The Royal Navy and the German Threat 1901–1914: Admiralty plans to protect British trade in a war against Germany by Matthew S. Seligmann
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, £60 (hb)
186 pages, with bibliography, index
ISBN 978-0-19-957403-2
The history of British naval policy at the start of the twentieth century has been keenly contested in recent years; Matthew Seligmann's contribution to the debate takes its courage from close examination of the archival source on an aspect which has been largely neglected by previous scholarly efforts: the Admiralty's engagement with the challenge of trade protection.
His exploration of the archives has revealed that the paper trail concerning trade protection is complex and dispersed. Many papers were weeded by the Admiralty, some arguably through conspiracy, and many more likely through incompetence. Seligmann has assiduously tracked down duplicates and drafts and position papers in other places, in various Admiralty departments and other government ministries. The evidence which emerges is compelling and offers a number of valuable new perspectives.
Seligmann begins by looking at the German threat itself, and makes clear that a good deal of German naval policy was formulated by departments other than Tirpitz's private empire of the Imperial Naval Office. As early as the late nineteenth century the Admiralty Staff took extensive measures to create a threat to British maritime power by sponsoring the creation of a fleet of fast merchant ships which were designed specifically for easy conversion to effective commerce raiders.
Seligmann goes on to show that – regardless of the question of capital ships – British statesmen and naval officers were aware from as early as 1901 that the German plans constituted a significant threat: the German Blue Ribandwinning liners were faster than any warship afloat, were built with reinforced decks and double bottoms, that many of their crew were naval reservists, and that fully loaded with coal they would have massive endurance. There were uncertainties: did they carry their own guns secretly on board? How many slower ships did the Germans also plan to arm in similar fashion? Seligmann argues that the British Admiralty persistently misunderstood the tribal structure of the German naval administration, and so proceeded on the basis that the German threat which they had detected was being pursued with full vigour by the German Navy.
Subsequent chapters examine individual strands of the British response, and make clear that the threat was taken very seriously. Thus one initial response was to react in kind, so the Admiralty subsidized the construction and operation of the iconic Cunard liners, the Mauretania and Lusitania. Upon reflection, naval officers revised their opinion of such unarmoured vessels, and the Admiralty shifted to express preference for purpose-built warships. This leads Seligmann into a revision of the controversial history of the battle-cruiser. He has uncovered persuasive evidence that they were originally conceived with the specific purpose of dealing with the threat from the fast German converted liners. The Invincible was initially intended to have a 9.2-inch gun battery, but this was later up-rated to 12-inch guns to give it additional capability, and it is this which Seligmann argues has misled generations of naval officers and historians. Similarly, in 1909 Indefatigable was up-rated from 9.2-inch guns as originally designed to 12-inch out of political expediency. Both Battenberg and Brassey's voiced concerns that battle cruisers would be misused in the main fleet as a result of the heavier guns. Only the later battle cruisers, argues Seligmann, were intended to match the German ships of that type, rather than for trade-protection.
The British Admiralty also pursued a range of other countermeasures. Seligmann reassesses Slade's reputation, maintaining that he had a firm grasp of the German threat, and he outlines Slade's efforts both to expose and inhibit their schemes by securing international treaty changes to prohibit the arming of merchant ships. The difficulties and ultimately failure in achieving this was one reason behind the establishment of a global intelligence network, so as to track the movements of the potential German threats; this was not Fisher's initiative, but Slade's. The continued flow of intelligence about German armed merchant cruisers and the threat to the nation's food supply resulting from the 1911 industrial strikes led the new First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill, to take even more active steps to secure British shipping. Efforts to provide state insurance for ships in wartime failed, so Churchill turned to non-financial insurance: the arming of British merchant ships in peacetime.
Seligmann's writing is both clear and engaging, and the structure of the book is coherent and sustains his arguments well. He is balanced and judicious in his handling of primary sources; he is clear about what is there, what is missing and the status of circumstantial evidence or that which is retrospective such as from memoirs. All this, plus his extensive archival coverage, lends considerable weight to the interpretations he puts forward.
There are nonetheless some limitations. The chapters which explain the Admiralty's countermeasures are thematic, and often run in parallel, which results in some repetition, especially of the bad blood between Fisher and some other officers. Some issues are not developed: Jellicoe appears to have changed his mind on the use of Invincible and the battle cruiser type (cf. pp. 78 and 86), but Seligmann does not explain the contrasting opinions. Nor is there any discussion of convoys, which seems a significant gap in the light of the experience of the First World War.
Seligmanns' book is valuable on many issues: a corrective to the general understanding of German naval administration; a revision of both the beginning and nature of the British Admiralty's perception of the German threat; a new take on the origins of the battle cruiser; a re-appraisal of Fisher's role in the development of a global naval intelligence network; a reminder that cutting-edge naval policy was not exclusively formed by Fisher, with important roles for numerous others notably Battenberg, Slade and Campbell; and a refutation of the allegation that the Admiralty neglected to plan for trade protection. It points out weaknesses in both older interpretations and newer revisionism, but itself does not purport to be a complete account of British naval policy at the start of the twentieth century. It does not put the German threat into the context of rivalries with other naval powers, and while it is clear that trade protection was given serious thought, it is less obvious how that compared with the attention given by the Admiralty to other issues such as capital ships, flotilla forces, grand strategy and financial concerns. We still have to wait for a new history to integrate the insights of recent scholarship.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2013.767565
© Oliver Walton