German decision to build a short-range navy meant that less space was required for fuel and crews. More watertight compartments could be provided, which made German warships difficult to sink. This could not be said of ships of the Royal Navy.
The Royal Navy’s planners would not listen to the specialists and experts and continuously rejected innovations for the big ships. While British optical instrument companies were building precise range-finders (with up to 30 feet between lenses) for foreign customers, the Admiralty was content with 9 feet separation. When Parsons, the company founded by the inventor and manufacturer of turbine engines, suggested changing over to the small-tube boilers that worked so well in German ships, the Admiralty turned them down. The triple gun-turrets that had proved excellent on Russian and Italian ships were resisted until the 1920s.
The German navy welcomed innovation. After a serious fire in the Seydlitz during the Dogger Bank engagement of 1915 they designed anti-flash doors so that flash from a shell hitting a turret could not ignite the magazine. On Royal Navy ships cordite charges in the lift between magazine and turret were left exposed, as was the cordite handling room at the bottom of the lift, and the magazine remained open during action. This weakness was aggravated by the way that British warships were vulnerable to ‘plunging fire’ that brought shells down upon the decks and turrets. Typically turrets would have 9-inch-thick side armour and 3-inch-thick tops. This deficiency would continue to plague the Royal Navy in the Second World War.
Churchill’s gamble with his 15-inch guns paid off, but the smaller German guns had the advantage of high muzzle-velocity. The Royal Navy knew that its armour-piercing shells broke up on oblique impact with armour but had not solved this problem by the time the First World War began. Only eight Royal Navy ships had director firing (as against gunners choosing and aiming at their own targets), while it was standard in the German navy. The superior light-transmission of German optics gave them better range-finders, and German mines and torpedoes were more sophisticated and more reliable. The Royal Navy neglected these weapons, regarding them as a last resort for inferior navies. It was a view open to drastic revision when HMS Audacious, a new Dreadnought, sank after collision with a single German mine soon after hostilities began.
As warfare became more dependent upon technology German superiority in chemistry, metallurgy and engineering became more apparent. The German educational system was ahead of Britain. In 1863 England and Wales had 11,000 pupils in secondary education: Prussia with a smaller population had 63,000. And Prussia provided not only Gymnasien for the study of ‘humanities’ but Realschulen to provide equally good secondary education in science and ‘modern studies’.8 The French scholar and historian Joseph Ernest Renan provided an epilogue to the Franco-Prussian War by saying it was a victory of the German schoolmaster. The education of both officers and ratings, coupled to the strong German predilection for detailed planning and testing, produced a formidable navy. Its signalling techniques and night-fighting equipment were superior to those of the British and this superiority was to continue throughout the war. Churchill warned in 1914 that it would be highly dangerous to consider that British ships were superior or even equal as fighting machines to those of Germany.
For many years the American Rear-Admiral A. T. Mahan’s book The Influence of Sea Power upon History had specified the way in which all sea wars must be fought: by big ships battling to contest sea lanes. But the British would not play this game. Surprising many theorists, the Royal Navy of 1914 refused battle and instead set up a blockade of German ports. The geographical position of the British Isles, and a plentiful supply of ships, persuaded the Admiralty to create barriers across the open water by means of mines and patrols. The Germans responded by a less ambitious blockade of Britain. German warships prowled the sea routes to sink the merchant ships bringing supplies to the British Isles.
Given this strategy, German engineering and the development of the torpedo, it was inevitable that the German navy became interested in submarines. Although they were the last of the major powers to adopt that weapon, the Germans had watched with interest the designs and experiments of other nations. The first German-built submarines were supplied to overseas customers. The Forel, built and tested at Kiel, was supplied to Russia and went by railway to Vladivostok.
The Germans rejected ideas about using submarines for coastal defence, or as escorts for their fleet. They wanted an offensive weapon. This meant longer-range, more seaworthy vessels. Because they considered the petrol engines used by the Royal Navy as too hazardous, their early U-boats used a kerosene (liquid paraffin) engine, but it was the development of the diesel engine that made the submarine a practical proposition. The first production diesel was made in the M.A.N. factory in Augsburg in 1897, and a much improved version was tested in a U-boat in Krupp’s Germania Works in Kiel in 1913. At that time the U-boat was still a primitive device. During the First World War the submarine tracked, attacked and escaped on the surface, its low silhouette making it difficult to spot. It could only hide briefly below the surface but (in a world without asdic, sonar or radar) hiding was enough. The British had more or less ignored the dangers of commerce raiding by submarines because the Hague Convention denied any warship the right to sink an unescorted merchant ship without first sending over a boarding party to decide if its cargo was contraband.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of commerce raiding, any last doubts about the value of torpedo-equipped submarines vanished in 1914, less than two months after the outbreak of war, when Germany’s U-9, commanded by a 32-year-old on his first tour of duty, hit HMS Aboukir with a torpedo and she sank before the lifeboats could be lowered. HMS Cressy lowered her boats to pick up men in the water, but while so doing was hit by a second torpedo. A third torpedo hit HMS Hogue, which also sank immediately. More than 1,600 sailors died. About three weeks later the same rather primitive type of submarine sank the cruiser HMS Hawke.
The development of wireless was changing naval warfare, as it was changing everything else. The admirals seized upon it, for it gave the men behind desks the means of controlling the units at sea. Intelligence officers saw that enemy ships transmitting wireless signals could be located by direction-finding apparatus. Better still, such radio traffic could be intercepted, the codes broken, and messages read.
Intercepted wireless signals played a part in the battle of Jutland in 1916, when Britain’s Grand Fleet and the German High Seas fleet clashed in the only modern battleship action fought in European waters. Lack of flash doors caused HMS Queen Mary to disappear in an explosion, HMS Indefatigable blew up and sank leaving only two survivors, and HMS Lion was only saved because a mortally wounded turret commander ordered the closing of the magazine doors. The loss of the Royal Navy’s three battle cruisers and three armoured cruisers could all be ascribed to their inadequate upper protection.
There were many ways to evaluate the battle of Jutland, and both sides celebrated a victory with all the medals and congratulatory exchanges that victory brings for the higher ranks. In tonnage and human lives lost the British suffered far more than the Germans, but the Royal Navy was more resilient. The British were seafarers by tradition, and regular long-service sailors who fought the battle accepted its horrors in a way that conscripted German sailors did not. Britain’s Grand Fleet took its sinkings philosophically. Within a few hours of returning to Scapa Flow and Rosyth, the fleet reported itself ready to steam at four hours’ notice.
There can be no doubt however that Britain’s technological shortcomings were startlingly evident at Jutland. Once the envy of all the world, Britain’s steel output had now sunk to third place after the United States and Germany, and German steels were of higher quality. Anyone studying the battle had to conclude that German ships were better designed and better made, that German guns were more accurate and German shells penetrated British armour while many of the Royal Navy’s hits caused little damage.
Radio had also played a part in the battle. Helped by codebooks the Russians salvaged from a sunk German cruiser, the men in Room 40 at the Admiralty ended the war able to read all three German naval codes. After the
