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Abstract
Revisionist historians have argued that in July 1914 Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, was preparing to implement a ‘Naval Revolution’ based on radical ideas they attribute to Admiral Sir John Fisher. This article examines Fisher’s influence on Churchill in 1911–14. By subjecting the revisionist argument to rigorous scrutiny, it demonstrates that Churchill did not embrace either ‘flotilla defence’ or the ‘battlecruiser concept’, the two central components of Fisher’s supposed radical agenda. On the eve of war, Churchill’s immediate goals were neither revolutionary nor inspired by Fisher. The weakness of the revisionists’ argument undermines their broad interpretation of naval policy during the Fisher era.
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Notes
1 Arthur J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, 5 vols (Oxford: OUP 1961–70).
2 The main revisionist works are those by Lambert and Sumida noted in the bibliography.
3 The first statement of the case for a ‘naval revolution’ was Sumida’s ‘Fisher’s Naval Revolution’, Naval History 10/4 (1996), 20–6. However, this should be read in conjunction with Nicholas Lambert, ‘On Standards: A Reply to Christopher Bell’, War in History 19/2 (April 2012), 217–40.
4 Some of the key works are: John Brooks, Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland (London: Routledge 2005); Matthew S. Seligmann, The Royal Navy and the German Threat 1901–1914 (Oxford: OUP 2012); Christopher M. Bell, ‘Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution Reconsidered: Winston Churchill at the Admiralty, 1911–14’, War in History 18/ 3 (July 2011), 333–56; idem, ‘On Standards and Scholarship’ A Response to Nicholas Lambert’, War in History 20/3 (July 2013), 381–409; David Morgan-Owen, ‘“History is a Record of Exploded Ideas”: Sir John Fisher and Home Defence, 1904–10’, International History Review 36/3 (2014), 550–72.
5 Bell, ‘Fisher’s Naval Revolution Reconsidered’ and ‘On Standards and Scholarship’.
6 See in particular Jon Sumida, ‘Sir John Fisher and the Dreadnought: The Sources of Naval Mythology’, Journal of Military History 59/4 (Oct. 1995), 619–38; idem, ‘Demythologizing the Fisher Era: the Role of Change in Historical Method’, Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 59 (2000), 171–81.
7 Jon Sumida and David Rosenberg, ‘Machines, Men, Manufacturing, Management and Money: The Study of Navies as Complex Organizations and the Transformation of Twentieth Century Naval History’, in John B. Hattendorf (ed.), Doing Naval History (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press 1995), 25–39.
8 Matthew Seligmann, ‘Naval History by Conspiracy Theory: The British Admiralty before the First World War and the Methodology of Revisionism’, Journal of Strategic Studies, this issue, <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2015.1005443>.
9 Sumida, ‘Demythologizing the Fisher Era, 173–5.
10 Ibid., 177.
11 Katherine C. Epstein, Torpedo: Inventing the Military – Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2014), 211.
12 Sumida and Rosenberg, ‘Machines, Men, Manufacturing’, 30.
13 Sumida, ‘Fisher’s Naval Revolution’.
14 Nicholas Lambert, Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press 1999), 10–11.
15 Jon Sumida, ‘Churchill and British Sea Power, 1908–29’, in R.A.C. Parker (ed.), Winston Churchill: Studies in Statesmanship, (London: Brassey’s 1995), 5–21.
16 Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1923), 71.
17 Sumida review of Lambert’s Fisher’s Naval Revolution, United States Naval Institute Proceedings 125/10 (Oct. 1999), 77–8.
18 Sumida, ‘Churchill and British Sea Power’, 7.
19 Ibid., 8.
20 Ibid.
21 Peter Gretton, Former Naval Person (London: Cassell 1968), 71–2.
22 Christopher M. Bell, Churchill and Sea Power (Oxford: OUP 2012).
23 Ruddock Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1973), 434.
24 Churchill to Battenberg, 10 Nov. 1911, WSC, II/2, 1326–7. In fact, the changes under consideration would have applied to the Navy’s 1911–12 programme. Sumida evidently assumes that it was too late to modify that year’s programme in Nov. 1911, even though the normal practice was to start work on ships at or near the end of the fiscal year, in this case March 1912.
25 John Roberts, Battlecruiser (London: Caxton Editions 2003), 38.
26 Board of Admiralty minutes, ADM 167/45.
27 Sumida, ‘Churchill and British Sea Power’, 10.
28 Ibid., 12.
29 Ibid.
30 Churchill, ‘Notes on the Manoeuvres: Prepared for the Prime Minister by the First Lord’, ADM 116/3381; for context, see David Morgan-Owen, ‘The Invasion Question: Admiralty Plans to Defend the British Isles, 1888–1918’, PhD dissertation, Exeter Univ., 2013, 173–5.
31 A good account of these manoeuvres and their consequences is provided in Morgan-Owen, ‘Invasion Question’, 197–204.
32 Admiral of the Fleet Sir William May, ‘Naval Manoeuvres 1913: Report by Umpire-in-Chief’, Aug. 1913, 17, ADM 116/1176C.
33 Churchill, World Crisis, Vol. I, 154.
34 Morgan-Owen, ‘Invasion Question’, 202–7. These developments are also outlined in Marder, Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, Vol. I, 352–8, which may explain why Sumida feels comfortable ignoring them.
35 Christopher M. Bell, ‘Sentiment vs Strategy: British Naval Policy, Imperial Defence, and the Development of Dominion Navies, 1911–1914’, International History Review 37/2 (April 2015), 262–81. Bell, ‘Sentiment vs Strategy’.
36 Sumida’s ‘Fisher’s Naval Revolution’.
37 On the possible origins of this claim, and the lack of evidence to support it, see Bell, ‘Sentiment vs Strategy’.
38 Jon Sumida, ‘Geography, Technology, and British Naval Strategy in the Dreadnought Era’, Naval War College Review 59 (Summer 2006), 89–102; and idem, ‘British Preparations for Global Naval War, 1904–1914’, in Monica Toft and Talbot Imlay (eds), The Fog of Peace and War Planning: Military and Strategic Planning under Uncertainty (London: Routledge 2006), 134.
39 Lambert, Fisher’s Naval Revolution, 10.
40 Ibid., 10–11. This is how Keith Neilson interprets Lambert’s work in his chapter ‘Great Britain’, in Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig (eds), War Planning 1914 (Cambridge: CUP 2013), 190.
41 Lambert, Fisher’s Naval Revolution, 245.
42 Fisher to Churchill, 6 Nov. 1911, CHAR (Churchill Papers, Churchill College Archives Centre, Cambridge) 13/2/102-104.
43 Churchill, ‘Notes on the Manoeuvres’, ADM 116/3381; also Morgan-Owen, ‘The Invasion Question’, 173–5.
44 Lambert, Fisher’s Naval Revolution, 246.
45 Ibid.
46 Lambert, Fisher’s Naval Revolution, 248.
47 Ibid., 284–6.
48 David Morgan-Owen, ‘An “Intermediate” Blockade? British North Sea Strategy, 1912–1914’, War in History (forthcoming).
49 Lambert states (‘On Standards’, 218) that he ‘found’ the documents about substitution, which is not entirely true. Robin Prior recorded in 1979 that Churchill’s draft memoir revealed his plan to replace two battleships in 1914 with smaller vessels. Robin Prior, ‘“The World Crisis” as History’, PhD dissertation, Univ. of Adelaide, 1979, 43–4.
50 Lambert, ‘On Standards’, 228.
51 Ibid., 239.
52 Bell, ‘On Standards and Scholarship’.
53 Ibid.
54 CHAR 8/61.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Christopher M. Bell
Christopher M. Bell is Professor of History at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Churchill and Sea Power (2012) and The Royal Navy, Seapower and Strategy between the Wars (2000), and co-editor of At the Crossroads between Peace and War: The London Naval Conference of 1930 (2013), and Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (2003).