The British Battleship. Norman Friedman
between France and Russia passed through Malta, his fleet base. Both the French and the Russians used it to preclude German interception of their messages. Fisher realised that any junction between the French and Russian fleets would have to be arranged by coded telegraph messages. Given the relevant messages, he could predict the movements of the two fleets. He could intercept one of them at sea before it met the other. If he could rapidly destroy that fleet, he would never face an overwhelming combination. To this end Fisher convinced the British telegraph chief in Malta to provide him with the relevant messages. He created a decoding cell.
To hit one enemy fleet before the other joined it he needed strategic mobility, meaning high sustained speed. Fisher’s fleet was powered by reciprocating steam engines, which notoriously vibrated and thus had trouble sustaining high speed. Fisher devoted considerable attention to his engineers. He said that his proudest achievement as Mediterranean Fleet commander was that he had transformed a fleet barely capable of 12 knots (with breakdowns) into one which could sustain 15 knots (without breakdowns). The Board of Admiralty devoted considerable attention to the issue of fleet speed in 1901–2, perhaps coincidentally just after Fisher had come to emphasise speed. Fisher’s introduction of turbines in HMS Dreadnought and his later advocacy of oil fuel can be traced back to his Mediterranean experience.
Fisher’s fleet also had to destroy one enemy fleet quickly before it faced the other. In 1899 dramatic improvements in gun and mounting design were raising the rates of fire of heavier guns. Fisher naturally looked forward to what amounted to heavy QF guns. That in turn led directly to the idea of an all-big-gun capital ship. The dreadnought revolution was the combination of strategic speed (turbines) and all big guns.
Fisher’s Mediterranean experience convinced him that the status of engineering officers had to be raised and that executive officers had to become more aware of technical issues. Like all naval officers, he was well aware of the social gulf between the two communities. When he left the Mediterranean to become Second Sea Lord, responsible for personnel, he proposed a radical ‘naval scheme’ which First Lord Selborne supported. He would merge the executive (deck) and engineer officer corps, at the least providing new officer cadets with the rudiments of engineering education by creating a naval college (Osborne) they would attend before joining the fleet. This change, with its deep social implications, may have been the main cause of the enmity Fisher soon attracted.
When Fisher became First Sea Lord in October 1904 Britain was governed by the Conservative (‘Tory’) or Unionist Party, which broadly favoured naval spending, but was reluctant to raise taxes. By 1904 the naval budget had reached the limit of what the Treasury could spend. Admiral Fisher was appointed to reform the navy so as to maintain its effectiveness without breaking the spending limit. HMS Dreadnought and the accompanying Invincible class battlecruisers were the most visible part of a policy designed to achieve the desired level of naval defence on a more affordable basis. Fisher’s naval critics said that he had been chosen only for his radical cost-cutting despite its dangers.
Battleships mattered because they could defeat lesser ships. They were massed to defeat enemy battle fleets, but massing created major command and control and tactical problems. The greater the number of battleships, the more complex the situation. Before the First World War navies operating massed battle fleets found themselves compiling explicit doctrines so that individual ship and squadron commanders would know what to do once the confusion of battle descended. The Royal Navy adopted follow-the-leader or line-ahead tactics both to simplify command and control and to make it possible to concentrate fire on an enemy fleet. These tactics, developed in the Mediterranean Fleet under Admiral Fisher, in turn shaped British battleships. Here the Grand Fleet, the largest of all concentrated big-gun battle fleets, cruises in the North Sea during the war. Cruising formation was in columns, for manoeuvrability and to minimise the target presented by the fleet. The optimum way to deploy into the desired line-ahead battle formation was a major concern of the pre-war Royal Navy and Admiral Jellicoe’s deployment at Jutland – across the Germans’ ‘T’ – was considered particularly masterful. It in turn was shaped by a new development, tactical plotting, which provided Jellicoe with a crucial degree of situational awareness. The same technique later convinced him to turn away in the face of an overrated German torpedo threat. (Dr David Stevens, RAN Seapower Centre)
The rise of aircraft carriers raised the question of how they could or should be integrated into a battle fleet. Until late in the Second World War it could be argued that carrier-based aircraft were unlikely to sink modern battleships, because their torpedoes could not defeat modern underwater protection and because their bombs could not penetrate thick armoured decks. That left battleship guns as the surest way to deal with an enemy battleship – but many foreign battleships could outrun their Royal Navy counterparts. Moreover, the experience of the First World War was overwhelmingly that an enemy would try to escape, so that the first requirement was to slow him down. The motto of the Fleet Air Arm was therefore ‘Find, Fix and Strike’, which meant that its main roles were to find the enemy fleet and to slow it down sufficiently for the British battle fleet to catch up and finish the job – which is essentially what was done to the Bismarck. It followed that for the Royal Navy the most useful air weapon was the torpedo, which alone could slow down an escaping enemy. The rules in the Pacific were very different, because that was so largely a carrier vs. carrier war. Carriers offered a reach and flexibility beyond that of battleships. Also, the effects of weapons were reversed: a carrier could have torpedo protection as good as that of a battleship, but she was much more vulnerable to bombs. Here HMS Resolution leads HMS Formidable during the Second World War as part of the Eastern Fleet assembled to block a possible Japanese thrust into the Indian Ocean. She returned home in September 1943 and was reduced to reserve after a brief refit.
The key financial problem in 1904, as it had been for some years, was the relatively new one presented by armoured cruisers needed primarily to protect British trade. In 1904 the Royal Navy planned in wartime to keep cruisers in ‘focal areas’ around the world. Enemy cruisers hunting British merchant ships would be drawn into these areas, where they could be destroyed. A second cruiser role was to operate with the fleet, both as scouts and as a screen to beat off enemy scouts and thus deny an enemy commander information about the deployment of a British fleet. Scouts might also operate off a port in which the enemy fleet was blockaded. In either case they would face enemy armoured cruisers.
Armoured cruisers benefitted from radical improvements in armour during the 1890s. Large ones were conceived as fast second-class battleships. At the least, it took an armoured cruiser to deal with another armoured cruiser. Both maritime powers against which the Royal Navy measured itself in 1904, France and Russia, had armoured cruisers. Although there was considerable intelligence suggesting that these ships were not as effective as had been hoped, there was no question that the Royal Navy had to match their numbers. A French Navy Minister wrote of guerre industrielle, a systematic attack on British commerce using (and covered by) the new cruisers. Although he spoke of the impact of trade attack on British maritime insurance, the phrase he used suggests that what he really had in mind was a ruinous arms race, in which the British would bankrupt themselves by building large numbers of battleship-sized cruisers to match the French.
Armoured cruisers transformed the ‘Two-Power Standard’, which had first been announced in 1889 in the context of that year’s Naval Defence Act. Initially it meant simply that the Royal Navy should have at least as many battleships (the word ‘modern’ was sometimes inserted) as the next two naval powers, France and Russia – which also happened to be its likeliest enemies. With the rise of German naval construction, First Lord Selborne added a margin of safety, as the Germans might intervene in a war between Britain and her two other enemies.2 In the autumn of 1904 he formalised the margin: 15 per cent in battleships and 2:1 in battleship-sized armoured cruisers, each of which cost about as much as a battleship. The 2:1 figure probably reflected the reality that the big cruisers had two alternative roles, commerce destruction and fleet scouting, which had to be carried out at the same time. Although the formal figure was new,