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, the big armoured cruisers had already been breaking the Admiralty’s shipbuilding budget for some time.
Fisher’s solution was one part new technology and one part new strategy based on intelligence. The new technology offered an overwhelming combination of firepower and speed in the Invincible class, sufficient to crush any existing armoured cruiser, although without a change in how they were used, the new ships would merely have been a faster road to bankruptcy for the Royal Navy. Fisher saw that he could use an operational intelligence system to track raiding cruisers well enough for the Admiralty to vector fast British cruisers to run them down. That would take a lot fewer cruisers than the earlier focal-area concept. It required central direction, high speed and a powerful enough armament to snuff out any enemy cruiser: a battlecruiser. By 1908, Fisher was writing that the new battlecruisers had been given unusually tall masts specifically to improve long-range wireless reception, so that they could be directed by an Admiralty at the centre of an intelligence net.3
Fisher envisaged the Admiralty as the centre of a spider-web of information-gathering. It would have a far better idea of the movements of foreign fleets than any local fleet commander. The Admiralty – the First Sea Lord – should therefore have not only the existing administrative role, but an operational one. He should guide deployed fleets into position to engage enemy fleets. Given its reliance on intelligence, this concept was not publicised. It was, however, tried during manoeuvres and the new role of First Sea Lord was made clear to seagoing commanders. They were understandably unhappy with the loss of their prerogatives. That was particularly evident when Admiral Sir Charles Beresford came from the Mediterranean Fleet to command the Channel Fleet, which by 1908 was the more important of the two due to the strategic shift towards the German threat. Beresford argued that without the usual detailed war orders he could not train his fleet for war. Fisher told him that the Admiralty would provide him with guidance when it was needed. Beresford was defeated in the subsequent inquiry, but Fisher found himself retiring early (January 1910) specifically to ensure that his favoured candidate Admiral Sir A K Wilson would succeed him.
Fisher’s solution to the cruiser problem helped him solve a central personnel problem. On paper the Royal Navy had immense strength, but much of it was inactive reserve ships which would be recommissioned by reservists in an emergency. Unfortunately reservists were generally unfamiliar with the ships to which they would be assigned on a more or less random basis. The French, the most likely enemy, had a far more efficient reserve system. When Fisher returned to the Admiralty in 1904, he proposed a new Scheme (with the motto, ‘the Scheme, the whole Scheme and nothing but the Scheme’) to solve the manpower problem. The key was to scrap many of the ships on foreign stations. The personnel released in that way would become the nucleus crews always assigned to reserve ships. Reservists would be earmarked for the ships they would man on mobilisation and they would drill on board those ships. The fleet would be split into three, depending on their degree of readiness. The First Fleet would be fully manned at all times. The Second Fleet would be nearly ready, the Third Fleet less so, but all ships would be mobilised periodically for training.
Fisher generated extreme passions; officers were either supporters or enemies. Because he rammed his innovations through the navy, he rarely felt compelled to explain his logic. Some of Fisher’s decisions as First Sea Lord seem to have been designed specifically to attack particular enemies within the Royal Navy. Examples are the abolition of the Trade Division in the Admiralty and his refusal to countenance the creation of a formal Naval Staff for war planning. The fight over the idea of all-big-guns led Fisher to regard the adoption of 6in secondary guns as heresy. That is why the battlecruisers and ‘large light cruisers’ Fisher ordered during his second term as First Sea Lord (1914–15) had 4in secondaries, rather than the 6in guns of the previous battleships. The decision to adopt the 5.5in gun for HMS Furious may have been a face-saver.
It says much for Fisher’s competence and promise that he had survived that long. In October 1905 the Conservatives lost a snap election. The incoming Liberals had the opportunity to appoint a new Board of Admiralty. Fisher was nearing retirement age. He was promoted Admiral of the Fleet, for which rank there was no retirement age at all and thus was able to continue at least some of his policies beyond the end of the Conservative Government which had appointed him. This was despite the Liberals’ desire to cut naval spending further and their interest in negotiating arms limitation with the Germans.
Once out of office, Fisher tried to retain influence through protégés. For example, he tried to advise Winston Churchill, who became First Lord in October 1911. Fisher returned to the Admiralty in November 1914 but had to leave the following June. At this time he exerted unusual influence because the civilian Cabinet ministers had no military credibility. Thus he was able to force through his new capital ship projects by threatening to resign. He came to see Churchill as a menace and his final resignation (June 1915) seems to have been a failed attempt to use the same tactic.
National Strategy and Naval Policy
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