The Washington Treaty ended massed battle fleets by dramatically cutting battleship numbers worldwide. Even had there been no treaty, drastic changes in capital-ship technology would have cut numbers by pruning obsolete ships. As it was, many ships which would have been discarded survived to fight in the Second World War. The post-1919 British battle fleet split into a Home Fleet and a Mediterranean Fleet, the latter the bulk of the War Fleet intended to go East to Singapore in a crisis. Here four Home Fleet battleships exercise in 1938. They belong to two distinct generations. HMS Revenge, in the foreground, was among the most modern pre-First World War ships, but by 1938 she was obsolescent. Without heavy deck armour, she could not fight at long range. For example, that year DNC analysed a fight between a ship of this type and the German Scharnhorst. Since the German shells could penetrate easily at range, the vulnerability of the British ship was a matter of what proportion of her deck was occupied by magazines. DNC credited her with a one-in-twenty chance of blowing up. Three years later, after Bismarck sank Hood, the verdict was even bleaker: any Royal Sovereign which encountered Bismarck’s sister Tirpitz would be blown up. Even the total reconstruction applied to three Queen Elizabeths was not enough to solve this problem. The two Nelsons in the background were part of the new generation, designed to fight at greater ranges. For them the verdict was reversed. Since Bismarck lacked effective protection against long-range (plunging) fire, a Nelson enjoyed a considerable advantage at about 20,000 yds range.
During 1884 Fisher was the naval officer who leaked information to the journalist W T Stead for his series ‘The Truth About the Navy’. This was part of a successful effort orchestrated by the senior Royal Navy operational officer, Admiral Phipps-Hornby (at the time C-in-C Portsmouth), to force Prime Minister Gladstone’s Liberal Government to modernise the fleet. Fisher learned about the political power of the press, which he later exploited.
After service as Controller, Fisher was given command of the North America and West Indies Station. This backwater may have been a holding appointment, as may also have been his membership of the British delegation to the 1899 Hague Peace Conference. Later that year Fisher was appointed commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, by far the largest and most important in the Royal Navy. He showed an impressive grasp of strategy and tactics and was later said to have been the first real naval tactical innovator in many decades. He conducted tactical experiments which convinced him that line-ahead formation was by far the best way to use a steam battle fleet, just as it had been best under sail. Line-ahead tactics were reflected in the design of HMS Dreadnought and her successors. At the time, many naval tacticians believed in very different tactics and formations.
Like other fleet commanders, Fisher felt short of ships to match the forces he faced, particularly if the French and Russian fleets managed to join together. The Admiralty could not spare reinforcements on the scale Fisher wanted, so he sought innovative solutions. Fisher’s solution was radical. The telegraph line 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
