The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (55 page)

Speculation about the causes and likely course of a future war had become a well-established and highly popular literary genre by 1900. The next fourteen years saw a steady rise in the output of sensational, semi-fictional accounts of wars between Britain and one or more of the great powers. The demand for this sort of fantasy was in part a reflection of the prevailing national mood of uncertainty and in part fascination with the new technology, particularly aerial, which was currently being developed for military purposes. The scenarios for these imaginary wars changed significantly after 1900. William le Queux, a jobbing wordsmith who specialised in this kind of fiction, made France and Russia Britain’s antagonists in his 1894 novel,
The Great War of 1897,
whereas Germany was the foe in his 1906 best-seller,
The Invasion of 1910.
This was serialised by the
Daily Mail,
whose owner, Lord Northcliffe, was a passionate Germanophobe and always looking for an opportunity to awaken his countrymen to the peril across the North Sea. After a tour of Germany in which he visited its growing industrial cities, he remarked, ‘Every one of these new factory chimneys is a gun pointed at England, and in many cases a very powerful one.’
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This sort of scare-mongering encouraged war-mongering. From 1906 onwards the country was convulsed by spasmodic bouts of spy mania, with rumours of an underground army of German secret agents and equally ridiculous reports of nocturnal Zeppelin flights over Yorkshire. Even the government got the jitters and introduced a badly prepared Official Secrets Act in 1912. Much of this agitation was orchestrated by the conscription lobby, which carefully exploited that intense, irrational fear of sudden invasion which had long been embedded in the national psyche. It had broken surface intermittently throughout the past century with invasion alarms and accompanying calls for national vigilance and rearmament. There was, however, an important difference between Victorian and early twentieth-century invasion scares which made the latter far more convincing; the growing German navy.

The 1898 German Naval Law and its successors outlined an ambitious programme of ship construction which, when completed in 1920, would provide Germany with a fleet of forty-five battleships and thirty-two cruisers. This projection had been revised by 1914 to give a total of sixty-one battleships by 1928. The inspiration for this enterprise was an American naval officer, Captain Alfred Mahan. His analyses of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British seapower convinced the Kaiser that if Germany, like Britain, possessed a large fleet, she could become a world power on the same scale and with equal, if not greater influence. At first, Wilhelm II had regarded the German navy as a necessary counterbalance to those of France and Russia, but it was soon apparent to him that it could be used as the servant of Germany’s new
Weltpolitik.
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If, as he and his advisers wished, Germany was to acquire colonies and international power commensurate with its growing wealth, it would have to be prepared to challenge Britain on more-or-less equal terms.

This intention was conveyed in the belligerent preamble to the 1900 Navy Law which insisted that ‘Germany must have a Fleet of such strength that a war, even against the mightiest naval Power would involve such risks as to threaten the supremacy of that Power.’
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The German fleet might not be able to defeat the British, but it could inflict wounds that would prove mortal. There was even greater menace in the planned deployment of Germany’s new warships, for all but a handful were to be concentrated at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. As one British naval commentator observed in 1905, the North Sea had become in effect an imperial frontier, and an extremely vulnerable one.

The creation of the German navy, its presence 400 miles from Britain’s coastline, and the possibility that it might be used as a bludgeon to extort overseas concessions presented the government with three problems. The first two were practical: new ships had to be laid down to preserve the Royal Navy’s advantage in numbers, and the existing fleet would have to be redistributed to provide squadrons for home defence. Calling home men-o’-war from overseas stations demanded a complete overhaul of Britain’s relations with those powers against which they had hitherto been deployed, France and Russia. Rearmament and diplomacy therefore proceeded side by side in what became a search for world-wide security. The first phase of this new course in British policy opened with the Japanese alliance of 1902, which cleared the way for the reduction of the Far Eastern fleet.

The radical restructuring and modernising of the navy began in 1904 under the direction of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord Fisher. He was a pugnacious, effervescent sexagenarian, well aware of his intellectual superiority over his brother admirals and, unusually for his times, the possessor of a refreshing contempt for all forms of sport and organised games. Twice, in 1904 and 1908, Fisher proposed to remove the German threat once and for all by the ruthless stratagem that had been used in 1806 against the Danish fleet, and more recently by the Japanese against the Russians; a preemptive attack. ‘My God, Fisher, you must be mad,’ was Edward VII’s reaction to the first suggestion, but it was aired in the press and caused consternation among German naval officers, who knew that their fleet could not have defended itself against such an assault.
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It was not only the British who were jumpy about the ‘bolt from the blue’.

Fisher’s greatest contribution to the remaking of the Royal Navy was pushing through the design and building of a new type of battleship, HMS
Dreadnought. Dreadnought
took a record eleven months to construct, was completed in October 1906, and rendered all other battleships obsolete. It displaced 17,900 tons, mounted ten twelve-inch guns, and could steam at over twenty knots. Three more Dreadnought class battleships were laid down in 1906–7, along with two battlecruisers, HMS
Inflexible
and
Indomitable.
These were also novelties, faster than conventional battleships thanks to lighter armour-plating, but armed with eight twelve-inch guns. These warships represented a revolution in naval architecture and gave a new, almost frenzied momentum to the race between Britain and Germany. In October 1906, as the original
Dreadnought
was beginning its trials, the German navy ordered its first ‘Dreadnought’, SMS
Westfalen.

HMS
Dreadnought
was a two-edged sword. By relegating all earlier, conventional battleships to antique status, its launch had cut Britain’s considerable lead over Germany in this class of warship. Nonetheless,
Dreadnought
and its immediate successors gave Britain a head start in what was a new contest with Germany; but the Germans possessed the will, technology, and most importantly the cash to narrow the gap. As German naval planners realised, the Anglo-German naval race was an economic marathon, rather like the American Star Wars project of the 1980s, in which victory would ultimately go to the power with the longest purse.
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Nearly every Dreadnought-class battleship and battlecruiser built between 1906 and 1914 was earmarked for service in the reconstituted Home and Channel fleets, which were now the empire’s first line of defence. Since 1904 there had been a gradual redistribution of the fleet organised by Fisher, which included the scrapping of over 150 assorted gunboats and sloops, the small vessels which had hitherto policed Britain’s official and unofficial empires. Large enough to overawe Chinese pirates or Arab slavers, they could play no useful part in a modern war, and the recent introduction of wireless now meant that the light cruisers, deployed on foreign stations, could be swiftly summoned to trouble spots. Reductions in the numbers of battleships attached to overseas squadrons was undertaken gradually and cautiously. The five serving in the Pacific were only withdrawn in June 1905, following the destruction of the Russian fleet at Tshushima and the renegotiation of the alliance with Japan in which each party pledged to assist the other in the event of attack by one rather than two powers. There was no such guarantee for British interests in the Mediterranean and so eight older battleships were retained there, supported after 1912 by two battlecruisers sent to shadow the German battlecruiser
Goeben.
The presence of these modern ships was needed in home waters, but it was thought that their withdrawal would have a disturbing effect in Egypt and India.
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Nevertheless, between 1904 and 1910 Fisher had completely changed the disposition of Britain’s navy: in 1896 there had been 74 ships stationed in home waters and 142 overseas, fourteen years later these totals were 480 and 83 respectively.

Such a sweeping change in the Royal Navy’s deployment had been facilitated by the new course in Britain’s foreign policy. In April 1904, Britain agreed the
entente cordiale
with France, a collection of accommodations which ended twenty years of acrimony and sabre-rattling over colonial boundaries and spheres of influence. Most important in terms of imperial security was French recognition of Britain’s position in Egypt, a concession paid for by Britain’s acknowledgement of France’s paramountcy in Morocco. This was put to the test in 1905 and 1911, when Britain stood by France in resisting German encroachments in this region.

It was less easy to come to a similar understanding with Russia, despite French encouragement. There was profound suspicion of Russian expansionism among British diplomats and strategists, and fears of a Russian attack on India were as strong as ever. This could have been forestalled had the Japanese been persuaded to lend troops for the defence of Afghanistan or diversionary operations in Persia, suggestions that were put to Japan’s delegates during the renegotiation of the terms of the alliance in 1905. The response was disappointing since, while prepared to fight Russia in Manchuria and Siberia, the Japanese had no desire to defend Britain’s empire.
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This rebuff drove Britain to open direct talks with Russia. The outcome was the Anglo-Russian Convention of August 1907, which terminated an eighty-year cold war in the Middle East and Asia. Russia promised to respect Indian integrity, and the two powers agreed to partition Persia into spheres of influence, Britain getting the south-eastern part of the country, which bordered on India, and the southern, which lay on the shores of the Persian Gulf. These terms had been extracted from Russia at a time when it was still recovering from its defeat by Japan and the subsequent revolution of 1905–6. By 1912, when a vast rearmament programme was in full swing and national confidence had been restored, there were clear indications that the Czar’s ministers were reactivating old expansionist policies. There was evidence of fresh Russian interest in such sensitive areas as Tibet and Chinese Turkestan.
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At the same time there was a recrudescence of Russian intrigue inside Persia which suggested that its government did not feel bound by the 1907 Convention.
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Misgivings about Russia understandably remained strong in British official circles. A plan concocted in 1912 for the possible occupation of the Turkish province of Mesopotamia (Iraq) included a proposal to build a railway from Basra to Mosul which would make it easy to launch a counter-attack into the Caucasus if Russia made moves against India.
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Britain had done comparatively well from its
détentes
with France and Russia, even if Russian goodwill was brittle. Disentanglement from old disputes had left successive British governments free to adjust their overall strategy to meet the threat of the German fleet in the North Sea. This had been achieved without entering into any formal engagement binding the country to war if either France or Russia was attacked; indeed, as late as 1912 strategists could still seriously contemplate the possibilities of a war against the latter in certain circumstances. This view of future neutrality in a European conflict between the great powers was not taken by the War Office, which in January 1906 asked for and obtained cabinet permission to open covert discussion with the French general staff on future cooperation in the event of a war with Germany.

What turned out to be a momentous decision was taken by the new Liberal Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and the Minister for War, Richard Haldane. Knowledge of the Anglo-French military conversations, like that of Britain’s atomic bomb programme forty years after, remained confined to an inner circle of ministers and the high-ranking officers involved. Only in 1912 was the whole cabinet informed of the by now well-advanced plan to send a 160,000-strong expeditionary force to the Franco-Belgian frontier if France was attacked by Germany.

One explanation for this secrecy was the fear that public opinion might react unfavourably to war plans devised by a government which continually declared that its principle foreign policy aim was the preservation of peace. Defenders of the arrangement could privately argue that helping France would preserve the balance of power on the continent, but the public might not be convinced that a diplomatic abstraction was worth dying for. For some time, ministers, diplomats, and senior army and naval officers had noticed that while the public could be raised to a pitch of clamorous indignation over bogus invasion and spy scares, it was bored by crises in such distant areas as the Balkans or Morocco. For some, this apathy appeared dangerous. In 1909, Captain David Beatty, later Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty, complained to his wife that ‘the idle public are as blind in England, as they were in Russia before the Russo-Japanese war’.
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He was not entirely correct in his assessment. The Anglo-German naval race was one close-to-home issue which periodically aroused the interest of large sections of the public, thanks to the propaganda of the naval lobby and its attendant journalists. Keeping ahead in this contest was Liberal as well as Conservative policy and, when the former party came into power in January 1906, it accepted the target of four Dreadnoughts a year that had been set by its predecessor. By October 1907, Britain was managing to stay comfortably in the lead with seven Dreadnoughts and three battlecruisers commissioned or on the stocks, while Germany had still to complete its first batch of new battleships.
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Nevertheless the government remained uneasy, and in 1908 the annual quota was raised to six Dreadnoughts. The following year, intelligence reports that Krupps were stepping up production of nickel were interpreted, wrongly as it turned out, as evidence of a rapid acceleration in German battleship construction. ‘We want eight and we can’t wait’ chorused the naval lobby and despite anxieties about the cost, Asquith’s cabinet caved in.