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

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  DREADNOUGHT

  Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War

  Robert K. Massie

  JONATHAN CAPE LONDON

  First published in Great Britain 1992 Reprinted 1992

  Jonathan Cape, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London swiv 2sa © Robert K. Massie 1991

  Robert K. Massie has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 0-224-03260-7

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent

  For Kim Massie, Jack May, Charles Davis, and Edmund Keeley

  AMICIS A IUVENIBUS

  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 Cadiz 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, 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 Cadiz, 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 wrong 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 cannon-balls 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 alongsid
e. 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, 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 yard 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 foreigners 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 muzzles of those four grim eighty ton guns peering from her turrets could ideal 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 conducive 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?" 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 officers 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 Majestat Schiff) Konig Wilhelm (King William) of the Imperial German Navy. "Germany has sent us 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 Kurfurst (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 Konig Wilhelm, "I deeply regret that I have no better ship to place at your disposal whilst other nations shine with their fine vessels. This is the res
ult 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 cliche 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, khediyes, 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.