The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (19 page)

Tirpitz always found time to read widely, although history was his favourite subject. He attended Treitschke’s lectures in Berlin and absorbed his ideas about the inevitable rise of Germany – and the equally inevitable hostility of Britain. He also read Mahan and took firmly on board the notions about the importance of sea power and the need for countries to possess battle fleets.
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‘It is characteristic of battle on the open sea’, he told his superior officer in 1877, ‘that its sole goal is the annihilation of the enemy. Land battle offers other tactical possibilities, such as taking terrain, which do not exist in war at sea. Only annihilation can be accounted a success at sea.’
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In 1894 he wrote a major memorandum, one section of which, ‘The Natural Purpose of a Fleet is the Strategic Offensive’, became famous. In it he dismissed the claims of those who argued for a defensive role for navies, including the building of costal defences, and asserted that the command of the sea ‘will be decided in the main by battle as in all ages’. Furthermore he became convinced that Germany was engaged in a life-or-death struggle for its place in the sun. The race was on for the remaining unclaimed pieces of the globe, and those nations which did not get their share would enter the twentieth century under a crippling handicap.
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Tirpitz was an imposing figure with his sharp eyes, broad forehead, large nose and a massive beard which ended in two sharp prongs. ‘Of all the advisers of William II’, said Beyens, ‘there was no one who gave such an impression of strength and authority.’
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Curiously, Tirpitz had no particular love for the sea and preferred to spend his long summer holidays working out his plans in his house in the Black Forest. He was also more emotional than he appeared. While he could be ruthless and determined in his battles with his colleagues and the politicians, occasionally the pressures proved too much: his secretary would sometimes find him weeping at his desk at the end of the day.
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His memoirs and other writings are full of self-justification and complaints about anyone who ever opposed him.

Tirpitz was, said someone who knew him well, ‘a very energetic character. He has too big a head of steam not to be a leader. He is ambitious, not choosy about his means, of a sanguine disposition. High as the heavens in his own joys but never relaxing in his creative activity, no matter how crushed he may appear …’
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His son later said of him that his motto was: ‘If man does not have the courage to do something he must
want
to have it.’
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He could have been equally successful in business, for he understood about organisation, management and team building. A senior officer gave a more ambivalent assessment as Tirpitz was about to become the Naval Secretary. ‘His otherwise successful performance in responsible posts has shown a tendency to look at matters one-sidedly, and devote his whole energies to the achievement of some particular end without paying enough attention to the general requirements of the service, with the result that his success has been achieved at the expense of other objectives.’
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The same might be said of Germany’s international policy in the years before 1914.

When Tirpitz took office under the Kaiser, the two men had already met on several occasions. The first seems to have been in 1887, when Tirpitz was part of the entourage accompanying the young Prince Wilhelm to Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. The two apparently had long talks. The key early meeting, though, was in Kiel on the Baltic in 1891, when, after an inconclusive general discussion about the future of the navy, the Kaiser asked Tirpitz for his opinion. ‘So’, said Tirpitz in his memoirs, ‘I described how I conceived the development of the navy,
and as I had been continually jotting down my ideas on the subject, I was able to give a complete picture without any difficulty.’
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Tirpitz arrived in Berlin in June 1897 and almost immediately had a long audience with the Kaiser. The new Secretary of the Navy was scathing about the existing ideas on the German navy (including the Kaiser’s own). What was needed was a strategy of attack and not the commerce-raiding or defensive measures that his predecessor and others had advocated, and that meant more big armoured battleships and armoured cruisers and far fewer of the fast and lightly armoured cruisers and torpedo boats that had been favoured up to this point. Such a navy would stir pride among Germans and – this was music to both the Kaiser’s ears and Bülow’s – help to create a new national unity. And, as Tirpitz made clear, Germany’s chief enemy at sea could only be Britain.

Unlike his compatriots such as Treitschke, Tirpitz did not hate Britain. Indeed, he sent his daughters there to a well-known private school, Cheltenham Ladies College. The whole family spoke excellent English and were devoted to their English governess. He was quite simply a Social Darwinist with a deterministic view of history as a series of struggles for survival. Germany needed to expand; Britain as the dominant power was bound to want to stop that. So struggle there would be; economic, certainly, but most probably military as well until Britain conceded that it could not carry on in opposition to Germany.

The central aim of a new naval bill, he told the Kaiser in that first meeting, must be ‘the strengthening of our political might [and] importance against England’. Germany could not take on Britain everywhere around the world but what it could do was pose a serious threat to the home islands from German bases in the North Sea. Providentially, under the Anglo-German Agreement of 1890 Germany had traded its rights in Zanzibar for the rocky island of Heligoland, which could provide useful in guarding the approaches to the German ports on the North Sea. So if Britain, as Tirpitz thought likely, tried to attack the German coast or the German navy itself in wartime, its battle fleet would suffer significant losses. His strategy remained fixed over the years: to destroy the British fleet a hundred miles west of Heligoland. And Germany had the further advantage of being able to concentrate its fleet while Britain had to disperse its own around the world. ‘Since even English naval officers, admiralty etc. fully know this,’ he told the
Kaiser, ‘then even politically it comes to a battleship war between Heligoland and the Thames.’
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He does not seem to have considered seriously the possibility that the British navy would choose to avoid a full-scale battle; that instead it would blockade Germany from a distance to prevent supplies from coming in by sea; or that it would bottle up the German navy by closing the Straits of Dover and the passages between Norway and Scotland rather than attempt an attack on the coast or the German navy, all of which happened in the Great War.
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Even more importantly, Tirpitz was also wrong about how Britain would react to his naval building programme.

In the next few years, Tirpitz laid out his notorious risk theory to the Kaiser and Bülow and their closest colleagues. It was both simple and audacious. His aim was to put Britain in a position where the cost of attacking Germany at sea would be too high. Britain had the biggest navy in the world and aimed to keep it superior in strength to any two other navies: the two-power standard, as it was known. Germany would not try to match that; rather it would build a navy strong enough that Britain would not dare to take it on because in so doing it would run the risk of suffering such damage that it would be left seriously weakened in the face of its other enemies.

If Britain did decide to wage a naval war with Germany, according to Tirpitz, it would be setting itself up for its own decline because, whether it won or lost, it would suffer losses. That would embolden its other enemies, most likely France and Russia, which also had strong navies, to attack the now weakened Britain. As the preamble to Tirpitz’s second naval bill of 1899 put it: ‘It is not necessary that the battle fleet at home is equal to that of the greatest naval power. In general this naval power would not be in a position to concentrate its entire naval forces against us. Even if it succeeds in encountering us with a superior force, the destruction of the German fleet would so much damage the enemy that his own position as a world power would be brought into question.’
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It says something about Tirpitz’s narrow focus that he seems to have expected that the British would not notice this very clear hint that they were in Germany’s sights.

And he was not alone. His colleagues, such as Bülow, and the Kaiser counted on time to build up their navy to the point that it was strong enough to carry out the strategy. Germany would have to be careful in
this ‘danger zone’ while it was still much weaker than Britain not to alarm its rival. As Bülow put it, ‘in view of our naval inferiority, we must operate so carefully, like the caterpillar before it has grown into a butterfly’. In twenty years, when his navy was finally ready, the Kaiser said to the French ambassador, ‘I shall speak another language.’
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If they were not careful, however, the British might be tempted to do something pre-emptive. What particularly weighed on the minds of the German decision-makers was the fear of another Copenhagen – the pre-emptive attack in 1807 when the British navy bombarded the Danish capital and seized much of the Danish fleet in order to prevent it from being used to support Napoleon.
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In their more optimistic moments, though, Tirpitz, the Kaiser and their colleagues hoped that they might get the upper hand over Britain without war. The risk strategy was not unlike nuclear deterrence during the Cold War, mutually assured destruction as it was known. What prevented the Soviet Union and the United States from attacking the other with their long-range nuclear weapons was the knowledge that enough of the enemy’s nuclear arsenal would survive, whether in reinforced silos on land, long-range bombers or submarines, for it to inflict unacceptable damage in retaliation. Indeed, Tirpitz sometimes behaved and spoke as though he never really intended Germany’s battle fleet to be used; during the several European crises before 1914 when there was talk of war which might involve Britain and Germany, he invariably said that the navy was not yet ready. Rather he seems to have hoped it could achieve the goal of forcing Britain to come to terms simply by being in existence.

Once Germany had achieved that position of strength where its navy could pose the unpalatable prospect of future decline to Britain, the British would surely realise that they had no alternative but to accept the inevitable and come to a firm understanding with Germany, perhaps even joining the Triple Alliance. For that reason both Tirpitz and Bülow were cool on the alliance offered by Chamberlain at the end of the 1890s. It was too soon. Writing after the Great War (in an attempt to show that Germany had not been responsible for its outbreak), Tirpitz declared: ‘Regarding the way of thinking of the English people as it prevailed at the turn of the century, I did not believe in the
fata morgana
of a benevolent understanding by which Joseph Chamberlain
may have lured perhaps himself but certainly some Germans in boundless dreams. A treaty that was concluded according to the English desire to rule would never have been in accordance with the German necessities. For this, equality would have been the precondition.’
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Within weeks of his arrival back in Berlin in the summer of 1897, Tirpitz had drafted a completely new naval bill which focussed on what were often called ships of the line or capital ships – those battleships and heavy cruisers that would take the crucial part in an all-out sea battle. Eleven battleships were to be built in the next seven years and the German navy was to increase in the long run to sixty ships of the line. Significantly, the law both fixed the strength of the navy and stipulated that classes of ships should automatically be replaced when they became obsolete, a timetable also defined in the bill. This provided what Tirpitz called the ‘Iron Budget’. As he promised the Kaiser, he intended to remove ‘the disturbing influence of the Reichstag upon your Majesty’s intentions concerning the development of the Navy’.
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In this and subsequent naval bills, as Tirpitz said in his memoirs, ‘The
Reichstag
surrendered the possibility of refusing money for the new types of vessels, which were increasing in size and cost, unless it was prepared to bring upon itself the reproach of building inferior ships.’
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Tirpitz’s first naval bill was a terrific gamble because, while he had the enthusiastic support of the Kaiser and of Bülow, it was not at all clear that the Reichstag would fall in line. He was, as it turned out, a master of lobbying and public relations. One of his first acts as Secretary of the Navy was to set up a ‘Section for News and General Parliamentary Affairs’ which became a highly effective tool for mobilising public opinion. In those months while he was preparing the naval bill, and over the next decades, his office poured out a flood of memoranda, statements, books, photographs and films. It staged special events, for example sending a hundred torpedo boats along the Rhine in 1900, and the launches of battleships were to become increasingly elaborate. In the run-up to the voting on the naval bill in March 1898, Naval Office representatives fanned out across Germany to speak to key opinion makers whether in business or universities. The Office organised 173 lectures, printed 140,000 pamphlets and distributed copies of Mahan’s classic work on sea power. Journalists were given special tours of naval ships and particular attention was paid to propaganda in the schools.
Public bodies such as the Colonial League with its 20,000 members or the Pan-German League were asked to help the cause and did so with enthusiasm, distributing thousands of pamphlets.
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This was not simply a case of manipulation from above; the idea of the navy touched a chord with German nationalists of all classes. It had perhaps a particular appeal to the growing middle classes, where it was seen as more liberal and more open as a career for their children than the army. And although the Navy League was founded in 1898 as an elite organisation by a group of industrialists, by 1914 it was going to have over a million members associated with it.