bounced and failed to break and he needed a second attempt before the wine flowed, and the great warship went creaking and groaning down the slipway into the water.
She was completed in record time: one year and a day. The use of the rotary turbine, instead of big upright pistons, made her profile more compact and thus better armoured. According to one admiral the bowels of previous battleships were uncomfortable:
When steaming at full speed in a man of war fitted with reciprocating engines, the engine room was always a glorified snipe marsh; water lay on the floor plates and was splashed about everywhere; the officers often were clad in oilskins to avoid being wetted to the skin. The water was necessary to keep the bearings cool. Further the noise was deafening; so much so that telephones were useless and even voice pipes of doubtful value … In the Dreadnought, when steaming at full speed, it was only possible to tell that the engines were working, and not stopped, by looking at certain gauges. The whole engine room was as clean and dry as if the ship was lying at anchor, and not the faintest hum could be heard.6
Gunnery was also changed. Ships armed with many short-range guns – exemplified by the 100-gun Victory – were no match for ships which could fire salvos of very heavy shells at long range. The big gun had proved itself. For the Americans sinking the Spanish ships at Santiago and Manila Bay, for the Japanese destroying the Russian fleet at Tsushima, the big gun had proved the decisive weapon. ‘Dreadnoughts’ – as all the new type of capital ships were now to be called – would have speed enough to force or decline a naval action. Furthermore the long-range gun would offset the threat of the torpedo; a sophisticated weapon that, wielded by dashing little vessels, threatened the future of the expensive warships.
The introduction of the Dreadnought design was a denial of Britain’s decline. It signalled that Britain had started to build its navy afresh, and that its sea-power could be equalled only by those who kept pace with the building programme. Almost overnight Admiral Tirpitz found his 15-battleship fleet completely outclassed. The Kaiser responded at once. SMS Nassau, the first of Germany’s Dreadnoughts, was ready for action by March 1908. On paper the German ships seemed inferior in design to the Dreadnoughts of the Royal Navy – for instance Nassau employed reciprocating engines and had 11-inch guns compared with HMS Dreadnought’s 12-inch ones. But the Nassau’s guns had a high muzzle-velocity, which gave a flat trajectory for better aim and penetration. The ship’s interior was very cramped, but top-quality steel was used as armour. Her small ‘honeycomb-cell’ watertight compartments made her extremely difficult to sink; a feature of most German warships.
The big new German ships provided the Berlin planners with an additional problem. The 61-mile-long Kiel Canal was essential to German naval strategy, for it eliminated a long and hazardous journey around Denmark, and the need for a separate Baltic Fleet to face the threat of Russian sea-power. But the Kiel locks had been built for smaller warships; there was no way that the Germans could squeeze a ship the size of a Dreadnought through the Canal.
Churchill – first lord of the Admiralty
In 1911, when the 36-year-old Winston Churchill was appointed first lord of the Admiralty (the minister responsible for the Royal Navy), he was appalled to find his Whitehall offices deserted, and ordered that there be always officers on duty. On the wall behind his desk he put a case, with folding doors which opened to reveal a map on which the positions of the German fleet were constantly updated. Churchill started each day with a study of that map.
Churchill revolutionized the navy. His principal adviser was the controversial Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher, who predicted with astounding accuracy that war against Germany would begin on 21 October 1914 (when widening of the Kiel Canal for the new German battleships was due to be completed). The Royal Navy did not welcome Churchill’s ideas. When he wanted to create a naval war staff, they told him they did not want a special class of officer professing to be more brainy than the rest. One naval historian summed up the attitude of the admirals: ‘cleverness was middle class or Bohemian, and engines were for the lower orders’.7
Churchill forced his reforms upon the navy. He created the Royal Naval Air Service. Even more importantly, he changed the navy’s filthy coal-burning ships, with their time-consuming bunkering procedures, to the quick convenience of oil-burning vessels with 40 per cent more fuel endurance. As industry in Britain was built upon coal but had no access to oil, this entailed creating an oil company – British Petroleum – and extensive storage facilities for the imported oil. He ordered five 25-knot oil-burning battleships – Queen Elizabeth, Warspite, Barham, Valiant and Malaya – and equipped them with the world’s first 15-inch guns. Normally a prototype for such a gun would have been built and tested, but rather than waste a year or more, Churchill put the guns straight into production so that the ships could be ready as soon as possible.
Britain’s need for naval alliances had dragged her into making an agreement with France that should war come Britain would send an army to help defend her. This was a dramatic change in Britain’s centuries-old policy of staying out of mainland Europe. Cautious voices pointed out that no matter what such an expeditionary force might achieve in France, Britain remained vulnerable to foreign fleets. It was a small offshore island dependent upon imported food, seaborne trade and now oil from faraway countries instead of home-produced coal. The extensive British Empire was still largely controlled by bureaucrats in London. Defeated at sea, Britain would be severed from its Empire, impoverished and starved into submission.
The First World War
To what extent Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm was set upon war with England in 1914 is still difficult to assess. If there was one man who, by every sort of lie, deceit and stupidity, deliberately pushed the world into this tragic war, that man was Count Leopold ‘Poldi’ Berchtold, Austrian foreign minister. But the German Kaiser stood firmly behind him and showed no reluctance to start fighting.
Bringing recollections of Fisher’s warning, elements of the Royal Navy were at Kiel, celebrating the opening of the newly widened Canal, when news came of the assassination at Sarajevo. A few weeks later Europe was at war. It was also significant that Britain’s widely distributed warships were told ‘Commence hostilities against Germany’ by means of the new device of wireless.
Germany had 13 Dreadnoughts (with ten more being built); Britain had 24 (with 13 more under construction, five of which were of the new improved Queen Elizabeth class). However, this superiority has to be seen against Britain’s worldwide commitments and Germany’s more limited ones.
Britain’s Admiral Fisher had gloated that the Germans would never be able to match the Royal Navy because of the untold millions it would cost to widen the Kiel Canal and deepen all the German harbours and approaches. The Germans had willingly completed this mammoth task. The British on the other hand had refused to build new docks and so could not build a ship with a beam greater than 90 feet. Sir Eustace Tennyson-d’Eyncourt (Britain’s director of naval construction) was later to say that with wider beam, ‘designs on the same length and draught could have embodied more fighting qualities, such as armour, armament, greater stability in case of damage, and improved underwater protection’.
The Germans built docks to suit the ships, rather than ships to fit the docks. With greater beam, the German ships also
