Ships in Bottles

 

The postcard above reflects an aspect of the history that found Germany and Great Britain at war in 1914. The conceit of this German postcard is that the battleships of the British Royal Navy, observed through the periscope of a German submarine, are confined to port—“bottled-up”—out of fear of Germany’s navy.

Because it was an island nation, with a far-flung empire on which it relied for necessities (included food), Britain had for centuries relied on the Royal Navy’s command of the seas—and commercial sealanes. But in 1871 a new and powerful German Empire was created, upon amalgamation of dozens of hitherto independent Germanic states, duchies, and principalities. By the closing years of the nineteenth century that new empire and its aggressive Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, were feeling their oats, and reaching (if not elbowing) for their “place in the sun.”

In 1890, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s influential book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History: 1660-1783, made the case that achievement of sea power was the only way for a nation to achieve real sway in world affairs.

Influenced by Mahan’s book, German Admiral Alfred Tirpitz determined that Germany required a mighty fleet, composed of the new “dreadnought”-class of battleships. He found an enthusiastic supporter in his sovereign, Kaiser Wilhelm. There is evidence that the pathologically insecure Wilhelm wanted a fleet principally to gain attention and respect; but Tirpitz made no secret of the fact that he expected Germany’s fleet to be employed in a war against England, the nation he viewed as the main obstacle to Germany’s achievement of its rightful place atop the world order.

Britons observed the construction of German dreadnoughts, in the twentieth century’s first decade, with apprehension. For what purpose did Germany want a powerful fleet, the First Lord of Britain’s Admiralty, Winston Churchill, asked himself, if not to employ it against Britain? “Against whom, except us, could she measure it, match it, or use it?” Britons in all walks felt the threat, and demanded that Britain spend whatever was necessary to maintain the Royal Navy’s naval supremacy. “More dreadnoughts!” they demanded; and the British government, believing that it had no other choice, acquiesced.

 

More Dreadnoughts!

Churchill, convinced that “the Prussians meant mischief,” observed that the competition to build dreadnoughts required of Britain “strenuous exertions, and  . . . a vigilance almost as tense as that of actual war.”

In the event, other demands on its exchequer meant that Germany was forced to abandon efforts to build a battle fleet well short of Tirpitz’s goals; and the image on the postcard introducing this essay thus is notable principally for its ironic disconnect with reality that governed by the time the two nations were at war.

In sum: during the twentieth century’s first decade Britain had been inspired by Germany’s ship-building campaign (a) to view Germany as an adverse power, and (b) to engross its own battleship fleet considerably. By the time war broke out, the Royal Navy enjoyed significant superiority to Germany’s High Seas Fleet in in the number of battleships deployed—and was ready.

The two fleets met in only one general engagement in the course of the Great War—the 1916 Battle of Jutland. Although Jutland did not result in a conclusive victory for either side, the Kaiser determined that the Royal Navy’s numerical superiority did not permit him to risk his fleet in another general engagement. His battleship fleet accordingly spent the remaining years of the war at anchor, in port, behind a protective screen of mines.

 

Come Out or Go Under!

“Come Out and Go Under,” the Royal Navy challenged the mothballed German High Seas Fleet. Germany declined the challenge.

It was thus Germany’s fleet that spent the war “bottled-up”—not Britain’s.  More closely mirroring the war’s reality is a British postcard picturing a German battleship, anchored protectively in port, “taking root.” By way of adding a final filip to its message of disparagement, that British postcard gives the craven German battleship a derisively German-sounding name: it is the SMS Stikphastz.

 

Germany’s High Seas Fleet, “Taking Root”

The implications of Germany’s challenge to the supremacy of the Royal Navy were manifold. The challenge, itself, established Germany, in the eyes of thousands of Britons, as a hostile power—giving rise, within England, to the “Navy Scare” of the twentieth century’s first decade. In 1908, Tirpitz’s British counterpart, John Arbuthnot Fisher, then Britain’s First Sea Lord, predicted (with uncanny accuracy) that Britain and Germany would be at war in 1914.

While the naval challenge did not, alone, ordain war between Britain and Germany, not for nothing was it identified by Churchill as one of the “milestones to Armageddon” . . . indeed, as the first of those milestones to be addressed in his history of the Great War.   

More portentous than the fact of Germany’s challenge to Britain’s naval supremacy was the failure of that challenge. The number of battleships it was inspired by the by the challenge to construct allowed Britain to impose—and, by degrees, tighten—a blockade of German ports once war broke out.

Germany responded to the inferiority of its surface fleet by deploying dozens of submarines—“U-boats”—on which it relied in conducting the war at sea (as the periscope view of this essay’s lead postcard image attests).  But no British dreadnought was sunk by a German U-boat in the war’s course. Moreover, Germany’s attempt to impose a U-boat blockade of Britain’s seaborne imports failed, even as the bite of Britain’s blockade of German ports broadened, and deepened.

Ever expanding categories of goods directed to German ports were interdicted as contraband by the Royal Navy over the years of the war—eventually including food, and the fertilizers that would have permitted German farmers to produce it.

Within a year of the outbreak of war, there were food riots in German cities.

By the second year of the war, Germans were starving—a theme touched on by other postcards examined in this series.      

 

 

Copyright 2024 by Stephen Dvorkin