Naval strategy is as interactive an enterprise as strategic geography. Germany faced a Great Britain that was not only blessed by geography—First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher christened Britons “God’s chosen people” for this reason—but that deployed a “brutally superior” Royal Navy astride German maritime communications. Threats consist of capabilities and intentions, but military strategists generally plan against rivals’ capabilities and leave the task of judging intentions to politicians. This division of labor makes sense from combat leaders’ standpoint. After all, intentions can change quickly whereas designing and building weaponry takes years in an industrial age. Admiral Tirpitz saw a dominant British Navy standing athwart German SLOCs as intolerable, despite scant evidence of British enmity toward the Reich.
Shortly after assuming duties as state secretary for the navy in 1898, Tirpitz informed Kaiser Wilhelm that the military situation against Britain demanded “battleships in as great a number as possible.” For Tirpitz, winning Germany’s rightful “place in the sun” of empire meant stationing a fleet of sixty-one capital ships at German seaports by the 1920s. It meant exempting naval procurement from parliamentary oversight and continually upgrading the fleet. Tirpitz wanted automatic replacement of German capital ships after twenty-five years of service life—a figure he lowered to twenty years after 1906, when the Royal Navy commissioned the Dreadnought, an all-big-gun, oil-fired, turbine-driven battleship that rendered virtually obsolescent battleships that were on the vanguard of naval technology only a short time before. In a real sense, the naval arms race began anew when the Dreadnought slid down the ways.
Tirpitz calculated the optimal size of the High Seas Fleet by studying British martial traditions and the politico-military configuration of late-nineteenth-century Europe. The conclusions he reached were on the flimsy side. He postulated, first, that Germany could accomplish its purposes with a fleet smaller than the Grand Fleet that defended the British Isles. In part this was because he believed Germany could offset numerical inferiority with superior ship design, constructing vessels able to stand up to battle damage and mete out punishment better than their British counterparts. And the navy secretary saw little need to match British numbers. Notes Holger Herwig, “Citing British naval history, Tirpitz argued that Britain would always be the attacker in war and, consequently, would require 33 percent numerical superiority; conversely, Germany would have to construct a fleet only two-thirds the size of the British, a ‘risk’ fleet . . . that London would hesitate to challenge for fear of losing its global possessions in a naval Cannae in the North Sea.”
Cannae was a battle from Roman antiquity in which the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s army encircled and annihilated a Roman army—giving European strategic thinkers schooled in the classics part of their vocabulary for debating military affairs. A more recent, and more commonly invoked, indicator of future British behavior was the Battle of Trafalgar, the decisive 1805 clash in which Lord Horatio Nelson’s outnumbered fleet crushed a Franco-Spanish fleet off the south Iberian coast. Though he seldom agreed with Tirpitz, Wegener too maintained that British mariners had been on the strategic offensive for centuries, bettering Britain’s strategic position and commercial interests in wartime and peacetime alike. This was the essence of British maritime strategy. If so, it appeared reasonable to forecast that the Grand Fleet would stand into the North Sea at the outbreak of war, offering battle on German terms.
The other premise underlying Tirpitz’s vision of German naval development was that fellow European powers such as France would bandwagon with Germany to escape British maritime dominance. The High Seas Fleet would form the nucleus of an “alliance fleet” that would match or surpass the Grand Fleet in numbers. But the Kaiser had systematically alienated prospective allies since dismissing Chancellor Bismarck in 1890, making him an unlikely leader for an anti-British naval coalition. Worse from Berlin’s standpoint, the Royal Navy supplied the international public good of maritime security, benefiting all seafaring nations. British high-handedness rankled with continental Europeans from time to time, but European leaders preferred the British devil they knew to the German devil they didn’t. Great Britain posed too small a menace to bind together an opposing coalition.
For an officer obsessed with a rival navy’s capabilities, Tirpitz was conspicuously oblivious to the diplomatic signals his own helter-skelter shipbuilding efforts sent. Tirpitz intended to threaten the Royal Navy in home waters, so German shipwrights fitted German vessels with heavier armor, offering greater protection against British gunfire. Rugged construction added weight, consuming additional fuel and cutting their range. Since German battleships’ cruising radius was too short to let them operate beyond the North Sea, it was plain to British observers that the High Seas Fleet was aimed squarely at Britain. Indeed, Paul Kennedy aptly describes the German battle fleet as a “sharp knife, held gleaming and ready only a few inches away from the jugular vein” of the premier sea power of the day. This was not a force built for colonial and SLOC defense but for decisive battle in European waters. Self-defeating though such behavior was, declares Herwig, Tirpitz’s strategic ideas hardened into “dogma, inviolable and sacrosanct,” by World War I.
Alfred Thayer Mahan hints at the dangers of obfuscating about maritime strategy. In commentary on Berlin’s 1900 Navy Law, Mahan observes that the law set forth a principle that was to govern German naval development “over a term of many years,” namely “that it was essential to possess a navy of such force that to incur hostilities with it would jeopardize the supremacy of the greatest naval power” of the age. This was lawmakers’ way of designating Great Britain as the primary foe and as the benchmark for German shipbuilding while remaining coquettish about the true purposes of the High Seas Fleet. Without “transparency” (to use today’s parlance for openness in large institutions) about the motives for German naval armament, the British were forced to judge German intentions by German capabilities. A fleet of short-range, heavily gunned, thickly armored warships stationed just across the North Sea could have only one purpose: to dispute the Royal Navy’s control of European waters. Net assessment, then, was the prime mover for the British naval buildup.
It is unfair to condemn German thought or actions without identifying strategic alternatives that were open to Berlin. As noted earlier, the German naval command made no effort to outflank Britain in a geographic sense, improving Germany’s strategic position. Nor did the naval leadership apply much effort to developing an asymmetric strategy that employed new technology. Early on, in fact, Tirpitz ruled out the strategy of the lesser naval power championed by French thinkers since midcentury. In essence, a “jeune école” strategy relied on cruiser warfare overseas rather than a head-on confrontation with a superior fleet composed of “capital ships.” For Mahan, “the backbone and real power of any navy are the vessels which, by due proportion of defensive and offensive powers, are capable of taking and giving hard knocks.
That meant either battleships or battlecruisers, the battleships’ faster, more lightly armored (and more vulnerable) brethren. Cruiser warfare, in short, was an asymmetric strategy that assailed an enemy’s maritime traffic while avoiding that enemy’s strength—a dominant battle line.
This sort of indirection was anathema to those intent on decisive fleet encounters. Partisans of the jeune école presumably would have applauded the asymmetric means under development in various countries during the years preceding World War I. The German navy, however, did not build its first submarine until 1906, largely because Tirpitz feared that undersea warfare would siphon resources away from battleship construction. Mine warfare and torpedo boats lagged as well. As a result, Germany entered into a symmetrical arms race it could not win at acceptable cost, and it shunned unorthodox means that might have let Berlin dispute vital expanses. In short, its delay in exploring new technologies such as U-boats, mines, and torpedoes represented a major lost opportunity for the German naval command.
