Castenea wrote:
Three things you are overlooking Dilandu.
1. Military technology was changing so fast in the period ~1850 till ~1960, that any military that wanted to be state of the art had to replace much of it's equipment every 5 to ten years. In 1850 the standard infantry weapon would have been nearly identical to those used by "Butcher" Cumberland in 1745, the latest twist was the percussion cap introduced about this time.
2. The RN had a policy of having more ships than all of the worlds other navies put together. This policy was followed untill the period of 1880-1890 when the USN was being built as a modern blue water navy. Anyone who seriously studied the relevant production potentials realized that no-one was going to outproduce the US in war material.
3. It is easier to build a superior ship for one purpose if you do not expect it to do anything else. The Kreigsmarine of 1914 would likely had trouble reaching the RN base at Halifax, Nova Scotia, even if the RN would not interfere. The German ships of that period were designed to operate close to base in the North and Baltic seas, with the crews typically housed in barracks ashore. RN, USN and IJN ships were expected to sail for weeks on end, and house their crews for the entire time they were assigned to the ship.
Okay, I don't sign off completely on Dilandu's analysis. Among other things, the French Navy
definitely took a backseat to the French Army in terms of funding priority and importance following the Franco-Prussian War, for fairly obvious reasons. Any hope the French might have had of building a naval power sufficiently great to threaten Great Britain's naval supremacy depended far more on British indifference than on French industrial or economic capability.
Having said that, the period from about 1870 or 1875 to about 1885 (the time period in which Dilandu has been arguing that Britain was vulnerable) has been called “The Dark Ages” of the Victorian navy, with (my own arguments notwithstanding) considerable justification, and the "Two Power Standard" didn't actually become the official policy of the British government until the very end of the time period you've given above. In fact, it
began only in 1889 and was not abandoned until after World War I.
The Carnarvon Committee in 1879, following a war scare with Russia [Smile, Dilandu!
], reported that the Royal Navy was badly understrength to meet its commitments in defense of the Empire (exactly as Dilandu has been arguing). In 1884 or 1885, a British journalist named Steed or Stead (don’t remember which) published an exposé on “the state of the Navy,” which led to considerable public unhappiness and the Northbrook Program, which went some way towards repairing the deficiencies (but only to the tune of only about £3,000,000 or so over a 5-year period, which was way too low to redressed the actual situation.)
The problem was exacerbated by the fact that the Admiralty was looking at several new types, rapidly evolving technologies, etc., which meant there was a lot of internal debate over exactly what sorts of ships ought to be being built in the first place. This is a period in which the Brits produced the
Admiral class battleships but also the coastal defense ironclad ram
Hero, which is one example of the confusion — or perhaps it would be better to say lack of certainty — over where the best naval designs were going to go. In about 1887 or 1888 — at any rate, before 1890 — the Admiralty introduced new, stricter, and (frankly) better standardization into the design process which brought an end to the problems they’d had with new classes coming in well over designed displacements. A second Russian war scare in the mid-1880s brought together the mishmash of types Dilandu’s been talking about and (with a lot of justification) slamming in a squadron intended for possible Baltic operations. It wasn't assembled until after the war scare had eased, but it was
kept assembled for exercises, and some of the conclusions drawn were of the unpalatable variety.
The experience gained with that ungainly gaggle of ships led to the solidification of a new conceptual model for battleship design which — in the Sir William White years — led to the “standard type” pre-dreadnought which pretty much set the pattern up until Dreadnought. And immediately following the second war scare, in 1887, a conference on the colonies led to plans to beef up the defenses of the British Empire’s overseas territories (especially Australia) and the establishment of additional coaling stations. At the same time, the conference either printed or leaked (I don’t remember which) suppressed portions of the Carnarvon Committee’s report about the Navy’s inadequacies, and public opinion was . . . unhappy.
One of the things which had played hob with the development of a truly homogenous battle line for the Royal Navy was that even though the Brits didn’t sign off on everything the French Jeune Ecole was arguing, there was genuine uncertainty — even in Britain — about the viability of the traditional battleship in the face of new weapons like the torpedo. There was a lot of angst about torpedoes at this point in time on both sides of the Atlantic, and it helps to explain the inclusion of submerged torpedo tubes on battleships when any realistic fleet maneuvers should have indicated that they were utterly useless and only weakened the watertight integrity of the ships who mounted them by putting great big compartments
below the waterline. (What actually happened, of course, was that every time torpedo range is increased, artillery ranges increased even more, meaning that the probability of successful torpedo attacks depended more and more on poor visibility conditions and became less and less relevant to Battle Fleet tactics. But I digress.
)
The point here is that there was feeling in Britain, as in some other nations, that if the battleship truly had become obsolete there was no point in pouring lots and lots of money into building more of them. Analyses of maneuvers in the late 1880s suggested that the day of the battleship was not, in fact, over, however, and in 1889 Parliament passed the Naval Defense Act of 1889. This is actually the first time that Britain formally adopted the “Two-Power Standard” for the strength of the Royal Navy (which had clearly been abandoned in 1870-85, if not sooner), and Britain began a significant buildup in battleships and cruisers. The biggest single class of battleships ever built by any navy was the
Majestic class, laid down in 1893-1895 ((9 units), but there were also the 7 units of the
Royal Sovereign class (laid down 1890-91, 6 units of the
Canopus class (laid down 1896-98), 3
Formidable-class (laid down 1898), 5
London-class (laid down 1899-1901), 6
Duncan-class (laid down 1899-1900) and 8
King Edward VII-class (laid down 1902-04. That’s 44 battleships laid down between 1890 and 1902 (and it doesn’t include several “second-class” battleships built for colonial service or acquired — like
Swiftsure and
Triumph — for political rather than military reasons), which was a pretty convincing answer to whether or not the British Empire intended to retain naval supremacy.
It was an even more convincing demonstration of what the British shipbuilding industry was capable of, and should probably suggest why there were a
lot of British analysts who thought Jackie Fisher was insane to build
Dreadnought and make the 50 or so battleships in which so much had been invested obsolete overnight. In many ways, Fisher probably
was a lunatic, but it’s certainly fair to say he was right a lot more often than he was wrong (of course, when he was wrong, he tended to be
spectacularly wrong, but that’s another matter). The truth is that other nations — specifically, Japan and the United States — had already committed to the construction of what became known as “dreadnoughts” before Fisher got the Admiralty and Parliament to sign off on
Dreadnought herself. If he’d waited another six months or so, the new type probably would’ve been known as
South Carolinas which, as an American, I think would’ve been pretty neat but which really sounds pretty dorky compared to
dreadnought. The Brits were
always copping the really cool warship names.
(As yet another aside, there are some resonances between British naval policy — and the disaster it might have engendered — in the years between 1870 and 1885 and US naval policy in the years 1921-38. For the Brits, the mere existence of the Royal Navy after 1815 was seen by the public as guaranteeing naval supremacy, and the complacency that engendered made it very difficult for the Admiralty to secure the budgets needed to build the strength the Navy truly required. During the interwar years, successive US naval budget proposals to build up to the allowed strength under the 1921 Treaty and the following accords — not to
exceeds treaty limits, but simply to build up to them — were routinely pared down to nothing before they ever reached Congress. It's virtually certain, in my own opinion, that had the US built up to the treaty limits and invested in keeping that treaty-strength fleet modernized and updated, not even the clique which eventually took Japan into World War II could have imagined it could have one a war in the Pacific.)
The point is that while I disagree with Dilandu about how vulnerable Great Britain really was during this period, there’s a great deal of validity to his analysis. He’s making it from the perspective of a continental power — Russia — which was embroiled in a series of crises and war scares with a maritime power — Great Britain — because of British fears over the security of India, more than anything else. The Russian pursuit of an ice-free winter port played its part, of course, but it’s highly probable that a Germany which hadn’t embarked on the construction of a “risk fleet” aimed directly at threatening Britain’s ability to sustain the “Two-Power Standard” might have found a reliable diplomatic partner in Great Britain against Russia to its east and a revanchist France to its west. Russia and France had a logical confluence of interests where Germany was concerned (especially with Austria-Hungary cranked into the mix), but Britain really didn’t until Tirpitz and Wilhelm embarked on their own ambitious naval program. Britain made several attempts — most notably Richard Haldane’s mission to Germany — to convince Wilhelm to back off on the North Sea naval race, but Germany refused, which is how the Double Entente became the
Triple Entente with Great Britain as the third and least likely bedfellow in the alliance. And it’s also a major reason why Germany so thoroughly misread British intentions and resolve in 1914 when it blithely violated Belgium’s neutrality. Looking at the thirty years or so of Anglo-Russian hostility and sputtering crises, the Germans didn’t believe that Britain’s heart was truly in the Triple Entente. Quite a few of their diplomats and military analysts believed that Britain would be looking for an excuse to stay out of a major Continental war. They failed to grasp the extent to which Britain regarded any threat to its naval supremacy as an existential threat to the Empire’s very existence (which meant they failed to understand how fundamentally the
High Seas Fleet’s existence had altered British military and diplomatic priorities), and hugely underestimated the strategic importance of the Royal Navy because they anticipated a short war (as against Denmark, and against Austria, and against France . . . but not as Russia and Japan had experienced in 1904-05). In a short war, the relatively small British Army probably wouldn’t be a decisive factor and any naval blockade (whose effectiveness was always a long-term affair) wouldn’t have
time to be decisive. To paraphrase the guardian of the Holy Grail in conversation with a fellow called Indiana Jones, “They chose . . . poorly.”
Anyway, that’s where Dilandu’s analysis is coming from, and as I say, a lot of it – almost all of it, politically and diplomatically — is pretty much spot on. IMHO, of course!
BTW, there was a lot of "quote snipping" in this post. I hope I got the ultimate attribution if not, I apologize!
)
