Abstract
James Goldrick, Before Jutland: The Naval War in Northern European Waters, August 1914–February 1915, Naval Institute Press: Annapolis, MD, 2015; 400 pp.; 9781591143499, $44.95 (pbk)
Isabel Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 2014, 384 pp.; 9780801452734, $45.00 (hbk)
Nicholas A. Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2012; 662 pp., 1 table, 1 map; 9780674061491, £37.95 (hbk)
Matthew S. Seligmann, Frank Nägler and Michael Epkenhans, eds, The Naval Route to the Abyss: The Anglo-German Naval Race, 1895–1914, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015; 558 pp., 9781472440938, £90.00 (hbk)
Lawrence Sondhaus, The Great War at Sea: A Naval History of the First World War, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2014; 417 pp.; 9781107036901, £25.99 (hbk)
The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the growth of the first international associations for the study of history. After meetings of likeminded scholars at The Hague in 1898, Paris in 1900 and Rome in 1903, The International Congress of Historical Studies began a regular series of gatherings, arranged on a quinquennial basis. 1 The 1913 meeting in London was the first time that the fledgling disciplines of naval and military history, hitherto primarily consigned to staff colleges, were represented in the programme. Julian Stafford Corbett, Lecturer at the Naval War College and a regular source of counsel to the Admiralty, edited the proceedings of the resulting panel for Cambridge University Press. In his paper, Professor C. Oman lamented how ‘a school of modern historians has systematically depreciated the study of military history’. To his mind political and personal bias led some contemporary scholars to diminish the utility of the discipline, focused as it was upon great men and cataclysmic events, rather than upon society as a whole and the steady march of civilizing progress. 2 Like all writers, Oman was a product of his time. Yet in articulating these sentiments he reflected challenges which have proven enduring to scholars of warfare in the century since he spoke. Despite widespread popular interest, military history remains unfashionable within the academy, where many remain sceptical about its intellectual rigour, methodology, and intentions. The books reviewed in this essay confound such doubts. They demonstrate the breadth and diversity of approach increasingly prevalent in the study of war, applying innovative research methodologies and approaching topics from fresh and interesting perspectives. They place the sea at the heart of the First World War, assigning it its proper place as far more than a medium for naval combat. People and their treatment are integral to the story, as are the myriad technical, logistical, and doctrinal issues involved with applying sea power in a total war. The volumes here discussed display the strength of military and naval history and why the study of conflict can no longer be questioned on grounds of academic rigour or analysis.
The First World War at sea has traditionally been approached from the perspective of the Anglo-German naval rivalry which grew up in the decade after Tirpitz guided the first of his Navy Laws through the Reichstag in 1898. Scholars have debated the precise moment at which Germany became a definite factor in the British Admiralty’s strategic calculations, however the naval race has all too often been viewed from a national perspective. The Naval Route to the Abyss addresses this oversight, providing a truly transnational account of the Anglo-German rivalry for mastery of the North Sea before 1914. With chronologically sequential sections dealing with developments in both countries, the editors have assembled a collection of the documents crucial to our understanding of how officials on each side of the North Sea perceived the situation and how their actions, intentions, and perceptions interacted. The translation of the German documents into English and the introductions provided by Frank Nägler and Michael Epkenhans are of particular value to scholars working without the benefit of access to the German archives. They show a clear progression in German thinking, from a focus upon fighting against France and Russia in the mid-1890s towards an Anglo-centric emphasis by the turn of the century. Whereas in 1895 Admiral Knorr could inform the Kaiser that ‘France’s Northern Fleet and Russia’s Baltic Fleet [were our] probable opponents’, as little as six months later Tirpitz was laying out his arguments for developing German naval power to increase her value as an alliance partner against Britain. ‘Germany’s alliance value’, he argued, ‘does not lie in our army, but to a great extent in our fleet … up to the present our policy has failed completely to grasp the political importance of sea power’. 3 This formed the basis of his policy after he became State Secretary in 1897 and provided the rationale for the Navy Law of 1898.
The influence these developments had in Britain, once viewed as defining British naval policy after 1900, has been called into question in recent years. Critics of this viewpoint have argued that Britain remained a global power and that the Admiralty simply could not afford to prioritize Germany over other threats to British interests – particularly those of Russia and France but also the Italian, Austro-Hungarian, and nascent US navies. This argument has some validity in that it is impossible to consider British naval policy in this era in a purely European context. However, it misses the fundamental point of Tirpitz’s policy; to make Germany an attractive alliance partner for other European powers in a standoff against Britain. Despite starting from a comparatively modest level of strength in the 1890s, the German fleet rapidly became a source of considerable concern in London precisely because the Admiralty was simultaneously preparing to defend British interests in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and the Far East, and had distributed its resources accordingly. Indeed, prior to 1903 there was no fully commissioned British fleet permanently located in home waters for this very reason. Thus, the relatively modest size of the German fleet prior to 1905–1906 cannot be considered justification to view it as a subsidiary concern in London. Matthew Seligmann makes this point clear with a comprehensive arrangement of documents detailing the evolution of British concerns about German strength. Some of these will be familiar to scholars of the period, but many will not. It will, perhaps, come as a surprise to some to see extensive discussions of the German naval programme as early as 1898, when the Senior Naval Lord minuted that the ‘real concern for this country is the new German Naval Programme which cannot be ignored’. An extensive use of the ADM 1 series in The National Archive enables Seligmann to compile a compelling case that the Naval Intelligence Department came to view Germany in precisely this light, and that by 1902, ‘the strategic centre in Home Waters lies in the neighbourhood of the Straits of Dover’. 4 The ability to view the development of the Anglo-German rivalry from both sides of the North Sea and from the primary material itself makes Naval Route to the Abyss a unique and important contribution to the existing scholarship and one of great value to students and researchers alike.
The destruction of Russian naval power during the War against Japan and the conclusion of the Entente Cordiale with France enabled Admiralty planners to focus more fully upon fighting a war against Germany after 1904–1905. Traditional interpretations have been critical of the naval leadership’s intellectual capacity to prepare to conduct such a war; however, the books reviewed here present a markedly different account. In Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War, Nicholas A. Lambert presents the case that the Admiralty developed a highly sophisticated strategy to exploit Britain’s dominance of global shipping, communications, and finance to wage an aggressive campaign of economic warfare against Germany. He posits that this was conceived as a ‘short war’ strategy, intended to produce such dramatic affects upon the German economy that she would rapidly become unable to prosecute war on a large scale due to the extent of domestic dislocation and the resulting social upheaval she would experience. ‘Economic warfare’, he believes, ‘constituted a national strategy of quick, decisive war comparable in function and objectives to Germany’s infamous Schlieffen Plan’. 5
On first inspection, the thesis presented in the first third of Lambert’s book – that which covers the pre-war period – appears strikingly at odds with previous scholarship, if not actively iconoclastic towards it. Lambert contends that the British government endorsed the Admiralty’s ambitious plans to devastate the German economy as the principal tenet of British grand strategy as early as 1912 and that this approach remained in place in August 1914. This confounds the consensus that Britain entered the war with a limited strategy of ‘business as usual’, which gradually shifted towards a ‘continental commitment’ only after the failures at Gallipoli during 1915. In forwarding this provocative argument Lambert does make a number of valuable contributions, both to our understanding of Admiralty planning and to the broader picture of British thinking about war as a whole. The extent to which British control of global shipping was seen as a means of augmenting pressure on Germany and the emphasis placed upon restricting exports from the Central Powers, as well as goods reaching those countries, are both important points of emphasis. Lambert’s story is also elegantly woven into the economic, political, and social context of the period. It features a range of compelling characters – some of whose involvement with the machinery of blockade during the First World War will perhaps come as a surprise to general readers. We find Professor Robert Griffin (of ‘Griffin goods’ fame) providing statistical advice on international trade to the Committee of Imperial Defence, and government officials finding support for the Admiralty’s arguments in Norman Angell’s best-seller The Great Illusion, for instance. Here we see some of the best aspects of modern writing on war – new research on technical issues being fused into a nuanced understanding of the wider political and economic context.
That said, Lambert’s ambition overtakes what the evidence will sustain in several important ways. This becomes particularly clear from the documents produced by the Committee of Imperial Defence’s ‘Trading with the Enemy’ sub-committee, reproduced in Naval Route to the Abyss, which are considerably less definitive in their tone than is reflected in Lambert’s thesis. The prominent Treasury official Sir Robert Chalmers’ cautionary words that ‘a policy of prohibiting trade might alienate the good-will of neutrals and incense our own population’ foreshadowed the debates which occurred after the declaration of War and Lambert does not convincingly demonstrate that the government overcame these issues prior to 1914. 6 Isabel Hull’s work on international law highlights other problems in Planning Armageddon. She shows that Lambert’s argument that the pre-delegation of responsibility for the economic warfare campaign to the Admiralty represented a major and highly significant departure from previous practice are exaggerated, reinforcing doubts as to whether the government had truly adopted the definite stance Lambert presents before 1914. Moreover, Hull stresses how Britain’s entire approach to the question of blockade and of international law prior to the War had been one of compromise and consent. The government worried that the independence of British Prize courts would render the strangulation of seaborne trade with Germany problematic, to say nothing of the issues arising from neutral shipping destined for non-combatant countries sharing a contiguous land border with the Kaiserreich. Whether a Liberal government, for whom the importance of ‘Britain’s self-image as law abiding and as a leader in the world community of “civilised” states cannot be overemphasised’, would accept a strategy based upon attempting to precipitate and then manage a general financial collapse, the effects of which would be felt globally, is open to considerable doubt. 7 This criticism is borne out by Lambert’s own account of the wartime administration of the blockade, which highlights how the lack of agreement between politicians, officials, and government departments combined with the vital necessity of preserving functioning relationships with neutral states to curtail the effectiveness of British economic warfare. The attention Lambert devotes to these debates between 1914 and 1916 inevitably calls into question his comparatively very brief treatment of the supposed acceptance of the ‘economic warfare’ strategy in 1912.
Another shortcoming in Planning Armageddon is Lambert’s failure to account for the vital question of how economic warfare would function in the context of the Entente with France. Successive French premiers had pressed the British government for a firm commitment of direct military support in the event of a German attack and Asquith was under no illusion that Paris viewed naval measures alone as insufficient. 8 If co-operating with France to maintain the balance of power on the Continent was a crucial prop of British diplomacy, how the government could have adopted a strategy so poorly calibrated to suit the needs of its potential ally requires some additional explanation.
Despite this tendency to overstate his case, the value of Lambert’s work is that it places the Admiralty and Britain’s maritime and financial power at the heart of the narrative. By doing so he restores an important element of perspective to debates over Britain’s involvement in the War. Regardless of whether four or six divisions of the Expeditionary Force were sent in August 1914, the British contribution would be primarily a maritime, naval, and financial one for the foreseeable future. The advisability of abandoning this stance in favour of increased military intervention on the Continent was a question of philosophical preference as much as it was one of political necessity. It therefore played an important part in shaping the attitudes many politicians and officials took to the wartime administration (or lack thereof) of the blockade. Emphasizing this point makes Planning Armageddon a valuable contribution to the broader debate on British strategy, even if it is questionable on numerous points of detail.
Whilst it diverges from Lambert’s work, Naval Route to the Abyss paints a similarly positive view of the capabilities and thoroughness of Admiralty planning prior to 1914. Seligmann’s previous work on naval and military intelligence enables him to present a clear picture of how the Admiralty identified aspects of the German threat and then proceeded to respond to them. Detailed information was gathered on German fleet tactics, the likely attitude neutral nations would adopt in wartime, and how the Germans might seek to prosecute a campaign in the North Sea. Combined with the Navy’s own fleet exercises and grand manoeuvres, this information led the Admiralty to anticipate many of the difficulties involved in operating effectively against the German Fleet in the North Sea. These stemmed primarily from the acknowledgement that, by 1912, regular observation of enemy ports would no longer be possible in the face of growing German strength. The British would therefore not be able to tell if and when the enemy fleet put to sea. This posed serious problems regarding how best to patrol the bleak swathes of the North Sea, how to protect the Fleet from enemy torpedo attack, and how to safeguard the east coast. Collectively these difficulties became known as the ‘North Sea problem’. Solving them obliged the Fleet to adopt an increasingly conservative stance, much to the chagrin of its pre-war commander, Vice-Admiral Sir George Callaghan, who warned that ‘such an idea, if allowed to grow, cannot but be most prejudicial to that spirit of initiative which is so essential’. 9
Yet if British Admirals grew more reluctant to risk operations off the enemy coastline before 1914, their conservatism was nothing compared to that of their German counterparts. German planning and force design was predicated upon fighting a battle on the most favourable terms imaginable; within the narrow confines of the Heligoland Bight, close to their bases, and in familiar waters. To an extent this was determined by the Germans’ inability to compete with the pace of British construction after 1912. As Tirpitz reflected ruefully in May 1914, ‘The English Navy is developing so strongly that the risk principle and thus the basis of our naval policy are in danger’. 10 However it was also the product of the divided nature of the German naval command. With procurement divorced from operational planning and political concerns underwriting the entire naval building programme, insufficient attention was paid to the question of how the fleet might actually be used in wartime. This was encapsulated in the orders issued to the High Seas Fleet at the outset of war, which stressed that an engagement would only be sought ‘after having achieved a balance of strength’ by wearing the British forces down through a series of ill-defined precursory steps. 11 The possibility that the British would not willingly oblige by exposing their ships to German attrition was not adequately considered.
Here the real strength of the comparative approach adopted in The Naval Route to the Abyss becomes especially clear. It lays bare the manner in which neither side’s plans were based upon a realistic appreciation of what the enemy might seek to do; the British credited the enemy with too much offensive ambition and the Germans believed the Royal Navy to be too aggressive in its instincts. British plans in particular were shaped by an acute awareness of the Navy’s own shortcoming and vulnerabilities. As Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson remarked in 1913, ‘our Admiral would know that however our fleet might be disposed some gaps must be left, and it was possible for an enemy to slip through’. 12 Dealing with this uncertainty was one of the challenges that the Navy struggled to overcome during the War and which ultimately played a part in curtailing British freedom of action and initiative. 13
The resulting stalemate is explained to excellent effect in James Goldrick’s Before Jutland. A Rear-Admiral in the Royal Australian Navy, Goldrick offers a unique insight into the practical difficulties both sides faced in operating in the North Sea in a period which he believes witnessed ‘the true beginning of modern naval warfare’.
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His account displays a rare fusion of professional naval experience only attainable through command afloat and a scholar’s touch for presenting his arguments in a manner accessible to the more general historian. The result is a highly original and compelling account of the fighting in northern waters in the first nine months of the war. A number of important themes emerge from Before Jutland: the Germans’ failure to apply sufficient thought to how to conduct a war if the British did not conform to how they expected them to fight; the vital importance of considering the Baltic and North Sea in conjunction; and the innumerable operational difficulties commanders faced in assembling, directing, and fighting sprawling formations at a time when ships’ firepower, speed, and manoeuvrability all far exceeded their ability to communicate and navigate precisely. Goldrick’s insights into the difficulties encountered by contemporary commanders reveal the true extent of the task they faced. On navigation, he explains: even if a compass were accepted as accurate within half a degree and the calculation of speed to 5 percent either way, the resulting pool of errors when steaming at ten knots for just one hour created an area of more than 350 yards in breadth and 1,000 yards in length. In ten hours … the pool could be nearly two nautical miles in one direction and five in another.
If Before Jutland is one of the first works to fully integrate the Baltic into its analysis of the War in northern waters, Lawrence Sondhaus’ The Great War at Sea provides a more balanced account of the War at sea as a whole by placing greater emphasis on the Central Powers than is common in most Anglophone accounts. Originally a scholar of the Austro-Hungarian navy, Sondhaus approaches the war in European waters in a commendably holistic sense, underlining the interactions between the Mediterranean, North Sea, and the Baltic. He also provides a valuable epilogue by extending his account to encompass post-War attempts to curb naval armaments at the 1921 Washington Naval Conference. The central theme of his book is that of how Allied weight of numbers and geographical advantages obliged the Central Powers to turn away from traditional approaches to naval warfare and towards submarines, as the pressure of sea power came to bear upon their domestic economies. This ‘great gamble’ was predicated upon the mistaken assumption that at worst it would simply fail to break the stalemate on the Western Front, rather than significantly worsen the position of the Central Powers by precipitating the entry of the United States into the conflict in 1917. Sondhaus makes the interesting point that German submariners succeeded in sinking more enemy shipping at a lower cost than either their successors in 1939–1945 or the US Navy in the Pacific in 1941–1945, but considers that ultimately this proved pointless due to the grossly optimistic estimations of the U-boats’ capabilities and of American attitudes; ‘the great gamble doomed Germany to lose the War’. 18 The Great War at Sea follows a well-established narrative arc, 19 but the synthesis it presents is no less compelling or valuable for that. By introducing new points of emphasis for the Central Powers and Russia, situating the War within a longer timeline of developments in naval warfare, and tying the analysis effectively into his view of the conflict as a whole, 20 Sondhaus has produced a valuable single-volume study of what is potentially a vast topic. In doing so he has necessarily sacrificed some potentially important topics; one chapter aside the narrative is Euro-centric, meaning that the importance to Britain’s war effort of mobilizing and transporting the resources of Empire receives scant coverage. The growth of Japanese naval power is also largely omitted. Nevertheless, The Great War at Sea fulfils its synoptic aim effectively and with considerable skill.
In his epilogue, Sondhaus reflects upon how ‘in the postwar years, the centrality of the blockade in the Allied naval victory became obscured by international political considerations’. 21 That the degrading affect Allied economic pressure had upon living conditions in Germany jarred with post-war efforts to depict the Allied effort as necessary and just after 1919 is undeniable. Yet issues of morality and the regulation of conflict did not emerge from the ashes of the War; they were implicit in its origins, too. This forms a central element of Isabel Hull’s work A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law in the Great War. Hull argues that, as the purpose of international law is to allow nations to shape their own destinies within an established framework of acceptable conduct, issues of law and its application lay at the very heart of why states fought in 1914. Differing legal cultures in Germany on the one hand and Britain and France on the other are held up as representative of broader societal and attitudinal tensions which contributed to the Great Powers’ inability to find a peaceful solution to the crisis which erupted in July 1914.
Hull also argues that legal considerations played an underrated role in shaping how belligerents conducted themselves during the conflict. This was especially true of Britain, for whom ‘contravening the law was more than simply embarrassing; it was an affront to a fundamental self-image held by British decision makers’. 22 New research into the topic of law in the First World War is long overdue and, despite some over-zealous attempts to convince readers of the importance of her topic (overlooking the importance of which would apparently ‘eviscerate[] the World War of meaning’), 23 Hull’s book is an extremely valuable one. As regulating the conduct of war at sea played a vital role in the evolution of international law, it is fitting that naval and maritime issues play a prominent part in her narrative.
Hull presents a more restrained picture of pre-War British planning for economic warfare against Germany than Lambert in Planning Armageddon. She suggests that ‘in the law abiding-culture of Liberal Britain, “deterrent” might have been the only way to cloak such radical suggestions’. Recognizing the terminological difficulties of describing British attempts to pressurize the German economy as a ‘blockade’ due to the term’s contemporary legal meaning, she believes ‘the policy of economic warfare that Britain discussed before 1914 and adopted thereafter aimed to strangle the German economy by blocking all seaborne trade’, 24 rather than the more exotic, financial means discussed by Lambert. Whilst the Admiralty’s conception of war had clearly progressed beyond the sphere of naval operations into thinking about grand strategy and to applying pressure to the enemy population, Hull makes the crucial point that the Foreign Office remained the ultimate arbiter in any decision with such potentially dramatic diplomatic consequences: ‘It, not the navy, was the administrative nerve centre of economic warfare at sea’. 25 This argument is borne out in her chapter on the blockade between 1915 and 1918, which highlights many of the diplomatic and legal issues covered in the wartime sections of Planning Armageddon. Due to the scope of the question she sets out to address, Hull’s book inevitably falls short of providing a comprehensive account. Her work is comparative and displays research in British, French and German archives, but her analysis does remain focused on those nations – with a particular strength on Imperial Germany. This limits her effectiveness on certain topics – notably the trans-Atlantic wrangling over the legality of Britain’s economic warfare campaign, on which neither she nor Lambert are entirely convincing. 26 Yet judging this interesting, well-researched book against the standards of a total history would be grossly unfair. Hopefully Hull’s work will provide the necessary impetus for other scholars to improve our understanding of the areas and topics not included in A Scrap of Paper.
It is ironic that despite the prominence attached to the Anglo-French military conversations that took place before 1914, the naval agreement for Britain to defend the French Channel coast played a more direct role in influencing the government’s decision to intervene in the conflagration sweeping across Europe in the summer of 1914. Maritime affairs were at the heart of British decision making then, and the works here reviewed represent a welcome and sustained attempt to return our focus to them now. Although broadly military in nature, each displays the traits of the best modern scholarship – an international, comparative approach – the fusion of specialisms to produce new insights, and the situation of their topic within broader economic, political, and societal contexts. As such these books can be considered valuable additions both to our understanding of the First World War, and to the study of history more broadly.