, she had been stricken from the list of battleships and reclassified a First-Class cruiser. Kaiser William II cabled his brother, Rear Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia, who was aboard the König Wilhelm, “I deeply regret9 that I have no better ship to place at your disposal whilst other nations shine with their fine vessels. This is the result of those unpatriotic fellows [William was condemning the Reichstag] who opposed construction of the most necessary ships.”
The British Empire, guarded by this fleet, was the largest in the history of the world. In 1897, the Empire comprised one quarter of the land surface of the globe and one quarter of the world’s population: 11 million square miles, 372 million people. It was a cliché that “the sun never sets on the British Empire,” but it remained, nevertheless, true. From Greenwich, the base from which the world reckoned time, the day moved westward to Gibraltar, Halifax, Ottawa, Vancouver, Wellington, Canberra, Hong Kong, Singapore, Rangoon, Calcutta, Bombay, Aden, Nairobi, Alexandria, and Malta. Within lay self-governing dominions ruled by parliaments, crown colonies, protectorates, and a unique empire within an empire, the brightest jewel in the imperial crown, the India of the Raj. The empire stretched over great land masses thinly (Canada, Australia) and densely (India) populated. It included tiny islands in the wastes of oceans: Bermuda in the North Atlantic; St. Helena, Ascension, and the Falklands in the South Atlantic; Pitcairn, Tonga, and Fiji in the Pacific. The Empire was a kaleidoscope of skin colors, a myriad of languages, dialects, religions, social customs, and political institutions.
All this had been won and was held by sea power.
Since the sixteenth century, when English mariners had annexed Newfoundland and created England’s first colony, the empire had expanded. A single major defeat had marred the steady progression: between 1776 and 1881 the North American colonies had successfully revolted and broken away. England bore this shock and moved forward. Only a few years after the Treaty of Paris granted American independence, Britain began two decades of war against Napoleon Bonaparte. Once the Napoleonic Wars were over, with the former Emperor confined on St. Helena, Britain became the arbiter of affairs beyond the seas. Britons landed on the shores of every ocean. They explored the continents; mountains, rivers, lakes, and waterfalls were named for British explorers. Railroads were laid, cities sprang up, governments were created, endorsed, or overthrown; by 1897 a multitude of kings, maharajahs, nawabs, nizams, khedives, emirs, pashas, beys, and other chieftains sat on thrones only at London’s discretion. The British firmly believed they had used their power benevolently. They had ended the slave trade, policed and charted the oceans, and, believing in free trade, admitted all nations to the commerce they had opened.
In 1890, an American naval officer, more scholar than sea dog, codified the Briton’s intuitive sense of the relationship between sea power, prosperity, and national greatness. In The Influence of Sea Power upon History, Alfred Thayer Mahan traced the rise and fall of maritime powers in the past and demonstrated that the state which controlled the seas controlled its own fate; those which lacked naval mastery were doomed to defeat or the second rank. Mahan, using a graphic metaphor to make his point, said the sea “is... a great highway,10 or better, perhaps... a wide common over which men may pass in all directions, but on which some well-worn paths show that controlling reasons have led them to choose certain lines of travel rather than others. These lines of travel are called trade routes; and the reasons which have determined them are to be sought in the history of the world.... Both travel and traffic by sea have always been cheaper than by land.” From the metaphor arose an imperative: to patrol the common, a policeman was needed; to protect shipping and trade routes, maritime powers required navies.
The British Empire was a sea empire. More than half the steamships plodding the oceans in 1897 flew the Red Ensign of the British merchant navy. To service this huge tonnage, Britain had girdled the globe with trading ports and coaling stations. The preeminent trade route, the Imperial lifeline, stretched to the east, through the Mediterranean and Suez to India and China. Other sealanes extended south to Capetown and west to Halifax, St. Johns, and Montreal. There were fortresses to guard the strait at Gibraltar and Singapore and the narrow seas at Malta and Aden, but what made it all possible, the tie that held the empire together, was the navy. Wherever the Union Jack floated over battlements and warehouses, and the Red Ensign flew from the sterns of merchant steamers, there too was the White Ensign of the Royal Navy to protect, defend, deter, or enforce.
Without the navy, Britain was instantly vulnerable. The merchant steamers could be captured or driven from the seas, the fortresses besieged and taken, the colonies—deprived of reinforcement—stripped away. Without the navy, Britain itself, a small island state, dependent on imported food, possessing an insignificant army, could be in immediate peril of starvation or invasion. Bonaparte, waiting on the cliffs at Boulogne, had understood this. “Give me six hours’11 control of the Strait of Dover,” he said, “and I will gain mastery of the world.”
But with control of the seas, all was reversed. While Britain maintained naval supremacy, no Continental power, no matter how large or well-trained its army, could touch the British homeland. With naval supremacy, Britain acquired diplomatic freedom; British statesmen and diplomats could afford to stand back and regard with detachment the rivalries and hatreds which consumed the youth and treasuries of Continental powers facing each other across land frontiers.
Few European statesmen or military men understood Great Britain or the British Empire. They were puzzled when they studied the small island, with its ridiculous army, its aloof, almost patronizing manner, its pretension to be above the passions and squabbles which dominated their days. And yet, for all its smallness and seeming fragility, there Britain stood, serene, unchallengeable, with a range of action which was immense; which had in the past toppled Continental giants. Foreign military officers were particularly incredulous. With an army which was only an insignificant fraction of their own, Britain ruled a quarter of the globe. To German officers especially, representing the mightiest army in the world, it seemed absurd that Britain should claim to rule India’s 300 million people with an army of seventy thousand. Yet, in India, Britain continued to rule.
If British naval supremacy had made it possible for the island kingdom to remain outside the web of Continental rivalries, Britain remained a European state. Political events on the great landmass across the twenty miles of water that separated Dover from Calais were of more importance to Britons than what happened in Brazil. By 1897, Europe was divided into two alliance systems: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy confronted France and Russia. England had taken no position and, under Lord Salisbury, her Prime Minister, did not intend to do so. This policy of aloofness Lord Salisbury had called “Splendid Isolation.”
England’s enemy since the Middle Ages had been France. Through the wars of the Plantagenets, against Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Napoleon, this had not changed. “France is, and always will remain,12 Britain’s greatest danger,” Lord Salisbury had said in 1867, and he clung to this view during his three terms as Prime Minister. France posed a multiple threat: to the British Isles directly across the Channel, and to the imperial lifeline as it passed through the Mediterranean. At a dozen spots around the globe, French and British colonies rubbed against each other uncomfortably.
Britain’s other traditional enemy was Russia. Although the two nations had fought only once—and then awkwardly, in the Crimean War—the size and expansionist tendencies of the Russian Empire gave off a sense of menace. Russia might not reach the British Isles, but pushing down through Constantinople towards the Mediterranean, or thrusting over the roof of the world through the Khyber Pass onto the plains of India, or pressing from Manchuria against Britain’s commercial monopoly in the Yangtze valley and South China, Russian policies seemed threatening. Britain’s Director of Military Intelligence warned in 1887, “The countries with which13 we are most likely to go to war are France and Russia and the worst combination which we have any reason to dread is an alliance of France and Russia.” In 1894, precisely such an alliance was signed and the dreaded became reality.
In the same month as the Diamond Jubilee Review, June 1897, two men were appointed to important offices in Berlin. Bernhard von Bülow, an ambitious career diplomat serving as German Ambassador to Italy, was promoted to State Secretary for Foreign Affairs—in effect Foreign Minister—of Imperial Germany. A week later, Rear Admiral Alfred Tirpitz, possessor of the most original mind and strongest will in the German Navy, became State Secretary of the Navy. Their assignments, although in different spheres, were linked. Kaiser William II wished his country, already the strongest in Europe, to advance beyond its Continental predominance to world power (Weltmacht). Bülow was to further this policy through diplomacy; Tirpitz was to provide the instrument by building a German battle fleet. William’s interest in the sea and ships came in part from his English ancestry—his grandmother was Queen Victoria—but it had been profoundly stimulated by Mahan’s book. “I am just now not reading but devouring14 Captain Mahan’s book and am trying to learn it by heart,” the young Kaiser wrote to a friend. “It is on board all my ships and [is] constantly quoted by my captains and officers.”
Having grasped the importance of sea power and seeking to advance Germany’s influence beyond Europe, William and his advisors confronted a dilemma: either Germany could accept British supremacy at sea and work within this framework, or it must challenge British supremacy and build a fleet powerful enough to wrest the trident away. Experience recommended the former course: in the 1880s, Germany had acquired colonies five times the size of the German Empire in Europe—and this had been done with British encouragement and assistance. The German merchant navy, the second-largest in the world, used British harbors and depended on British naval protection around the globe. German naval officers had grown up on British-built ships, burning British coal, using British techniques and tactics. British and German officers looked on each other as brothers. One choice, then, was to build on this relationship, reinforce and solidify it, looking to the day when Germany and Britain might act, in Europe and the world, in partnership, perhaps even in alliance.
The appointment of Admiral Tirpitz signalled that the opposite choice had been made. Why, the German Kaiser and millions of his people asked, should England, simply because it was an island and possessed an empire, claim to command the sea as a right? At any moment, the British Navy could blockade the German coast, bottle up German ships in harbor, and seize German colonies. Why should the German Empire exist on British sufferance? Why should German greatness come as a gift from another people?
Geography dictated confrontation. German merchant ships, leaving the Baltic or the North Sea harbors of Hamburg or Bremen, could reach the Atlantic and other oceans of the world only by steaming through the Channel or around the coast of Scotland. A German Navy strong enough to protect German merchant shipping in these waters and guarantee unimpeded passage to the oceans meant, in the last resort, a German fleet able to defeat the British Navy. This Great Britain would never permit, for it meant also a German fleet strong enough to screen an invasion of England, to sweep from the seas all British merchant shipping, to strip Britain of her colonies and empire. Thus, the goal of the German Navy—to protect German commerce on the high seas—was wholly incompatible with the interest of British security. What one power demanded, the other was unwilling to concede. The threat posed to German security by the British Fleet, so British diplomats argued, was significantly less. Repeatedly, in the years ahead, British statesmen and diplomats attempted to impress this point on their German counterparts; always the German reply was that German warships posed little threat to Britain and that the German Empire had the same right as the British Empire to build whatever warships it chose.
For a number of years, the Kaiser and his ministers, certain that the most effective way of turning a neighbor into a friend was to frighten him, cherished the belief that they could both build a powerful fleet and draw Great Britain into an alliance. The Kaiser believed—and Tirpitz said he believed—that once Britain saw and accepted the formidable nature of the German Fleet, Britain would respect Germany and offer friendship—a friendship in which Germany would become the dominant partner. This proved a catastrophic misunderstanding of the psychology of Britons, to whom command of the sea remained a greater necessity than any Continental alliance.
As the century turned, the Diamond Jubilee and its great naval review would be seen as the high-water mark of British naval supremacy. Soon, the strains on British power would begin to tell. The empire was stretched too thin; even with the navy, Britain could not meet its commitments. German shipbuilding would be met by British shipbuilding, but a change in British policy was necessary. Britain could not afford to be left to face single-handed a power which dominated Europe and might acquire control of all the fleets of Europe. To throw its weight against the dominance of one power or group of powers which might threaten her existence had for centuries been the basic foreign policy of Great Britain. Now, as Britain began to fear the German Fleet, it feared also that the greatest military power in Europe would not aspire to become a great naval power unless it wished to dominate the world.
And so Britain began to shift. Splendid Isolation was reexamined. As the danger across the North Sea grew, enmities were composed, old frictions smoothed, new arrangements made. Britain became, if not a full-fledged ally, at least a partner of her erstwhile enemies, France and Russia. The alienation of Britain from Germany, the growing partnership between Britain and France and Britain and Russia, were caused by fear of the German Fleet. “It closed the ranks of the Entente,”15 said Winston Churchill. “With every rivet that von Tirpitz drove into his ships of war, he united British opinion.... The hammers that clanged at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven were forging the coalition of nations by which Germany was to be resisted and finally overthrown.”
Saturday, dawn broke low and gray and heavy mists still hung over the Solent. The sun rose at three forty-seven A.M., obscured by masses of soft, gray clouds. The air was sultry. From shore, the lines of ships could barely be discerned. The fleet became more visible at eight A.M. when, on signal from the flagship, the whole of the lines broke out in a rainbow of colors as each ship dressed itself in bunting from the bow, over the top of the masts, down to the stern. By noon, the weather improved, as the sun burned off haze and mists. A breeze blew out the flags and bunting, and covered the sea with small whitecaps that changed in color and shade with every shadow that crossed the surface of the water.
Through the morning, pleasure boats and sight-seeing craft had swarmed through the lines. Then, near two P.M., as the hour of the review approached, all private and commercial boats were shooed away and the columns of warships lay in silence. Except for swooping gulls, snapping flags and bunting, the sunlight and shadows rippling over the water, there was no movement; it became a fleet of ghostly mammoths, five walls of long, black hulls, standing majestically and silently on the pale-green water, stretching down the Solent as far as an eye could see.
Onshore, all was noise and tumult. The Southwest Railway Company had promised to dispatch forty-six trains from Waterloo Station to Portsmouth between the hours of six-thirty A.M. and nine-thirty A.M. on Saturday morning. Trains ran every five minutes from Waterloo, arriving in Portsmouth and pouring their human cargo, slung with field glasses, cameras, and guidebooks, onto the cobblestones of the station square. From there, rivers of people flowed through the town to piers and beaches. Every roof and window looking out to sea was occupied; the piers, Southsea Beach, and every little rise on the Hampshire plain were dense with spectators.
At twelve-twenty P.M. the first of two royal trains bearing the reviewing party from Windsor Castle arrived at the Royal Quay in Portsmouth Harbor. It carried the Dowager Empress Frederick of Germany. Named Victoria after her mother, she was the Queen’s eldest child and the mother of the German Emperor, William II. Her younger brother Arthur, Duke of Connaught, wearing the scarlet uniform of a colonel of the Scots Guards, gave her his arm and conducted the Empress immediately on board the royal yacht, Victoria and Albert, which lay beside the quay. As she mounted the gangplank, the gold and black German Imperial Standard soared up the mainmast. Forty minutes later, a second royal train arrived and the familiar rotund figure of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the central figure of the day’s events, descended. The Prince would take the review while his mother, fatigued by her six-mile drive on Tuesday through the streets of London, surrounded by a million Britons cheering themselves voiceless, spent the day quietly at Windsor. With the Heir to the Throne were his wife Princess Alexandra, his brother, Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and his son, George, Duke of York. The Prince was wearing the dark-blue and gold uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet. So was his brother, Alfred, who, until he had assumed the family duchy and moved to Germany in 1893, had been titled Duke of Edinburgh and had served as Commander-in-Chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet. Prince George, too, was in blue and gold and had earned his rank of Captain on active service. As the Prince and his party boarded the Victoria and Albert to join his sister for lunch, the Royal Standard of Great Britain ascended the mainmast to fly beside the German Imperial Standard, and the guns of Nelson’s Victory boomed in salute.
At two P.M. precisely, the Victoria and Albert cast off her lines from the Portsmouth quay and her paddle wheels began to turn. Steaming out of the harbor, the royal yacht flew five huge flags, each the size of a baronial tapestry. Atop her foremast stood a dark-red banner with an anchor in yellow, the emblem of the Lords of the Admiralty. At the peak of her mainmast flew the Royal Standard of Great Britain, golden lions and silver unicorns on quartered fields of red and blue, and the German Imperial Standard, a black eagle on gold. At the mizzenmast floated the Union Jack and from the stern waved the White Ensign of the Royal Navy. Behind the yacht followed a procession of ships, large and small, carrying special guests. Immediately astern was the pale-green P & O line Carthage, her deck ablaze with the colorful uniforms and flashing jewels of foreign and Indian princes. Their guide was Captain Lord Charles Beresford, hero of the naval service. The Admiralty yacht Enchantress came next, bearing the Lords of the Admiralty and their guests. Next came the Danube, freighted with members of the House of Lords. She was followed by Wildfire, carrying the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, surrounded by the prime ministers and governors of the colonies and territories which made up the British Empire. Near the end, steaming very slowly “lest she tread on the toes16 of some of the little ones,” came the huge Cunard liner Campania, biggest and fastest of Britain’s transatlantic greyhounds, her immense bulk dwarfing even the battleships’. Steaming down from Southampton, where she had embarked 1,800 passengers—the members of the House of Commons and their friends and relations—the Campania had followed in the wake of the much smaller Danube, carrying the Lords. At one point in this passage, John Burns, a Radical M.P., had quipped with a smile that if the Campania’s master would increase speed, many constitutional questions between Commons and Lords would be settled permanently. Last in line was the Eldorado, which bore the foreign ambassadors accredited to the Court of St. James’s.
The fleet was ready. As soon as the boom of Victory’s signal cannon was heard announcing that the royal yacht was under way, a flag soared to the peak of Renown’s signal halyard: “Man ships!” In the days of sailing vessels, the result was the most dramatic of naval spectacles: seamen standing at regular intervals along every yardarm of the towering masts. Now masts and yards were gone, but the signal still created a memorable transformation. Great steel ships, previously grim and silent, now boiled with running men. Within a few minutes, lines of seamen stood motionless along the edge of every deck and on the tops of gun turrets and barbettes. Here and there, on the bridges and in the fighting tops, a splash of red showed where marine detachments were stationed.
As the royal yacht entered the lines, each warship boomed a salute and soon clouds of white smoke were drifting over the green water. (Sharp eyes noted an exception in the salutes from the French cruiser Pothuau, which was using the new smokeless powder.) Steaming slowly, the yacht came within easy hailing distance of the black behemoths. From the warships, it was easy to see the Prince of Wales surrounded by his party. His brother and his son stood beside him, and the Crown Prince of Japan and Sir Pertab Singh, huge jewels flashing in his silken turban, were nearby. Not far off was a mass of other officers, wearing scarlet, blue, and green tunics decorated with gold and silver. The ladies clustered around the German Empress and the Princess of Wales. Most were in yachting costumes of cream and navy blue, or sky blue and yellow, or maroon, or pale green. “No one looked better17 than the Countess of Warwick, in her dark blue alpaca, the neck of white embroidered batiste, the whole exquisitely fitting her beautiful figure,” one correspondent described the Prince of Wales’ former mistress.
As the royal yacht drew abreast each warship, officers and men removed their hats and shouted three cheers. If the ship carried a band, the band played “God Save the Queen.” Observers noted pleasurably that the American sailors on board the Brooklyn cheered as lustily as any British crew and that the band on the deck of the König Wilhelm followed the anthem with a brisk playing of “Rule Britannia!”
While the Prince was inspecting the fleet, the lanes between the warships were kept clear of pleasure and spectator boats by naval tugs and patrol boats. But once Victoria and Albert had passed, an impudent maverick craft made a sudden appearance and began to race up and down the lines, weaving and darting between ships with astonishing speed and maneuverability. Patrol boats, attempting to overtake or intercept the intruder, failed. This strange craft, painted gray, shaped like a torpedo one hundred feet long and nine feet in beam, was Turbina, the world’s fastest vessel, capable of thirty-four knots. Her performance was intended to persuade the navy to give up the heavy reciprocating steam engines which powered its warships and change to the steam turbine which sent Turbina knifing across the water. The boat’s designer, Sir Charles Parsons, was on board, standing just aft of the tall midships funnel, which belched a flame at least as tall as the funnel itself. Racing among the towering men-of-war, defying authority, Turbina dramatically upset protocol. “Perhaps her lawlessness18 may be excused by the novelty and importance of the invention she embodies,” grumbled The Times.
Finishing her tour of the lines at four P.M., Victoria and Albert drew abreast of the Renown, dropped her starboard anchor, and signalled all British and foreign flag officers to come on board to be received by the Prince of Wales. The admirals had been waiting in steam pinnaces and launches bobbing alongside their flagships, and when the signal came there was a race to the port gangway of the royal yacht. The behavior of the Russian admiral in this respect was much admired: disdaining to race, abjuring steam, he arrived in his barge pulled by the oars of sixteen sailors in white. While the guests were still on board, Victoria and Albert released a pigeon carrying a special message from the Prince to his mother at Windsor Castle: “Admirals just presented.19 Beautiful day, review unqualified success. The only thing to have made it perfect was the presence of the Queen.”
At five, the visitors went down the gangway. Victoria and Albert pulled her anchor out of the Solent ooze, backed engines, and steamed away in the direction of Portsmouth. As she departed, another three cheers rolled out from the fleet. Turbina then made another surprise appearance. She had been lolling astern of a cruiser, but as the royal yacht got under way, Turbina fell in behind. At first she followed at moderate speed, but suddenly her propellers spun, she raised her bow, buried her stern in a mass of seething white foam, and blazed away on a tangent from the royal yacht. Leaving the fleet astern, the Prince of Wales ordered a welcome signal run up the halyard: “Splice the mainbrace!” and the Commander-in-Chief ordered every ship to distribute an extra tot of grog (rum and water) to every seaman.
Even as the Prince was receiving the admirals, menacing clouds were gathering on the southern horizon. As he left the fleet, the black hulls stood on black water with a bank of dark thunderheads towering overhead. Before Victoria and Albert reached Portsmouth Harbor, the sky was green and black and the first large raindrops had begun to fall. By the time the yacht was berthed alongside the quay, rain was lashing the decks with tropical violence. Lightning split the air with prolonged, crackling bolts of fire, and thunder rumbled like cannonade. Out in the fleet, curtains of rain blotted out the sight of ships in adjacent lines; decks and turrets became a tumult of dancing water. Ashore, where the drains were unequal to the deluge, great sheets of water lay on the Esplanade, and Southsea Common became a swamp. All shops were closed and crowds of people huddled under whatever shelter they could find. The thunderstorm, which lasted an hour, was one of the most severe ever recorded in southern England.
During the storm, it had seemed that the illumination of the fleet, the feature of the evening, would have to be cancelled. But at sunset only a canopy of heavy clouds darkened the twilight of the summer sky. To watchers on shore, the fleet was gradually fading into the deepening shadows. Then, at nine-fifteen, a signal cannon boomed. Renown suddenly jutted out, traced in fire, against the gloaming. A second later, every warship in the anchorage burst into outline, traced against the black sky by hundreds of electric lights. Strung the length of each ship, following the outlines of hull, bridge, funnels, masts, and turrets, the lights appeared as “lines of fire,20 which in the light haze which still hung above the water after the storm, took on the golden color of glowworm.” Seasoned naval correspondents grew rhapsodic: The lights were “a myriad of brilliant beads,”21 the ships “a fairy fleet22 festooned with chains of gold... lying on a phantom sea that sparkled and flashed back ripples of jewels.” British flagships carried a large electrical display at their mastheads: a red cross on a white background announcing the presence of an admiral. Foreign ships created special effects. The Rossiya bore the Russian Imperial Double Eagle in lights. The Brooklyn spelled out electrically “V.R. [Victoria Regina] 1837–1897” along her armored side. Another Brooklyn feature was the fixing of the British and American flags floating at the top of her masts in the beam of powerful searchlights.
For almost three hours, this unique technological and imaginative accomplishment glimmered in the darkness. From shore and aboard the ships, people stared. Around ten P.M. the Prince and Princess of Wales came out again from Portsmouth in the small royal yacht Alberta to cruise through the fleet. The Alberta carried few lights and attracted little formal attention as she passed slowly down the stationary lines. At eleven-thirty, however, as the yacht departed, bands again played “God Save the Queen.” Then, in a final salute to the Queen and her Heir, all the warships in the anchorage fired a royal salute. The ships were wreathed in curtains of smoke, illuminated by lurid red flashes from the guns. It was a spectacular climax: the continuous roar of a naval cannonade, tongues of bright flame leaping from multiple broadsides, smoke rolling in red clouds across the myriad of glowing electric lights.
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