Castles of Steel (59 page)

Fisher’s return to the Admiralty temporarily linked the two powerful advocates of a Baltic naval offensive. When Churchill showed Fisher his correspondence with the Russian government, the admiral’s eyes shone with enthusiasm. The new First Sea Lord’s huge naval building program, begun during Fisher’s first week in office and launched with the First Lord’s endorsement, was filled with shallow-draft vessels designed to work in the shallow waters of the Baltic. But beyond their agreement on the grand objective of entering the Baltic, the two men differed. Fisher favored an immediate, direct naval attack on the Baltic without any preliminary effort to defeat the High Seas Fleet in battle; the German navy, he said, could be locked up inside Heligoland Bight by the laying of extensive minefields. Churchill remained dedicated to action in the Baltic, but he had reluctantly accepted that the British navy could not pass through the Belts without preliminary action to neutralize the High Seas Fleet—and that this action would have to consist of something stronger than laying minefields. Churchill’s idea was to “storm and seize” an island close to the German coast; this, he believed, would provoke the Germans to a major sea battle in the island’s defense; if it did not, capture of the island would provide a base to help blockade the High Seas Fleet. Three islands loomed largest in these plans: Borkum, off the Ems River; Sylt, off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein; and Heligoland itself. Unfortunately for Churchill, all of his island-seizing proposals were declared impracticable by Admiralty staff experts; it was one thing, they said, to seize an island, but quite another to hold it and keep it supplied at a considerable distance from England and a very short distance from the enemy. (One exception to the naysayers was Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, who vehemently advocated the seizure of Heligoland, although it was bristling with artillery, surrounded by minefields, and lay only thirty miles from Wilhelmshaven, the main base of the High Seas Fleet.) Even in the face of overwhelming professional disapproval—“a palpable reluctance . . . manifested by lethargy,” the First Lord called it—Churchill refused to give up. Oliver recalled that “Churchill would often look in on his way to bed to tell me how he would capture Borkum or Sylt. If I did not interrupt or ask questions, he would capture Borkum in twenty minutes.”

Ultimately, the issue narrowed to a disagreement between Churchill and Fisher. “I am wholly with you about the Baltic,” Churchill wrote to Fisher on December 22. “But you must close up this side first. You must take an island and block them in; or you must break the canal or the locks, or you must cripple their fleet in a general action. No scattering of mines will be any substitute for these alternatives.” After the war, Churchill took a harsher view of Fisher’s views: “Although the First Sea Lord’s strategic conceptions were centered in the entry of the Baltic . . . I do not think he ever saw his way clearly through the great decisive and hazardous steps which were necessary for the success of the operation. . . . He talked in general terms about making the North Sea impassable by sowing mines and thus preventing the Germans from entering it while the main strength of the British fleet was in the Baltic. I could not feel any conviction that this would give us the necessary security.”

While the two principal proponents of the Baltic plan continued arguing over means, an opportunity appeared at the Dardanelles, and the Baltic project faded away. This outcome came as a huge relief to the man who commanded the Grand Fleet and whose duty—had he been so ordered—would have been to lead his ships into the Baltic. Jellicoe’s general reluctance to risk his fleet was coupled with a specific condemnation of Churchill’s Borkum scheme. He could not understand, Jellicoe wrote, “how an attack on Borkum could possibly assist fleet operations in the Baltic or lead to the German fleet being driven altogether from the North Sea.” As for Sir Arthur Wilson’s idea of seizing Heligoland, Jellicoe wrote simply, “We one and all doubted Sir A.’s sanity.”

During their first weeks together at the Admiralty and before the Baltic project began to divide them, a continuing, prolific, and mellow exchange of letters, notes, and memoranda flowed between the First Lord and the new First Sea Lord. Their relationship worked because, in addition to a shared fierce determination to defeat the enemy, each knew how to speak to the other, assuaging ego with compliments while still making the desired point. Churchill deferred to the old sea dog whenever he could, and Fisher responded in avuncular kind. On December 8, he offered Churchill advice when the First Lord returned from one of his numerous, much-criticized visits to France. “Welcome back!” Fisher wrote. “I don’t hold with these ‘outings’ of yours! I know how you enjoy them! Nor am I afraid of responsibility while you’re away! But I think it’s too venturesome! Also, it gives your enemies cause to blaspheme!” Despite these warm feelings, it was not long before signs of friction appeared at the summit of the Admiralty. Fisher’s ego had much to do with it. It was not easy for a First Sea Lord who had ruled and revolutionized the navy to see operational signals going out to the fleet, sent by the First Lord with the notation “First Sea Lord to see after action.” In addition, Fisher’s volcanic energy often overflowed established channels, and his huge outpourings on naval matters were combined with a limitless, incautious correspondence with people outside the service. Before long, his extreme language, his triple underlinings in green pencil, his capitalizations, his exclamation points, and his frequent threats of resignation were alarming as much as assisting the First Lord.

Essentially, the two men were competing for control of Britain’s sea power. On this matter, both had miscalculated. The First Lord’s determination to restore Fisher had rested on the assumption that he could control and use the old admiral. Paradoxically, Fisher and others had agreed to his restoration on the grounds that he alone would be capable of controlling Churchill. When this failed to happen, the admiral began to complain. “My beloved Jellicoe,” he wrote to the Commander-in-Chief on December 20, “Winston has so monopolized all initiative in the Admiralty and fires off such a multitude of purely departmental memos
(his power of work is absolutely amazing!)
that my colleagues are no longer
‘superintending Lords’
but only
the First Lord’s registry!
I told Winston this yesterday and he did not like it at all,
but it is
true! and the consequence is that the Sea Lords are atrophied and their departments run really by the Private Office, and I find it a Herculean task to get back to the right procedure, and quite possibly I may have to clear out.” Beatty had caught a whiff of this discord. “The situation is very curious,” he wrote to Ethel on December 4, 1914. “Two very strong and clever men, one old, wily, and of vast experience; one young, self-assertive with a great self-satisfaction but unstable. They cannot work together. They cannot both run the show.”

Long afterward, when because of the collision between the admiral and the politician, both men had been stripped of power, Violet Asquith, the prime minister’s daughter and a close friend of Churchill’s, asked him whether he had had any

inkling that he was on the edge of a volcano in his relations with Fisher. He said “No,” they had always got on well, differed on no principle, he had always supposed him to be perfectly loyal, etc. Poor darling Winston. . . . He is quite impervious to the climatic conditions of other people. He makes his own climate and lives in it and those who love him share it. In an odd way, there was something like love between him and Fisher, a kind of magnetic attraction which often went in reverse. Theirs was a curiously emotional relationship, but, as in many such, they could neither live with, nor without, each other.

CHAPTER 16
“The Requirements of the Commander-in-Chief Were Hard to Meet”

Historically, the Royal Navy never seriously concerned itself with numbers when it went into battle. Against the Armada, Howard and Drake brought ninety ships to face Medina Sidonia’s 130. At the Battle of St. Vincent, Jervis had fifteen line-of-battle ships against Spain’s twenty-seven; at Trafalgar, Nelson’s twenty-seven annihilated Villeneuve’s thirty-three. In 1914, however, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, already concerned about the threat of submarines and mines and about his lack of a secure harbor, worried about the comparative strength of the Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet. Throughout his two and a quarter years of command, Jellicoe kept a jealous watch over his ships; any attempt by anybody to remove a vessel, for whatever reason, was fiercely resented and likely to provoke a storm of protest. In the months ahead, Jellicoe was to begrudge even the taking of navy machine guns for the Dardanelles campaign as “weakening the Grand Fleet in principle.”